IntoxiNation

Originally posted by: Ryan121214 Well, I think that Mac deserves to have Cities XL, because PC seems to get everything, and we Mac users deserve the freedom of having these kinds of technology. The second thing I've noticed is this quote said by a Simtropolis Moderator "Hamish": "I'm sure that if all Mac users on this site took some time to think about it, they would rather want a Windows version of the game with a slight chance of a Mac Port, rather than no game whatsoever..." I find this confusing, because if you think about it, around 70-90% of Mac users only have Macs. Not to be offensive, but I find this comment a bit awkward. We wouldn't want to go out and buy a Windows for the sake of a game like Cities XL, right? Think about it. quote> "70-90% of Mac users only have Macs". Take into consideration the fact that MAC has a less than 6% market share pentration, as compared to over 91% for Windows (estimated). Since city builders are never a really hot item (if they were then we would be comparing CXL to SimCity 5), adding a port for MAC would have been an even bigger disaster for CXL given the costs to maintain a MAC port. MC is struggling to stay afloat as it is right now. That added overhead would have just made increased the rate of their downfall.

Originally posted by: ScaryMonkey Ah, my bad... I'm not too familiar with the details of the StarPeace deals, that's just what I heard secondhand. Yes, the libraries are certainly an issue (I've heard elsewhere that they also use SpeedTree, which is proprietary). But that would most likely be something we would be able to assess if we started negotiating to buy the code. quote> Yeah they do use SpeedTree. Liscensing on that runs around $10,000 depending on what engine you are using and they would never allow that to be released to an open source project, so it would have to be removed. That's not really a biggie though, but does represent a larger question - what else in their gfx engine is 3rd party. To me the biggest asset in CXL is the graphics engine. The actual game logic could be duplicated rather easily, but the graphics would take a lot to reproduce.

Originally posted by: ScaryMonkey As I've said before, it might be worth considering a Blender-type effort to buy up the source code in the event that MC does go belly-up, or even if they simply decide to abandon CXL; It seems like something they might be amenable to, considering they were previously willing to sell the rights to StarPeace to fans.quote> MC didn't have the rights to sell to the people. The game was developed by Oceanus and that's who released the source code. When that happened, MC had nothing to do with StarPeace. It had sold the distribution rights to Sega a couple of years before. There's also other issues that need to be considered. Does CXL use any third party libraries? I know of one used in it, FreeImage. That has a free distribution liscense, but if they use any commerical libraries in it then that can be a deal stopper right there. For example, the scripting engine. If they are using a 3rd party engine for that which prohibits releasing to open source, then they would have to strip it out before letting the code out. Now you are stuck with pretty much their graphics engine. That's a problem that always comes into play with changing a game from closed source to open source, and a reason you don't see it happen a lot. That's the bad side of it. The good side is that these libraries allow for more rapid development of games.

Originally posted by: rsd6000 correct - one thing they need make a patch with full things before they shut down - they need is make open source means people can carry on after the develepers abandon or kill the game - that what simcity 4 did - they allowed creators and makers of mods to develop a new ideas quote> I highly doubt CXL will ever go open source. Source code is considered an asset for software development companies, and sometimes one of their biggest assets. If MC is struggling financially then they will want to hold onto that asset. If they go bankrupt, then that asset can be sold off to help pay some debtors off. SC4 never went open source, they just added in the new stuff for modding. The only SimCity that is open source is the original version, which is now called Micropolis and released under the GPL liscense. It only took 20 years for that to happen.

Here's something to think about. CXL requires online activation when it is installed. What if I get a new computer, or reformat this one and have to reinstall? If MC shuts its doors and no one buys the rights to the program and continues its support, then we would be left with a shiny coaster instead of an actual game. That or MC would have to issue an activation removal patch. That's one of the reasons I hate online activation mechanisms. You're taking a bigger gamble in the survival of the company than before.

Originally posted by: Garek Maxwell There was someone...or someones who posted in the earlier days of Cities XL about why they needed such large servers and possibly why it took a long time to save. Things of that nature. From what I read, the reason why MC needed such powerful servers is because the entire city was stored on their database. I know this was probably done to cut down on cheating and to make avatar system work, but I honestly believe that was a terrible move to make. Instead of using the equivalent of a tiny text file to keep track of trades between cities and just gutting the avatar system in favor of a first person camera mode, they went with something that ...well, it required a lot of power to pull off. Yeah, it's nice walking around player cities and such, but that could have been alleviated by allowing players to put up their cities for download somehow in something equivalent to the Sims 2-3 neighborhoods. Heck, they could even turn that into a highly compressed file for easy sending that contains minimal data (no graphics, etc...) making it possible to store those things on their own servers. If this was done, then their server costs would never have been so high. Anyway, had it failed in spite of these things, then it would probably be really easy for players to do the same thing on their own. Just trying to point out the problems of doing it on your own with the way the game was currently designed. I should mention though that this isn't meant to bash MC at all, merely to point out that had they done it slightly differently the PO could have been cheaper for them to run and maintain...Possibly even making it a success financially due to it probably cutting down on server costs. I know it sounds negative, but it's not a positive situation for MC right now. I hope the best for them and their future plans.quote> IMHO that was a major killer for them. When I did my testing I noticed about 30mb transferred between my computer and the CXL servers in under 20 minutes for a city with a population less than 40,000. Networks are like plumbling in your house - they can only handle so much information being pushed through them. Then you have hard drives storing the cities, and those can only write information so fast. Having these huge city files automatically save to their servers every few minutes was a huge price impact.

These blue prints are for the game CitiesXL, hence they aren't actual blue prints. Nothing to really help with modeling in there.

Originally posted by: mr-tom I'll admit that I may be missing something, but I imagine that servers cost money to build, run on electricity and that bandwidth isn't free. I also suspect that a cities xl server would need to be quite a beast. Finally, I'm not sure why MC would give away code that they spent years writing and which they clearly still hope to obtain financial salvation from. Whilst I like the idea of a community project, I'm not sure that I really understand how the fact that it's "community" somehow makes it free. Somebody's still got to cover the costs.quote> Big big costs. I know one time playing around I found 6 different US servers I connected to on the PO and 4 in France.

You're dealing with two totally different gaming scenarios. In FS, you are actively playing with other people as you are connected. In CXL, the trading system depends upon being able to trade even if another city is offline. You would still need some centralized database to keep track of all the ongoing and pending trades. To better illustrate, take this scenario. You and me are both playing at the same time on Sunday. You take a trade from me for so much oil at 500 tokens, or whatever. Now on Monday you decide to delete your city. I don't come back on until Thursday and you stay offline for a week or two. There has to be a mechanism so that my city now knows that the contract we initiated on Sunday is now history. You can see how quickly things would get fubared. If online was solely limited to trading, and saving of the actual city was done locally and you couldn't visit cities, then all this could feasibly be handled on a single server with the proper development and planning (good database design, using good caching like memcache and lightweight web servers light Nginx or LightHTTPD). After all, you would be talking about simple text transfers instead of the huge binary files that make up the actual cities.

Originally posted by: ScaryMonkey I guess my question is, from a technical standpoint, if we had the Cities XL code in hand, how much could be done with it? Would it be possible to graft a deeper simulation onto the graphics engine? Or would it need so much reworking as to not be worth it? I suppose there's no way to know without actually seeing the code... although the lack of multicore support makes me wonder. quote> It's really hard to say, but one thing to keep in mind is that you wouldn't want to aileniate people with older hardware. CXL is built on DirectX 9. You would gain a lot by moving to 10 or 11, but then you would loose people getting into the game because their gfx cards only support DX9. Of course with the smaller niche that is into city builders, it might not be that bad to say "screw the DX9 people - let them upgrade". I do believe if the code was ever released you would see a bigger focus on modifying the game play, making it mimic more of a SC4 type experience. A lot of that stuff can be done without touching the gfx engine.

Originally posted by: ScaryMonkey Interesting thought... there's certainly precedent for that sort of thing, it's exactly what happened with StarPeace (although that didn't turn out so well) and Blender (which *has* been quite successful since then). It would certainly be a shorter path to an open source city builder. quote> Blender's source code wasn't just "released". There was an active fundraising campaign that ended up raising around $100,000 to get the code released. It would be interesting to see if that kind of energy could be stirred up in the city building world. Funny though with StarPeace. That was actually published by MC.

Originally posted by: USA_Pride Originally posted by: Shilka Well, they promised me monthly new content when I paid for my januari PO, and I never got it. I fail to see what's logical about letting people pay for something, and then not giving it because you want to let them pay for it again in a later stage...quote> Nothing in January, nothing in Feb... Smells like a Scam Offer! But look at the bright side, you'll lose all your cities unless you use an unsupported transfer method that may or may not work. That's Monte Cristo's way of thanking you for all your dollars!quote> Well the have been saying March 8 is the big day. Hopefully they will make up for it with whatever they are releasing on that date. On the bright side, they could have just said "screw it", filed for bankruptcy and we would be left with nothing at all. At least it looks like MC is trying something here and that is good news.

Originally posted by: mrtnrln Originally posted by: gianthaikuRomove Omnicorp, Trade between your own cities, quote> I think we shouldn't remove Omnicorp. If your city is in need of something that your other cities aren't selling, you can always trade with Omnicorp as a last resort. Allowing trade between your own cities is a good idea, and even planned. quote> Big +1 to that.

This is not shocking at all. As I have stated in other threads, running all these servers is expensive. It's actually very good news. At least MC is willing to cut the P.O. loose and not let it bring them down totally (a very welcome sign from the powers to be at MC). I believe most/all of the P.O. players will be willing to go to solo mode, but trying to force solo people to go to P.O. and pay a monthly subscription fee would be suicide. Focusing on the solo mode and make that as awesome as possible is the way to go. They can focus on content/expansion packs for solo mode and even charge for them, then they would most likely come out ahead financially. Here's how they can really make solo mode shine: - Enable the ability to trade between your own cities (shouldn't be that bad to do). - Embrace the MOD community more. If people start seeing all these ways they can 'mod' CXL then the will probably end up selling more copies of the game. - Develop some really cool expansion packs. If they came out with one that offered trains and subways I would be willing to pay an extra $20 for it, but I am a train freak. - Create a CXL exchange. People would be able to download cities from other users on there, mods, scripts and anything else. Since these would be totally static files, MC could get buy doing all this on a VPS+CDN. Monthly server costs would be a lot less than they are now. They could probably even bypass that cost by working out a deal with the owners of this site. Take some time and do things like that and build up a really good reputation as the best city builder out there. Once they bring in enough users that are hooked on the game then they can maybe look at a revamped P.O. sometime in the future.

And today we have the answer: The end of planet offer

Originally posted by: USA_Pride Originally posted by: mentarmanAssuming you are in the United States, I wouldn't read too much into that, my understanding is that it was never part of their plan to have much of a presence on retail shelves in the U.S.quote> I'm not too family with the "ignore the United States" model of business for video games, especially if the game is already in English for England. quote> That amazes me also. Considering city builders have always been a niche game you would think CXL would want to expand that niche as much as possible. One very good way would be to show the game on shelves, especially with some of the amazing screen shots they have.

I couldn't tell what it was saving since the data was compressed and I was just reading raw packets. It seems like every auto save of my city of 60,000 was around 1mb or so.

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460 The game only uploads saved games to the server. And there is a chat system; it's not a real time game like some others around that have to transfer a mass amount of data every second you are on line. Also I don't know about the US server part, I always assumed it's there is one central data base that it is sending to. but regardless, the serves wouldn't be owned by them they would be renting it, and keeping there serves there on line is not MC problem, that's the company that is running it. Also that's why they pay anther company to do so. So they won't be sending anyone anywhere to fix anything. Again it's just transferring a saved game. That is transferred the saved game from you computer to MC data base And it only dose that them you are quitting the city.quote> It also does autosaves throughout the game. From what I saw that appears to be more of a progressive type save, with a complete save on exit. As far as "live data", there is that to some extent in the PO with trades. It has to be that way so two people can't take the same contract. But you are right on the servers. Most likely they are doing a cloud system for better failover and availability. Since trades and chats are limited to the current planet a user is on, that also reduces some of the overhead of keeping data consistent amongst the entire network. That way they can keep a minnimal staff on hand for actual tech problems. The hosting company would handle hardware failures and their people handle the software side, since they are most likely running some customized server software. I know when I was doing my tinkering I went to some large cities (4 million + pop). Those cities would be 20-30mb downloads. I bet MC got a pretty big hit on bandwidth when the game first came out and those cities started popping up, just from people exploring. I would venture to say that has slowed down pretty much now. I remember a few days after the release when MC suspended the 7 day free trial for PO because of so much response.

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460 MC don’t make money base on how many copies the retailers sell to the public, they sell a set amount to them, depending on how well the retailers think the game will sell. So any CXL box you see for sale anywhere MC all ready got the money for a long time ago. The box sales are not a true indication on how many copies MC acutely sold. There could be anther 100,000 copies of the game spared out across the world still yet to be sold buy the retailers. Also I don’t know the inner working of MC but if they have been loosening money for the lest 4 years, and they still manege to gather enough capital to make CXL then, something isn’t a float hear, it could be many thing, such as, MC are there as a tax ride off of anther company so there sole peruse is to run at a loses, but with out knowing the French tax system, or the people that own CXL, It would be hard to say. MC certainly don’t sound like a company that have been failing for 4 years what with CXL and all. All I can say is you should not juge a book by it cover. Or what you read on the net ! There are not that many retailers selling CXL. No one knows the true numbers. I would say Steam has been the biggest seller of the game and that even isn't an actual physical unit. It was just presented as a bare minimum estimate of what MC would have to sell (not counting PO) to recoup for 1 year of losses. Originally posted by: mrdazza_460 The serves ant’s that expensive to run at all, in simple terms it is just a power bill, a large telephone bill and 1or 2 tech guys to make shore it’s running smoothly, all the money is in buying the serves and installing them. I would say they have also cut down there design team and all the rest of the staff that where need to make the game, but have come redundant now because there id nothing to do. Hence why where are not getting update like we where before. I've already been round and round about this on another thread. Sorry but you are wrong. Servers are expensive. Bandwidth is expensive and so are the people to keep the servers up and running. I know I have found a handful of PO servers running in the U.S. alone. Run CXL with Wireshark and you will be amazed at the amount of bandwidth a PO game uses and the number of servers it connects to. Yeah they probably have the 1 or 2 tech guys in France to handle updates and problems with their software, but they are paying companies to keep these servers operational. If not then how much will people complain if a hard drive goes down on a U.S. server and they have to wait for a tech to fly from France to the U.S. to fix it?

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460 Well it doesn't surprise me that MC did not make any money in 2008 they weren't selling anything, so it's pretty hard to make money when they where designing CXL. I don't normally uses this a excuses, and I can't stand when people do, but MC are not EA they don't make 10 or more title's a year, they make one every 2 year buy the look of things. Just from your statement you say there net lose is about 4 Mill, really do you think they would go under because they lost 4 million dollars, hardly, even for a company as large as MC they should be able to cover that, unless they have monkeys running the show. They would have made up 4 mill even before the game was released though pre sales to wholesalers. As fore 2006 and 2007, well my guess is that is city life territory. And lets face it that game was terrible.quote> Actually though they lost $4 million US last year and have been losing money since 2006. That's most likely from the development costs of CXL and the fact they don't have any other big selling games to help carry them over. The thing is though, think about what that means for CXL. They were planning on some big sale numbers just to break even. I doubt game sales alone have been enough to do that. Just to make up for 2009 that would amount to selling more than 100,000 games, depending on what the mark up is for the distributors. Now they do make money off the P.O. (which is what this threads about), but consider the fact that they most likely have a pretty big monthly overhead just in server costs alone. Add to that the staffing of developers and graphic designers, and the monthly costs really go up. Given the negative reviews of CXL and what I saw to be decreasing P.O. activity over the past couple of months, it's hard to see how MC stays afloat for to long. To recover I could see MC taking 1 of 2 routes for the PO. Either come back with it being much cheaper and bank on quanity, or go with the current or even slightly higher price structure and bank more on quality. Each has it's downfalls. One of the big problems with going on quanity is that means MC will have to open up more planets and it will consume more server resources. With quality it is a big gamble. Are people going to be willing to pay $9.95 a month or more for the PO? I doubt there won't be the numbers on that to keep the game alive. IMHO, the best thing for MC to do is make the content packs available to solo mode. Sell them as add on packs and try to build the business better that way. I personally wouldn't mind spending $15-$20 for the Bus content pack if I could do it in solo. The only reason I ever did the PO was for the content packs, but "renting" them for $120 a year is just down right ludicrous.

Originally posted by: commanderkai Maybe, but the issue is, we're not really that sure. MC, unlike EA, Ubisoft, and other large scale companies, are not that large to receive major attention from mainstream media sources, or gaming sites. It's hard to tell if MC is being profitable or not due to the secretive nature of the company, as well as the small stature of the company as well... Plus, content patches aren't exactly a tell tale sign, because it's not really known when the content was created. quote> Yeah even if MC went totally belly-up, I doubt it would get much attention from the mainstream media. Software companies come and go everyday, and MC has never been a really big player in the arena.

What happened to the 3 months for $18.95 deal? Now you can only get 1 month for $9.95? If that's the case then I'll just go solo mode.

Back in the beginning of November I went through and counted the cities on the planets and there were about 43,000. Now it looks like there is around 50,000. My brother in laws city is still there and he just did the free week trial right after CXL was released, so it's been sitting there 3 months. So it looks like cities aren't getting deleted and with only a 7,000 city increase over the past 2 months, I would say that the PO isn't doing as well as MC was hoping. Of course dropping the 2 and 3 month subscription option at a time when a lot of 3 month subscriptions will expire won't do anything to help that. The approach MC has taken with this is really poor business practice. It's much better to keep current customers than it is to tick them off and hope they will return. It looks like a lot of people are pretty much done with the P.O. because of this. Once they are done, I would say 85-90% will stay done. Why give it another chance, risking the same stunt being pulled by MC again? Instead they will either start playing solo mode and be happy with that, or they will give up on CXL all together, because of the bad taste this move has left in their mouths. Simply put, MC has just shot themselves in the foot with a deer slug. The best thing they could do right now is re institute the 2 and 3 month deals, with a good-faith discount and work on their new program during that period. They also need to be more forthcoming with their user base. A simple blog post on the CXL site explaining why they dropped the 2 and 3 month options would have softened the blow a lot, instead of the "making people hunt them down for an answer" approach.

I just found out about this and it is a very bad move on MC's part. Sure they might be "restructuring" their plans, but let's consider the fact that next week marks 3 months since the game was released and I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people finding out the hard way that the price basically went up on them. Oh well - looks like solo mode from here on out. FYI Mods: Given the time frame I mentioned above I got a feeling more people are going to be bringing this up. It might be a good idea to sticky this thread for awhile. I didn't know it existed and that was using the category search for "3 month subscription" before starting another thread. That search returned 0 results.

I finally found it 3 pages back. I did actually take the time to search using the "category search" and when searching for "3 month subscription" I got no results found, even though that thread is titled "MC Withdraw 3 month subscription".