aereus

I think it's safe to say that we aren't really the target audience for SC5. They're betting on the Facebook crowd, and just hoping that the real fanbase won't be able to say no and will buy it anyways even if they drop it after a few weeks.

Maybe they have Arcos in the game already we don't know about?

What I find funny about that is the feigned tone like you have a choice or not. You don't. They claimed graceful degradation for when they have server troubles though -- I wonder what would happen if you just routed all the server calls to localhost in your hosts.txt file...

They want a representative sample of different hardware so they can root out bugs. IE: People with marginal machines just at the min specs, people with awesome gaming machines, etc. So the DxDiag allows them to pick a good cross-section of hardware.

Story of the last 5 years, really. Create great franchise with many loyal fans. Dumb down franchise to sell to Facebook crowd for more money whilst alienating the smaller original fanbase that got you there. Profit.

I just don't understand why they artificially cap it low for EVERYONE, just because some may be on poor systems. It should be reasonably easy for them to do a quick benchmark to see what your system is capable of and enable/lockout larger sizes or more features based on that to maintain a minimum FPS or whatnot. The only logical reason is because of forcing online play and having the leaderboard, etc. Otherwise hampering users just to annoy them doesn't make good business sense. But yes -- I'm genuinely hoping we can diffuse some of the anger and frustration with Gamescom. I'm just skeptical, because game development rarely involves drastic changes 5 months before release. Or maybe we can raise enough of a fan outcry that they WILL add said benchmark/larger regions to the game. The one nice thing about running the game on a distributed platform like Origin, and it being supported by a monthly revenue stream from DLC sales -- is we should see a lot more granular update support for the game and/or adding of new features even after release.

Ah, it's a gaming convention that used to be held in Milwaukee and moved to Indianapolis around 2005. Attendance is around 35k and it's for anything and everything gaming related. D&D, Larping, board games, video games, bopher equipment, renfair props and equipment, etc.

Going to Gencon at all? It's in Indy the same weekend. Which also explains why no game companies ever come to Gencon anymore -- they're all over in EU for Gamescom lol...

They didn't say they would have a monthly fee for Simcity. What I imagine he means is just that they will be releasing a constant stream of DLC content. New ploppables, new city themes (IE: British looking), maybe new transportation types, etc. Why I find this bad, is that it probably means modding is gutted. Because a strong modding community would mean taking money out of their DLC sales. IE: Nothing like the STEX will probably be possible with the new Simcity. But, we'll find out for sure in the next couple months, won't we.

joshriddle: What do you mean by entirely clean? It's a mostly residential city of 90k where they commute to jobs in the next region lot. (On a huge region lot) All of the graphics turned to max, playing at 1600x1200. And I wouldn't recommend running the game on multiple cores -- it really does crash to desktop more often. Although getting a new Core i5/i7 would still be a nice upgrade, since those feature a new "overclocking" feature that will turn down 2 cores and speed up the other 2, which would work really well for putting SC4 affinity restricted to the 1 core. And of course the manual wouldn't say Win7, because even the SimCity Box was released in 2008 -- before Win7 was released. And SC4 itself of course was released back in 2003, when even Vista was still in early development. Windows shouldn't have any issues with XP programs though. The only time you might find troubles is running stuff designed for like Windows98 or earlier... Also yes, your PC is very old. UDMA100 or 133 would be a sustained speed of 30-40MB/sec. A modern SATA300 hard drive sustains around 75-100MB/sec depending on the model. An SSD hard drive does sustained read of 250MB/sec. Although I'm not sure where the bottleneck is for loading SC4 -- probably a combination of hard drive and processor.

Originally posted by: Servan Crashing to desktop. Will check into the processor usage like City2themax suggests. Loading times. About 5+ minutes for a city of 100k+. This on a system with a clean Win 7 install, 2gb RAM and 256mb graphics card.quote> Sounds like your problem is probably just an older PC, and maybe the video card. I just loaded my city with 86k pop and it only uses 350mb ram. City loads in 8-10 seconds with my quad-core set to use 1 core, 1gb graphics card, and an SSD hard drive. I would recommend 4gb ram using Win7 as well, because a base install uses like 1-1.5gb ram just booting so...

I recently got an itch for city-building, and decided to dust off SC4 I remember some old issues I had with the game that maybe people could help me with. (Maybe some of these are fixed with the newest NAM?) No matter what I tried, getting Sims to use the public transportation never seemed to work properly. I would place Bus Stops, Subway exits, and even tried Monorail to go from residential to the commercial districts (along with some parking garages) -- and they never seemed to use any of it. The parking garage would have like 5 cars use it, the bus maybe 12, etc. I guess maybe I just don't understand how the game expects me to place them. When designing rural sections of a region, even when demand was high for farms/jobs, some areas wouldn't have anyone working them. (And pollution was extremely high across the entire farm areas then?) Am I supposed to intersperse a limited amount of residential all across the map between farm plots? And what is the best way to get industrial to use rail for transporting goods? Even with an all farm map, they barely use 10% capacity on a freight line. Also, how far out do city zones affect each other in a region? Like as far as fulfilling demand for Commercial, Industry, etc. or even job commutes? I'm still too used to thinking of 1 city lot on the region map being its own microcosm, instead of part of a larger whole. Thanks for any help you can provide~