aereus

This is something I don't understand -- is Maxis going to be extending modding support now that the initial release is out? It seems silly they "add mod support", but it has to be this Black Box affair where people have to reverse engineer it. Adding buildings seems like one of the more innocuous things one would expect would be a core functionality of modding the game.

Basically, it's because SC4's simulation was based on fairly rough numbers. AKA the traffic you saw on streets wasn't actually specific Sims, but a canned "heavy traffic here" animation. Power was some raw number, and each building took X amount, and if you were into brownouts, it just like picked random buildings to power down or such. This is actually sorta how I think we could push larger maps though: Return the power/water/sewage to more static spreadsheets instead of agents. Maybe even lower garbage generation to more sane levels, and figure out a way to be able to define static routes for collection. More of a longshot, and something thats probably not possible without access to the core files: Make the agent simulation able to take advantage of full multicore processing for those with the CPU to do it. Yes, there is a lot of the simulation that has to be done on the main thread. But I have to imagine you could spawn off a lot of agent-related stuff to other threads and batch the return data, even if it meant losing a bit of granularity to the simulation.

Has anyone considered, you know, asking the developers whether the map size code is in moddable files or not? They could probably tell you exactly where it is, unless they don't want to.

Is it possible to mod all buildings to work from a static energy pool ala SC4? That would free up a decent amount of agents if we didn't have to sim power, water, sewage, etc.

So anyone know if the Modding Rules from the January news post on the EA site are active for modding in Offline mode as well? They pretty expressly state you can't modify almost anything about the game that matters. Are we allowed to fiddle with the .com, .dlls, etc. to make custom agent stuff and custom regions now, or no?

Simtropolis is pretty influential in Sim City circles for a fan site -- would we have any clout here to basically put it to EA that no modding will be done until they change the legalese about giving them perpetual license to take all mod content for their own for any profit they want, without credit, and without recourse? That is pretty much the deal-breaker for me being willing to do anything for them. I've never heard of a restriction like that before.

They're doing a really poor job of conveying this info then. Google only comes up with info on the old January article, the FAQ doesn't mention that info at all, and the Modding changes are buried in a paragraph of a tangentially related blog post only. And when I went to ask on the official forums their Mod/PR staff didn't seem to have an answer for me when asking about it either. I assume the tools to do this more in-depth editing is forthcoming yet, as I haven't heard anyone talk about any sort of API or modding methods for agents, etc.

Welp. Time to ignore the game for another 9 months again until they pull their head out of their butt another inch

Found this forum post that mentions how you can sandbox Origin to prevent it from collecting data about your system. They can still probably collect your IP unless you are going through a VPN, but they shouldn't be able to get anything else then. http://mygaming.co.za/forum/showthread.php/18062-Blocking-EA-Orgin-from-searching-folders-on-your-computer And yes, I know some of you are going to say you shouldn't have to go through all those hoops, but just throwing the option out there.

The total beta download is 1.7GB. There is 184mb initial install, then it downloads about 1.5GB more data. That's not a lot at all...

I think it's a bad idea to basically drop the beta on people on Friday if what you're saying is true. Because then you're making everyone download it on the same day instead of spreading the load out over the entire week.

This is such a joke. I can't believe they're trying to call a 1hr marketing demo a "beta test" ... Disheartening since we were told the beta wouldn't just be a marketing beta, and this is even worse than that...

About Beta: I would think that at least Closed Beta they would listen to feedback about gameplay, etc. That of course assumes that it will be followed up by an Open Beta after that. I would have to imagine, with how much EA would like to segue the Sims crowd into Simcity, they will have a pretty much unlimited Open Beta advertised on Origin, game sites, etc. Best chance to hook more casual players is being able to try something out free, rather than expect them to plunk down $60 on something they don't know anything about.

Well, let us know what your budget is for a new PC and we can come up with something for you. I've been assembling a thread with recommended builds at various budgets on the official Simcity forums, as well. As for full vs micro ATX board -- it really depends on what you need. The board I have in that picture has everything you could need -- just not in huge amounts. 2 RAM slots, which is fine if you get 2x4GB sticks for 8GB ram. It even supports higher than DDR3-1600 speeds. 2x USB 3.0, 4x USB 2.0 (and your case usually adds a few more in front). 1x PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot, etc. The only downside is few onboard fan power and limited OC support I assume, but you're easily saving $100USD over the Z77 boards. But yes, that would be for a lower end system. For mid to higher end systems I would recommend the Gigabyte UD3H or UD5H boards. Lots of features, heavy duty heatsinks on all the chipsets, etc. I price stuff out using Newegg, since thats the site I'm familiar with. But http://www.ebuyer.com/ or several other sites work just fine for people in the UK/EU. Unfortunately, it seems certain hardware is more expensive than the USD pricing. I guess because of VAT? (The Core i3 CPU for example comes to like $175 on Ebuyer, CCL, and novatech)

Ando, what is the exactly model number of HP Pavilion you have? Then we could look up its exact specs. It sounds like you may have a single core PC, which would not work here. At any rate, even if you bought a new video card, you would probably be CPU bottlenecked then, as that is a very old system. What you could do, assuming you only have a small budget, is get something like below. It should fit in your current PC case, and depending on the wattage of your power supply, you may not even need to buy that for now. So the price would be around $240. $300 with the power supply if you need a new one. That CPU has Intel's new HD4000 onboard graphics, which should do an adequate job of playing Simcity. Then at a later date if you feel like upgrading, you could buy a new power supply and graphics card. (And probably case lol...)

Problem is part of the greenway appears to be included in those dimensions, and actual lot sizes are much larger, so not nearly as much fits on a 2km city tile as did in SC4...

Sure it does. Your refutation doesn't make any sense. If it was strictly offline only, and I was running a brand new 8-core 32GB RAM Nvidia GTX680 x2 SLI setup -- it could probably run a region 10x the size. What basis do you have that there is some engine restriction? The wording of everything they've said alludes to performance restrictions based on what the system requirements are, not what the engine can handle. Glassbox, as explained in the videos as well as the technical powerpoint presentation last spring, shouldn't be restricted in that manner. The macro-level statistics that are compiled are going to be the same whether 10k or 100k agents are involved. Agents themselves are a data container that inherit certain decision trees -- the processing of their decisions with proper multi-threading could be shunt off to any free core on the system.

Then it needs to be redesigned or scaled back. Because that also means that 5 years from now it would still run just the same. I'm not an expert in simulation design, but I am a programmer, and I just don't see that type of bottleneck being at play here. The simulation is a myriad amount of basic decision trees at work. Given more CPU cores and more GPU power, you should be able to scale the simulation up quite nicely. Especially if the GPU mechanics had Load on Demand and Falloff implemented.

That's one thing to think about -- the basic small unupgraded police station range was small, but we didn't consider that you can add onto the station or build a larger one. And of course, as Guillaume said they are still tweaking the ranges. I still don't buy into the statement about the city tiles size due to being a complex simulation -- holding us to 1 city tile size when the min specs of the game are a very dated system from 2005 means a modern system could handle at least 4x the city size. It can't be THAT demanding if it's designed to run on 7 year old hardware thats something like 10x slower than current stuff.

This event wasn't really meant for diehard fans from SC4 imho -- it was designed as a Marketing Leverage to get Sims3 fanbase into buying Simcity. Hence why they made it a combo event for Sims3 and Simcity despite Sims3 being 3 years old now. That's why you had a replay of the video and a bunch of softball or already answered questions -- because it's all stuff that the casual facebook crowd doesn't know about.

Almost none of this stuff was new info. Other than the city abandonment stuff, they had already said pretty much everything else on the forums before. Also -- lots of marketing shills posting to the Live Chat...

Not at release. Only surface transport, boats, and planes.

I get the feeling that the regions vs cities aren't meant to be to scale. That is, regional transport is more of an abstract display of how things are connected. The detailed transport displayed in correct ways (curving tram turns etc) are for inside cities themselves. I do think that road and rail regional transport not being available to all city plots is a mistake. Sure, not all cities IRL have rail that go through them; but if they are going to make rail such a huge supplier of tourists, we should be able to extend regional transport to them. Even if it ends up being an extra cost to the city later on in its life. It seems like there are certain plots that would just rarely get used then in a Region. And rather than take an inferior city tile, people would just start a new Region to get prime city tiles.

I will just say that I would be fine with this new direction, if only the city sizes were about 4x larger at least. And yes, offline mode would be nice, but not a total deal breaker to me since I can pretty much get online whenever I want between home internet, wifi at school, or tethered 4G mobile.

Anyways, I will say that I see the franticness and entitlement attitudes are getting worse lately. This was definitely the time to make our voices heard, but now that they've heard our concerns loud and clear, continuing to flog the horse on the exact same stuff isn't very productive. I'm just sitting back now until beta where we can get our hands on the actual game and provide feedback that will have more weight with them and an actual chance on being acted upon.