joerg

I grew up with SimCity, and have been playing the games since the early 90s. Every single one of them got better and better until Simcity Societies when either I got to old for a Sim City game, or EA and Maxis decided they needed a new target audience. I played SimCity in order to create my dream cities, the problem is my dream has always been one a bit more grounded in reality. If I play Minecraft for example I build structures that might be able to realistically stand on their own rather than floating lava towers made of diamond. Every bit of who I am as a gamer today was shaped by those initial years of playing SC2K, 3K and 4. I remember calling in sick from school the day SC4 came out and from that point forward I devoted hours of my life to playing it, modding it, making BATs, and playing it some more. All of that love for the series came from the concept of achieving a realistic dream, a dream which could actually exist in the real world, one in which I could base my ideas on reality. Why is it that Maxis is so very afraid of realism? Everything from the costs of buildings and taxes, to the scale and populations are so far gone from reality. I know there is an entire thread dedicated to map size limitations, but seriously maxis don't you freaking understand anything about the idea of a city? My home town of 48,383 people would barely fit onto a 10x10km map..... ok so lets say scale isn't perfect and players tend to add less buffer area between zones and stuff than in reality so maybe we could squeeze that same city into a 5x5km map if we really tried.... NO, Maxis expects me to put 200k people on a freaking 2x2km area! just no. I understand that maybe processing power became a limiting factor because you are forced to calculate the dietary habits of a million sims in a freaking city building game.... I can understand that, but make it a population limit then not a city size limit. Heck I would be fine with a 10x10km area with a max pop of 500k people. Theoretically it shouldn't take anymore processing power to calculate the eating habits of 500k sims on a 100km2 map than a 4km2 map. If its an issue of graphical power then I am going to just laugh and say Maxis needed to rethink its graphics engine of choice then. There are tons of games out there rendering much larger areas with significantly more detail than what SC2013 seems to posses. Heck I wanted bigger cities in SC4, but I was never going to win that argument, at least not with the sloppy coding that made the game such a resource hog (ran nearly the same on my old old althon 1.4ghz with 1Gb of ram as it does on my six core I7 with 16Gbs of ram). Alteast there are regions though right? so that you can choose your own connections between cities and zoom out to region view and see your awesome creation from a single fixed perpective? Nope, seriously why in the world did you guys make connections preset and then add a 10 mile wide buffer between your city and its neighbor city? The question of scale bothers me even further. In SC4 they were moving in the right direction with the addition of suspension bridges that actually looked like they didn't belong in a cartoon caricature of a city. They still had some work to do though, airports for example were so small that even a real life aircraft carrier would have dwarfed them. Now in SC2013 they decided that the bridges needed to go back to looking like cartoon caricatures of the real things, and that airports needed to consume an entire city tile.... Seriously guys? Why can't you get them both right at the same time? its not like this is a guessing game, we have these things called measurements. On the subject of population, I have seen many screenshots showing cities with populations of around 200k, but some even showing 700k. Lets say that most well developed cities in the game would achieve a population of around 240k. That puts the density at 60,000 sims per kilometer. The densest city in the world is Manila, at 40k people per Km... New York city, still a fairly dense city even by european standards has a density of around 14,000 people per square km making it about 1/4 as dense as an average well developed SC 2013 city. Seems like easy math to me. Was the design decision basically that people like big numbers so we should lie a bit and say that 25 sims live in a house? Speaking of numbers, why can't things cost a realistic amount? Sure Ill take 30 schools at $5,000 each Bob! I just don't get it... a school costs a couple million to build. Cities rake in millions in revenue quarterly. We also calculate that revenue quarterly and even yearly in many cases, so why does maxis insist on hourly revenue? Are our attention spans that short that the thought of waiting for more than an hour of game time to balance our budget just makes us loose it? I know this is negative, and I am of a minority that wants extreme realism. However, I would love to see some middle ground here, maybe cities slightly larger with a population cap and the ability to only simulate traffic patterns, job needs, and income levels with 1 in 10 sims simulating everything and then extrapolating that data to the other 9 sims similar to them? That would dramatically simplify the processor load and give us bigger maps. If it is graphics limited then for crying out loud just give us simple lods again at longer view distances, and use that awesome tiltshift shader tech for something useful and just don't render those out of focus elements. Making data values like population and costs realistic is as simple as changing a couple numbers around, and you could even have a realism mode in the game! As for scale, there is just no excuse, if maps were the size they needed to be then you wouldn't be forced to make a suspension bridge 1/10th its normal size and still leave buildings their proper size. If you read this far then sorry for this massive rant, I just miss the game I grew up with, and the idea of being able to do things even somewhat realistically. That is what a SIMulation game is supposed to do right, realistically simulate things?

I have 3 issues with the city size, the first is that the physical appearance of the cities and region view will not at all resemble a city. Obviously many people have discussed this, and it seems a common concern. However, it will prevent me from buying the game, and cost Maxis some money, maybe not much but who knows how many people are thinking the same way I am. Next the simulation will be dramatically impacted. For example the glass box engines transportation system sounds awesome, but it will end up being completely worthless on a 2km x 2km tile. In SC4 I often longed for the ability for my sims to make 45 minute commutes across multiple large tiles allowing true suburbs. This will be completely ruined in SC2013 because of the region layout, lack of highways, and tiny city size. SImultation will be affected in many other ways and in my opinion that makes the game fairly pointless even if I didnt mind the appearance of the small tiles. Finally my biggest concern is that they are rushing it to release without doing everything possible to increase the tile size. Honesty, I think the game would be better off it it got delayed another 6 months for them to overall the region and city size issues. If the game launches and even a generous 200k people buy it and Maxis makes their money there is still a huge risk of users falling out of love with the game very quickly due to the limited amount of gameplay time users are going to have working on small tiles with broken regions and not having more than 16 save slots. I could see myself getting a couple weeks of solid fun out of the game, but that is nothing compared to the multiple years SC4 gave me. SC4 had enough gameplay right out of the box that by the time rush hour and modding community really got into the swing of things there were tons of addicted users. SC2013 has the potential to sell a lot of copies, but not engage those users for long enough for any real support to emerge. Delay the game for 6 months, and things could be totally different.

I think I may have been miss understood a bit here. My point has little to do with the realism of the graphics (afterall graphics are the easiest things in a game to mod), and more to do with realistic limitations to the game. Things like scale can never be truly corrected for once EA decides to ignore it, or the incredibly small map size and limited region abilities. These things would take years for modders to even begn to correct, but were fundamental decisions that clearly Maxis had to make in the early days of SC 2013's development that are now going to be incredibly tough to change. The point is we needed a solid foundation where even if it didn't look realistic the simulation could still be realistic and the ideas of what actually happens in a city could remain intact. These issues are over arching and cascade through the game changing everything. Lets take the map size and scale issue and look at them a bit more in depth. The game will have a 2x2km map, as stated before this is significantly smaller than even the smallest of real world "cities". If I lived in the middle of a 2x2km city I would never need a car, my longest round trip would be less than 2 miles even to the corners, consequently from a realism standpoint I no longer need large roads or parking structures. Obviously the get around this issue of cars becoming insignificant developers had to change scale to make the issues of a smaller map size less significant, there by opening a whole new can of worms. One of the greatest joys for many players is laying out and maintaining the transportation networks of their cities. How important could a transportation network possibly be when a Sim could walk any where in their city in 10 minutes???? Oh wait Maxis opened up another can full of worms to fix that issue, lets make certain income brackets less likely to walk to work. This idea while good in theory has been put in place as a solution to a problem caused 10 layers back and not as an added bit of realism. And the issue of map size and scale cascades even further. Maxis knows its players want huge populations despite what a 4km^2 area should hold in real life, so they make buildings and houses hold more people than they should, allowing populations to soar while still keeping the map size small. Then they have the issue of radius for fire, education, healthcare and safety. A single police department should easily be able to handle a 4km^2 area in reality, but that would make the game to easy so instead you need 10. All of these issues stem back to a fundamentally poor decision to give us extremely tiny maps, a decision that will impact every piece of the simulation and force maxis to try and correct for these issues by creating all new issues. My point goes back to the idea that to create a realistic simulation we needed realistic scale and map sizes. I suggest realistic monetary values not because I want to be an accountant and wade through mountains of million dollar values, but simply because Maxis seems to be doing a poor job of scaling real values to a more manageable number, using something closer to the real values would have insured they couldn't have messed it up. I don't expect breathtakingly realistic graphics, and am quite content with the graphics i have seen so far despite being way over saturated (thankyou optional filters). What I did expect was at least a suitable ground work for a realistic simulation. One that would allow me to at least realistically need a highway system and train system to get my sims from place to place. The idea of tracking every sim individually is awesome, but when they can never move more than a couple kms it seems a bit pointless. I just don't see the fun in being forced to build cities so inherently unrealistic. BTW way off topic, but I have been out of the game for years now and would love to play some SC4 again, but cant imagine doing so without some mods. Are there any mod packs or mod loaders out there that make installing 500+ bats, mods, and dependencies any easier or is it still like a 2 day long process of tracking down files and installing everything one by one like it used to be? Wish I could just download someones dat file and be done. Sorry for the off topic question that probably has an answer somewhere in the forums

I dont know about the rest of you, but looking at what we have seen so far from SCS makes me believe that there is no reason to continue following its development. The game doesnt appear to have a single feature we have all been wanting. So I present you guys with my proposal, this is going to be fairly long so bare with me. Ill start with the games basic concept. -No more regions, but instead a tile system much like the trainz series uses. For those not familiar you basically start with one tile and when you fill it up you simply go to the edge of the map and add another and keep going like this. This will provide us as the developers with the easiest and most effective means of making a massive city simulation. -Full 3d, for the sake of fast development and custom content creation the game needs to be built in full 3d. Sure 3d has ruined a vast amount of sim like games, but i feel we can create something worth while. Look at games like Trainz, Flight Sim, and many others to see good examples of what 3d gaming is capable of with decent textures and rendering. For those fearing the need for enormous computing power I propose we use a hybrid of the current sc4 system and flight simulator. This basically means there will be a field of view component to the game so buildings, trees and automata x distance from the camera will fade out. Furthermore buildings could have 2 models created for them one complex and one a simple lod much like we have now, the lods could be auto constructed and rendered very quickly much like they are rendered now but with side and top camera angles instead of iso metric. ( To elaborate a bit more the simple lods could basically be 6 sided objects and each side could be rendered out in max and then mapped as a texture to that side. This would create a very simplistic structure, but it would only be for max zoom distance and when something is far off in the distance.) -Stick with a grid, but make it much much smaller. Two huge problems arise from using a grid, first roads are limited to only a few basic angles, and second scale is limited by the grid size. Going with a smaller grid like 1 square = 1 meter would mean that networks could have far more complex paths, the best example of this is if you go into paint and you draw something on a document that is 10x10 pixels and then zoom in it looks jagged, if you draw the same thing on a 100x100 pixel image it will look much smoother when you zoom in. Drawing roads could follow the same principal. Infact with the ability to go full 3d we could simply do roads as paths and say that this path fills (X) tiles. Using smaller tiles presents us with a small hurdle though. what in the world can we use to fill in all the empty squares that are left next to diagnol paths (transit networks)? The answer is rather simple.... Filler Tiles. As city builders we are constantly manually placing parking lots and empty grass tiles and things to take up this extra space where there simply isnt room for a large building. Well guess what if we divided a normal sc4 grid into 1 meter squares we would have another 256 squares in every sc4 tile. Now lets say a path cut through this tile and used about 200 of these squares. We could easilly tell the game to fill the tile with filler squares that are designed to match the zone they are placed in. For example low density res would simply use grass or bushes, and industrial could use parking or barrels. -Zoning needs to be improved, but the complexity of writing code that deals with the way zones work and everything seems staggering, but this is my proposal. Lets simplify zoning basically no more individual zones but instead one massive zone that buildings place them selves in according to a set of rules. So basically it would work like this you lay down a road network and pull out your zoning tool, the tool would have 2 options fill much like a paint bucket in ms paint or photoshop works, and normal grid based zoning. Lets say you use fill and you just fill in an area defined by 4 roads. Now the game has this basic blob of zone with no predetermined lots. The game can now start applying rules to fill in this area. Rules like: -Buildings must face a road and be no more than (X) tiles from a road or pedestrian side walk -Buildings must first attempt to fill a zone starting from the corner so as to leave room for other buildings. -Filler tiles can grow after buildings have been put in place -Parking lot filler tile can only grow in (X) zones, must be directly adjacent to another parking tile or a road. -Other filler tiles could all have their own sets of rules and such. -Automata is very important and keeps the game from simply being a plopable art project. Transity automata kills sc4s performance becuase it basically trys to determine a path for ever single sim to take on their way to work. So we need to develope a new method and cut that number of computations down dramatically. So my proposal is a heirarchy system. Basically at the street level paths are drawn for every sim until they reach a major artery, then a path is predetermined for every sim entering that artery this cuts the numbers down tremendously. Sims will also be programmed to move up the heirarchy as they commute so they should choose to leave their house by street then switch to road then avenue then highway as soon as possible. Each transition from one level to the next will automattically contain a set of paths for that sim to take to the next transition. So basically the sim leaves his or her house and they are immediately given the path to the transition from street to road, then once they hit road they are given the path from road to avenue and one they hit avenue they are given the path from avenue to highway and then in reverse as they close in on a destination. Each destination and each transition would have its own unique ID and transit paths would map those IDs So from a coding stand point it would work like this. Sim lives at desination 1011 and works at 2032 so the game says alright which path file contains 1011 it then gives the sim the path and simply builds upon that path by transitioning to other paths until it reaches a path that contains 2032. I know that sounds incredibly complicated but the jist of things is that path files would be drawn before sims ever need them and the game would never need to calculate paths for individual sims but rather the network as a whole. -Finally the physics could be as simple or as complex as we want, we could in theory create weather and land slides and everything we could possibly dream of, but for the time being im guessing simple physics would be best, things like running water, and gravity. Alright so i know this is all a huge huge undertaking, but these are just suggestions and the culmination of years of wish listing for new sim cities. The point is we can do this, the ideas are programable and the basic ground work i am setting forth would give us the abilties to do all the things we have been wanting for so long. So the trick is getting the ball rolling and formulating a plan of action. I propose we start with 3 teams, first team will be programmers (the area i have no expertise in), second team will work closest to the programmers and be our logic team, these guys will come up with the numbers that the programers can work around, finally a content creation team, these guys will make 3d content and textures and just pretty much everything and just keep doing it until the coders are done. The basic idea is that all 3 teams can work simutaneously becuase we will make the program as open source as possible so all the models we make in max can be directly imported to the game as the coding continues. I dont know what level of participation i could take in this project but i am willing to work my but off creating content and working with programmers and other team members trying to keep the ball rolling. I honestly think we have a shot at this, and with a bit of commitment and talent we can destroy SCS. I dont ever want to charge for a game like this, but donations could help out as im sure we all have real jobs and things to so our time would be valuable. 100 people donating 10 bucks could buy a computer built to do nothing but render models. or 1000 people donating 10 bucks could pay for the web traffic of downloading this game. I see simtropolis as a great place to build from and the perfect name for such a project. To all those saying SC4 is good enough, I ask you if you would like to have true running water? The ability to develope massive cities with no need for exiting back to region, full 3d abilities like walking in a city or even driving, real physics, direct 3d import of bats, free drawn roads and highways, the abiltiy to add new networks without overwriting old ones, and the abilty to say hey EA we are sooooo much better than you.