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ONE-ON-ONE WITH SIMCITY'S 'MAYOR' "It's a new age for SimCity. The cities you build no longer stand alone; they are not only part of a region but a global market as well. Your sims play a greater role in your city's life. You must balance the needs of your situations with the resources you can find, create, and afford. Yet the core of SimCity remains the same--giving the player a real influence on the world."

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This new SimCity brings a whole world of change. As it turns out, PCs have gotten significantly better at running simulations in the nine years since SimCity 4, and Maxis is putting them to good use to create what's already looking like an incredibly detailed and flexible blank slate on which to found our cities. Also, though you'll be able to play alone if you want, Maxis is pushing hard to get us playing together -- or at least side-by-side -- with other virtual mayors. On that note, those of you who can't tolerate EA's Origin and online-only games should tap out early before you get excited about this: Yes, you will have to register an Origin account in order to play, and yes, you must be online at all times while playing in order to start playing. EA has confirmed that you will not be kicked out if your connection is interrupted.Moving on. The actual game looks kinda like this, except not a painting. "By himself, he doesn't seem too complicated," observed Lead Designer Stone Librande, with the game camera focused on a lone, ant-sized Sim citizen. "But what I love about it is that when you get 10,000 people, it's really fun to watch. Even though everybody's basically a stupid, very simple little algorithm, when you get enough of them, and some people are shopping, some people are at schools, and some people are at parks, you get these really rich flows through your city." It's an impersonation made possible by a mind-bogglingly detailed simulation. It may be a stupid little algorithm, but it does a great impression of a crowd of pedestrians. A few hundred Sims strolling around a small loop of road bears a striking resemblance to the movements of a real crowd you might see leaving a movie theater after the show. It's an impersonation made possible by a mind-bogglingly detailed simulation -- one that simultaneously keeps constant tabs on up to 200,000 of these guys as they go through their daily lives. By comparison, the four prior SimCitys are primitive, basing their simulations on statistical guesswork that has only a foggy idea of where a particular Sim might be at any given moment. Sweet Curves What's more, those sorta-smart Sims were walking down smooth, curvy roads. "This isn't a grid-based SimCity, it's a free-form SimCity that's all structured by the roads," explained Creative Director Ocean Quigley, a 17-year Maxis veteran who's had a hand in every SimCity except the original. When he demonstrated how the new cities are laid out, first laying down a road and then attaching residential, industrial, and commercial zones to that framework, I had to imagine someone at Maxis smacked their forehead when they thought of that. After four games of the old style of drawing zones arbitrarily and then trying to make sure that there was a road within four grid squares of every zoned square, this simple design tweak might just kill off one of the series' more frustrating quirks. And with those curvy roads, the map has effectively become a game of urban-planning Draw Something in which we'll be able to create any city layout we want, not just a gridded Philadelphia clone. You can tell how wealthy an area is by how shiny its buildings are. Maxis is bashful about showing actual screenshots because it hasn't yet put a lot of attention into the graphics (hence the concept art you're seeing here), but a few showcase buildings -- like the fire station -- looked sharp and colorful, with detailed animations to show when they're operating. Quigley pointed to model railroads and scale models as great sources of inspiration for the look and feel, and also pointed out a bit of diorama-like texture trickery used to efficiently create an illusion of interiors to buildings and even cars without slowing down the framerate. That's a first for a SimCity game: there's a full resource economy. This city, however, wasn't doing so hot. It had no power, and no police or fire protection. The citizens were picketing at city hall in protest, and rightly so -- no one was picking up the garbage on their front lawns, which (due to a lack of a sewage system) was technically at least partially poop. At the root of the city's woes was the lack of juice flowing from the coal power plant, which didn't have any coal to burn. That's a first for a SimCity game: there's a full resource economy, complete with a form of supply-chain crafting, and to use them we'll be need to either buy raw materials from the global market or extract them from the land ourselves. Throwing down a mine in a coal-rich area set off a chain reaction: miners (actual Sims who now had jobs) dug out the goodies, a truck carried a load to the power plant, and the power plant sprang to life and began to process the coal into electricity and an unhealthy dose of pollution. Power pulses shot out from the plant along the electrical grid, lighting up the town as they went, and solving half of the problems facing the town. SimSocialism? Wait a minute -- I thought this was a civic simulator, but this all sounds like a business. What gives? "If everything just came from off the screen, from stage left or something, then you wouldn't care about it," replied Librande. "Now you actually need people -- someone's got to be digging that stuff up. Your community is going to be wrapped around that. When you look at cities, like the big oil cities, the government is really involved in the big businesses... So I don't see it as two separate things. There's a police station, there's a school, and then there's an oil refinery, and these are all things you have to manage." Asked if there'd be a "libertarian mode" where the government would keep its hands off of business, Librande said that it's totally possible to ignore that aspect and simply buy the goods you need from the global market -- but it'll cost you more. Big businesses can move in if you give the mayoral thumbs up. It sounds to me like this economy is designed to make us more dependent on the new multiplayer aspects. It's an interesting setup -- players won't be operating in the same city map, so you don't need to worry about your friend bulldozing your stuff, but cities in the same "region" (a map made up of between four and 10 cities) can help or hinder each other. For example, a player producing a surplus of electricity can sell some to a neighbor, but if he's producing all that juice by burning tons of coal, he'll also unintentionally export pollution. Other than competing for leaderboard scores, though, there won't be a great deal of competition between mayors -- although I did catch wind of plans for a sports team rivalry system. Two or more mayors playing together and specializing their cities' production roles can make sweetheart deals. Maxis has come up with an interesting asynchronous multiplayer system that doesn't require you and your fellow players to be online at the same time to play together (which is great, because otherwise no one would ever finish one of those games), so it shouldn't have a traumatic effect on your city if your friend goes AWOL. But from the sound of things, two or more mayors playing together and specializing their cities' production roles can coordinate and make sweetheart deals that give all the cheap power, clean water, and other goods they need to build a metropolis-level city much more efficiently than a solo player. Specializing a city will give it a unique look and feel. So now the city had power, but there was still no police or fire protection. With no police, when a very conspicuous black van with flames painted on it started driving around the area, there was no one to stop him and ask if he was an arsonist. It so happens he was, and moments after he pulled into an apartment building a blaze broke out, so Lead Producer Kip Katsaelis paused the action to show off the new modular building system. He plonked down a basic fire station, which by itself would provide basic protection, but then he used a Spore-like modification system to add on an extra fire truck garage to increase coverage. I wondered if this system, which applies not just to fire stations but police stations, hospitals, schools, and more would increase the micromanagement load on the player, but Katsaelis seemed confident that wouldn't be an issue. "We feel like we hit a nice balance there with the amount of 'plopables' that you had to place -- the amount of fire stations that you needed to place in previous SimCities versus the number of modules you need to place in this SimCity -- and we're hitting about the same amount of management game." Gridlock Katsaelis resumed time, and in moments the fire station was fully staffed up and had dispatched a truck to the scene of the blaze, where panicking Sims were pouring out in droves. Again, those Sims are each represented individually, whether on foot or in a car -- and that proved to be a problem for the fire truck, which was caught in a traffic jam on a narrow road. It seems wider roads and smoothly flowing traffic are essential to a city's well-being, because this delay cost lives: before the truck finally reached the fire and extinguished it, several Sims in the building caught fire and ran outside before burning to dust. And that'swhy you pull over when there's a fire truck behind you. The arsonist is just one type of criminal we'll need to watch out for -- among others, Maxis says that the Limited Edition will include both the heroic Maxis Man and his arch-nemesis Dr. Lu, a supervillain (complete with lair) who will do some serious damage if left unchecked. I should not have laid off all those firemen. Maxis knows the power of a good mod community. "We're not idiots." I asked Quigley whether we'd see mods, and the news was encouraging -- a surprise, given the online requirement. "SimCity is a data set that sits inside a GlassBox. It's all just text-based rules. We've built an infrastructure that's moddable," he said. However, exposing all those guts to modders would take some work, and it's yet to be determined exactly when that work might happen. But Quigley added that he and Maxis know the power of a good mod community. "It's worth pointing out that the reason people are still playing SimCity 4 today, 10 years after we shipped it, is because the modding community essentially recreated it. They filled it with new content and fixed bugs, and made it as much of a hobby as a game. We're very cognoscente of that -- I mean, we're not idiots." For the grand finale, Quigley attacked some skyscrapers with giant marbles, shattering buildings and sending chunks flying everywhere to show off the demolition physics. Giant doom balls won't be a disaster in the final game, but we'll definitely see things like fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and (most likely) alien invaders. This will certainly be the most destructible SimCity yet, and for me at least, demolishing a megalopolis has always been the greatest reward for building one.

Cities, by their nature, are a complicated patchwork of interpersonal relationships and infrastructures. In the real world, no city exists in a vacuum. It is always a part of pulsing organic matrix where events and decisions made at a distant city impacts it sooner or later. Sadly, when SimCity first hit the gaming scene in 1989, the technical infrastructure needed to create vibrant interconnected virtual cities was barely in existence. Graphics and processing technology weren’t very advanced and players are happy to play with blocky graphics and very basic AI. Thankfully, the Internet, graphics chips, and processors have evolved to the point that they can enable the developer of SimCity, Maxis, to fully pursue their grand vision for the city simulator series. In the upcoming iteration of the SimCity concept, dubbed by game followers as SimCity 5, players’ cities will interact with the supplies, materials, and weather patterns of nearby cities. Cities will no longer exist in a vacuum but will be members of a thriving community of cities linked together through the Internet. Screenshot from Sim City 5 (Credit: EA) Citizens will travel among differing players’ cities. Similarly, individuals in the cities are now empowered by modern processors with more unique personal details like education and particular needs and wants. Each separate city will be impacted by the trade and other decisions made by other cities. The same goes with weather patterns and natural resource availability. Based on these developments, SimCity 5 looks poised to take the city simulation genre to a whole new interactive community-based level. Finded on: Game Bandits

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GLASSBOX INSIDER'S LOOK - PART 1 March 20, 2012 Ocean QuigleyHi Everybody. My name is Ocean Quigley and I’m the Creative Director on SimCity. Over the next few weeks we’ll be giving you an inside look at GlassBox, our new simulation engine. By the end of this series, you’ll understand how this powerful simulation engine works, how it will affect your gameplay experience and what it means when we say, “What You See Is What We Sim.” Here we go! Why Bring SimCity Back Now? Ten years ago when we made SimCity 4, computers weren't powerful enough for us to simulate a city at the level of fidelity we wanted. We were able to give you a broad approximation of what was going on and we did our best to make it look plausible, but there wasn’t a tight connection between your actions and the simulation’s behavior. Now, with GlassBox, we can really represent everything that happens in your city. The buildings, the Sims, the vehicles, the trees, the roads—they’re are all really there, they are all living simulation objects. Your actions will result in a visible changes to the way that your city behaves. You will see direct consequences from the choice you make. The simulation responds to you. The overall life of your city is built out of the interactions of the things you create. Here's a video showing some of the simulation components that we've created. These are the basic building blocks of GlassBox, and we combine them to make the systems that constitute a city. Resources: What Are They Good For? Absolutely everything. Let's start with resources. You can think of resources as information. Put another way, information flows through your city in the form of resources. For example, the many Sims that populate your city are resources that walk or drive from building to building, carrying "population," money, happiness or germs. Inside a building, you might have resources for power, water, coal, or education. There are lots of different resources, and they're used to control what the simulation does. Resources can be held in different places. They can be in a building, they can be carried about by Sims or vehicles (agents), or they can be inside maps of various sorts. The natural environment is a collection of resources to be consumed, added to, or transformed by the city. When a building has the right sorts of resources, it will come to life and start running simulation rules. The rules can do a number of different things:transform resources, pack resources into agents and send them on their way, change a building’s state, interact with maps, or create and destroy things. Why Rules Run the World. The rules define the behavior of buildings. They define what the building actually does. They are the simulation logic inside a building that brings it to life. It is not enough for rules to be running invisibly inside buildings. The buildings need to show you what's going on. When a rule is doing something, we represent it visually or audibly. You’ll hear it with sound effects or see it with an animation, an effect or some other visual representation. For example, when an industrial building is producing goods; you can see gears moving within it and watch as individual resources are being made and processed. And because each building has its own rules and resources, you can combine building components together to extend what they do. Adding another component adds additional simulation behavior. Zoning, Roads And Pipes…Oh My! The roads and pipes are the circulatory system that agents use to move resources within a city. The buildings hook onto networks and absorb or create agents. Zones also hook onto networks and run simulation rules that determine what buildings should actually appear in a given area. Remember those industrial buildings we discussed earlier? You can see trucks delivering resources from them to commercial buildings to be sold. Sims carrying money will travel to those commercial buildings and exchange one resource (money) for another (goods). Those are the major components of GlassBox—the toolkit that our designers are using to create a living, dynamic SimCity. Check back in soon when our Lead Gameplay Engineer, Dan Moskowitz, explains the Economic Loop and how GlassBox powers SimCity, the ultimate city simulation! Want to see more now? Watch the first part of our GlassBox Engine demo. Tags Simcity glassbox COMMENTS Submitted by NiceGuyEddie86 on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 08:34Hey Ocean, a loyal SimCity fan here. I just wanted to throw my two cents into the ring here. I am a firm believer in the 'gritty' aspects of running a city. That is; charts, data maps, budget balancing, advisors (each with their own agenda), lobbying, etc etc. A Sim City game without these aspects isn't true to the series, in my opinion. In SC4 you had a board of advisors, each with their own view on the city. The environmentalist hated you for putting the water pump next to the factories, and the utilities man praised you for it, or the city planner mentions the lack of humble streets in suburbs, while the transit specialist gave you props for updating the infrastructure. Making all of them happy was tough, but very possible once you get the hang of how the engine works. Aside from advisors I want to see all the boring spreadsheets and data views return. Sure, the system of transparency sounds great, but I want hard data that makes me feel like a real mayor. I've heard a lot of rumors of it being an ecologically themed game. I think this would be a major killer for me, in truth. In reality I'm a landscaper and love nature and the environment above all, but in a SC game I want to do what's more logical for the city's funding and it's citizens no matter what it takes. I want to create a clean pollution free urban utopia and then start a new city and make it like Hoboken on a bad day. In other words, I have no interest in playing An Inconvenient Truth: The Game. My city will naturally be effected by pollution, I don't need a slap on the wrist from the game itself. Finally, the most precious aspect of SC4 to me was the infrastructure. Building a freeway system to connect three cities (and the commuters) together, carrying thousands of cars back and forth each day, from the suburbs past the projects and the industry into the city center with all the skyscrapers. Sitting back and looking at those green arrows made me feel like my city was alive. I've seen what you have to offer so far and I'm liking it very much, but please above all else don't let it enter Societies or CitiesXL territory, please? Those games are fun for a couple hours but they don't hold a flame to Sim City. Hopefully I haven't spilled my guts too much here, A fan. Submitted by Pabloeinstein on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 11:40Three important tips: FLOOD is a disaster that I want in SimCity. They exist worldwide. And if the city is growing and there is no planning, there must be SLUMS. Be able to build in various locations around the WORLD, each with its own challenge (Regardless of country and politics, only natural resources and cultures). by Pablo from Brazil. Submitted by Pabloeinstein on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 11:59The GlassBox should govern the rules of nature, for example, seasons, animals, rain, tides etc... And SimCity need bike paths, trails and pedestrian pathways. Submitted by Trevorprice123 on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 12:37Hi there, I think the new SimCity should have a little bit of warfare, and maybe rival cities? Like you could design your city and then build naval ships to attack other SimNations? I know it takes away from the point of SimCity but maybe that option/game-mode would be good. Submitted by Trevorprice123 on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 12:38Street trolleys would also be a good addition. Submitted by Zoidberg538 on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 15:58Oh this is gonna be good! Submitted by jls8w on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 17:48"Here's a video showing some of the simulation components that we've created. " The video is missing. Submitted by nissan178 on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 20:33i want to see power lines in the new simcity like telephone poles what see in the sweet today!! Submitted by thejoshanater on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 22:03this is the video they are referring tohttp://www.youtube.com/watchv=vS0qURl_JJY&context=C4287299ADvjVQa1PpcFOh... Submitted by thejoshanater on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 22:05my apologies copy paste did something weird lets try it like this

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