squidgeny

Ah of course! I should've known Sadly I gave my disc away many years ago, but it's worth buying again (especially at current prices!). Thanks for the links.

Thanks for this excellent thread. Long-time simcity player here, and have come back to SC4 after something like a 7-year break But I have a problem! Although each of these updates say they have successfully updated my game, the exe still shows as version 1.1.610.0 Is there a way to determine from inside the game whether it's been updated? I snooped around the menus but couldn't find anywhere where it tells me the version. Also nothing seems different when I'm in a city (though that might be because the changes aren't immediately visible or noticable). Any help greatly appreciated!

I think this is an interesting question. Given every sim/commodity is being simulated, it's going to be a lot harder for a processor to simulate at a faster speed than when everything was abstracted with statistical overlays in, say, SC4. I would guess that running a glassbox simulation at twice the speed would be roughly equivalent to simulating twice as many agents/whatever at normal speed. Since the publisher is going to want to market this game towards the slowest processors to maximise its audience, I think fast-forward could be left out of the game in favour of bigger cities. Fast-forward might work for small villages (or supercomputers) - so they might throw in the option - but for most people could turn out to be quite useless. That said, there does seem to be a lot of evidence that fast-forward will be in the game, so I guess I don't know! One thing is for sure though: The simulation of sims in their daily lives won't be synced with the simulation of construction. A sim could well drive past an empty lot to get to work and drive back home to see a giant factory on the same lot. If sims age, they'll probably age at super-accelerated rates too. It sounds unrealistic but it will barely be noticable, because it really doesn't matter how many days are in a year in the sim universe.

Pretty realistic, then!

Yeah def. Personally I'm really pumped about buses. According to the reddit transcript, buses are in (and to add weight to that, I've seen them in one gameplay video)... but for buses to actually have a sensible impact on traffic (i.e. during rush hour when sims commute to work) they'll have to operate like you would expect them to i.e. following planned routes. I hope to god we can define those routes ourselves!

Ooooh! I did not know this (never played it). That's good news though, because the devs will probably be wanting to "one-up" them by doing the same thing and then integrating it with their agent system. I mean, that's really the only way they can make buses work in the game at all, and I doubt they'll avoid the problem by leaving buses out entirely. I am super-excited about that prospect

Cell towers boost desirability? They definitely don't in the UK - most people consider them an eyesore! I do like the idea though, of cell towers lowering desirability - but companies will pay you to put them around town. A bit like the company deals in previous simcities.

That's actually quite an old screenshot, and all the early screenshots show a rather more "finished" quality than the E3 video. I'm not sure why. Presumably, the video was made later than the screenshots, but it seems less finished (the road-bordering-grass being one good example)

Nobody's saying that, at least not in this thread. There have been a few people around the forum saying that, though (and it does strike me as a sort of idle "threat") - but I think in those cases, they're actually just stating what would be the deal-breakers for them. Which is reasonable. Edit: I think this is a bit of an unrealistic expectation, given the way they've approached this latest incarnation of SimCity. If it was going to use the same mechanic as previous titles (i.e. statistical data overlaid on a map), then I'd agree, but since they're planning to simulate each and every citizen, then there's going to be a lot of difficulty in integrating all the agents with features we've come to know and love. Take buses for example: in SC4, it was as easy as sprinkling bus stops over your city and letting them absorb traffic. But in SC5, sims are going to actually have to physically walk to a bus stop, board a bus and then get off at the other end when they want to go from home to work. If the sim is going to arrive to work on time, then the bus will have to follow a sensible path (rather than roam the city randomly, stopping every time it encounters a bus stop) - and that path will have to be either manually determined by the user or automatically calculated from some "sense" of where the residential areas and the industrial/commercial areas are. This would have to be done, otherwise many sims might end up waiting at bus stops forever and that could have dire consequences for gameplay! Especially considering that factories won't function if nobody shows up to work. I honestly can't think of a solution to this other than (a) leaving buses out entirely (b) letting sims teleport from bus stop to bus stop without an actual bus mediating the travel or ( c) going whole hog and letting the user place bus depots and bus stops, define bus routes, and populate each route with buses (this would be mind-bogglingly awesome, by the way, but probably quite a substantial effort on part of the programming team with little gain from the "casual gamer" audience) This is but one of what I can imagine are a lot of difficulties to be overcome, all as a result of this glassbox system, and we're likely to see a lot of simplifications and abandoned features as a result. All I can hope for is that the game will be moddable, so the brainstorming (and programming effort) of the community can be harnessed to "recover" these lost features. Now I know this doesn't apply to zone-density, which I can't see any reason for removing (glassbox or not), but I just wanted to share the above thought concerning your comment.

I'm not sure I've seen all these interviews. Are they linked on the main site? I couldn't find them.

Thank you all

^^^ agreed! The terrain editor in Simcity 4 blew me away when that game came out... I had as much fun in that as I did actually building a city I'd rather see those processing resources go towards simulating the sims/vehicles/what-have-you, than dynamic water physics. If this is the first game where they're simulating everything in the city, there's probably not a lot of room left over for dynamic water. Standing water will be good enough for me, and I think it's a bit silly for some (eg. spa, not you) to speculate that even that won't be available - nothing defines the shape of a city more than a coastline or a river! The concept art has it, the big-shot trailer even opens with a cargo ship pulling into port.

I dunno about that I'm in the UK, and the M17x with those specs is costing the equivalent of $2,200 according to Dell's online store :/

It's already gone through. Spent a good amount of money on an Alienware M17x last summer, and I don't foresee getting a new PC anytime soon....although I have kicked about the idea of building a desktop, I wouldn't guarantee that happening. My current machine is well equipped to run this new SimCity well. I'm gonna need a new computer to run SC5 (my current one is frankly laughable), and I've been eying the Alienware M17x. What's your specs on it?

I had a look at the three videos on the Simcity site, but there's no sign of varied densities. The only video that comes close is a brief moment where the user zones for residential in video #1. No menus are open and the zone is all the same density, so I can't tell.