fatbuster

They posted an explanation to that yesterday. The answer was posted in this thread: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?836809-Does-cars-disapears-even-not-in-traffic-jam&p=18900912&viewfull=1#post18900912 Essentially they said that this is something that this should only happen under extreme, potentially game-breaking circumstances. That particular case seemed to have been caused by really bad planning and an optimization issue with roundabouts.

Paradox posted their 7th dev diary. This one is focused on the simulation aspect of the game. There really isn't much info on here but it should give a good idea on how they are approaching it. From what I've read it seems that they are using a system similar to what SimCity 2013 uses (but hopefully better). You can read the diary here.

I think the one thing you can take away from this is that EA stills sees this game as a (financial) success. This means that the game should at least continue to receive patches and new content. Some of the smaller issues could still be fixed, but it remains to be seen if the larger ones (city size, Sim Complexity & Offline Mode) will be also addressed. It will be interesting to see the state of the game a year from now.

I know some of you may have seen this on Reddit but I'll post it here for those who may have missed it. https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/342073329479454720 Just a tweet from Dan Moskowitz. It's cool to see that the devs at Maxis are not only enjoying your work , but also feel optimistic about it. He also mentions that editing simulations scripts are likely to cause issues with the server right now .

its a good idea but i don't think it would help since during my testing it has work on some maps and not on others and then after a restart it suddenly works on the map it didn't work on before. but once it worked once on that map it will work in the future regardless of what i do. i can be that the region or map is flagged as cheating whilst looking through the java scripts i found some code that reported a city box as either broken or cheated so it could be that Sucks to hear. I have hope though that there's still some way around this issue. Does the randomness also occur with sandboxed or private sandboxed regions as well?

I finally tried this out yesterday and it help with traffic a ton! I was wondering, is it possible to make it so that cars can't cross over the center divider on certain road types (like the avenue with grass median)? It just looks weird to see cars cutting through grass and trees trying to get on the right side!

Looks like someone over on Reddit was able to modify the regional highway (and create new highway roads) by enabling some hidden debug tools. Looks like the changes even save to your city when you quit! Here's the link to the Reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/

I played a bit with the railroads in the last beta and you can easily make the rails look like the first image. Though the game will also still allow you to make 90 degree turns if you want. It will be up to personal preference and skill on how you'll want to run them.

Ocean already mentioned that the train stopping was a bug. Also, even at the slowest sim speed the time is still going at around 1 minute per second, so speed and acceleration will always be a bit exaggerated.

Ever heard of youtube? when you do there is a search bar, type Oceans full name a MAGIC! I'm sitting here staring at his channel not seeing anything about larger maps. And that video above is no proof of anything. He doesn't say "testing out larger map" anywhere. Yes but it doesnt take 6 minutes to travel around a 2km-2km map does it!!?? also note the shear amount of ridges, bridges and 2 towns he passes... There is also another video of the same area but from the cars perspective... You just need to look... He's running it at the slowest simulation and the track he made has a lot of turns. Also, you can see a few minutes in that the train reached the starting point again (just looks different because me moved the camera around a few times).

You do realize that none of that is true (aside from there being an in-game store)? This article looks to be about as factual as something from The Onion.

Just been looking for more info: Found this from Ocean's twitter feed: I'm guessing that people will be poking and prying it open almost immediately, but official mod support will come later. Mostly just surprised that he didn't try discourage it and acknowledges that it will happen regardless. The biggest piece of info I found though was this. It seems that someone has figured out how to read the files the game is using! It also seems that he is looking for some help.

That's what a USA train station looks like. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, virtually nobody in America rides the passenger trains. If the government didn't run the train company, there would be absolutely no train service at all. Kinda sad. Even my small town of 40.000 has 4 platforms and trains to 3 other cities every hour. Cities with a population of 100.000 have mostly between 5 and 8 platforms overhere in Belgium. Cities above 100.000 have more than 8 and once you get to 500.000 12 platforms isn't anything abnormal. The really sad thing is even here in the North East (Massachusetts) anytime there is talk about expanding the transit system people come out in droves to argue against it. There are always arguments that the money is being wasted supporting it and should instead go toward the road system to support more cars. Not to mention that our commuter trains are pretty old and break down way more often than they should. To stay on topic though:

Here's just a small interesting thread I found on reddit. Specifically the answer to this question here: Its not advised that you mod the game until we release official tools. Not sure what will happen, but nothing good can come from it. and no, i dont know when we will be supporting mods. I don't really read too much into smileys but that's an interesting way to phrase that answer. I wonder to what extent we can already modify the game if someone were to figure out something like the algorithm they're using for the package files.

Yeah, looks like the game would require an extensive re-write if they even want to think about raising the city size. Least of which would mean converting the game into 64-bit, which I'm sure is more work than anyone would think. If they tried raising the size now I would imagine many people either start having their games crash or have major slowdowns as the game reached the 2GB limit. Unfortunately I don't see a fix for a very long time. Don't be surprised if adjacent cities as a workaround is starting to look really good to them right about now.

I honestly hope they designed glassbox to be able to handle resources better than that. That would mean that the relationship between city size and resources is exponential. Which is one of the worse Big O of n run times possible. Any software with that design should receive a failing grade, and I know if I turned in anything like that i would likely loose my job. You'll probably be interested in reading this (specifically at the ryani's second post). This is the most technical explanation from a maxis dev I've found so far regarding both city sizes & adjacent cities. This topic has already been talked about at length though so I won't add too much. Personally, considering the publisher in this case, I think the online requirement most likely would have existed regardless what city sizes were finally chosen.

I actually like this idea. It wouldn't change how the current system works since the pre-made connections would still exist & and it would easier to make something that looks like a real city, at least from afar. The only issues I see with this is that they may have to add highways we can use since they would likely be cutting deep into our cities. It would require them to add user-made over/under passes so we can have roads crossing the highway. Overall though, I would love to see this added into the game. You should try showing this to Mr. Quigley on twitter to see was he thinks about this.

I don't think modding will be implemented in the multiplayer mode since everyone in the region would have to have the plugin. However it will most likely be implemented in the singleplayer mode. Which still raises some questions as to the extent they'll allow us to modify the game because even in singleplayer mode you're still connected to the Internet. Officially they said you have to be online even during singleplayer so that you can participate in the global resource market but we all know it's EA's hilarious attempt at stopping piracy. I'm wondering, Has anyone that knows about modding tried looking at the files yet? I saw that they were *.package files but don't open In the ilive reader (at least not yet). Though I would imagine someone would have to go through and figure out how they're saved again, hopefully it's not too different or hard. I would really love to see what is currently accessible from those from those files. They do have a sandbox version that they said will be available on release. Supposedly it will disallow you from affecting the global market (also allows cheats & instant access to all buildings), not sure if multiplayer will be available through it yet (though I'm sure many people on this site wouldn't care either way). I think that any modding that will happen will probably be limited to sandbox mode, which I would perfectly fine with.

Here's a reply Ocean gave someone regarding creating their own vehicles for the game. Let's see - they're 5 LOD's, from 800 tris at highest down to like, 20! on the lowest. Also a 256x256 normal/spec/diffuse maps Even though these are just the requirements for a vehicle I can imagine anyone creating a building would need to know at least this much (and potentially much more). It would seem that anyone used to creating building in CitiesXL may have a head start if/when custom content is allowed.

There's also another "dev" beta that is going on right now. People in this beta don't have the time restrictions and limitations that the upcoming weekend beta has. Besides marketing , this upcoming beta will most likely be used to stress test the servers.

How is Minecraft's engine in any comparable to SimCity's? As croxis pointed out, It's not constantly pushing anywhere near the same amount of data that Simcity does. The only time minecraft has a large amounts of data moving around is either when someone creates a gigantic explosion or spawns a large number of mobs, both of which can bring even powerful servers to their knees very quickly. If you want to compare it to another game at least compare to one using the same type of simulation behavior, like Tropico 4. Just to compare one aspect of both games, Tropico 4 has a hard population limit around 1,500. That may sound laughably low but you can get rid of it with a mod. Though, the funny thing is that even with the cap removed people still struggle to get over 20k without their games slowing to a crawl. Now, SimCity claims to not have any population cap and we've heard reports of cities topping 1mil. That may not sound like it means anything but the thing to remember is that low population limits in agent based simulations like Tropico were pretty much the norm until now. The fact that SimCity can handle that many more times the information than other games in the same genre, that were released recently and remain playable, is actually pretty amazing. Now, I'm not a fan of the limitations the game has and I'm willing to agree that Glassbox may still be too much for our PC's right now to be used in this game, but by no means would I consider the Glassbox engine to be a crappy engine from everything I've heard and seen so far.

hmm...anyone notice that the grass between the side streets and the avenue looks very different compared to the rest of the wild grass? I wonder why that is? (please tell me those are some kind of filler lots!)