Alonjar

A truly profound statement. Doing this would definitely have made a lot of people feel better... all they had to do was push them closer and rebrand it so that "regions" are actually cities, and the current "cities" are actually neighborhoods or boroughs. Would have solved 80% of peoples hate.

All buildings which use service trucks (trading, garbage, etc) offer "Service roads" in their edit menu that you can place ANYWHERE! Now the thing about service roads is.... ONLY service trucks will drive on these! You can use them to create shortcuts for your delivery trucks to get straight to where they need to go (trade ports, highway, etc) and bypass normal traffic! Here is a picture example from my city. The magenta arrows show the flow of service vehicles, and the green arrows show where "normal" traffic goes. http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/8810/serviceroads.jpg As you can see, the service trucks bypass all the rest of my city and just move directly on/off the highway, and straight to my oil fields/trading ports. The faster your trucks make their rounds, the more money you make per hour! and the less likely you are to have "full" depots and mines/pumps! This applies for garbage trucks and recycling (i believe) as well. Even if rush hour traffic backs up in your city, the trucks just... bypass it! (just make sure the service road is the shortest path)

So do we actually have to wait for the queue timer or can you quit and relog until you're in?

Yeah, what he said. This. People sure do freak out over nothing...

I'll join, my origin name is "LordRixus"

Anyone know what I need to edit to create a custom resolution?

A happy bonus that I was nervous about: eyefinity triple screen wide-view works flawlessly! I have included a widescreen screencap for your enjoyment. I'll make some better ones as my city matures, right now i'm too concerned with playing but i wanted to share. Oh, and while the map is "small" i guess, it feels pretty big to me when actually playing.

I doubt its overload, things were going smooth before they went down. Probably a hot fix.

The trick is to pay attention to the little blue placement dots... they show you exactly where/how a building can fit in relation to the roads.

If true, it means the game is all locally saved, and people can haxor it any way they want. Lame.

lies

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make an agent-based simulation engine like Glassbox multithreaded? Maintaining global state while simulating the interactions of thousands of agents does not parallelise in any obvious way. If EA were to have developed Glassbox multithreaded then the game would have cost possibly an order of magnitude more, would have taken far longer to develop, and would be much more difficult to test (and therefore, more unstable). Multithreading is not just a switch you can flick. It is one of the hardest problems in computer science. Your conjecture that the simulation is single threaded in order to target single core 2003 PC's is nonsense, incidentally. The minimum specification for the game is an Athlon 64 X2 or a Core 2 Duo, both of which are dual core, and were produced from 2005 and 2006. I'd say you're very wrong. I create testing systems for a world famous amusement park, and simulating a multitude of concurrent "agents" is a perfect environment for multicore processing. It actually doesnt get much better than that. Single core was chosen because its lazy, fast (read: cheap) programming. Simple as that. They were able to rip code from EA's thousands of other projects, splice them together with some refinishing, and spit out something they could sell in short order. Its the same reason almost all of the design decisions went the way they did. Its EA's prime business strategy. They buy "great" titles/companies, and then spit out "good enough" games under that brand until its used up and tossed away. Rinse and repeat.

Pre-paying for a game that doesn't even have a set release date? No thanks... and certainly not from EA!