DumplingPod

The city you built was very well done and it definitely looks very modern.    The only thing that's bothering me is the one building in the first screenshot known as Tomorrow Square which is found in Shanghai, China. 

Then I have absolutely no idea... It's very interesting though...

Here's my $0.02... + A lot lot lot lot more... SC13 is a great game. Shortcomings aside, it's the best SimCity I've played. It has had the best performance of any SimCity game, it looks fantastic, and it's pretty fun. The Always-On DRM isn't a problem for me. I have loved the SimCity franchise ever since I've started playing it on the SNES. I'm always connected to the internet. My gaming PC cannot go onto a train or plane or spaceship. My laptop can "play" but it isn't as enjoyable. I'm perfectly fine with this DRM. I try to be as neutral as possible. I am for and against this Always-On DRM, and I understand all the reasons for and against the argument. I realize I speak for a small chunk of the community, but the Always-On DRM isn't too big a deal. I feel that the technology is evolving. More devices these days are shipping with 4G LTE and 3G connectivity options. The Chrome Books that Google is shipping are basically completely useless without and internet connection. Of course you can type some documents offline, but you don't get the full power unless you're online. This is similar to SimCity and many new games. Even with a single player experience, I think some would like to see themselves contributing to a worldwide community, much like mayors today will do. Technology today is evolving and we are becoming more and more connected as we speak. Google is rolling out their Fiber service that is going to provide essentially Free internet in the United States. All our phones these days can act as mobile hotspots, which is definitely enough to get SimCity started. After that, feel free to disconnect and you're fine! Free wireless is available in coffee shops and McDonald's all across the world. AmTrak is providing Wi-Fi service to many popular trains and stations. The Keystone line, for example, which services my area, has WiFi now. A list can be found here: http://www.amtrak.com/journey-with-wi-fi-train-station. Airports all over have Wi-Fi now and even some flights have some sort of internet connection. United Airlines is working Wi-Fi into their planes. http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/inflight/wifi/default.aspx. It would be nice if SimCity had something similar to what Minecraft has today. An offline mode. You sign on once, the full client downloads, and you can play your single player worlds. Of course, you aren't signed in so you don't have your skin, and you don't have any sort of mutliplayer access. Minecraft even has this thing where if you lose your internet connection whilst playing a single player game, it retains the information and lets you keep playing until you log off. If you're playing multiplayer, tough luck. An offline mode would be nice especially if it was separate from what we are doing now. It would be nice to see if you could download your cities to your hard drive and play them completely separately from the online play. I honestly don't see a reason why that can't be. Of course, it would be like the sandbox mode where you can't contribute to it. If you want to compete with other cities, you have to play online. That makes a lot of sense to me. If you are going to be offline, plan ahead and start playing a region that you play solely offline. This plan, I believe, is fairly easy to implement. Just make online and offline play completely separate from each other. Offline play does not have any relation to online. Your cities are completely separate. It's like two different worlds. In offline mode, you can't play on leaderboards. In offline mode, achievements are completely separate. That would be really easy to implement because it doesn't require too much changing of the code. Completely separate play. The always-on DRM is not a problem for me. Everything works perfectly fine for me. If there's a power outage, my computer goes down and my internet goes down. I'm not going to be playing SimCity because there's no power for me to play it. My computer's battery isn't strong enough to keep a graphically intensive game running for more than 2 hours. If I'm on a plane or train or something, I will just play a different game. If I have internet, I will probably play something like SimCity. It's really that simple. It's always great to have some variety in life. I feel that the always-on DRM is, in a way, trying to change the gaming industry. It may seem all negative, but I feel that always-on DRM is pushing for the international access to internet that is funded by advertisements, much like Google and YouTube today. I feel that always-on DRM is pushing for a more connected and social gaming experience, even though some games might not fit it. I think SimCity wouldn't have been so successful if multiplayer wasn't introduced. There is a small fan base that will buy the game if it was completely single player, but what game these days doesn't have multiplayer? If you take a look at the top games on twitch.tv, games like League of Legends, Dota 2, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Diablo 3, RuneScape, these are all games that have multiplayer. A game without multiplayer, even if it doesn't necessarily fit the franchise, won't be as welcoming. Although reliable fans want one thing, sometimes, it's a risk companies like EA must take to try and get gamers that aren't necessarily involved with the franchise excited about the game. Otherwise, it's just another sandbox game that gets boring after a while. Multiplayer adds a bunch of new possibilities and new scenarios that would've never been able to be reproduced in single player. I honestly think... calm down about the DRM... Play the game for what it's worth now... and complain later... Enjoy it for what it is... Play SimCity 4 later... SimCity is a different game... It's not like games where multiplayer is incredibly repetitive... SimCity is a game of infinite possibilities. It not like those stupid Facebook games that EA is shutting down... SimCity is more than just a game. SimCity is a hobby... The SimCity community might be small, but because SimCity is a sandbox game, shutting down the servers might be hard... especially if there are still lots of people playing the game. EA is not stupid... (Or at least, not completely) We're all hoping that they will listen to the community that has brought SimCity back, and they will hear us out. EA is losing lots of rep for this... Losing rep = losing money. Who knows... they might make this game completely offline before shutting down the servers. It only makes sense... EA hasn't released a sandbox game of this magnitude in a really long time. They have a (somewhat) dedicated programming staff and the lead developer seems to be much more in to the game. I think he wants to see SimCity in its former glory. Not an EA cash cow. Thanks for reading!

Just a quick note: I never meant for that to sound rude or anything. I don't mean for this to sound rude at all!!! I honestly have absolutely no idea... My PC is sub-par compared to yours... It's an i72600 (Sandybridge) and 560ti. It may be because of the hard drive speed. It could also be that you might be recording to the same hard drive that you're running Windows (assuming the OS here) and SimCity on. (Again, I'm completely assuming possible scenarios) Since programs like FRAPS and DxTory record in a different style compared to the in-game recorder, that might be what's causing your 80% lag. The only possible scenario I can think of is the hard drive. I have Windows running on an SSD (C:/) and SimCity is installed on my storage HDD (D:/) which is also where I'm recording. I'm thinking that your in-game recorder is skipping frames because of your hard drive setup... I'm probably wrong though... Your computer is clearly better than mine, and it's clear that I'm getting smooth video and you're getting really choppy video. It's quite strange... I'm glad you found a way to work around it though! In case you need to refer to my video again... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIVD_LucnqY

I had this period of time where I would play SimCity 4 w/o mods. Now... I won't play it without mods. I feel the vanilla game just doesn't have enough to offer. SimCity 5, with it's always on DRM, seems to be much harder to mod, and like you, I have a phobia of screwing up my SimCity 5. The new SimCity doesn't seem to be as mod friendly... And really... mods are the thing that is keeping SimCity 4 alive today! In an EA fashion, they are going to be releasing all this stuff in these really dumb and expensive DLCs. I hate to see games go this route...

I'm saying this just to say the recorder isn't crap. I think really the only fix for this is get a better computer. I use the in-game recorder on my it's relatively smooth on my computer. Trying to record w/ the in-game recorder on my laptop, however, is pretty much the same as what you're experiencing. Even on a good computer, it only records 720p, which is sufficient, and it slows down the entire game to allow for recording... I'd say about 1/2 or 1/3 the speed... It doesn't affect game play fortunately...

Yeah... the disappearing traffic was quite a bummer... I think there were some mods that allowed for different textures... I forget what those types of files are called now... It's been forever since I've placed SC4

I've also noticed that the radius in which is affected by radiation is very small based on what the developers have to say about city size. Here in South Central Pennsylvania, we have a nuclear power plant by the name of Three Mile Island. You may know about this power plant. The partial meltdown caused a lot of panic in the area. Luckily, this place is still habitable. When there's a nuclear emergency, they have a guide that is mailed to us every year that tells us where we should evacuate to, what radio stations to listen to, etc. You can see the packet here: http://www.exeloncorp.com/assets/energy/powerplants/docs/TMI/bro_TMI_PIB.pdf They tell us to evacuate at least 10 miles (16 km) and they even provide a map with the radius. The radius includes part of Harrisburg, the entirety of Hershey (Yes, the chocolate Hershey) and many surrounding communities. When a reactor melts down in SimCity 5, however, it only covers a radius that is barely 1 km. Not only would the city the power plant is in would be deserted, but many surrounding cities. An entire region could get destroyed by that meltdown. I thought that this was pretty interesting.

I actually had all four reactors in my nuclear power plant meltdown. This was in a city where I was trying to achieve I believe either the level 5 or level 6 city hall (the one that requires over 200k citizens) and I wanted to make more room in the city, so I destroyed my university to make some more housing. I made it to 300k, but then my fully maxed out nuclear power plant melted down. 4 times in fact because each reactor melts down independantly. I'm quite surprised that nothing actually explodes. The nuclear power plant in SimCity 4 did explode, however. This is quite realistic, however. A nuclear power plant accident is actually a meltdown. A meltdown is very different from what the general public thinks it is. A meltdown doesn't "damage" anything (By damage, I mean destroy any nearby buildings), but it spews out radiation like crazy. Living near Three Mile Island, (within 3 miles), they ask us that in the case of a nuclear emergency, we evacuate outside a radius of 10 miles. Cities and towns including Harrisburg and Hershey are in this radius. When you have a meltdown in SimCity 5 in one of your reactors, nothing explodes, but a huge area, about 1 - 1.5 km, becomes abandoned due to radiation and you're forced to demolish any buildings in that area. The radiation radius seems quite unrealistic compared to real nuclear disasters, but I guess it's to compensate for the small city size. Unfortunately, nothing really happens in terms of explosions or graphics. The nuclear power plant for me is my third resort to power. I start with Wind, then either coal or oil, and then I go nuclear. It's just the easiest one stop solution and it doesn't require any resources. It's really cheap and you don't have to worry about resource trucks getting stuck in traffic as your power plant is running at 50% reduced capacity. it's also relatively clean. I always try to build it as close to the college/university as possible. Or I at least wait until high tech has sprawled up and place it in between. This almost guarantees skilled workers to enter the plant.

I remember Sim City 4 having something semis in the game. I remember in U-drive-it, if you crash into a semi, the trailer actually disconnects from the main engine. I found that quite interesting. I always wanted to drive a semi in U-drive-it, but I could never get those mods to work.

It would be nice to see Maxis create a Utility Center that would provide sufficient power, water, and sewage to all the cities as a great work. It does seem fairly unrealistic to have a giant power plant in the middle of the city after all.

Hello!! Welcome to the Dumpling Pod! This is my first time posting to the Simtropolis Forums!! I decided to try and take advantage of the beautiful new SimCity and make some cinematics! The new tilt-shift camera and amazing 3D buildings create an excellent looking cinematic. I took a few shots of two cities that I built over the past few months and created 2 cinematics. I would definitely like to learn about different camera tools that allow for more control, so if anybody has any tips, please feel free to tell me!\ I've always wanted to do cinematics of cities, but real cities are hard to do as they require helicopters for flyovers and much more expensive equipment! When I tried SimCity 4, I thought it would be possible, but due to the 4 view camera, it seemed quite silly. SimCity 5 was the first SimCity game that included a much more dynamic camera, which allows for a much cooler cinematic. At the time, there weren't too many cinematics for SimCity 2013, so I decided to get crakin'. They might not be 1080p, but they're 720p. My goal was to create a seamless cinematic that looks like a cinematic in a real city. Please don't hesitate to Subscribe to my YouTube channel!! http://www.youtube.com/DumplingPod Cinematic #1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWGldg_7shk Cinematic #2 http://youtu.be/wIVD_LucnqY Playlist http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL53v2RoQ1LqOuUi0LUoWa4B2QXjIPLITg Please feel free to like and favorite the videos! It really helps keep me motivated!! If you have any suggestions for future cinematics, or comments, please don't hesitate to post them either as a reply to this post or as a YouTube comment! I hope you enjoyed my first two cinematics!