The_Balm

It's also not like modeling a car for a game, it's just buildings and a low res ones at that.

I don't think that's why the maps are small and that doesn't even make sense. And they're working on offline support, so... Their servers aren't the problem.

I really don't think Java is a problem. It doesn't seam to really do much in Java.

Uh Wut?! That's not how programming works. I actually posed this question to friends whom are embedded software engineers, and they said that no, quadrupling the size would not quadruple the resource requirements. Would an increase in simulation size increase the required resources? Yes, but not to that level. Given how many corners the simulation itself cuts, I wouldn't be surprised if quadrupling the simulation size would only require 1.5 times the current amount of resources. Without knowing the internals of how the simulation works, it's really useless to speculate IMO. It could scale sub-linearly, or it could scale super-linearly, we have no idea. Agreed, we also don't know how much of the CPU's resources are being used for overhead that wouldn't need scaling.

Pretty much. What they set out to do was to catch the casual, facebook type gamers. That is a group with a short attention span, and yes, they probably all left to do their own thing within a couple months. Everything about this was a fiasco in that regards. They blew that chance big time and got hammered for it. All that's left are the hardcore fans, who now have to decide if they will give EA/Maxis a chance as they slink int he backdoor promising to mend their ways. You know simulation genre of gaming is classified as casual based on market data over the past decade. Simcity is the flagship title of this genre and has always been labeled as a casual and kiddy game. Most of the hardcore Simcity fans are casual gamers including most posters on this site, thanks to the definition of what casual gamers and games are. So please learn the official definitions of what casual games and gamers are this day in age. (I can repost the graph showing where each gaming genre falls and who plays them.) At EA's last quarterly earnings report showed the majority of players were still regulary playing the game. This is partially true, but it's too polarizing. For example, do you think X-Plane is a game geared towards casual gamers?

Finally the rewrote the game into a better language. Hopefully this will fix alot of things. They just rewrote the server side code for communicating data inside the region in C++ not the whole game. The core game isn't in Java.

Do to it's third-party server integrations are you not able to test it in a dev testing environment? I'm sure it would need a little testing on the live server, but I can't see it being more then a minute or two if its already been tested elsewhere.

What would be a NAM equivalent in SimCity 2013? It already has spline-based roads. Maybe NAM wasn't the best way to put it. I meant a really good highway/interchange and more diverse road system.

If we can up the city sizes to at least 4 x 4 and get a NAM equivalent I will be so happy.

A couple months ago. I had no idea it was years old. As for "why not", well, there are two questions that need to be answered as to the opposite question of "why": 1) does it deliver enough benefit to be worth the extra work of adding and maintaining? 2) is it safe or does it introduce security flaws? Of course these questions ultimately need to be looked at and decided by an admin of the site, but I'll give it a quick shot. 1. I do not personally have any experience with the installation and updating of the plugin, but it looks just like most add-ons for server side web software, upload a few files and directories, couple settings and done. 2. Obviously anytime you add more third-party code to a site you are upping the risk of having a security flaw. But Tapatalk is no rinky-dink few-month-old start up, it's used on over 60,000 forums including some very big ones, MacRumors (just under 18 million posts and 870,000 members) and Operation Sports (just under 11 million posts and just under 500,000 members) being among the bigger ones I use it on. It is also in the IPS Marketplace for IP.Board (I linked to the version for IP.Board 3.4).

When was the last time you used Tapatalk? They've improved it a lot over the years. I know not everyone likes Tapatalk, you're not forced to use it if it's installed on a forum. I'm a huge fan of it (and I know others are too) and I can't imagine it hurting ST, so why not? Options are always good. It's not just that forums are sized for the screen. I routinely (while in front of my computer) use Tapatalk to check up on all the forums I use just to see if I have any replies real quick. P.S. you can get mobile browsers that have tabs. Atomic Web for iOS is one I sometimes use that has tabs.

I don't know if this was directed at me or not, but I'm going to reply to it as if it was. I had never implied that VRAM had anything to do with video performance, and if you read the specs of my PC you'll see that I DO have 8GB of ram. In my post I detailed about why SimCity can't use more than 4GB (compiled in x86), which is why I used a 4GB RAM limit. You're also partially right that it is mostly the CPU, in that the CPU directly affects how much ram a system can have. Because it's safe to assume that maps twice as large will use over 4GB of ram, and x86 CPUs cannot use more than 4GB of ram, no x86 CPUs will be able to run the larger maps at all. If Maxis were to fix this by distributing a separate x86 and x64 versions of the game, then one would have a massive advantage over the other and the game would become fragmented. (x86 and x64 players would have be separated from one another) You are not understanding me. The CPU isn't the bottleneck for RAM (there isn't a shortage RAM). Maps twice the size won't need 4GB of RAM. The CPU is the bottleneck. Increasing the map sizes will need more CPU power more then anything. Very rarely does a game need to be 64-bit to access over 4GB of RAM (games just don't need that much). Then again Maxis didn't really max-out anything. I use 1GB of RAM and I'm only using ~20% of my CPU power. This is on my laptop too (brand new, top of the line 15" Retina MacBook Pro, but still, it's no gaming rig).

Looks like no dice for Tapatalk, too bad. I'll still poke around, but not as much.

Tapatalk is an app for iOS, Android and Windows Devices. Here's link to it on the app store for iOS (also here's the paid one with a few more features). It makes all forums have the same fantastic UI and searching and sorting capabilities (view just threads you've participated in, most recent posts, all unread posts, subscribed threads etc.). It even can send push notifications for being quoted or for new replies to subscribed threads. I highly recommend anyone to check it out the free version, is fully fledged and works really well. Multi-quoting, liking posts, PMs, emoticons, images, videos, GIFs, you name it its got it, there's almost nothing that you can't do with it. Any user with the app can connect to any forum that has the Tapatalk plugin installed (which I linked to in the OP). For benefiting ST, I'd say more people will visit the site on mobile devices and be more active due to push notifications and the amazing UI of Tapatalk (I mean who doesn't want to have the same UI for every forum they view on mobile). I know I'm a lot more active on forums with Tapatalk support even if I'm just using it as a helpful reminder that I might have a reply to my post. One downside to Tapatalk is due to it being their own UI you cannot have ads, but it doesn't look like ST has ads on the mobile site anyway. I think this was closer to the whole tree than the nutshell , but I can't stress enough how great the app is and in some cases it's better than the desktop view of a forum.

It doesn't work on Windows Phone? That's odd. In my search I only found one mention of Tapatalk so I thought I'd make a thread requesting it.