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[KKRT00]

Then you develop a game that lowers the graphics fidelity in exchange for allowing bigger cities on lower end hardware. This game was a mistake from the beginning.

Its not about graphics, its about underlining tech behind agents. Agents are now fully dynamics and real-time, in other games they are approximated through the day, week and month.

Think fluid dynamics vs current gen water tech. One is made from hundred of thousands particles, second is just a geometry that is deformed by shaders.

---

Just make the game scale area size depending what specs you have. Shouldn't be hard for EA/Maxis to do... Oh wait we forgot that EA is the worst company in the US 2 years in a row:/

I would love something like this, but You're saying like its normal for other companies. Is there even a game that does something like this? Have different gameplay, on different machines?
I think, they could be sued for making gamers not equal.

---

So basically, it's the engine's fault.

So ambition is now bad? You know what this tech allows? Tons of different mechanics that werent possible in earlier Sim Cities. True that they havent used it much, but they can and next games will definitely benefit from this tech more. Its future proof engine, which was unfortunately released in a game 2 years to early.

 

[Succinct Verbosity]

Just release Sim City 4 HD and be done with it.

 

[waterydave]

SimCIty?! Wow I forgot this game exisited and it still is online only?

 

[chubigans]

Its not about graphics, its about underlining tech behind agents. Agents are now fully dynamics and real-time, in other games they are approximated through the day, week and month.

Think fluid dynamics vs current gen water tech. One is made from hundred of thousands particles, second is just a geometry that is deformed by shaders.

The sacrifices they had to make to get there weren't worth it at all. Not even close.

 

[troopershades]

EA should fire the entire Maxis team and just have the Tropico devs do the next one.

I like the way you think.

 

[Darklord]

For a love of god.

Its not an engine fault! Its fault of low PC requirement. Big cities would require 4 cores, but most of their player base play on low end PCs and laptops.

CPU: Intel/AMD 2,5 GHz or higher
RAM: 1 GB RAM (XP), 2 GB RAM (Vista/7),
VGA: ATI Radeon HD 3850/INTEL HD/NVIDIA Geforce 8800 or higher, 512 MB RAM

I know, those are PRETTY insane specs. A whole 1gb of RAM!

 

[Mrbob]

Sorry Maxis, everyone has given up on your game. Too little too late. Lack of bigger cities is a worse design decision than always online.

The drop off in sales from the original game to the expansion is going to be huge.

 

[Nugg]

March:
Offline? IMPOSSIBLE!
Bigger cities? IMPOSSIBLE!

Six month later:
Offline? Well okay, maybe.
Bigger cities? IMPOSSIBLE!

I'm waiting for the next expansion.

 

[epmode]

Its not about graphics, its about underlining tech behind agents. Agents are now fully dynamics and real-time, in other games they are approximated through the day, week and month.

They're already approximated in the Sim City we have now. Population counts versus agents are significantly fudged as population increases.

The fully dynamic agents thing could be good in a future game when the hardware can support it.

 

[Morzak]

But does the "agent model" even work???

I thought clever PC players looked into it and found that it was all just smoke and mirrors with the AI system not working anything at all like they claim it does.

Oh I think with their blog posts and answers after the launch debacle, they themself have shown that their Agent model is many things, but it's not suited to simulate Persons in a city, Public Transport or even Sewage.......

Oh and did they fix interregion play? or is it still broken with stuff not sharing, Workers not commuting etc? I mean it was one of the main reasons to justify the small cities.

 

[Heysoos]

Guess I won't ever be buying another SimCity game then! RIP!

 

[Bedlam]

For a love of god.

Its not an engine fault! Its fault of low PC requirement. Big cities would require 4 cores, but most of their player base play on low end PCs and laptops.

You heard that developers? Don't you dare release games with good graphics anymore since requiring decent hardware is a fault!

Seriously, I remember you from various SC2013 threads in which you defended the game against any criticism. You are, of course, wrong again. The agents system is just inefficient, partly smoke and mirrors and on top of that prone to not working as intended. Bottom line: it's a shitty engine and in its current state it's obviously not suitable for a city simulation.

 

[Shambles]

Repurposed Facebook game confirmed. What a disaster.

Exactly this.

 

[Rapstah]

That's interesting if they patched it to run on four cores like Yellow Gandalf Sign Guy says, I swear a developer said on Twitter around launch that the main game calculations ran in one thread with additional threads for sound and rendering.

 

[slash3584]

I still remember the shitstorm on the official forum when people discovered that the sims "AI" was really non-existant and that the population of a city was inflated by a multiplier when you reached certain ammount of habitants

 

[Dolor]

No big cities? No Steam? No buy.

 

[KKRT00]

They're already approximated in the Sim City we have now. Population counts versus agents are significantly fudged as population increases.

The fully dynamic agents thing could be good in a future game when the hardware can support it.

Yeah, because agents are expensive on CPUs, thats why they decreased their numbers.

But its not an Engine fault, engine is fine and ambitious and should be praised, not bashed.

There is so much talk about companies playing safe, tech and gameplay being stagnant and so on, but when someone tries to innovate, its bashed to death, because he failed, mostly due to new tech and too low specs of average player ...

---

CPU: Intel/AMD 2,5 GHz or higher
RAM: 1 GB RAM (XP), 2 GB RAM (Vista/7),
VGA: ATI Radeon HD 3850/INTEL HD/NVIDIA Geforce 8800 or higher, 512 MB RAM

I know, those are PRETTY insane specs. A whole 1gb of RAM!

I'm sorry, but You dont understand what i'm saying. Its not about graphics, its about simulation computations.

===

You heard that developers? Don't you dare release games with good graphics anymore since requiring decent hardware is a fault!

Seriously, I remember you from various SC2013 threads, but not in a good way. You are, of course, wrong again. The agents system is just inefficient, partly smoke and mirrors and on top of that prone to not working as intended. Bottom line: it's a shitty engine and in its current state it's pbviously not suitable for a city simulation.

If You're smart, tell me whats the reason why its inefficient, partly smoke and mirrors and prone to not working?
Do You even understand the tech behind this game? I think not, because You talk about graphics.

 

[chubigans]

I still remember the shitstorm on the official forum when people discovered that the sims "AI" was really non-existant and that the population of a city was inflated by a multiplier when you reached certain ammount of habitants

The worst part for me was how the AI routines work- individual sims don't actually have their own homes or work, they just drive from home, find the first available empty job on their route, then when returning home drive to the nearest available empty house on said route.

I don't even want to see sims driving from home to work...the whole notion of having each little detail micromanaged like that was such a horrible mistake.

 

[Lamptramp]

Pfft. Much too little much too late.

At this point Maxis could hand deliver via trained Capybara a gold plated version of the game with a USB powered Faberge Egg an Offline mode and larger cities and I would still slam the door in their faces.

And I would really love a Capybara.

Though a part of me is happy for those still playing that an offline mode is in the pipeline.

The sacrifices they had to make to get there weren't worth it at all. Not even close.

This, a million times this.

 

[rrs]

CPU: Intel/AMD 2,5 GHz or higher
RAM: 1 GB RAM (XP), 2 GB RAM (Vista/7),
VGA: ATI Radeon HD 3850/INTEL HD/NVIDIA Geforce 8800 or higher, 512 MB RAM

I know, those are PRETTY insane specs. A whole 1gb of RAM!

Cities XL however gets VERY laggy with large cities

 

[chrominance]

There is a lot more computation in SC2013, the agent model makes a lot of computations necessary. The problem is more it seems to be damn ineficient, just give us bigger cities and let's see how many peole can handle it.....

Mind you even though SC2013 has to do a lot more computation and every sim is actually an agent, the system they designed is so incredible stupid, that the behaviour just doesn't make any sense in the context of a CityBuilder.

So if they deliver offline mode, will they allow mods that impact (fix) the simulation? or would that destroy the vision of maxis.....

Increasingly, that agent-based model looks to be the single biggest mistake Maxis made when designing SimCity--yes, even more than online mode. It was something that people didn't really ask for, but it looked impressive when Maxis first unveiled their new tech. We just didn't realize (or assumed Maxis figured out) the high processing cost of modelling every agent individually instead of the statistical model used in previous games. And in the end, that agent model didn't actually make the game feel much more realistic anyways.

Meanwhile features I feel were asked for more, like mixed-use development, pedestrian paths, better transit integration, etc. didn't really happen. Even if Maxis had ignored all that stuff and just updated SimCity 4 Deluxe to run better on current computers with updated graphics, that would've been decent if somewhat uninspired. But this? Disappointment.

 

[Interfectum]

So ambition is now bad? You know what this tech allows? Tons of different mechanics that werent possible in earlier Sim Cities. True that they havent used it much, but they can and next games will definitely benefit from this tech more. Its future proof engine, which was unfortunately released in a game 2 years to early.

Ambition is bad if it breeds a bad game, which SimCity is. Nothing they did with this game really changed much or added to the gameplay in any significant matter. All it did was severely cripple the scope of the game from day 1. If they truly had ambition they would have accounted for this at the beginning of designing the game and adjusted accordingly.

 

[Morzak]

Its not about graphics, its about underlining tech behind agents. Agents are now fully dynamics and real-time, in other games they are approximated through the day, week and month.

Think fluid dynamics vs current gen water tech. One is made from hundred of thousands particles, second is just a geometry that is deformed by shaders.

---


I would love something like this, but You're saying like its normal for other companies. Is there even a game that does something like this? Have different gameplay, on different machines?
I think, they could be sued for making gamers not equal.

---


So ambition is now bad? You know what this tech allows? Tons of different mechanics that werent possible in earlier Sim Cities. True that they havent used it much, but they can and next games will definitely benefit from this tech more. Its future proof engine, which was unfortunately released in a game 2 years to early.

The tech is interesting, but those ideas are hardly new (IT and AI is not limited to games), and their implementation of the tech just doesn't work for the type of simulation they wanted to create. Don't forget they are producing a game, not a research project.
IF it had gameplay advantages over the old verisons tradeoffs would be fine, but it just doesn't.
Feedback about you're Sims is unstable or flat out incorrect or nonsensical for someone that didn't read up on the tech behind it. The Agent behavior does in no way mirror what you would expect from someone traversing a city. There is no real emergent behaviour that is more then, oh look an agent got stuck at that intersection and my city is now fucked. The simulation system needs so much work to even make sense...... The behaviour of public Transport is just insane.

If an agent system does not create the simulation necessary, you're better of in creating a graphical representation of a relatively simple system like Cities XL, SC4.

 

[Savitar]

Simcity 2013.......what a freaking disappointment, they bungled it badly and it's damn obvious they realized it some time ago, but what can they do to fix a problem that has too many issues, basically it comes down to waiting and seeing if next time they do better or not.

So maybe in another decade we'll see a good Simcity game.

 

[epmode]

Yeah, because agents are expensive on CPUs, thats why they decreased their numbers.

But its not an Engine fault, engine is fine and ambitious and should be praised, not bashed.

There is no much talk about companies playing safe, tech and gameplay being stagnant and so on, but when someone tries to innovate, its bashed to death, because he failed, mostly due to new tech and too low specs of average player ...

Attempting to come up with a new way to handle a city builder is commendable. I doubt anyone in this thread would disagree with that.

The problem is that Maxis/EA should have seen how poorly it was working in practice and changed directions rather than releasing a half-broken game.

 

[MrGreencastle]

That's unfortunate. I was really looking forward to coming back and playing some more Sim City if Maxis were to put out a bigger city update. I love the game, but I just get bored once I've filled out the little plot size.

 

[Succinct Verbosity]

Oh yeah, and the guy who said to hire the tropico developers? YES PLEASE.

Hello, if the tropico developers said they were working on a larger scale tropico I'd throw money at the screen.

 

[SteveWinwood]

CPU: Intel/AMD 2,5 GHz or higher
RAM: 1 GB RAM (XP), 2 GB RAM (Vista/7),
VGA: ATI Radeon HD 3850/INTEL HD/NVIDIA Geforce 8800 or higher, 512 MB RAM

I know, those are PRETTY insane specs. A whole 1gb of RAM!

yeah but does that have hot agent simulation where people go to work?

edit: i was late and already called what he was going to say

because watching little sims drive in their cars is so fucking exciting and why i play sim city

 

[slash3584]

The worst part for me was how the AI routines work- individual sims don't actually have their own homes or work, they just drive from home, find the first available empty job on their route, then when returning home drive to the nearest available empty house on said route.

I don't even want to see sims driving from home to work...the whole notion of having each little detail micromanaged like that was such a horrible mistake.

Exactly, I still remember the day I decided to get a refund.

It was like a week after the release when I finally managed to play for more than 10 minutes, and then, I noticed that the sims were really like ants going from one hole to another. Sewage, garbage collection, firemen and police didn't work and worst of all the regional trading system was busted.

I was in denial for like 2 hours until I saw Maxis official statement that read something like: Yeah we released the game on a pretty shitty state, but those things were supposed to work that way.

Thank god for amazon refunds.

 

[Kemal86]

Well then, your engine sucks ass and you made a poor investment.

I bought the game at launch, one of my biggest gaming disappointments ever.

 

[Bedlam]

If You're smart, tell me whats the reason why its inefficient, partly smoke and mirrors and prone to not working?
Do You even understand the tech behind this game? I think not, because You talk about graphics.

Don't worry, it's not like it's too complicated to understand.

But yes, it's inefficient and prone to failure. The area-based systems of past Sim City games not only allow for huge cities but also produce more accurate results most of the time. The agent system might've been ambitious in theory but as others have said: the sacrifices were not worth it at all. And it's clear that they had to cut corners mid-development and simplify their original ideas resulting in hilarious situations that have nothing to do with real life (see the "workers live at different places each day because the game just fills up the nearest available houses"-situation as one example). There are so many things that have gone wrong because of the agent-system.

 

[Khaz]

the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities

They need to learn the difference between a PC and a console.

 

[goldsoundz]

The only thing that would ever bring me back to this game is bigger city sizes. Filling up your entire plot within 10 hours at max density isn't what I consider fun. Region play was so busted at release that I have no interest in whether or not it was fixed since then--LOL tourism specialty cities.

Despite the small city sizes, region play, and other various problems I enjoyed the game for about 3 weeks.

 

[ViviOggi]

Let it be

 

[aeolist]

can you still make a city with 100% residential zoning and succeed?

also is the single zig zag road still the only optimal layout?

 

[KKRT00]

Ambition is bad if it breeds a bad game, which SimCity is. Nothing they did with this game really changed much or added to the gameplay in any significant matter. All it did was severely cripple the scope of the game from day 1. If they truly had ambition they would have accounted for this at the beginning of designing the game and adjusted accordingly.

Then complain about game, not about tech.

--

Attempting to come up with a new way to handle a city builder is commendable. I doubt anyone in this thread would disagree with that.

The problem is that Maxis/EA should have seen how poorly it was working in practice and changed directions rather than releasing a half-broken game.

I agree completely, people should bash the game, but they shouldnt bash the engine.

I've even said on launch period that i would love an option for bigger cities for players who knows that they can handle bigger agents load. It could be locked behind cheats, behind achievement or something like, doesnt matter, just give us an option.


---
As i said, they've brought a game few years too early. Tech is good, but it needs power, a lot of power.
I hate all that HSA debate, because is stupid for most games, but actually the tech behind Sim City is perfect for HSA computing.
Unfortunately i dont think is possible to use Sim City tech in normal GPU Compute, because of sync and latency issues, which would make impossible to patch DX 11 compute support with Big Cities.

 

[VegardTveitan]

Don't worry, it's not like it's too complicated to understand.

But yes, it's inefficient and prone to failure. The area-based systems of past Sim City games not only allow for huge cities but also produce more accurate results most of the time. The agent system might've been ambitious in theory but as others have said: the sacrifices were not worth it at all. And it's clear that they had to cut corners mid-development and simplify their original ideas resulting in hilarious situations that have nothing to do with real life (see the "workers live at different places each day because the game just fills up the nearest available houses"-situation as one example). There are so many things that have gone wrong because of the agent-system.

I agree, I think the main reason for the limited city size is that the realism of the agent system starts to break down in larger areas. Based on those videos a while back, the ai doesn't respond well even given small irregularities in road layout.

 

[Panajev2001a]

There is a lot more computation in SC2013, the agent model makes a lot of computations necessary. The problem is more it seems to be damn ineficient, just give us bigger cities and let's see how many peole can handle it.....

Mind you even though SC2013 has to do a lot more computation and every sim is actually an agent, the system they designed is so incredible stupid, that the behaviour just doesn't make any sense in the context of a CityBuilder.

So if they deliver offline mode, will they allow mods that impact (fix) the simulation? or would that destroy the vision of maxis.....

Despite what some PC vs console posts seem to imply sometimes, Maxis (with all their faults) is running a business facing the reality of their user's PC specifications which are not all gaming monster PC's that run all games with lots of AA, at 1080p, and at 60 FPS...

The current engine might not be nearly as efficient as it should be and it is true that a large city might also show big issues in the way their game modules have been designed, but seeing the performance issue always disregarded feels a bit wrong to me.

 

[eznark]

After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes.

And I will continue to ignore your game.

 

[chrominance]

Its not about graphics, its about underlining tech behind agents. Agents are now fully dynamics and real-time, in other games they are approximated through the day, week and month.

Think fluid dynamics vs current gen water tech. One is made from hundred of thousands particles, second is just a geometry that is deformed by shaders.

But this kind of thing happens all the time. Games are often not at the bleeding edge of anything computational, whether it's graphics rendering techniques or artificial intelligence or whatnot. Because games need to run in real time, developers often have to compromise between depth/complexity and speed: you can have a more comprehensive simulation, but at the cost of raising the minimum system requirements. You can put more models on the screen, but at the cost of requiring more video RAM. And so on and so forth.

Maxis made the wrong call when it came to deciding where to draw that line. Plain and simple. Agent-based simulations are nothing new; the innovation here is Maxis trying to create a comprehensive real-time agent-based simulation, but the compromises required to get there are arguably not worth it. Just because the theoretical applications of the tech are fantastic doesn't mean it wasn't still a bad idea to try and utilize that tech before everyone's computers could catch up.

I would love something like this, but You're saying like its normal for other companies. Is there even a game that does something like this? Have different gameplay, on different machines?
I think, they could be sued for making gamers not equal.

Of course it's normal for other companies. Two people with different computers are absolutely not guaranteed to have the same experience--everything from graphics degradation to reduced physics interactions to scaling back the complexity of the AI systems (ex. Dwarf Fortress) can happen, often via user-selected settings. Want to run your game with all the highest settings on a laptop? Go right ahead--but you'll get 5 FPS. Even hard gates exist--ex. you can't play this game at all if you don't have DirectX 10 (Shattered Horizon). The idea that a game company could be the victim of a successful lawsuit for allowing larger city sizes depending on how fast your computer is is insane.

So ambition is now bad? You know what this tech allows? Tons of different mechanics that werent possible in earlier Sim Cities. True that they havent used it much, but they can and next games will definitely benefit from this tech more. Its future proof engine, which was unfortunately released in a game 2 years to early.

Yes. The game released two years too early is still bad. Maybe two years from now Maxis will make a good SimCity again, but that doesn't change how bad this SimCity is. And if the current SimCity would've accomplished its goals with a statistical model and given us more features/larger cities to boot, it wasn't worth trying to cram their new engine into this game before it was ready for prime-time.

 

[firehawk12]

What about the power of the cloud?!

 

[feint_ruled]

I would love something like this, but You're saying like its normal for other companies. Is there even a game that does something like this? Have different gameplay, on different machines?
I think, they could be sued for making gamers not equal.

I remember The Settlers on the Amiga had a map size selector. If you added more RAM or had a faster CPU, it allowed you to select bigger maps. Why not do the same here? Unless their engine scales exponentially, and no-one has a fast enough PC! In which case.. it's a bad engine!

Your legal speculation doesn't hold water, I think.

 

[LeleSocho]

Hey EA/Maxis what about call it a day and start from scratch with another SimCity without all the bullshit this one have instead of working uselessly on this since it will not gain other people because of how bad it is/was?

 

[padlock]

There is so much talk about companies playing safe, tech and gameplay being stagnant and so on, but when someone tries to innovate, its bashed to death, because he failed, mostly due to new tech and too low specs of average player ...

---

Taking risks is laudible only if you're willing to pay the cost of having the thing you're trying not work out.

Don't find something doesn't work, results in a horrible game, and ship it as is anyway. In that case, you're not actually taking any risks at all, only the customers who buy your game are.

 

[Bitmap Frogs]

After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities. We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine.

Translation:

Reworking our gheto ass single core engine to take advantadge of modern multicore processors is hard work and we'd rather sip a mojito.

 

[Morzak]

Despite what some PC vs console posts seem to imply sometimes, Maxis (with all their faults) is running a business facing the reality of their user's PC specifications which are not all gaming monster PC's that run all games with lots of AA, at 1080p, and at 60 FPS...

That's why you build games that scale, make maps that may not run smooth on all systems, just make sure that the core game, works on the advertised specs. The game doesn't even seem to utilize all cores of my I5. And you don't build power intensive agent systems and the limit you're whole game because it has to run on a P4.......

@@KKRT00 but it's exactly the tech that is the problem, they can't handle it their implementation is more the questionable. They chose a tech that doesn't work for a game like Sim City at least for now. They also seemed to be totally oblivious to the risks such dynamic systems pose to the stability of the simulation.

 

[xk0sm0sx]

At least they were being honest...

 

[StayDead]

Just buy Sim City 4 and play the definitive Sim City experience.

 

[eznark]

Hey EA/Maxis what about call it a day and start from scratch with another SimCity without all the bullshit this one have instead of working uselessly on this since it will not gain other people because of how bad it is/was?

Unless they bring an entirely new team on board, I can't imagine anyone caring. This was a series killer.

 

[Czigga]

I'm just waiting for the price of this game to drop to $20