BurnOutBrighter
Banned
Awesome. It won't be long till someone hacks/mods in local saves.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
SimCity modded so it can be played offline indefinitely + editing of highways
- Thread starter nickcv
- Start date
Awesome. It won't be long till someone hacks/mods in local saves.
Aquamarine
Member
Absolutely wonderful. Bless those people for dismantling such an arbitrary and annoying restriction.
ambientmystic
Member
Bumping this for added visibility, more SimCity players have to try this out.
Jake Tower
Banned
If you're aegies, you literally don't know what you're talking about.
I'm not counting on it lasting.
How can you work on the game and not know what the creative director wants out of it?
FunkyMunkey
Banned
What's amazing to me, is that in the case with this game, people who wait and pirate it are going to get a game that is almost better in every way. And then, EA will complain about people pirating it and probably use it as ammunition for even stricter attempts at DRM in the future.
It just blows my mind.
It just blows my mind.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Agreed on the last part. The devs have been open about what agent behavior is like as far back as last year. This got in turn conflicted by the marketing message, which in the end resulted in certain unfulfilled expectations and disappointments for some.
Still, I would have thought that they would have had better pathfinding for launch, but whatevs.
JasonUresti
Member
Artie Gies, aka Big Money, has not only moved the goal posts, he called up and said that the game is actually being played at a football field three area codes over that way.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Maybe it's not up to him either.
I dunno if I'm being overly analytical about this, but before this whole thing blew up, I always noticed something about Ocean in his interviews. He'd always go out of his way to mention how he had to get approval from Lucy, his boss, in order to make this new SimCity.
Just the way he says it, seems, odd....and now with her being part of the reason for the whole fuckup...I dunno.
So basically did Gies pull a "My hair is a bird, your argument is invalid"
I don't get it either. The whole thing reminds me of some of the more disorganized and failure-destined companies I've worked at. I appreciate the effort of several of the Maxis employees like Guillaume Pierre in communicating with customers on Twitter, but they seem to say things like "not my department" or "talk to so-and-so about that" a lot.
I understand being careful with how much you say, or having a designated spokesperson for each part of the product. Maybe that's all it is. But when coupled with the unfathomably low quality of the product they just shipped, I'm inclined to believe that Maxis has a bad case of the right hand not talking to the left.
This is a very stark example, with an important lesson behind it.
A lot of piracy that goes on is presumably because people want to get games for free. Others might use it as an easy way to get demos, but that's a difficult thing to justify to anyone but the individual.
In the case of Sim City, it seems that it is inevitable that the pirates (or rather, modders, but they are still going to be called pirates by EA) are going to get the superior product. People who want the best they can get should be able to, by default, get the superior product if they pay for it. Oddly, the reverse is looking to be true here.
EA really have a huge mess on their hands.
And instead of football, it's a game of cricket.
Charoncaori
Member
Paid DLC.
To be this dumb, takes aegies.
I've always been a bit suspicious of Gies since his first tweet when Microsoft unveiled Smart Glass at last years E3 was something along the lines of "Wii U is finished".
The Wii U has plenty of problems but none of them are associated with the existence of Smart Glass. Two different products that do entirely different things. Thanks for the inside knowledge, Arthur.
The Wii U has plenty of problems but none of them are associated with the existence of Smart Glass. Two different products that do entirely different things. Thanks for the inside knowledge, Arthur.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-6-streetcars
So Maxis is fixing the pathfinding for cars and stuff
So Maxis is fixing the pathfinding for cars and stuff
Zenaku
Member
I've been under the impression that he was just a Microsoft fanboy; at least, his comment about Nintendo controllers not following the "standard" set by the XBox led me to believe that. You know, despite Nintendo using the same ABXY layout since the SNES. Can't remember how he retaliated to that, but it didn't change my opinion.
Could be the M$ monies too, though.
Team Filler
Member
Doesn't surprise me that he would say that. Back when I actually listened to Rebel FM, I recall it being typical for Arthur to say something racist/jingoistic without any counter from the others. It's hilarious when juxtaposed with his white-knighting/knee-jerk reactions to things that he perceives to be misogynist.
grimshawish
Banned
This is how he went about his 'Durango info'.
Nothing he knows is enough for him to publish on Polygon but he'll have a go at other people no matter how well informed they are.
Hes a very odd character and not exactly likable.
PairOfFilthySocks
Member
This fucking guy.
QuicheFontaine
Member
Sorry, but I think you're way off with this assessment. Comical coding like this arent so-real-its-scary like uncanny valley human likenesses. It's more like a shit puppet where you can see the strings.
When its put like that I feel stupid for not figuring it out myself.
His point isn't literally that they're becoming human-like, it's that the core engine is getting so complex and robust that flaws which would be forgiven in older games are much more pronounced. That said, a game should be judged by its merits as it relates to the time it comes out.
Yes, old Sim City games had a lot of flaws and bugs to them, but they were very special at their time. This game has a lot of ground to make up to be a very special game.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Huh? Your video is making my point. In Simcity 4, you don't ever see cars go home. All you ever see is a bunch of arrows indicated by the route query tool. All the "cars" you see on the roads are just placeholder animated objects that aren't going anywhere.
But that didn't bother anyone. We all just assumed that they went home as usual. It's our mind filling in the blanks, and because of that, we assume that our mind fills in the blanks correctly and attribute that to the game accordingly.
FYI, the sims in SimCity 4 got jobs the same way as the sims in SimCity 5 do. SimCity4 sims never had permanent employment either. Everytime the work commute pathfinding tool would make a new calculation, each residential area was reanalyzed and new routes to work were generated for each building lot. The sims in SC4 got new jobs every cycle too.
They would get new homes each cycle too, if morning and evening commute weren't part of the same calculation.
But like I said, no one really gives a shit because it all plays out in a way that makes sense in our heads. There is nobody going nowhere in actuality. It's all values on a spreadsheet. With SimCity 5, the more complex engine has to generate sims going places. We can't just imagine it anymore, and inevitably, the software is going to make the sims do things that to our own mind seem stupid. The only reason we notice it more is because we are taking less things on assumption and seeing the game play them out in front of our eyes, rather than us doing it in our own heads.
The game is "simcity" - the design is premised on simulating a city. It's an iteration/continuation of a long standing series.
In what world are people paid to make such a game where certain simulations are broken on release, review sites then "praise the game despite server problems," and then the developers essentially start a 2nd round of "beta testing" post-release under the guise of "fixes and patches." In what world...
This is the problem. Plenty of people have figured out through common sense that the server side calculations would only ever relate to simple checks (like for piracy), and for doing asynchronous sending and receiving of information (resources, money sent too and from friends, etc). Basically, the game could be played single player, if there were a single player mode.
Maxis people will be saying that those checks and sending and receiving of info require an Internet connection and thus cannot be done offline, justifying the always-online requirement. They are calculations and could be described as complex as that's a relative term anyway, thus they never lied.
I'd argue that it's still deceptive to hide information that you know your audience doesn't want to hear, in order to try and coax them into buying into your project, when you know if you presented them with an alternative they'd take it instantly.
QuicheFontaine
Member
Ah, I think I understand your point a bit better now - That actually seeing these short cuts occur is what's hacking people off. i.e. we wouldn't be annoyed if, say, there was just a pie chart or something over the building that filled up as it became occupied. Yes, I think I agree with you there.
I'm just not seeing the analogy with the uncanny valley though. From reading the thread I imagine the preceding annoys people mainly because it was missold. The advertising touted it as being realistic, with real people that you could follow around. Maybe people's expectations were too high, but I did one module of computer science when I was at uni 5 years ago and the pathfinding and job/home allocation system seems incredibly simplistic for a game coming out in 2013.
EDIT: Thinking about it, that module of CS was in my first year, so 9 years ago! Feels old man :-/
I'm trying to find a way to pitch the idea of an agent claiming a sink when it's spawned to the developers. I wish I could just phone them up, because it's such an improvement that the game would be essentially fixed for me, if they implemented it.
Right now, I mix commercial zones with residential, so that shoppers have a short commute, but the problem is now that delivery trucks roam the city in hordes, racing for the closest place to deliver to, and then it's claimed, and the next site is half way across the city, and as so they just run around spending way too long to deliver their freight
But the point is still that this has nothing to do with uncanny valley, and just that things were abstracted before, and now they aren't, and they're solving it poorly. If they'd only implemented the suggestion I have above, no one would've ever known this was how things were done. It was just a poor implementation of a visual concept.
Right now, I mix commercial zones with residential, so that shoppers have a short commute, but the problem is now that delivery trucks roam the city in hordes, racing for the closest place to deliver to, and then it's claimed, and the next site is half way across the city, and as so they just run around spending way too long to deliver their freight
But the point is still that this has nothing to do with uncanny valley, and just that things were abstracted before, and now they aren't, and they're solving it poorly. If they'd only implemented the suggestion I have above, no one would've ever known this was how things were done. It was just a poor implementation of a visual concept.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Sorry Hamster, but your assessment of how traffic works in Simcity 4 is incorrect.
Simcity 4 traffic is divided into two routines: pathfinding and destination finding. The destination part is what allows the sims to leave their homes and find work, this runs once every few months (I believe it is once every four months?). The traffic routines run much more frequently, so if you change roads layouts you will see the effects in traffic patterns fairly soon, but the sims are still trying to get from the same houses to the same jobs, at least until the destination routines run again.
So if you level a place of business and make some sims unemployed, they stay unemployed for at least a few months until the destination routines run again.
The big difference is that Simcity 4 doesn't track nor show each individual sim driving around and such. Instead the game stores traffic volume data on road sections, calculated from pathfinding routines that run every few days or something, but the sims routes are calculated from their destination data, which only changes every four months. Graphically displayed road traffic (cars) is based on the traffic volume data stored for each road section. If a road has many sims pathing over it, the game shows a high volume of cars driving on it.
You can test this very easily by using the path query tool in Simcity 4 on any sims home. If you don't change anything in your city and you watch the queried path for a few months game time you can indeed see that the sims hold their homes and jobs for extended periods of time.
In many ways, Simcity 4's simulation is much, much more accurate than Simcity 5's, it's just that you don't see the visual representation of each individual sim driving around.
I doubt the creative director has any say over it whatsoever. It's almost certainly an Origin policy to protect Origin, not the games themselves.
Which is why he's very stupid to go around on Twitter giving the impression that modding is fine when it isn't up to him.
Who do you thinks hires lackeys and asks for those god-awful PR drivel reviews? My guess is that he'll use Gies until Gies' name becomes a liability and then hire the next lackey.
Graphics Horse
Member
And that he could post on GAF about but wouldn't write an article because of his lack of computer engineering degree, yeah that was an odd one, why not interview some experts about it instead of just sitting on a, huge scoop?
indigo-cyclops
Member
Note, this gem happened after he conceded that cities could be played offline.
"This guy... Is un-fucking believable. "
Christopher Walken, The Ripper
Seriously though, Gies has always seemed like a joke to me, this just cements it. Polygon and it's place in 'games journalism' makes perfect sense more than ever. It's already tough that the predominant sites can't be trusted, and with how games are being made now it's very frustrating to see.
Note, this gem happened after he conceded that cities could be played offline.
lmao... asking questions thinking he knows the answer so he can have that "aha!" moment, but it never comes. He just keeps putting on a bigger dunce hat with each attempt, lol.
The last few pages are amazing 
I'd like to thank Polygon for taking almost all of the most annoying, fanboy, idiotic and just plain out right horrible game critics and sticking them to work on one site, it makes it so much easier to ignore everyone I don't like in that industry. Now can you hire Ben Parfit please?
I'd like to thank Polygon for taking almost all of the most annoying, fanboy, idiotic and just plain out right horrible game critics and sticking them to work on one site, it makes it so much easier to ignore everyone I don't like in that industry. Now can you hire Ben Parfit please?
Neuromancer
Member
Awesome! But will Origin ban people who do this?
Also when is Arthur going to leave Polygon for EA? Getting hired there is basically just a formality now, right?
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
I don't know if he's an idiot or not, but he is certainly "one of those guys" who makes stuff up in order to sound like he knows what he is talking about when in reality he hasn't the slightest clue what he is talking about. Probably fueled by a strong desire to sound like he's "on the inside" of the industry. And now that his make believe has backfired big time and it's painfully obvious that he was just talking out of his ass, he is just too stubborn and egocentric to admit that his bullshit was all horse puckey. So he is sticking to his guns, because even though he looks incredibly idiotic right now, it's still better than admitting to himself that he was just spewing bullshit to make himself sound better, smarter, and cooler than he actually is.
Very sad, really.
How can You say that it is more accurate, when You just said its less accurate? In Simcity 5 You have real-time changes every day, not every week/months and actual goods deliveries are done real-time, what is produced in factory/shop goes out in real-time by agents and is delivered to clients - thats all simulated, when in SC4 You had statistical approximation every few days for that data. Reemploying citizens everyday is not realistic, but it definitely gives better precision of simulation overall.
---
We need performance tests for agents scheduling. Everyone here wants bigger spaces for city, but are theirs 4 cores processors ready for it? Because i think that for 3 times bigger city plot, You will need at least 4 cores processor [my is ready btw
].You need to understand that they are calculating at least 50k agents in real time and on speeds from 1x to 3x and with bigger cities amount of agents will increase drastically.
He's obviously talking about the results. And the more astract simulation of Sim City 4 produced results closer to real-life behavior than the more complex simulation in Sim City 5 apparently does. It's the results that matter.