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[Corky]

and there, but for a moment, a million happy sims in an awful slum with no jobs

Please tell me that's the smallest tileset.

 

[Darklord]

Please tell me that's the smallest tileset.

The only.

 

[Rebel Leader]

The more I see those screenshots the more it really shows how tiny each "locale" is. Hell, at some point it felt like the islands in Tropico are larger than the given region!

thelazygamer has shown an appoxmate size simcity 2013 cities are compared to simcity 4

 

[Boss Doggie]

thelazygamer has shown an appoxmate size simcity 2013 cities are compared to simcity 4

Wow.

And it was proven that the population counter lies too right? Damn... there's really nothing to defend about the game as far as density is concerned.

 

[Corky]

The only.

Oh wow man :/ I knew SC was smaller but I was hoping that image represented the smallest one, had no idea there was only one size or that it was so small for that matter...Then again I'm positive that we'll see dlc/expansion expanding borders a lot.

 

[Rebel Leader]

Wow.

And it was proven that the population counter lies too right? Damn... there's really nothing to defend about the game as far as density is concerned.

More than likely after the discovery of the "fudge.population" javscript code

 

[Won]

I think everybody has the "it can't be really that small?!" moment at some point. Then you start to get all creative in laying out your city and......."fuck it really is that small!!!"

 

[dark_chris]

Watch EA say "wanna increase the size of your city? $4.99 DLC!"
I really want this game but I don't support this online only crap

 

[thelurkinghorror]

and there, but for a moment, a million happy sims in an awful slum with no jobs

But they are happy at the Pyongyang level, you must be happy or...

This is not a good city, very low level buildings everywhere, this is not the goal of the game, this is just one experiment you can do with SimCity.

 

[Darklord]

This is how fucked the population is in SimCity compared to the previous games.
63,000

Compared to 60,000

 

[BlackJace]

It's a damn shame because the game looks really fun.

 

[EmCeeGramr]

this is self-parody at this point

 

[JakkuFurosu]

nobody at polygon is telling him to just stfu already?

 

[grimshawish]

this is self-parody at this point

Hes just fucking up himself at this point. Obviously small-man syndrome. Hes on the fringes of the bottom of the industry rather than deep at the top of the decision making process - so he arrogantly tries to make himself seem bigger than anyone with fucking stubbornness.

Its pathetic.

 

[inky]

nobody at polygon is telling him to just stfu already?

They are probably waiting for EA's OK to do it.

 

[Neuromancer]

this is self-parody at this point

"way down the line it could be'"

"a lot of work from Maxis"

How's that job application coming along Arthur? It's really just a formality at this point, you're already hired as far as EA is concerned!

 

[Haunted]

This looks so unnatural.

Too bad they took out the terraforming and made most of the map unusable.

 

[dragonelite]

So what other game looks the most on sim city.
City XL?

 

[Stet]

This looks so unnatural.

Too bad they took out the terraforming and made most of the map unusable.

No terraforming
Inflated populations
No jobs necessary
Tiny cities
Sims who only exist in transit
Always online
Only one type of road necessary
Unreliable servers
Forced social aspect

Welcome to CityVille!

 

[NobleXenon]

Any word on saving the game to 127.0.0.1 instead of EA?

 

[FStop7]

"way down the line it could be'"

"a lot of work from Maxis"

How's that job application coming along Arthur? It's really just a formality at this point, you're already hired as far as EA is concerned!

How is Chris Grant not telling this guy to shut up? He's making Polygon's bad reputation even worse.

 

[border]

I think I may listen to a new episode of RebelFM for the first time in years (ironically for the same personality that made me stop listening). I wonder if Arthur Gies is going to try and talk his way out of the hole he's dug on the podcast, or if he's just going to keep his SimCity comments limited to terse dismissals on Twitter.

 

[Kinky John]

This looks so unnatural.

It looks like a Civilization city.

 

[qwerty2k]

I see modders have re-enabled cheetah speed (well variable speed) via a client side patch/hack

 

[Cerebral Assassin]

How is Chris Grant not telling this guy to shut up? He's making Polygon's bad reputation even worse.

He's doing his job pretty well, he is maintaining good relations with a major publisher & is keeping Polygon in the news so unless you believe he was hired for his writing ability why would his boss have an issue?

 

[mackattk]

I see modders have re-enabled cheetah speed (well variable speed) via a client side patch/hack

I really can't wait until modders can really open this game up. The city size is so small, it is just depressing to see how it compares to the older simcity games. I haven't even really played the game much due to these issues, picked up Tropico 4 while on the sale and been playing that lately...

After seeing all this blowing up like it did, I really can't help but agree that this $60 I spent on this game was originally supposed to be a facebook game.

 

[dragonelite]

We make this sim city will be the modders motto.

 

[turnbuckle]

I think everybody has the "it can't be really that small?!" moment at some point. Then you start to get all creative in laying out your city and......."fuck it really is that small!!!"

I haven't purchased the game yet and thinking that I probably won't after all this nonsense, but seeing the comparison to SimCity4 absolutely gave me the "it can't be really that small?!" feeling you described. I knew it was smaller, but seeing the comparison is really telling. I don't know how this game happened.

 

[Pasco_]

this is self-parody at this point

 

[Air Zombie Meat]

^ lol

Was waiting for that since I saw the original post.

 

[Deleted member 10571]

heh, just noticed the little additional 'shop

 

[Neuromancer]

Clever :lol

 

[EmCeeGramr]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVPk1aK7BUA

 

[Broder Salsa]

It's just getting more and more embarrassing for him, but at least he is making it obvious to everyone that he shouldn't be taken seriously.

 

[RoKKeR]

It's a damn shame because the game looks really fun.

It's a damn shame because it is fun.

 

[ConfusingJazz]

And here I thought Gies was Evil Vinny because of that head up your ass, self important documentary, not that his opinions are ass backwards and overly defensive about them.

 

[NEOPARADIGM]

... by Bradshaw's own admission they were never intending on delivering a traditional SimCity experience

This is the part that really pisses me off. The rest of it is all icing on the shitstorm cake.

 

[rdrr gnr]

And here I thought Gies was Evil Vinny because of that head up your ass, self important documentary, not that his opinions are ass backwards and overly defensive about them.

But don't worry. Call him names on Twitter and he'll be sure to retweet you.

 

[Ferulci]

Pure Gold !

 

[Corky]

I never jumped aboard the Geis hate train, in fact I have a faint recollection of actually finding him affable in the early days of Rebel FM... with that said the dude doesn't know when to quit it seems, with regards to Simcitygate :I

When you, for the lack of a better term, defend the game more than the publisher and devs themselves then something is wrong.

 

[Nokterian]

And a new article on RPS about offline mode by the hacker/modder who found out to the debug mode. Glorious just glorious!

SimCity Modder Tells Us Offline Regional Play Easily Done

Link

 

[ConfusingJazz]

But don't worry. Call him names on Twitter and he'll be sure to retweet you.

Meh, I got better things to do.

I mean, I won't do them either, but I do have them.

 

[smokeandmirrors]

And a new article on RPS about offline mode by the hacker/modder who found out to the debug mode. Glorious just glorious!



Link

That's fascinating. It's almost as if Maxis/EA tried to get away with putting minimal effort into this game as possible...

 

[Toma]

That's fascinating. It's almost as if Maxis/EA tried to get away with putting minimal effort into this game as possible...

$$$

And because people still bought it, it worked out perfectly fine. At least the Gamerankings score is sitting at a comfy 65%.

 

[NinjaTehFish]

And a new article on RPS about offline mode by the hacker/modder who found out to the debug mode. Glorious just glorious!



Link

Just when you think the clusterfuckery couldn't get any worse.......

 

[Sir Abacus]

And a new article on RPS about offline mode by the hacker/modder who found out to the debug mode. Glorious just glorious!

Link

This who saga just keeps get stupider and stupider. It makes me wonder whether they'll eventually relent on this.

 

[Rentahamster]

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.

This is what I mean. The sims in SimCity 4 only have "jobs" until the game recalculates the route again. Just like the sims in SimCity 5 only have "jobs" until the game recalculates the route again. It doesn't really make a difference that it happens less frequently in SC4 than in SC5. The sims' employment is irrelevant in both games since it is renewed every recalculation.

This goes to my further point of plausible acceptability since in our minds, we see the imaginary sims of SC4 going to work, and in our minds, it's not that noticeable that they change employment all the time since there's a longer stretch of "game time" in between calculations. This is contrary to the SC4 manual *ir maybe it was the strategy guide) that said that the sims remember their employment until they get fired or find something better.

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.

But this is where SC4's traffic gets unrealistic. The roads can never slow down past 30% overcapacity, so in essence, that makes roads have unlimited capacity. There is a cap on how bad traffic jams can get.

 

[Rentahamster]

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

Stick a freight depot in your industrial area. They will deliver it to that instead. Or a Vu Tower. Or an airport with a cargo hold. Freight is stupid in this game as it only applies to industrial, and it has no bearing whatsoever on anything else, despite what the game might have you believe.

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.

That's the point. Nobody gave a shit when you couldn't see where the sims are actually going in previous simcity games. Still nobody gave a shit when you could only see an arrow, and most people didn't even make the connection that sims' jobs weren't permanent in that game either.

Now that the game engine has increased in complexity, it's actually much more obvious to us know how stupid the pathfinding is because we can actually follow them around now.

 

[Rentahamster]

That's the problem, it's not giving a more realistic overall simulation. Simcity 5's design is creating "herds" of cars all rushing towards one empty house or one available job, then the next, and then the next, every day. Roads and avenues remain open with no traffic at all while other roads are congested into the red simply because it's the shortest path available to the "next" house or job. Simcity 4 never suffered this phenomenon, not even before Rush Hour and certainly not after the NAM mod.

Vanilla and Rush Hour used shortest path routing too. it was able to be spread out more than SC5, though, and of course you're not going to see herding, because in SC4, there's no traffic over time component like in SC5. In SC4, all the sims just teleport to work simultaneously.

 

[Rentahamster]

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.

The analogy is that we notice the programming shortcuts much more than before since the simulation engine has increased in "realism/complexity". Just like how the flaws in a CG animation are much more unsettling in a "lifelike" character more than a cartoon.

The stupid pathfinding wouldn't bother us so much in SC5 if we didn't have to see the sims play out their stupid pathfinding routines in front of our eyes, rather than us making it up in our heads.

And yes, the PR was an incredible disaster, and still continues to be. That was a separate point.