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SimCity |OT| It's not the simulation or city that matter, it's <parameter: string>
- Thread starter Cjdamon042
- Start date
Tony Rocky Horror
Member
Same here. Preloading it as we speak. I really hope it has improved a lot!
Monado Blade
Member
Its finally coming out for the mac? Cool, hope to see more people online then.
AnotherNils
Member
How big is the download? Preloading never occurred to me.
Tony Rocky Horror
Member
You can still preload it. It was done in 10 minutes for me. It was only around 2 gigs, which seems small?
Tony Rocky Horror
Member
All right, so it appears to be available. I can launch it, but after having the icon bounce a few times it just disappears..
Edit: It's working after restarting the Origin client. I'm using the beta client right now.
Edit: It's working after restarting the Origin client. I'm using the beta client right now.
AnotherNils
Member
Well I'm stuck at work.
rangersfan414
Member
Seems like nobody is playing :/
haha, not surprised
AnotherNils
Member
With two extra months of course the client is still sketchy. I exited, had to force quit the app after it stopped responding and after the icon disappeared from the dock the game is still on my desktop and won't force quit via activity monitor. I have never seen something like this on all my time on OS X.
Edit: I'm not the only one…
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Crashes/SimCity-for-Mac-freezes-completely-upon-quit/m-p/1457530#U1457530
Edit: I'm not the only one…
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Crashes/SimCity-for-Mac-freezes-completely-upon-quit/m-p/1457530#U1457530
they release bigger cities yet? I remember the stuff with the survey EA had, did anything come out of that? I liked the game, especially playing together with a friend and laughing at the ridiculous stuff we dealt with as we built up our cities, but everything felt so damn cramped we both just dropped it.
storybook77
Member
I'd imagine most of the things in that survey would be part of an expansion set.
I didn't want to support the awful state of Simcity during launch. I really wanted to buy it bad. Now I picked it up from gamersgate for 20 some dollars.. (And have some manual review wait WTF?)
I hope bigger cities are not something you have to pay for.
EDIT - OK I have dug into this game more and the small city size is unfortunately MUCH SMALLER than I thought it would be! I have played every PC game n the series and even the SNES version. I hate trying to figure out what I should destroy in my town so I can fit in an upgrade to a power plant. Crap. Also most all buildings, especially the critical ones, have upgrades that you have to attach extra pieces to a building. All of these take up precious space. You either leave a leave a lot of space for buildings which makes you run out of space early. Or you get frustrated when you have to demolish roads and other items later on just to add on another classroom section to a school for example.
Really, if they released this game as Simcity : Small Town Edition that would have at least let us understand what we are buying.
So after playing the game very little I think this game would be fun on a grand scale. As it is now it is just frustrating. That is after less than 20 hours of playing.
I hope bigger cities are not something you have to pay for.
EDIT - OK I have dug into this game more and the small city size is unfortunately MUCH SMALLER than I thought it would be! I have played every PC game n the series and even the SNES version. I hate trying to figure out what I should destroy in my town so I can fit in an upgrade to a power plant. Crap. Also most all buildings, especially the critical ones, have upgrades that you have to attach extra pieces to a building. All of these take up precious space. You either leave a leave a lot of space for buildings which makes you run out of space early. Or you get frustrated when you have to demolish roads and other items later on just to add on another classroom section to a school for example.
Really, if they released this game as Simcity : Small Town Edition that would have at least let us understand what we are buying.
So after playing the game very little I think this game would be fun on a grand scale. As it is now it is just frustrating. That is after less than 20 hours of playing.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
https://twitter.com/simcity/status/380084396209868800/photo/1
They talkin' about this?
What does the future hold, Mayors? Come back in two days to find out! #SimCity pic.twitter.com/xgMCkiB8vM
They talkin' about this?
AnotherNils
Member
We get taller cities.
AnotherNils
Member
"Nobody specified if they wanted cities bigger in height or width."
storybook77
Member
I can only imagine what those behemoth buildings will do to traffic......oh god.
PotatoeMasher
Member
I wouldn't worry, they'll probably just fake the population boost.
AnotherNils
Member
superpopfudge.
Xcell Miguel
Gold Member
How crazy, that engine must really be awful. At least from what I can see, Tropico 4 can handle a lot more than SimCity 2013. It tracks 1000+ agents, each with assigned jobs and homes, as well as their individual attribute-based needs and pathfinding. It also handles hundreds of buildings that intake and produce goods based on a high number of variables. SimCity fakes most of this stuff, and has to do it on a much smaller scale.
I would love to be a fly on the wall at Maxis HQ and learn what really went wrong with this game.
I would love to be a fly on the wall at Maxis HQ and learn what really went wrong with this game.
AnotherNils
Member
gutterboy44
Member
And there goes any hope of every firing this broke ass game back up. I won't uninstall it though. I want to be reminded of how stupid I was for jumping in day 1 and how I will never support an always online game forced into a single player offline game.
At this point, who the fuck cares about "most people not being able to run it" Treat city size as a graphics setting. Let those who can, crank it up.
At this point, who the fuck cares about "most people not being able to run it" Treat city size as a graphics setting. Let those who can, crank it up.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
The engine certainly has it's share of problems. Faking RCI charts, inflating population counts, horrible traffic AI. Graphically the game is excellent, but the engine is just not capable of delivering a game that is worth playing. Part of that falls on the narrow minded design from the get go. Choosing not to multi-thread the engine to make use of multi-core CPU's was a horrible design choice. I'm guessing they did it to 1) make their job easier, and 2) allow them to eventually port the game to mobile devices. It was still a terrible design choice, and it's the number one reason why we will never get larger cities. Not until they improve the engine in a big way, and at this point they can't.
It's why I haven't bought the game yet, and it's why this will be the first Simcity game I have not bought EVER, It's just not what I want. Hopefully Simcity 6 is a better effort and more true to the staples of the franchise.
1000+ is not much. SimCity tracks more than 15k.
---
@Mengy
Engine is multithreaded, it loaded all my 4 cores on i5 2500k. And they cant port it to mobile.
Inflating population and simple traffic AI was because they were targeting low spec machines too [low power dual cores].
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Per Dan Moskowitz, of Maxis:
https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/296355832998801408
This is the single reason why we can't have larger cities, confirmed many times by Maxis themselves.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
And somehow the Maxis general manager just got promoted to senior vice president.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...-promoted-to-senior-vice-president-at-ea.aspx
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...-promoted-to-senior-vice-president-at-ea.aspx
Per Dan Moskowitz, of Maxis:
https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/296355832998801408
This is the single reason why we can't have larger cities, confirmed many times by Maxis themselves.
I doubt that they havent rewritten that already when they were experimenting with bigger cities. It would be total tech development disaster if they havent.
---
What? lol, she was clueless.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
They haven't. Dan said months ago that to make the simulation core multi-threaded is out of scope for Simcity 5, but that it will be something they consider for future versions of Glassbox (ie: Simcity 6). The initial choice to make the simulation single threaded locked them into it for this game. I have no idea what reason on Earth they had for not pursuing multi-threading from the very start of Glassbox, but whoever decided it is a fool, plain and simple.
Trust me, I've been following this game since the first hint of it. I absolutely love the franchise, one of my favorite franchises of all time on the PC (second only to Civ) and I own every previous version of it. Back during alpha, the more I learned about the game the more excited I got, it all sounded great. Then I got into the hour long beta, and I realized that things were very off (why would they limit us to only an hour?), but I still had hope. Then, after launch, I realized why they limited us to that hour: because it was so insanely easy to run out of space in their tiny little cities that if they allowed testers to play for more than that hour then the shortcomings would become so obviously apparent.
And I've followed it very closely since launch, waiting for the news that we've all been waiting for: offline play, mods, and larger cities. I had hoped that for the expansion they would totally rewrite the engine to use cores for the simulation, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen now. I guess they are happy with what they have, even if the fans aren't.
I blame EA for shitty microtransactions. I blame the devs for a shitty game.
BolognaSoup
Member
And may they never develop another SimCity game ever again. Amen.
AnotherNils
Member
The devs get their fairshare for this glass box limitations, but I honestly think EA made them put it out the door before the next quarter.
That suggests the game can be fixed. The devs are specifically saying now that they tried to fix it (regarding city sizes) and it can't be done. Another quarter baking in the oven wouldn't have changed that.
And calling it a shitty game maybe isn't fair. It's not a terrible game. It's just not the game that many of us wanted. And it sure doesn't seem like 10 years of improvement over the last game.
There wasn't any improvement over the last game though and that is what makes it a terrible game. SimCity 4 is better than SimCity 2013.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-cities-of-tomorrow-omegaco
So is this SimCity: Blade Runner Edition?
I dunno if I want this futuristic stuff. I want a city simulator.
Who knows, though. This could be brilliant. We'll see.
OmegaCo is your very own futuristic mega-corporation. Your goal is to take the technological wonder that is Omega and make tons of Simoleons off of it by building OmegaCo factories in key strategic locations across your city. Each factory comes with a production facility that will produce and deliver Omega to nearby industrial buildings. At first, Omega is distributed for free, but after a certain amount of deliveries, those industries become Omegized into OmegaCo-owned franchises. At that point, theyll start paying you on the hour while producing quality Omega-infused goods! Sure, Omega pollutes, smells funny and puts odd, magenta-colored smoke vapors into the air, but your industrial businesses will learn to live with it.
So is this SimCity: Blade Runner Edition?
I dunno if I want this futuristic stuff. I want a city simulator.
Who knows, though. This could be brilliant. We'll see.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
To be fair, the road placement system is much improved over Simcity 4. As is the user interface. It's just the rest of the game that is so much worse than it's predecessor.
I wish Simcity 5 was simply Simcity 4 exactly translated into this modern 3D engine with the new roads and UI. I'd pay over a hundred bucks for that game without hesitation.
No bigger cities ever? Well that sucks the life out of this game. Was sort of hoping eventually maybe even through DLC means they would provide such a feature. Guess that's the end of this sad tale.
"After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing an offline mode. 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 an offline mode. 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. We’ve chosen to cease work on an offline mode and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore new forms of DLC for you to buy; like what about steampunk houses? Steampunk is still popular right? Please buy more DLC so we can continue to make money off this game. In the meantime some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on an offline mode will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance."
Translation...
"After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing an offline mode. 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 an offline mode. 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. We’ve chosen to cease work on an offline mode and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore new forms of DLC for you to buy; like what about steampunk houses? Steampunk is still popular right? Please buy more DLC so we can continue to make money off this game. In the meantime some of the experiments we conducted to improve performance on an offline mode will be rolled into future updates to improve overall game performance."
Yeah those hour long betas were nothing but advertising to drive the hype up. And it's exactly why you said, play the game for more than an hour and you see the limitations of the whole thing.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
That...looks quite horrible honestly. Did anyone really want tech trees and future cities and trading markets? How about just adding subways? Or highways? Or terraforming? Or farms???
I feel like starting work on my own indie city building game just to fill the huge void Maxis has created here. What a horrible direction for the franchise.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I reluctantly agree. I want my SimCity to, you know, simulate a city. 'n stuff.
I did put a lot of time into it, and while it did have some things I liked about it, I don't really think it was the best direction they could have gone in. Oh well. I don't think SimBladeRunner is going to be much better, but who knows. I'm hoping to get surprised.
I feel like starting work on my own indie city building game just to fill the huge void Maxis has created here. What a horrible direction for the franchise.
I wish someone would do that. At the least, a design goal of "like SimCity 4, but with new and pretty graphics and updated simulation algorithms" would be nice. At the most optimistic, perhaps "simulate every citizen in real time (and only citizens)", but such an agent-based system could potentially fall into the same trap as Maxis did.
Just read that update on the bigger cities. I find it astonishingly short cited to have an engine designed purely on operating on a single core processor (and of course bring that limitation to the actual game design). I would love to have been a fly on the wall with the first person who brings up 'Nice, so this is the small map right? Load up a large one! .... what do you mean this is the only size?' at their office during development.
And their actual way of delivering this news is not one of 'Well guys, we fucked up!', they actually go the route of blaming the average gameplay experience that would suffer to the low percentile using a PC their grandfather left them. Using their reasoning, we'd be stuck with whatever graphical option they deem is acceptable and not be able to scale anything!
I left the game after a few weeks. Server issues was annoying, but the flawed game was worse. I was hoping to jump in before the first expansion. But it seems the only thing they've actually fixed is the server and the DLC pricing is a fucking joke.
This game doesn't deserve an expansion.
And their actual way of delivering this news is not one of 'Well guys, we fucked up!', they actually go the route of blaming the average gameplay experience that would suffer to the low percentile using a PC their grandfather left them. Using their reasoning, we'd be stuck with whatever graphical option they deem is acceptable and not be able to scale anything!
I left the game after a few weeks. Server issues was annoying, but the flawed game was worse. I was hoping to jump in before the first expansion. But it seems the only thing they've actually fixed is the server and the DLC pricing is a fucking joke.
This game doesn't deserve an expansion.