NEW SIMCITY

[RacePace]

Originally Posted by impactX

hmm... I have problem transferring metal/alloy from recycling centre to arcology...

make sure you have trade depots and set them on Use locally. And press the power button on Send metal/alloy for the archology

[Presto]

Originally Posted by Cman333

HOw's this game? I'm so tempted but all the bad reviews are kinda making me want to hold off on the game

Personally, I would wait. Maxis/EA are still working shit out. There's a lot of AI issues, too. It's like all that time in development was spent slacking. Not really official, but here's a post about the Traffic AI:

One of the biggest problems people are having with the game is the massive traffic-jams that seem to clog the entire system up. Now, this is responsible for the ineffective coverage of ANY traffic-based services (Fire, Police, Garbage, Medical, Education, Mass-Transit.) There are also a number of smaller complaints that may also be directly related to how Glassbox handles traffic.

"Workers aren't commuting."
"There aren't enough workers, even though I have plenty of population."
"Tourism is broken."
"Emergency services are slow/unresponsive/broken."

The agent system that is used for utilities (power, water, sewage) seems to be identical to the system that handles traffic.

The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.

"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.

Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"

The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.

Sharing resources and services gets to be a joke, because all the vehicles ("agents") get bound up with the busses at the entrances to cities.

TL;DR: Fixing the way the game handles traffic and "sims" will fix 90% of the problems plaguing players!

[Presto]

The rage continues for Simcity. The main point being the always online requirement. Maxis has stated that the servers are needed for simulation calculations, which is complete and utter bullshit as evidenced by uninterrupted simulation after a loss of network connection. Now there's corroboration of that fact from an anonymous Simcity developer on Rock Paper Shotgun:

In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.


Our source, who we have verified worked directly on the project but obviously wishes to remain anonymous, has first-hand knowledge of how the game works. He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on. Our source explains:

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers. Something which would surely be impossible were the servers co-running the game itself. Markus “Notch” Persson just tweeted to his million followers that he managed to play offline too, despite EA’s claims. And now with the information from our source, it would seem the claims just don’t hold water.



So what are the servers doing? Well, alongside the obvious, of being involved in allowing players to share the same maps for their cities, and processing imports and exports between them, they’re really there to check that players aren’t cheating or hacking. However, these checks aren’t in real-time – in fact, they might take a few minutes, so couldn’t be directly involved in your game.

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”

Clearly an offline game that included a single-player simulation of the region system derived from multiplayer would be more challenging to develop, but our source assured us that it was far from impossible.

So how difficult would it be for EA to create a single-player game that simply did away with the multiplayer-derived aspects and just let us build? It seems that lies somewhere between “easy peasy” and Bradshaw’s claims of “significant engineering”. According to our source:

“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

EA’s claims about the necessity of online play – claims that more people are seeing for themselves not to be true, just by running the game with the internet cable yanked out – seem inexplicable.

We’d obviously be very interested to hear a proper explanation.

[gilly]

im plateaued at 50,000 ppl. how do u guys get sooo many ppl? I have a constant above 75% happiness

[trip]

increase your road density and land value

im constantly at 230k ppl and even after i bulldoze stuff it doesnt drop very much

putting game on hiatus until they fix the AI. ITS SO BAD..

why do all the busses (30 or so) go to pick up the same BUS STOP

[RacePace]

Originally Posted by Mr.HappySilp

LOL it was fun but since some people starting earlier than me their crimes were spreading to my city LOL.

Realized your city was connected to my two, the city you're closest to has three casinos. You're gonna have a bad time lol. I'll send some police over to you

[Mr.HappySilp]

Originally Posted by RacePace

Realized your city was connected to my two, the city you're closest to has three casinos. You're gonna have a bad time lol. I'll send some police over to you

I might have to delete that city and start over -_-
Apparently there is a bug right now where alloy and ores aren't being sent out to tradie even though I got a trade dept and I am making alloy and minning ore and coal........
Also it seems recyleying center is having issue after last patch where they won't go collect anything and ally and metals that was recyle isn't being sent out for trade......

[CT10]

Originally Posted by Amuro Ray

OK So i added pretty much everyone from the list onto my origin friends list... if you still don't see me (tc_terencec) and would like in, let me know

As far as the RS Region goes, we still have round 5 cities left to be claimed IIRC

Invite please

My origin name is humgachan123

[pherio]

running out of space in my city, do you still need your trade depot after having access to the trade port?

[RacePace]

Originally Posted by Mr.HappySilp

I might have to delete that city and start over -_-
Apparently there is a bug right now where alloy and ores aren't being sent out to tradie even though I got a trade dept and I am making alloy and minning ore and coal........
Also it seems recyleying center is having issue after last patch where they won't go collect anything and ally and metals that was recyle isn't being sent out for trade......

Are you building lots for those resources at the trade depots?

[CP.AR]

Originally Posted by CT10

Invite please

My origin name is humgachan123

diuuuu

you sure your name is right? searching in origin gives me nothing

[CP.AR]

I knew that the always online- server doing calculations thing was bullshit.

The moment that I was able to play the game while my roommate restarted the router I knew it was complete bullshit

[CT10]

Originally Posted by Amuro Ray

diuuuu

you sure your name is right? searching in origin gives me nothing

check pm

[GotRice604]

amuro_ray, please add bbqpork88

[Taxmonkey]

Couldn't wait anymore, bought the game!

Invite me: Jubomonkey


Can't seem to find a game with empty spaces to join ....................

[Mr.HappySilp]

Originally Posted by RacePace

Are you building lots for those resources at the trade depots?

I do have a trade depot and expanded to allow alloy and ore to be store. Then I click the options to export it. It still gets full and cause my ore factory to shut down.......

[ziggyx]

Originally Posted by Amuro Ray

I've setup a new region on NA West 4
Join the server at least once so I can see you as a player on that server and I'll invite you in.

This region should connect all the cities too, give that both sides of the shoreline has at least one ferry terminal in it.

NA West 4 is full

[Taxmonkey]

so ur all on NA west 4?

yup na west 4 is full ................

cant even connect to my old server now after trying to switch. damn it!

[ziggyx]

^ i thought you should be able to connect to that server if you've connected to it before?

[ForbiddenX]

Let me know if you guys want a vent server up. I don't mind renting a 20 slot one out!

[Taxmonkey]

Originally Posted by ziggyx

^ i thought you should be able to connect to that server if you've connected to it before?

apparently my server went down. it's back up now i think.


I want to get on a server to play with you guys

[metal]

Kinda interesting how deeply some people are taking the analysis of this game already. Good stuff though, shows how much needs to be fixed already.

It's not pathfinding, it's GlassBox : SimCity

[Jmac]

Originally Posted by Presto

Personally, I would wait. Maxis/EA are still working shit out. There's a lot of AI issues, too. It's like all that time in development was spent slacking. Not really official, but here's a post about the Traffic AI:

I doubt it was spent slacking. It was likely just used in typical EA fashion, namely:
1) Spending time integrating new gimmicks
2) Ignoring issues with core gameplay
3) EA's infamous "release knowing the game is faulty and patch and patch and patch and patch and patch and ... until the game is either mostly fixed or no longer profitable" technique.

[Taxmonkey]

anyone want to play right now?

[MikeyStyle]