Sim City

Slutmonkey57b

I think that the whole "first available job" assumption was based on previous Sim City games though. If a building was only available under certain criteria (wealth etc) it wouldn't get built/would decay.

When buildings have a requirement for x workers of y skill type, and there is a broadcast for z jobs available per day, it makes no sense to fail to tack on the skill type requirement to that broadcast. If the game is tacking on skills and education to individual Sims, it makes no sense for them to ignore those traits when going about their business.

So as stated above, while the developers didn't *outright lie* they left enough of the truth out, and hammered the drum on other functionality which logically links into it (but actually doesn't), that consumers came to the conclusion that's what the game would deliver. Undoubtedly, that is what the developers intended.

It's like saying "you can have a garden. In gardens, you can have roses.", then delivering a patch of weeds with the comment "I never promised you a rose garden."

Disingenuous bull**** and more reason to refuse to buy their game, no matter how many patches go out.

Azza

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

When buildings have a requirement for x workers of y skill type, and there is a broadcast for z jobs available per day, it makes no sense to fail to tack on the skill type requirement to that broadcast. If the game is tacking on skills and education to individual Sims, it makes no sense for them to ignore those traits when going about their business.

It does make sense, I'm pretty sure the developers said the game engine wouldn't be able to handle every individual Sim having several traits.

I know city's can have population of up to 1 million at least maybe more. 1 millions Sims with individual traits would probably melt most PC's.

I know there isn't really 1 million sims going around and huge proportion are ghost sims being simulated. I've read a city with a simulated population of 1 million is actually only 121,000. Rendering 1 million actual Sims would be probably kill a PC as well and would look retarded in such a small city. Even still I'm sure several thousand Sims with traits would still be really hard to do.

nesf

Azza wrote: »

It does make sense, I'm pretty sure the developers said the game engine wouldn't be able to handle every individual Sim having several traits.

That indicates a severe failure when designing the engine or a large drop in the desired minimum specs after the engine was designed.

Azza

Well PC gamer has backed up what I said, separate to that video you posted earliar they claim that this limited behavior was mentioned as far back as the very first article the US edition of PC gamer had on Sim City in May 2012 and this limited behavior was mentioned numerous times in subsequent interviews and previews.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/14/simcity-tested-offline-play-phantom-sims/

They concluded that in regards Sim behavior Maxis didn't mislead anyone.

They did conclude that Maxis didn't make it clear that it wasn't a 1:1 to simulation in terms of actual population. While they didn't hide the fact, PC gamer felt Maxis didn't do enough to clarify it.

They figure that the reason its not a 1:1 simulation is that "things don't work well with 100,000 sims" which I'm going to take as saying the game engine can't handle so many sims.

nesf wrote:

That indicates a severe failure when designing the engine or a large drop in the desired minimum specs after the engine was designed.

I'm not a game developer or a programmer but it does seem pretty reasonable to me.

Slutmonkey57b

Azza wrote: »

It does make sense, I'm pretty sure the developers said the game engine wouldn't be able to handle every individual Sim having several traits.

I know city's can have population of up to 1 million at least maybe more. 1 millions Sims with individual traits would probably melt most PC's.

I know there isn't really 1 million sims going around and huge proportion are ghost sims being simulated. I've read a city with a simulated population of 1 million is actually only 121,000. Rendering 1 million actual Sims would be probably kill a PC as well and would look retarded in such a small city. Even still I'm sure several thousand Sims with traits would still be really hard to do.

Realistically, the logic for requesting and assigning jobs to Sims isn't at all that intensive. The job requests are timed in shifts, so you'd get one batch of calls at 8am. The broadcast/response logic doesn't have to be a "usr agent" that travels individually along the road network. Pretend it's a phone call instead. So the call goes out for x jobs of y skill at location z. If a Sim meeting that requirement gets the request, it responds. Once x responses are received, Sims that respond back to the original call are rejected and wait for another job. Locations that didn't fill all their spots make calls until they are filled, up to a time limit (say 9 am), possibly dropping the skill level requirements as they do so, if the responses aren't being met. Sims who got the jobs start traveling to location z and only at that time does rendering/pathing logic come into it. If a location was expecting x Sims but only received x-n Sims, then the game would flag to the user at the end of the shift pattern "you've got traffic problems".

All of this is crude examples but it's still valid. The game's logic is actually working against it, because it's creating, unnecessary user agents to simulate requests which then follow a pathfinding logic to reach a responder who has to pathfind and render its way back.

Keeping up a database of 100,000 entities with 20 attributes each is fairly trivial on today's hardware. Particularly if the "heavy lifting is being done on the servers" :-D :-D

As for rendering the graphics of the tiny towns, again that shouldn't be a problem locally. The expensive part, processing wise, is actually probably the pathfinding.

nesf

Pathfinding for any non-trivial map is a bitch. Do people remember the "wall hugging" method of the early 90s? Hug a left wall and follow it until you reach your destination. :P

What would have been interesting is some tweaking of the pathfinding, say a certain % have a preference for quieter less used routes to where they're going. It's add some organic nature to the traffic.

VinLieger

Basically what this all comes down to is the designers wanted to make a game with specific mechanics but it turned out the technology simply didnt exist to make such a behemoth so in the end they decided to fudge the numbers as much as possible use smaller maps to try and hide that fact and simply give the consumer a worse product overall when in fact all people wanted was a faster better 3D version of simcity 4. We got simcity 5s retarded brother who will never live up to the expectations set for it

cherryghost

The farce continues. Official DLC video is a parody in itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kIy4NrMFiE

nesf

cherryghost wrote: »

The farce continues. Official DLC video is a parody in itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kIy4NrMFiE

You could have convinced me very easily that was a spoof video by someone with too much time on their hands. 9 Euro, for two parks an a form of transportation that only works if other people have the DLC? Really, I'm falling over myself trying to get my credit card out.

bizmark

i love how he knows his audience though due purely to his voice sounding like he's speaking to someone after a serious brain injury

Now timmy this is HIGH wealth boost HIGH wealth and this is a MEDIUM wealth HIGH is better than MEDIUM

ShadowHearth

I cant remember when the last time I took a Blimp to work...

Yakult

nesf wrote: »

You could have convinced me very easily that was a spoof video by someone with too much time on their hands. 9 Euro, for two parks an a form of transportation that only works if other people have the DLC? Really, I'm falling over myself trying to get my credit card out.

I really, really hope no one is buying this ridiculous DLC. Wouldn't even interest me much if free, never mind the price they are charging.

Azza

I'm not a person who feels the need to criticize DLC just because it exists but I do find it plain wrong that their advertising this DLC as an option to alleviate traffic problems both at the entrance to the city and in the city when the traffic isn't working correctly in the the city due to programming issues and the one entrance to the city is a design decision. Its like they created the problems so they can sell you the solution or wanting to charge you money for a patch.

In fairness Maxis have said there working on a fix for the traffic problems to be included in a future patch but I think its kinda of obvious that the patch to fix the traffic issues should be the priority over DLC.

Azza

On a slightly more positive note, a survey going around by Maxis made mention of a classic mode, which works both online and offline.
Leading people to speculate that an update will bring offline play soon enough.

cherryghost

And they'll probably sell that as DLC/expansion.

Kirby

I wish this game was better. I wanted to love it so much but just couldn't. I'm holding out hope that their sequel or expansion will fixed a lot of issues, give it some much needed depth and make it more fun.

Drexel

Kirby wrote: »

I wish this game was better. I wanted to love it so much but just couldn't. I'm holding out hope that their sequel or expansion will fixed a lot of issues, give it some much needed depth and make it more fun.

Me too. Sim city is my favourite series and I would spends 100's of hours playing this if it was decent. I hadnt booted it up in ages and checked in here to see if there has been any improvements and see the useless DLC they are selling. Hopefully Maxis will have some sense of self worth and fix it or make a new and improved one instead

Slutmonkey57b

cherryghost wrote: »

The farce continues. Official DLC video is a parody in itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kIy4NrMFiE

I just watched this. That has to be the most condescending voice ever to narrate anything. The Tweenies are less patronising than this wanker.

Dear "Balance Designer":

You are **** at your job. This game is balanced like a pile of broken pint glasses. The position is that the Buyers should talk down to you, because you're an idiot.

Drexel

Keep getting a sim city itch but can't enjoy this cause of the limited size.

Can't go back to 4 either after the beauty of this.

Just wanna say once more

Fûck you EA and prob Maxis too for ruining my favourite series

Sarn

I just went to buy something on Amazon.com there and found that my €20 discount after buying Sim City is still valid, despite returing the game! They also sent me a €20 off code that I'll have to try as well. That's a win, win in my book.

Wonda-Boy

Game is still wonky....bigger plots is all we needs!

Mc Love

did they come out with a new update then? You hit the nail on the head, bigger plots or even better still access to the land surrounding the cities!

Mc Love

Update 7 is out and the reports I have seen so far have said huge improvements in traffic and services now functioning as they should have from day one!! Plus you can build tunnels and overpasses!

Mc Love

Oh and there are now houses of worship!

Origin are also having a sale at the moment - some of the expansion packs are half price (the price they should be anyway)

Branoic

Nice to see progress, but not one cent more goes to Maxis from my wallet until they increase the city sizes.

Eoin247

Branoic wrote: »

Nice to see progress, but not one cent more goes to Maxis from my wallet until they increase the city sizes.

Unfortunately there isn't enough people who would be able to utilise this, thus maxis don't have this on their priorities list.

A guy on the fansite simtropolis did some calculations a while back and told us that a ridiculously tiny percentage of players would have a good enough computer to play a 2x city size with decent graphics setting.

nesf

Mc Love wrote: »

Update 7 is out and the reports I have seen so far have said huge improvements in traffic and services now functioning as they should have from day one!! Plus you can build tunnels and overpasses!

Maxis are dead to me. If they were some small independent developer or with an impoverished label I could forgive this. You don't get this from me if you're releasing a AAA title.

twinsen

Eoin247 wrote: »

A guy on the fansite simtropolis did some calculations a while back and told us that a ridiculously tiny percentage of players would have a good enough computer to play a 2x city size with decent graphics setting.

was this guy working for EA by any chance?

Simcity is using max 30% of my over 2 years old CPU.

Eoin247

twinsen wrote: »

was this guy working for EA by any chance?

Simcity is using max 30% of my over 2 years old CPU.

Not unless he was undercover :P

But seriously, simcity as it is is one of the most taxing games out there for computers. I think it's the GPU you should be looking at rather than CPU. A quick google search for GPU reviews and benchmarks shows that simcity at max settings gives you one of the lowest fps of any game currently available!

Azza

I might pick this up now, seems to be in decent order now after several patches and it can be picked up pretty cheap now.