Sim City

VinLieger · 14-01-2014 10:47pm

Shiminay wrote: »

Yes, most likely based on a contract that was put in place long before Origin existed EA pulled many titles from Steam when they launched Origin, not all - probably for contractual and common sense reasons.

This, its part of a contract and EA cant get out of it. You will never see another NEW EA game on steam as long as Origin is up and running.

Your seriously missing out if you only play steam games and own a PC as its not that great a platform if im honest its just nobody was in time to rival it similarly to WOWs domination of the MMO market. It cornered something and did it very well for a time but now theres so many other awesome games out there that arent on it. Just look at GOG for one very obvious example

Julez · 15-01-2014 1:12pm

cherryghost wrote: »

I still don't understand this. Beefy PCs can handle the cities as it is no problem, so why not? And the people with slower pcs can just play the game as it is. Christ on a bike

Well there goes any chance of me ever going back and playing this. Very disappointing.

VinLieger · 15-01-2014 4:08pm

If I ever do play this again it will be a cracked and heavily modded version played far away from origins and EA's prying and intrusive eyes

InTheTrees · 16-01-2014 4:57pm

I still havent bought it yet, and I'm jumping back to this thread...a year later? Lunacy really.

Anyway. I saw this story in the last few days and it seems hopeful, what do you think?

"SimCity will finally be able to go offline.

Patrick Buechner, general manager of Maxis Emeryville, confirmed in a blog post on Monday that the developer was working on a mode that doesn't require an Internet connection, which will come in the next update to the city-building game. "

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57617125-235/hallelujah-simcity-finally-gets-an-offline-mode/

humanji · 16-01-2014 5:03pm

As said above, it's too little too late. They had a chance of making a great game, but took a load of short cuts, lied to the fans, tried to get every extra cent they could lay their hands on, refused to admit their mistakes until a year later, and then lied again about how much effort it was to fix some of those mistakes.

They'd be better off just dropping the game completely and starting again from the beginning. There's nothing they can do to fix this game without recoding the whole thing. Which is sad, because in the early parts of the game, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Wossack · 17-01-2014 2:07pm

offline mode? gonna be really cynical and suggest this is purely so EA can start shutting down some multiplayer servers

Laviski · 17-01-2014 2:32pm

played again yesterday and despite its problems and small size i still really enjoy it. started from scratch again as its being so long and lost 6 hours easily before realizing it.

Offline mode is a step in the right direction be it their goal is to shut down some online servers or not. larger city sizes should only be their next goal.

Drexel · 21-01-2014 8:34pm

Laviski wrote: »

played again yesterday and despite its problems and small size i still really enjoy it. started from scratch again as its being so long and lost 6 hours easily before realizing it.

Offline mode is a step in the right direction be it their goal is to shut down some online servers or not. larger city sizes should only be their next goal.

Hopefully the modding community will be able to do something about city sizes now there is an offline mode. Te size is still the biggest problem. Cities are all the same. No room for creativity at all. No terrain tool either.

Just seen the cities of tomorrow pack is 25 quid! Omg. They really are mo fo's

nesf · 21-01-2014 9:18pm

Wossack wrote: »

offline mode? gonna be really cynical and suggest this is purely so EA can start shutting down some multiplayer servers

Probably because they're paying for far too many servers that only have single player regions on them. :P

Overheal · 22-01-2014 3:27pm

Wossack wrote: »

offline mode? gonna be really cynical and suggest this is purely so EA can start shutting down some multiplayer servers

you mean that dell inspiron in the corner that just checks to see if you're online and lets you run the game locally?

nesf · 22-01-2014 3:48pm

Overheal wrote: »

you mean that dell inspiron in the corner that just checks to see if you're online and lets you run the game locally?

Pfft, Dell? Nah, they just strung together a few Amigas.

humanji · 22-01-2014 4:09pm

jonny666 wrote: »

Hopefully the modding community will be able to do something about city sizes now there is an offline mode. Te size is still the biggest problem. Cities are all the same. No room for creativity at all. No terrain tool either.

Just seen the cities of tomorrow pack is 25 quid! Omg. They really are mo fo's

A guy already cracked the city size thing, but I don't think simple mods will help. The game doesn't seem to be capable of handling larger cities.

Shiminay · 22-01-2014 9:22pm

It doesn't seem capable of handling small ones either

VinLieger · 22-01-2014 11:03pm

humanji wrote: »

A guy already cracked the city size thing, but I don't think simple mods will help. The game doesn't seem to be capable of handling larger cities.

Mainly due to the piss poor coding behind the engine it would seem, sure it ook how many months for them to sort out traffic?

humanji · 23-01-2014 10:01am

VinLieger wrote: »

Mainly due to the piss poor coding behind the engine it would seem, sure it ook how many months for them to sort out traffic?

They sorted it out?

Snake Plisken · 27-03-2014 1:25pm

just ogt a mail from ea saying offline mode is available now!

Shiminay · 27-03-2014 1:29pm

Yea, who gives a fig?

Game's still utterly broken.

Kiith · 27-03-2014 1:41pm

Larger cities would probably make me try it, but i don't want to play a remake of Sim Town.

wyrn · 27-03-2014 1:50pm

It took me hours to install it. It wouldn't allow me to run the game. Finally googled the problem and installed as an Administrator and bingo it worked. Never played the game. Which is a shame seeing as I have the previous versions

Dcully · 27-03-2014 3:16pm

Thought id try it out the other day and i was bored within an hour as the usual BS of too small and area.
This is not sim city its barely even sim village ffs.
Biggest waste of money on a game ever for me.

Shiminay · 27-03-2014 6:49pm

Yea, it's grand for that first hour, but then the awful reality sets in.

I'd love to watch someone from Maxis play this and show me how you're supposed to enjoy it - maybe they just play the game in a totally different way than the real world does and they've learned how to enjoy it.

nesf · 27-03-2014 7:35pm

Shiminay wrote: »

Yea, it's grand for that first hour, but then the awful reality sets in.

I'd love to watch someone from Maxis play this and show me how you're supposed to enjoy it - maybe they just play the game in a totally different way than the real world does and they've learned how to enjoy it.

It's simple, first get some lead paint chips...

Sierra Oscar · 27-03-2014 8:00pm

Dcully wrote: »

Thought id try it out the other day and i was bored within an hour as the usual BS of too small and area.
This is not sim city its barely even sim village ffs.
Biggest waste of money on a game ever for me.

Yeah, the city size limits are really off putting. I thought they said that they were thinking about expanding the city limits? Haven't heard much about that!

gaynorvader · 28-03-2014 11:13am

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

Yeah, the city size limits are really off putting. I thought they said that they were thinking about expanding the city limits? Haven't heard much about that!

I believe there was a quote earlier in the post from Maxis saying that their algorithm wouldn't work on bigger cities.

Who doesn't make scalable code?

Sierra Oscar · 28-03-2014 11:36am

gaynorvader wrote: »

I believe there was a quote earlier in the post from Maxis saying that their algorithm wouldn't work on bigger cities. Who doesn't make scalable code?

That is pretty poor planning! Anyone with a little bit of foresight should have realized that one of the first things people would like to see was bigger cities.

nesf · 28-03-2014 6:29pm

OSI wrote: »

I don't think it was so much the code wouldn't work, as they used marketing spec for "It's so utterly unoptimised it would crush any PC that's sub €5,000"

Nah, that was back when apparently our PCs couldn't handle the simulation and they were going to have to ship a lot of the heavy lifting off to a server farm.

Which has anyone with even a vague understanding of IT going "eh..."

humanji · 28-03-2014 7:38pm

It's not that computers couldn't handle the calculations. It's that the software couldn't. The game is designed on the small scale, so removing that limit requires essentially reprogramming huge amounts of the the game. Considering they couldn't be arsed putting in offline mode until a year later, the chances of them making an effort at increasing the city size is non-existent.

nesf · 28-03-2014 7:46pm

humanji wrote: »

It's not that computers couldn't handle the calculations. It's that the software couldn't. The game is designed on the small scale, so removing that limit requires essentially reprogramming huge amounts of the the game. Considering they couldn't be arsed putting in offline mode until a year later, the chances of them making an effort at increasing the city size is non-existent.

I'd say more than likely, there was some substantial change to how things were modelled made after most or all of the modelling code had been written and the team moved onto a different part of the project or a different project, so a patching was done rather than rewriting large amounts of code. I'd say there's some interesting stories that we may not hear for many years that went on during the development of this one.

Sim City

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