new "real" Sim City in 2013

[Shadow Assassin]

Can you the Uncanny Valley with buildings? Always was told that's something for people/animals. After all, a buidling is just that. Not that I mind a stylised (even slichtly cartoonish) style. when done right those can be glorious in their beauty too.

Well, I think it could happen to buildings, too. Not to the extent with faces, but when a BAT is trying to be ultra realistic, you will start noticing even small details that are wrong. I think that scale will be a big issue with a free 3D camera. Under or overscaled buildings look weird in SC4 but in most cases I am able to ignore it. With full 3D you will see it immediately.

Yup, exactly... case in point (in the SC4 world)... buildings that are done with BAT4MAX.

They're more realistic, yes... but they stick out. Why? Because they're more realistic. The colour palette used for BAT4MAX (the new rig, that is) tended to be emphasised more towards the blue end of the spectrum (relative to buildings rendered using the default SC4 BAT rig), and as a result they tended to look a little more sterile. Superior quality, yes... but it just never sat well with me.

The uncanny valley is something that tends to be used to describe things that don't exactly sit right relative to everything else.

[ldvger]

Well, after having read all 10 pages of this thread and linking to all the sites listed, I have to say my initial pessimism has been greatly allayed and I, too, am cautiously optimistic about the new SC5.  Many of my original questions have been answered and while many questions remain, there is 12-18 months of dev time still to go and I am certain Maxis is going to continue to leak us SC4 fans tidbits of news on a regular basis. 

I am especially a bit excited about the Glassbox engine.  I mean, think about the name for a minute:  Glassbox.  You can SEE eveything inside the box, right?  Why would the devs go to the trouble to make all the items inside the engine visible if not to make them also ACCESSIBLE?  Just to torture all the modders?  Hardly.  And from the short video that explained how individual items were pathed via agents, etc. (all a bit over my non-programer head), it appeared to me that  the player will be able to create and path game items in a nearly infinite number of customizable ways. 

The idea of an actual water table is also encouraging to me and something that I thought was horribly overlooked in SC4, as anyone who has followed my frustration with game water/plop water rants over the past 9 years knows.  We'll see if SC5 has a realistic water table scheme, i.e. one that allows the water table to vary in depth across the landscape, but if it does, we may actually be able to create fresh water lakes and rivers again, without resorting to plop water. 

Only major question remaining to me is backward compatibility to the 9 years worth of incredible work the entire SC4 community has created.  Sadly, I don't think it will be possible and that the huge library of custom content created so far will end up compatible only with SC4.  For those of us who don;t create content but use that created by others, this will be a major blow, at least for the first couple of years...until the modders who mod for fun start playing around inside the Glassbox engine and creating an entire NEW library for us to play with.  For many, the challenge of the new engine and years of new modding work ahead of them, this new game will be a dream come true.  For others, the lack of custom content from the beginninng will be a deal-breaker, at least for a while.  The good news is, SC4 will still be around and us non-modders can still play it happily for years to come while the modders get SC5 up to snuff for us.

Myself, I plan to pre-purchase the game as soon as I gather together the money to do so.  Yeah, it's a bit pricey, especially for someone working part-time in fast food, but I've been playing SC for almost 20 years now and must, must, must have the new game.  I'll be following all the news and developments in the year ahead and, if Glassbox lives up to it's hype, may actually venture into the world of modding myself.  It looks to be a much easier interface that what we currently have, at least what little we have been shown about it so far. 

Lastly, I think it may be time to create a new board on the forums here dedicated to all things SC5.  Ten days, ten pages so far, and we have a year or more of discussion ahead of us while we watch with anticipation (and dread) how SC5 development pans out. 

Just my $.02.

Lora/LD

[ivo_su]

I'm interested in whether or not the MAXIS have asked one of the NAM team for help in building the transportation network of Sim City 5. It would be stupid hell if they do not comply with the work of the NAM here and leave only primary road network of Sim City 4 and NAM team to work must start from zero.

- Ivo

[catty]

Scientific American has done an article on the new SimCity

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=simcity-2013-players-face-tough-energy-environment-choices

a quote from page2 of it

Because the game is participatory, however -- players "share" virtual worlds via the Internet -- decisions made in one city affect others. Sewage pumped into a shared waterway can have health effects on a downstream population, and air quality is affected by all players in the region. There are even rumors that climate change may appear as a "macro-level" pollution effect.

doesn't sound like standalone is going to be an option

[Terring7]

I disagree, the article is about the complexity of the new Simcity and not necessary about the multi-player. Even in standalone you need to be carefully. Beside, Maxis said that multi-player is not the only way of playing.

[macvirt]

Nobody wondering what approach EA will impose on Maxis in regards to third party content, considering topics like DLC, City Sets, and so forth?

Another item, I keep seeing remarks towards the style containing words like "playful". When you look at the transcripts, there's a lot of negating on point questions (understandable, hello marketing) but always followed by emphasis on cool and playful look & feel. To me one of the big selling points of SC4 is realism as deep as you want. Having ran away from Sim City Societies (and vividly remembering the trauma from a briefing of the fortunately cancelled Village bull) there's some simple commercial thinking to apply. Both developer and publisher will want to use an existing set of user groups as a catalyst. They will also realise however that these are not really their target markets. Far from. It's a case of "need em for transition", but nothing more. Targets set will simply adhere to common commercial sense. A balance will be sought between casual and leisure gameplay, with the usual fashionable dose of achievement / online presence sharing. Add microtransactions on top.

There is one thing that still stands in the back of my mind though, at a GDC a while ago there was a discussion between some EA and 2K guys, with the latter being subject to giddy ridicule on the case of Civ V and its tantrums in publishing. EA will have learned from 2K's mistakes.
In many ways, the transition from Civ 4 (with its core user groups towards a larger set of commercial targets (and adaptations in design & programming - etc) with dependancies for the latter rather than the former) to Civ 5 is not that commercially different from the transition of SC4 to SC5. 2K did it terribly, but that is fine since it made money as projected.

The developer being Maxis, that is nice. But publisher beats developer at every corner in this industry. This being EA, does worry me.

It will be interesting to observe third party developers for SC4 and their interactions as individuals (and teams) with Maxis over the upcoming year. Equally interesting will be to see clarity down the road on style (which decides far more in terms of development mindset than most people seem to consider), and on mechanisms.

[dedgren]

Can we do one thing here, please?  The distinction between "Maxis" and EA that various commenters around the SC4 community are drawing is a completely artificial one.  Maxis (the company) was bought by EA in the late 1990s.  The remnants were wholly subsumed into EA around the time SC4 was released.

I think that EA now realizes there is significant goodwill remaining toward the Maxis name in the community, hence its resurrection in connection with SC:Next.  I do not believe, however, that Maxis is being used as anything other than a way to further brand the effort.  It is really amusing, here and elsewhere, to see the numerous references to "good" Maxis and "evil" EA.

Folks, it's all EA.


David

[Tarkus]

To my knowledge, sometimes Maxis, in its present-day incarnation, is referred to as "EA Emeryville", or sometimes "EA Maxis Emeryville", both of which have appeared in recent press releases about the game--and that's technically what they are.  It's basically just a second office EA has in the Bay Area along with the main office (EA Redwood Shores) that currently houses SimCity development.  EA's owned Maxis for 15 years--2 years before SC3000 was even released. 

Regarding single vs. multiplayer, everything I've seen has said 1-16 players.  That obviously means single player is an option.  This was reiterated in the Reddit session and recently via the @SimCity twitter account.

-Alex

[NCGAIO]

Asking for license for reproduction of texts .... I do not think I get too detailed but it was a bit confused!


""4) halfbakednco:
Maybe I missed it in all the released details but I am hoping there is an offline mode that is full featured with region play similar to SC4?....
Maxis:
[Ocean] Yeah, like SC4, you can build out a region by yourself, and make all of the cities serially. There are lots of players who just want to control their own world, and they don't want anybody to interfere with it. But even those solo players are going to be participating in the flow of resources that constitute the core of the games economy – the economic landscape that they're operating in will be shaped by the actions of other players, even if they are only playing solo. ....

[Andrew] We've addressed this elsewhere, but I just want to repeat, single player is definitely still a big focus. And if you want to play all the cities in a region yourself, that's absolutely possible. .... ""

I think that they themselves have not reached a consensus but make sure that relying on the EA prevailed the first answer.

I have not seen in any text despite repeated questions a positive confirmation that the game will have a stand alone option.


""25) Zakerias:
What do you think will be the biggest gameplay improvement over Simcity 4?
Maxis: [Dan]
As for the biggest gameplay improvement, we're moving from a purely statistical simulation model to an agent based model. So one example of how that's different would be that the vehicles you saw in SC4 were just visual representations of 'traffic density' at that location, they weren't real, if you watched them long enough they'd fade out as they turned corners. By contrast, with our new simulator, each and every vehicle and person is a real simulation entity heading to some real destination. ""

This certainly was a utopia unless we were all sitting in front of powerful workstations do not see how it would be possible in large and medium cities. The graphical representation of the traffic already represents a huge load in the game made in current patterns where the actual model and displaced by the effects directory just to follow the routes of travel and congestion show.
Really represent each entity as a model to be moved according to the path set for such work is sure to cook any i7 despite below to answer what are the resources required for the game.

""27) nhexum:
....How are you planning to keep hardware requirements accessible for large cities?....
Maxis:
[Andrew] Like most of the games we make, we're targeting a broad audience with this game, we don't want to limit ourselves to only those who have the latest-and-greatest graphics card. What we do is scale our graphics options depending on what hardware you have, so it's playable on our min spec, but we can still turn on all the cool bells and whistles on the high end. (Did someone say tilt-shift?)
""

That is the same as we do now!

The possibility of free cameras would mean losing all content created during these years by the community from scratch and relying on the promise that the game would still be modifiable as it is today which leads me to the equation below.

  EA. +. DLC. +. Their other games = I find it very hard to believe

Anyway if the world does not end in 2012 we will see how the promises will become reality.

[catty]

Thanks NCGAIO for putting those quotes together, it makes it clear that when people like myself are asking about a standalone version (my city, on my computer and no internet access) they are talking about a solo player city-building on a virtual world and still being effected by other players decisions on that virtual world.

Not something I want to do, for me city building is my unwinding time at the end of a busy day ... just me and the computer, I was building a cemetery the other night (not in SimCity, but in Cities in Motion ... see results in sig link) and it was just     and I would have got the same feeling had I been doing it in SC4.

I don't want to worry about other players or the "economic landscape" ... RL is complicated enough I don't need it in my "downtime" as well.

Cathy

[Connor]

"Yeah, like SC4, you can build out a region by yourself, and make all of the cities serially. There are lots of players who just want to control their own world, and they don't want anybody to interfere with it. But even those solo players are going to be participating in the flow of resources that constitute the core of the games economy – the economic landscape that they're operating in will be shaped by the actions of other players, even if they are only playing solo."

"We've addressed this elsewhere, but I just want to repeat, single player is definitely still a big focus. And if you want to play all the cities in a region yourself, that's absolutely possible"

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but to me those two statements seem a little contradictory.

[catty]

I've been doing a bit of google research, this is just one link

http://www.highpants.com/technoid/?p=8166

but pretty much all the other articles are saying the same thing

Being built from the ground up to make use of the latest multi-player and multi-platform technologies players will be able to play co-operatively as well as continuing your cities evolution across many devices. On the go play it on your tablet then when you arrive home jump on your PC and pick-up the game where you left off.

Central to this the game will make use of cloud storage for saved games and allowing a new multi player collaborative mode with up to 16 people able to work within the same world simultaneously. The cloud storage also allows the game to easily be played on various platforms.

[jondor]

Only time will tell, but my personal feeling is that those statements are being taken the wrong way.

First off:

Yeah, like SC4, you can build out a region by yourself, and make all of the cities serially. There are lots of players who just want to control their own world, and they don't want anybody to interfere with it. But even those solo players are going to be participating in the flow of resources that constitute the core of the games economy – the economic landscape that they're operating in will be shaped by the actions of other players, even if they are only playing solo.

My impression here is that just like SC4, you still have to deal with the simulation engine; the flow of resources that constitute the core of the games economy and therefore the economic landscape that they're operating in will be shaped by the actions of other players, even if they are only playing solo; taken as a generalized statement, in the single player case the other players (read mayors of the other city tiles) will be you.

You can't just ignore the simulator in SC4, you either have to make sure your city shows a profit or you have to occasionally ctrl-x yourself some more money in order to keep your city afloat while you play in your psuedo-sandbox.  I suspect the same will be true this time around, unless they do add a SCURK-like tool/mode.

[Haljackey]

New development video. I'm impressed.

http://www.youtube.com/v/vS0qURl_JJY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS0qURl_JJY

[Shadow Assassin]

Some of the stuff in the video is very, very clever, especially for a game that's fairly early in development.

Also note that it comes accompanied with a blog entry.

[Lowkee33]

Perhaps by going through Mr. Quigley's blog some of our top BATers can get a jump on how to create low-poly models for SC5

[Tarkus]

I'm really very impressed.  There's a nice sense of levels of hierarchy to the simulation. 

-Alex

[mave94]

I am happy to see there are developments of a new Simcity. At first I didn't believe it, but the last video is very promising. I'm impressed, too.   
Can't wait to see the new game being finished.

[WC_EEND]

Well, I have mine preordered since monday. Not on Origin though, in an actual store

[Silur]

Nice SC2013 ideas with very primitive pictures of buildings ... It's for primary school - looks like Sims 2 or Sims 3