Be Excellent To Each Other

"Follow the Sims from home to work and back," EA promised. Now watch this: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=WH-CdkSq ... qDSs&gl=GB
Each Sim just drives to the next available house, and the cars change colour when they park up.

That's a lot of nerd science. I approve.

Gosh, I shall have a proper read when I get to work, but that doesn't look good for the claims from EA!

Is that headline news though? I spent some time observing the lives of my sims and it quickly became apparent that they weren't being accurately modelled on anything like an individual basis.

(At one point I saw a bus park up and about fifty people all ran into the nearest small trailer park home.)

Then again, I wasn't aware of the claim by EA that this was allegedly happening, so I didn't really think anything of it.

And the buses are shit too, they'd loop around the same five stops in a circle and yet not visit the outlying stops on the route all day, whatever I tried to do to encourage them.

By itself, not much I guess; but EA have been trotting out the "cloud computing and small map sizes are needed because of the depth of the simulation" argument. In light of that, it's interesting, I think.

Oh it's certainly interesting, the sheer depth of breadth of how much stuff is broken in this game is pretty shocking.

I think my days of pre-ordering anything are well and truly over. I got burned on Diablo 3, but I didn't think it was possible to fuck up a Sim City game so much.

Reading around the (many) articles on the subject I have at least managed to find out why one of my casinos just randomly couldn't seem to make any money whatsoever (and indeed simply haemorrhaged it):

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous- ... ka#U737060

More info and chat on the very broken traffic AI:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=523158

Also: oof.

Very similar sort of thing here.

Absolutely dreadful, this is base-level AI pathfinding that we're talking about here, and it's completely fucked.

(For those not familiar with the game, all the cars are getting clogged up on a low density dirt track which is the lowest 'level' of road in the game, despite there being an obviously available high density major road to choose instead.)

WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN DOING FOR TEN YEARS.

Devising a rubbish always-on DRM ............

Well if nothing else it's answered a few of the questions about why large chunks of my city simply weren't worked as intended, there are loads of obvious clangers with transport (which Grim... has already detailed a lot of), but I just got an overall 'feeling' that the underlying simulation was broken in lots of different ways - a couple of pages back I made a comment along the lines of I thought the game was just making a lot of stuff up - and it appears it most certainly is.

I WANT MY MONEY BACK EA YOU SHOWER OF LYING ROBBING CUNTS.

Grrrrrr.

Predictable, but amusing nonetheless:

http://cdn0.dailydot.com/uploaded/image ... mcity1.jpg

It's the route-planning AI from 'Transport Tycoon', all over again.

May I be the first to wish you the very best of luck with that...

Oh yes I know there's no refunds, I'm going to have to just take it on the chin - I still feel hoodwinked though.

Aye, it was the core argument for needing to be constantly online.

We can blame EA all we like for their push for DRM, however as more and more people look into how the game actually works under the covers, and quite how broken it appears to be in some areas, the previous underdog of Maxis being seen as the beaten up good guy, just trying to do their best, seems to be a wrong conclusion. They have built a shit game, the EA DRM was probably a blessing for them to hide behind..

Doesn't seem to be the case though as now people are complaining about the shit AI just as much as the game-breaking DRM.

Indeed, it's all coming out now!

They spelled it wrong

I haven't had much of a chance to play it again since Monday owing to RL fun, but I was still enjoying it then. I don't think I've wasted my money, it's a good game - just sigh-inducingly not a great one. Why you paid the full £70 for the superfluous building sets I've no idea though, AE. And I wouldn't write the game off just yet.

The announcement that the game is single-threaded is a bit of a shock. I'm frankly astonished that they took that route. However they never said that every sim was fully simulated with-simlives and what not. They said early on that basically when a sim goes into a building it 'rerolls' to certain set algorithms depending on how the city is doing. This way they get the emergent gameplay but without the CPU punishing smackdown that would be a full-on from-birth-to-death simulation. A fair compromise, say I. So Maxis were actually honest on that front, for some reason it didn't get picked up on out there in the previews, so maybe they had their hand over their mouths 'Drink Duff responsibly' style when they said it to the journos. The lack of the cloud doing anything is a bit of a surprise. From the beginning I figured the cloud servers would do bugger all in the processing and was incredibly surprised when the EA/Maxis staff started saying, "No, it does - really!" Why they felt compelled to lie about it completely baffles me. I didn't much care as they seemed wedded to the DRM and had resigned myself already, and those who actively hated the thought of it wouldn't get it anyway.

I agree on the traffic AI being borked, but not as badly as people are claiming. There are ways to get unclogged streets within the game, even if it does follow a slightly mad logic at times. I also don't care about the lack of subways at the moment, or monorail. There weren't any in Sim City 4 upon release either. And street cars aren't a tool you can place willy-nilly, I think its right for the game to make you take painful decisions in demolishing existing stuff. It's just a shame that it makes it unfair through the small city size, if we had more space to plan properly early on it wouldn't be as cruel.

So, I have final thoughts in a couple of weeks in a review form. We'll see how much I'm playing of it then. I think its a bit silly to write the game off after a few days play, but even if the Beex Region becomes tumbleweed central I've still got SimCityHall to play with. It'll be interesting to see if I reach back for SimCity 4 before the month is out, though in playing this new one I suspect that although SC4 is the better creative tool, SimCity is inherently more fun to play in its mechanics.

Definitely better than Spore and quite a bit of fun to be had, that's all I can say, with the addition that I sadly don't trust Maxis anymore - despite some awesome names in the team. I think Lucy Bradshaw has, at the most charitible reading, a bad case of the Molyneauxs. I remember her making wild claims about Spore, and she Kip-Kramer-from-Seinfeld-Kasteralis promised more with this one than than Quigley and Stone did, who looked increasinly nervous as launch date approached. I think it'd be pretty interesting to be a fly on the wall at Maxis, that's for sure!

It's totally still fun, it's just flawed - very flawed.

Don't lose sight of the fact that simcity 4 was truly broken at release and they had to rush out a patch a month later. That patch, incidentally, at a time when many people still had dial up. It took 2 days to download on my connection at the time.

Also with those videos I also get the impression that ea/maxis are once again victims of their own hyperbole. For sc4 they said that all graphics truly reflect the interactions of sims and this was immediately disproven - I think it's likely that the same happens here to a degree - but also cities may need to mature to evidence more complex routings. Day 1 of travel would imply that the first video of car paths all going to successive houses would actually be logical.

Fascinating side-effect to the modelling of traffic means one of the most efficient city layouts is a single long road, so the sims have no opportunities to make bad decisions:

But if an emergency vehicle started off on the wrong side of the road, it would have to drive all the way around to turn around and come back on the right side of it

Probably still quicker than sitting in my citywide gridlock.

Was reading this Blog on how Streetcars LINKY.

What I love the best about this is that so much is based in chance! I have no idea why they'd consider adding chance/probability to manage these tasks in this way. Surely this should ideally work in a logical order?

I was going to make my next city a huge spiral, but thought that would never work due to the traffic jam. Maybe that isn't the case!

Via comment on here:Awful if true. The stuff I'm reading about how fire handling works (all firetrucks go to first fire, ignoring any others; all trucks stay there (or in traffic) until that fire is put out, then go to the second fire, and so on) is mind boggling.

Yes. I've lost many, many buildings to fire now. I went all spendy on a fire helicopter and it never takes off from the helipad despite half my industrial sector being ablaze. I do see Grim...'s chopper often though. They seem to cover neighbours' cities better than their own. Chopper. Seen it. Grim...

Sim City 2013 vs Sim City 1998 city sizes (screenshot from Sim City 2000, but it's an imported save file from the first game)

It's pretty much as bad as you can imagine and then worse Doc, the more you look the more stuff you see that clearly isn't working in anything like a logical fashion.

I noticed emergency vehicles snarled up in traffic multiple times, as well as the fire engines all going to the same place.

I swear to god there's no rhyme or reason as to how stuff is shared between cities, I've had vehicles coming in from neighbouring cities to do all sorts of random stuff, despite the infrastructure in my city being more than up to the job.

Early on I tried to use the follow cam to follow Sims around, and as soon as they go into any building they just disappear, and then different Sims come out later on.

It's a demonstrably worse game than any other SimCity game I've ever played, and I've played them all since the first one on the Amiga.

Well, that settles that then. Sim City 4 when I get home.

(I've got SC4 but have never really got into it - it ran woefully on the PC I originally bought it for, so I went straight back to Sim City 3000. This thread is making me want to give it another try, plus it should run great on my current PC).

Updated SimCopter plz.

Make sure you patch it before you start, fortunately the patch is still readily available.

http://www.ea.com/simcity-4-deluxe

Unfortunately it's one of those old games that needs a disc in the drive to run, although you could hunt down a NO-CD crack I guess. It only spins up once at game launch though and then settles right down, so it's no biggy TBH.

I've not looked into all the mods that are available for it, apparently some of them are pretty swizzy.

It depends on how you read the description for them, but I think that's all they do.

In news that will surprise absolutely no-one, you can now buy the city sets for £8 each. So if like me you bought the basic game on DVD for £35, that Deluxe edition looks even more overpriced than it did last week.

There aren't enough swear words in the world for me to direct at EA and get the job done properly.

What is a city set?

Well, there is something you could stop aiming at EA, your money.

IIRC there were three of them, British, French and German, and you get to build super-duper landmarks from each of them in your cities when you get to a certain level, or something. (I quite fancied having the Houses of Parliament.)

I really can't remember what the fuck I was thinking when I pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition.

I was lulled into a false sense of security by none of the editions being labelled the 'Doesn't Fucking Work Edition', and thought Deluxe sounded nice.

L-LOL

They really should make one of those!

Basically, you could pay double the price and have 3 different building packs (they give no functionality and you'd only ever have used the UK one anyway). No other benefit to the Deluxe version (There is HErores and Villains too, but I can't see that getting used).

Less than a week later, you can buy the packs for £8 each on the basic game price. Which I still wouldn't do.

Modding the game, some preliminary info -

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comment ... ed_basics/



Debug mode -

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comment ... oundaries/

(YouTube video link at the top).

Just coming into post that link. The guys figured out how to edit roads outside the city boundaries. He's also turned off the "detect no longer online" counter, and confirmed you can play endlessly (but without any region or save uploading) while offline. Just in case anyone still believed the cloud was necessary for the simulation.

Well that looks promising, if the modding community can make some headway, in conjunction with Maxis getting some patches out, perhaps the game has a modicum of potential after all.

As coincidence would have it, there's a three page advertisement analysis feature in Custom PC this month about Glassbox.



Ahem.

EDIT - Ooops I appear to have done the attachments the wrong way around, start from the bottom and work up. I'm simulating how Sim City would do it.

I'm really disappointed that this has been screwed up so badly but at least I was waiting for a mac version so couldn't buy it. Now advise me please, if I want one of either a sim city game or a civilisation game, for mac, which game should I choose and which version? I am interested in playing both, the only difference being I have played civ rev on Xbox and have never played a sim city. Plus I have a fifteen pound amazon voucher burning a hole in my pocket.

I had Sim City on my Android thing and my biggest complaint was the city size had been reduced. It made it a pain to plan the city and expand. You are gifted a stadium and you have to knock down a load of houses. You couldn't even reclaim land from water without a cheaty workaround I found which involved bulding roads next to the waters edge. In short it was cack because you didn't have enoygh room to expand and experiment.

Screw EA if the areas are actually as small as pictured. I want no part of that.