SimCity 5

EA better make SC5 moddable. SC4 is the greatest urban citybuilder of all time because of that. SC5 should also have a in depth traffic system like SC4

After a disappointment with Societies and the micromanaging nightmare of 4. I just hope they return back to the mechanics of SC3k where I did not have to go to each flipping power plant to micro manage them. Oh and traffic should be improved as well and certan classes of sims aren't picky about using mass transit.
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Heck no, SC4 is light years ahead of SC3K with what you can do with it.
 
Interesting, and looks like it could be good. But it looks like it might be online only? I wouldn't object to an online option, but I like to able to run my own, isolated city in the offline world, too.

If it does turn out to have both good city management and low-level Sim detail, though, that would be pretty cool.
 
I'm calling it now: Either EA won't make a Mac version at all, or they'll do it like Sims 3 and make a Mac version but not support it at all.

Also, I like Sim City 4's graphics better, they look more realistic.
 
Buying a Mac and expecting to play every good game out there is probably self defeating.
 
Synsensa said:
Buying a Mac and expecting to play every good game out there is probably self defeating.
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I'm expecting it to play a game that's made to be playable on Mac. I think I have a bit of a right to expect it to work well since I paid full price for it and have a perfectly capable computer.

EDIT: I'm speaking about Sims 3 here.
 
I don't understand why people keep bringing up SimCity Societies. The game was always intended as a spinoff and I don't remember it being advertised as anything like the main game.

Anyway this is great! It looks like they are starting with Sim City 4 and working from that gameplay. I can't wait.
 
Skwink said:
I'm expecting it to play a game that's made to be playable on Mac. I think I have a bit of a right to expect it to work well since I paid full price for it and have a perfectly capable computer.

EDIT: I'm speaking about Sims 3 here.
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They made Simcity 4 for OS X although it was PPC (what's that Lion users? No Rosetta? :rolleyes:)
 
civ_king said:
They made Simcity 4 for OS X although it was PPC (what's that Lion users? No Rosetta? :rolleyes:)
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Actually Aspyr made the Mac version of Simcity 4. And yeah, I still maintain that the subtraction of Rosetta was the worst part of Lion :p
 
I got this from PCGamer. Very interesting, and I like how every sim has a purpose and something to do, rather than just being their because they can be.

Here's the article.

At EA’s Game Changers event yesterday, Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw confirmed that SimCity is back, and showed off a very pretty, but very gameplay-less, trailer. Today at GDC, however, Maxis went into detail when it unveiled the game’s engine, GlassBox, which I also got a look at during a recent visit to the studio. Wow. Spore was certainly ambitious, and The Sims has reached incredible commercial success, but GlassBox may turn out to be Maxis’ most impressive achievement yet.

The previous SimCity games rely on relatively high-level statistics to tell us what’s going on–the pollution number goes up, so the happiness number goes down. GlassBox does the opposite. It simulates the little things–thousands of individual Sims–and lets the city mechanics emerge naturally. You won’t have to look at a spreadsheet or graph to identify a crisis, because you can watch it all happen in real-time. Pollution will taint the soil and thicken the atmosphere with smog, Sims will get sick and fill the hospitals, businesses will lose employees, and everyone will be really ticked off about the whole thing.

Fire stations no longer provide statistical coverage–a fire truck must drive from the station to the scene of a fire, and the longer it takes, the longer the building burns. Every car and every pedestrian (which are referred to as “agents”) is someone going somewhere to do something, and every traffic jam is the natural result of the patterns they create as they navigate your roads.

Creative Director Ocean Quigley demonstrated how agents operate by artificially populating a closed loop of road with vehicles and pedestrians.

“We’ve created all these people in here, and there’s no jobs for them, no houses for them, and no place to shop. They’re basically all miserable and would love to get out of here as fast as possible,” said Quigley, as hundreds of his sadsack residents drove and trudged in an endless circle.

“So let’s connect their little maze to the outside world, and these people are going to abandon the city as fast as they can. So, all the little agents, they have an agenda, a mood, something they want to do. They hate it here, they want to get out, and so that’s what they’re doing.”

Now consider that Maxis is striving to simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time, and that resources such as power, water, coal, and oil are also treated as individual units, as well as every house, business, and factory, and you can start to get an idea of the incredible number of emergent possibilities GlassBox introduces.



Of course, if SimCity were an ASCII game, this wouldn’t be quite as impressive. Lots of games feature detailed and intricate simulations. But it’s not–every one of these agents is modeled, animated and dynamically lit. The engine’s data is even detailed enough to play a different sound for a sedan turning a corner than it does for a truck approaching a stop light.

And, most importantly, everything you see and hear in GlassBox is really something happening in the simulation–it never creates ambiance for the sake of it. The jingle of a shop’s door is a Sim entering, and the sound of a cash register is a purchase being made. A power plant’s smoke puffs represent pollution entering the atmosphere, and the size of its coal pile represents its current supplies. When I saw all of this (and much more), happening at once, I really got the feeling that I was looking down at a tiny living world. So, wow. I think a bit of excitement for the project is justified, even at this early-ish stage of development.

But, of course, this is still an early stage (SimCity’s release date is projected for sometime in 2013, and Maxis is only releasing concept art so far), and things can change. And while GlassBox is the foundation, there are all kinds of rules and systems that are going on top of it to turn it into a proper SimCity game, so there’s still a lot to discover. We’ve got 8-pages of details in the May issue of PC Gamer US, which is on its way to subscribers, and will be on newsstands later this month. We’ll keep you updated as development continues and more of our questions are answered.
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I eagerly anticipate the bolded section. The one of the things I particularly hated about SC4 was the zone in which Fire, Police or Hospitals operated in. With the new glassbox engine it appears I can finally enjoy a real world simulation of emergency response. I hope instead of 2 firetrucks responding to a big blaze I can order 5 or more from different stations to the same large blaze.
 
This is really looking like it's gonna be worth the wait!
 
Got some more information from the reddit post:

Cities will be the "medium" city size form SC4, but they are designing regions to be better integrated so you can make one large city from the smalelr chunks. Hopefully it will feel less isolated than SC4.

The engine supports modding and they are focusins on single player.

The engine was made first and it is almost "done." The idea to make a sim city is out of it is fairly recent which is why there isn't much about it.

The UI is modified HTML and javascript

Here are 4 videos fromt he conference showing how the glassbox engine works: http://www.hardwareclips.com/tags/GlassBox

Note that these are developer grpahics and ui. There is no real game yet.
 
JtheJackal said:
I don't understand why people keep bringing up SimCity Societies. The game was always intended as a spinoff and I don't remember it being advertised as anything like the main game.

Anyway this is great! It looks like they are starting with Sim City 4 and working from that gameplay. I can't wait.
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I think people keep bringing it because it had been the only successor to Sim City 4 for years. Even though it might not have been intended as a successor, it kind of assumed that. The same thing might have happened with CivRev had Civ5 not come out until 2013. Let's be glad that wasn't the case.

Interesting article, Germanicus. Sounds like a promising game, and potentially a very engrossing one. I wish I knew where my SC3K CD was now; I could go for some SimCity after this thread.
 
croxis said:
Got some more information from the reddit post:

Cities will be the "medium" city size form SC4, but they are designing regions to be better integrated so you can make one large city from the smalelr chunks. Hopefully it will feel less isolated than SC4.

The engine supports modding and they are focusins on single player.

The engine was made first and it is almost "done." The idea to make a sim city is out of it is fairly recent which is why there isn't much about it.

The UI is modified HTML and javascript

Here are 4 videos fromt he conference showing how the glassbox engine works: http://www.hardwareclips.com/tags/GlassBox

Note that these are developer grpahics and ui. There is no real game yet.
Click to expand...

Medium was always my preferred map size so I'm glad to see they're still doing the region thing and be able to stitch together a huge city. I'm also happy about the HTML because I'm a pro at that!
 
The $150 game can't be far behind.
 
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