SimCity 5

[cubanstud21]

Re: SimCity 5

Now that I've had a chance too play a bit longer, I've noticed that you might not need a stable connection to play the game. You can continue to play the game if you disconnect from the servers. The problem is that if you don't connect before you quit your city won't save. It also seems you won't be able to do any of the resource sharing if you do disconnect.

Here's a pic of my city so far.

Spoiler

[Bruins]

Re: SimCity 5

Anyone know of any sales going on? $60 is too expensive for me for a game these days, but I REALLY want to get my SimCity on.

[cubanstud21]

Re: SimCity 5

Anyone know of any sales going on? $60 is too expensive for me for a game these days, but I REALLY want to get my SimCity on.

Try Greenmangaming.com

They have $7 off or maybe gamefly.(I heard gamefly is having issue with there keys.)

[iLLosophy]

Re: SimCity 5

I'd rather they give us a patch getting rid of online play only over a free game....

From what I read, it's way too tied to "cloud processing" to turn it off. I know that sound likes a scapegoat for EA to push Always On, (and they probably road that idea into the ground), but bottom line if it was designed this way, they will never be able to turn it "off" without doing some major overhauls.

From what I gathered about the glassbox engine...every single sim, package, resource must be computed in realtime. That is extremely demanding, even for today's CPUs. All the previous Simcity's used estimates, approximations, etc to calculate the movement and pathfinding of sims. So I sorta believe the need for cloud to be true.

HOWEVER in my opinion, it's an inefficient use of processing. Nobody needs that level of detail. Nobody is going to watch every single sim in their city, or watch every single bucket of water travel down a pipe. Granted I haven't played the game yet, so that might change my opinion.

[Goffs]

Re: SimCity 5

From what I read, it's way too tied to "cloud processing" to turn it off. I know that sound likes a scapegoat for EA to push Always On, (and they probably road that idea into the ground), but bottom line if it was designed this way, they will never be able to turn it "off" without doing some major overhauls.

From what I gathered about the glassbox engine...every single sim, package, resource must be computed in realtime. That is extremely demanding, even for today's CPUs. All the previous Simcity's used estimates, approximations, etc to calculate the movement and pathfinding of sims. So I sorta believe the need for cloud to be true.

HOWEVER in my opinion, it's an inefficient use of processing. Nobody needs that level of detail. Nobody is going to watch every single sim in their city, or watch every single bucket of water travel down a pipe. Granted I haven't played the game yet, so that might change my opinion.

Yep...you're right...

It Would Take ‘Significant Engineering’ to Make SimCity a Singleplayer Game

http://kotaku.com/5989648/it-would-t...gleplayer-game

The question has been answered before, but Bradshaw reiterated the reason overnight to Polygon: "With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud," she said. "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I would really really really like to smack the guy on the head who thought that having a connected to online only was a good idea....

[jwilphl]

Re: SimCity 5

Yeah I don't understand that design decision. Did they really think people wanted an MMO-City Builder? That's what they've created here. I highly doubt they had much customer feedback in that regard. Sure all games are going multiplayer, I understand that, but that doesn't mean they had to make this game exclusively multiplayer. It could have a single player mode like most other games that aren't MMOs.

It almost makes me think they designed it this way just for DRM purposes. At the very least they made the game they wanted and not what the general public was necessarily interested in. Is this supposed to be innovative?

[mestevo]

Apparently enough wanted it that it caused all of these problems.

It's an amazing game paying with a few friends, I'm very interested to see how it plays out going forward with DLC, expansions, etc.

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2

[Burns11]

Re: SimCity 5

Yeah I don't understand that design decision. Did they really think people wanted an MMO-City Builder? That's what they've created here. I highly doubt they had much customer feedback in that regard. Sure all games are going multiplayer, I understand that, but that doesn't mean they had to make this game exclusively multiplayer. It could have a single player mode like most other games that aren't MMOs.

It almost makes me think they designed it this way just for DRM purposes. At the very least they made the game they wanted and not what the general public was necessarily interested in. Is this supposed to be innovative?

IMO, this is what is going on. And before you lay blame at EA, I really don't think this is EA's doing, remember they designed Origin as their default DRM just like Steam. I think one of the higher ups in Emeryville has a thing about piracy, their last 3 games have had bad DRM (Spore with draconian SecrueROM, Darkspore with always on requirements, and now Sim City with the same).

[mestevo]

Good to see the traffic fixes, will have to see how effective they are.

SimCity Update 1.3

This update to SimCity contains the following updates and fixes:

General

• Fix for a crash related to the highway interchanges and vehicles.
• Traffic was optimized for complex road sections.
• Fix for a specific case of city processing that forced players to rollback their cities to a previous state.
• Fix for a crash some players saw when exiting their city.
• Rapidly clicking or accidently double clicking the Claim city button will no longer create multiple regions.
• We temporarily removed filtering by friends and maps on the Join Game screen to better support database performance. Players can still find friends' regions by going to their friends' profile pages.

Servers

• Various database optimization to address issues with connecting to our servers
• We've added 8 new servers (Oceanic 2, NA East 3, NA West 4, EU West 5, NA West 3, EU East 4, NA East 4 and EU West 6).

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk 2

[ODogg]

Re: SimCity 5

IMO, this is what is going on. And before you lay blame at EA, I really don't think this is EA's doing, remember they designed Origin as their default DRM just like Steam. I think one of the higher ups in Emeryville has a thing about piracy, their last 3 games have had bad DRM (Spore with draconian SecrueROM, Darkspore with always on requirements, and now Sim City with the same).

And considering Diablo was the same way and it was hacked immediately and pirated how's that working out for them?

You know the irony here?

Everyone who bought the game honestly this past week haven't been able to play it, or play it much.

Pirates who hacked it are probably playing it offline just fine and have been since it was released.

That's irony for you. It's almost as if these companies are punishing their consumers and rewarding the thieves instead of the other way around.

[PurePlayinSerb]

Re: SimCity 5

From what I read, it's way too tied to "cloud processing" to turn it off. I know that sound likes a scapegoat for EA to push Always On, (and they probably road that idea into the ground), but bottom line if it was designed this way, they will never be able to turn it "off" without doing some major overhauls.

From what I gathered about the glassbox engine...every single sim, package, resource must be computed in realtime. That is extremely demanding, even for today's CPUs. All the previous Simcity's used estimates, approximations, etc to calculate the movement and pathfinding of sims. So I sorta believe the need for cloud to be true.

HOWEVER in my opinion, it's an inefficient use of processing. Nobody needs that level of detail. Nobody is going to watch every single sim in their city, or watch every single bucket of water travel down a pipe. Granted I haven't played the game yet, so that might change my opinion.

i played every sim city, and i for one, think its an enormous waste of processing power, if i cared what the sims were doing, id play the sims, i just wanna build f'n cities, and im sure everyone else feels the same, one city should be the size of the biggest regions with todays computing power... simcity took a step backwards imo, i can say that after playing this game quite a bit now, i enjoy it still, but should have kept the same style and made it bigger, instead they thought giving us information on lil ants aka sims, as we play god was a good idea

[mestevo]

Re: SimCity 5

It's not just every sim though, it's every resource. The oil you are processing, the goods you are buying, selling exporting, all interacts with the local and global market. Know what can impede that? Traffic. Those sims you don't care about going from their work to home, or visiting as a tourist from the next town over, or driving kids to school in a schoolbus... create a situation where all of their worlds become one by being stuck in the same congested street and your city dies.

...and that's just traffic. Those sims you don't care about have to be educated, or the right class of workers to even be able to work at your oil refinery, if they don't have jobs they don't spend money at your commerce. They are the blood cells of your city, neglect them and the city dies.

In the end it's all connected, and I think it's a better game for it. This is much better than a cosmetic portrayal of arbitrary traffic in an intersection, market conditions, population density, etc.

To me, ignoring the sims is like ignoring the players in Madden. All you want is to be the team with the higher score and win the Super Bowl. Not saying there aren't people like that, but like Madden SimCity is a game for the min/maxer, people who like the little things and getting the most out of what they've got and ultimately 'figuring out' the best way to do some things.

[rsnomar05]

Re: SimCity 5

Ea is not alone. No Steam game I own is playable if my Internet connection goes down. Every 2k sports title ages poorly because it doesn't know what to do when it can't load nba/MLB today or whatever that crap is called.

Steam at least lets you play in "offline mode" so you don't need an internet connection to play single player. And that's what is so bad here, the fact that you have to be online even when playing single player.

[bcruise]

Re: SimCity 5

Today I was able to click on skyboxer's profile and get all the way to the point where I could join his region, so OSVille may be back in business.

Mill, if you could create it again I think we might all be able to join this time.

[iLLosophy]

Re: SimCity 5

To me, ignoring the sims is like ignoring the players in Madden. All you want is to be the team with the higher score and win the Super Bowl. Not saying there aren't people like that, but like Madden SimCity is a game for the min/maxer, people who like the little things and getting the most out of what they've got and ultimately 'figuring out' the best way to do some things.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. No one is "not caring" or ignoring sims, is just the bigger city you have, the less "in touch" you are as a mayor. Because as a human you only have so many hours in a day, and following one of your million constituents from home to work would be an enormous waste of time. Mayor Bloomberg of NYC pays people, who pay people to find that information out for him. They then present their findings of significant groups of people and present it in reports, graphs, flowcharts, etc. Because as a mayor of New York, I don't care a single household, I care about entire zipcodes.

If you're talking about small towns, I'd agree. These are the towns where everyone in town call the Mayor by his first name, his kids go to school with your kids, you might've even been over his house. In that case it is important to have access to each one of your constituents. Each one of their votes matters a lot more. Granularity is valuable.

Like i said I haven't played the game, yet, so I don't know if this is the case for certain. But if they are processing every single individual sim and unit of resource for a city of 500,000 people, that is an enormous waste of CPU.