Sim City adopts a tilt-shift style look and feel | Hacker News Reader

Sim City adopts a tilt-shift style look and feel

wired.com

A picture's worth a thousand words . . .

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-gameplay-d...

Surprising that Wired actually wrote close to 1,500 words with a headline about the graphical style of the game, but included one scant screenshot. . .

Looks like Tropico.

I personally would like to see simulation games offer "tilt-shift" as another option in their video config.

The actual headline is "Versatile 'GlassBox' Engine Powers New SimCity" and it goes into a lot more detail than just the new graphical approach.

Interesting. I hope that this doesn't become Sim Suburbia. The lack of "subway"/"rapid transit" (just "rail" and "streetcar") is worrying. Hopefully larger buildings won't be surrounded by parking lots - streets in the city (besides 14th, 34th, etc.) are narrower than those in suburbs.

I also don't like how the trains just instantly turn around and how T intersections on rails are possible - these are things that were okay in the 90s, but that I would have hoped to be fixed by now.

Ha, that’s exactly what I was thinking. It seems you can only ever build the same kind of boring city in Sim City, one fundamentally built around streets and cars. It seems even worse with this newest incarnation: Streets form the backbone through which everything runs. You can only build along streets, they are (or at least seem to be) the only thing that carries water and energy. It seems you cannot deemphasize the role streets play even if you wanted to.

I want pedestrian only streets and avenues, bike lanes, subways, different kinds of trains, etc.

I can see why they didn’t (making only streets the fundamental building block simplifies the game), but the cities you can apparently build with this Sim City are not very appealing to me.

So, "SimCity Planner"? I like it.

Personally, I'd love a "SimCity Manager" that was ran from a local government perspective, rather than a "God Hand" one. You change zoning, woo potential investors/business, decide if kids can skateboard downtown, build a skate park, or just arrest them, etc.

Master of Orion 3 tried to "SimCity Manager" approach: the result was one of the least enjoyable games of all time.

Which is a shame because Master of Orion 2 was amazing.

That's... Unfortunate. But hey, I'll give it a shot. Maybe I was the person they made it for; thanks!

Hm, no, that honestly sounds boring, too. Basically, all I would want is the same old Sim City approach but with more flexibility. I do think Sim City gets the basics right.

The problem with that is that it complicates the game. Games like Sim City are complicated as is, if you also add fundamentally different ways to build the basic infrastructure (including ways to mix and match) you are in danger of creating a game few will want to play. That’s why streets are the basic building block.

I agree with you; I'd definitely like to no only see SimCity offer a wider variety of basic tools to build upon. But I also think the ability to modify rules (say, in mods) would offer replay value and niches for all. So, let's hope they embrace mods. We all get what we want!

> It seems you can only ever build the same kind of boring city in Sim City, one fundamentally built around streets and cars

Ugh. Well, designed by a American company, so ... :(

I want sim-subways, sim-pedestrian areas, sim-giant-hub-rail-stations, and sim-congestion-pricing....!

SimCity actually has a very liberal design (within technical constraints) and rewards you for replacing all your roads with rail.

Yeah. The first was essentially "Build a California City!" But hey, it was created in California, so, why not?

A picture is worth 1000 pictures!

All I've read about the new SimCity so far makes me sad.

The gameplay video [1] makes it look like a nice game but I just can't countenance this trend towards making all games online, social and/or persistent. Why do I need to be online to play this?

I played, precisely once, Civ V and it was (IMHO) a terrible game. Civ IV OTOH was an amazing game... not for the game itself but for an amazing mod called Fall From Heaven II [2], which volunteers spent years on. I can't tell you how much time I spent playing that mod and playing out the different races and winning strategies.

The beauty of Civ IV is that it Just Works. You don't need to be online. You don't need to sign in to one publisher's bullshit social platform (one advantage of consoles like the Xbox 360 is at least the bullshit social layer is standarrdized as Xbox Live).

Sadly this doesn't work on a Mac as it adds a number of DLLs. I believe the guys who did that are developing their own game.

Civ has been one of the (now) very few turn-based strategy games, which is what I like to play. Not everything needs to be an FPS/RTS. I've seen reviews of Civ and Heroes of Might and Magic and the like being knocked for "not being an RTS" even though they never weer and hopefully never will be.

Seriously, I'd like something I can put on my laptop and just play on and off as I please without having an Internet connection (eg on a long-haul international flight). I was hoping that SimCity would be at least that but apparently not.

Screw Origin and the rest of the mainstream PC games industry. I can't be the only one. Where are the Kickstarter campaigns for kind of game? If I saw one, it'd be "just shut up and take my money".

[1] http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-gameplay-d...

[2]: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=171398

I respect your opinion about Civ5, but it's worth pointing out that it did recently get a very large expansion pack called "Gods & Kings" [1] which improved (IMHO) the dynamics of play quite a bit. I would have to concede that the AI is still incredibly poor however.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_V:_Gods_%26_Kings

The Civ teams have often bragged about their AI and the things it does under the hood. Apparently all of the leaders have their own personalities and respond differently, but to me, they do a poor job of getting the Civs to communicate that.

Basically, it goes like this: I act peaceful and focus on cultural advancement, and many instantly hate me. I act loyal to a certain subgroup, they adore me, until they inevitably hate each other, and then both hate me. I can't get much more from the game than that.

I really do understand your dissatisfaction, as I've felt the same way before about Blizzard games, but I actually feel like this is a game where always-online makes sense.

I've played SimCity since the last time there were no numbers on the box, and the best changes have always been the ones that fundamentally alter the gameplay, rather than add asked-for features like diagonal roads. SC 2012 may add plenty of those (curved roads!), but its real change is making multiplayer integral – playing in a live economy with other players. If it's executed right, opening it up to play solo on a plane should be as desirable as doing the same with Team Fortress 2.

As long as the multiplayer remains in service of gameplay (and not the quagmire of wall-posting "social gaming"), I'm really looking forward to this game.

> If it's executed right, opening it up to play solo on a plane should be as desirable as doing the same with Team Fortress 2.

More accurate to say "as desirable as doing the same with Diablo 3" Team based FPSs don't work for solo gamers, ARPGs and building Sims do.

There will be benefits to the online community model which for some people will be wonderful, but for others the benefits are not wanted so it's just a pile of drawbacks.

I don't think you're quite using enough imagination here. I'm not talking about ARPGs and building sims in general - I'm talking about a very specific sim game that's structured entirely around multiplayer. If SimCity 2013 isn't that game, then yes, Diablo 3 is an appropriate comparison, but if it is, I think the Team Fortress analogy is apt.

>>If it's executed right

That's a big if, is it not?

"You need +3 friends on Facebook for your Sim to be promoted"

I fear that.

"Why do I need to be online to play this?"

There are many answers to this with varying degrees of truth. I suspect the truest answer is because by forcing you to be online to play it it becomes substantially more difficult for you to pirate it.

The status quo for "big studio" PC game developers these days is to make a game tied to online as a form of DRM and then invent reasons for it to have to be online.

I'm not really familiar with Origin (I have an account, but sadly, if this is Origin-only, I won't be playing it), but surely there is an offline mode like with Steam? So, you would have to log into Origin, and you'd require the network connection when you set it to offline, but then you're good? That's how it used to work with Steam, although now you don't even need the network connection when you set it to offline mode.

Oh, and by the way, you don't have to play multiplayer.

Say there is an indie developer working on something like that, what would your wish-list be?

I've been craving a new SimCity since SimCity 4 left me wanting. I've played Cities XL, and while it has it's own unique deal going on, it just grinds on me a bit. I don't like that your townsfolk will demand things that you can't provide, for example. You need to constantly juggle multiple cities, developing each in order to build a world rather than build a city. I need to ship oil from this town to that town I get water from, etc. This is all possible and advisable in SimCity, but far, far from required.

Even in Cities XL, I still spend most of my time micromanaging road traffic. I sit waiting on population levels to grow so I can unlock the rest of the tools (I hate having to sprawl my city out so far before I can unlock apartment buildings, then have to consolidate things back downtown).

I want a Sim City that I can play as my own, not how the game demands I play it. Sim City 2000 really was the last game like that I played.

I've long been a SimCity fan, but every edition of the game has suffered from performance problems. It's fine when your city is small, but once it gets large enough to be interesting, it's unbearably slow. I've learned that the real minimum requirements on these games are a computer released 2-3 years after the game is.

Given the amount of marketing around the new game's excessive simulation of unimportant details, I expect it to be at least as bad as its predecessors.

I read somewhere that the tilt-shift effect is actually a performance booster as well as stylistic choice – it creates an LOD cutoff that enables lower-poly models to be rendered in the background to offset extra-high detail in the foreground.

If true, that is a really awesome hack. I've always assumed the performance problems were more about O(n^2) simulations, such as every Sim evaluating every route for driving to work, etc. If it's mostly graphics bound this could be a big help.

The whole application sounds like an optimizer's dream. Improving performance (especially startup) has always one of the most fun aspects of programing for me and to take one something like sim city where there are probably tons of opportunities and many different things to consider would be a real fun job.

Also Simcity 4 at least performs appallingly on modern hardware. You need to disable hardware rendering as it's actually slower on modern graphics cards and you need to limit it to one cpu or it gets very unstable. To the point where the best system to play it is probably a high clock speed P4 plus an Geforce 8800 or something.

sigh I'll need to create an Origin account and always be online to play this, right? I miss the days when we could simply install a game. The only validation being a product key.

Agreed. A growing number of games are requiring a persistent online connection for DRM verification.

I miss that feeling of being able to completely disconnect from the Internet and just enjoy gaming on my local machine.

Sim City isn't just online for DRM, it's a multiplayer only game like Diablo III. There is no single player, there is only making an online game without other people. There is no reloading an earlier save, there is the persistence of an MMO.

It's a shame, I would have loved a new single player city building sim but after seeing how badly Blizzard screwed Diablo III there's no way I'm trusting EA to manage this.

They also seem to be hostile towards modding, which is a shame, since extensive modding has kept SimCity 4 alive to this day, close to 10 years after its release. A cold gesture towards their fan community, as well.

Well Origin does have an offline mode, IIRC. Online to activate, then you can play away from a connection if you want.

It's a shame, and it's inconvenient, frustrating, only hurts legitimate players and won't do a thing to stop piracy, but it does mean that a multi-billion dollar corporation greenlit a fantastically nerdy sandbox sim and gave it a triple-A budget. If that's what it takes to keep their board happy, so be it.

I would rather take the slight-to-moderate pain of EA/Origin DRM and have an honest-to-goodness SimCity 5 to play than not have one at all.

And come on, this really does look like it's going to be brilliant, doesn't it? The enthusiasm of those engine designers was obvious, and there's a lot of talk of how it's going to be even richer than previous versions (2K, 4 Rush Hour.)

Sim City will not not work offline, even if Origin does.

http://kotaku.com/5915377/like-diablo-iii-sim-city-will-requ...

It's also not going to let you reload an earlier savegame - your city is in a persistent world, even if you want to play in a private region without other people.

I'm skipping this one; I'd rather feel I was missing out on a good game than become bitter trying to actually play it the way I want.

Oh no, that's dreadful. Thanks for the clarification anyway.

I think there's ample market for a good "indie" city sim. Simple, stylized graphics with a focus on the transportation network and the ability to model real-world cities in the game. And as much moddability as possible.

SimCity 4 was sometimes criticized for being too difficult and complicated, and what few city sims we've had since SC4 -- and that may include the new Sim City -- tried to appeal to a broader audience, but they have all done so at the cost of alienating the more "hard core" sim fans. They're all still playing a heavily modified SC4, but the game is showing its age.

Have you played OpenTTD? http://www.openttd.org/en/

It focuses on transit, but it's an excellent game and very open ended.

Welp, it looks like there's going to be a localhost server hack.

It will probably be an easy one too, since the game can apparently run "for a few minutes" without network connectivity so I'm guessing it will be all client side with the server just handing storing save files/data etc and real work being client side.

This also means it will be possible to hack your city and get it into the persistent world, so if your city affects nearby regions the game will be a mess.

That's exactly how I felt about Diablo. After waiting for so long then waiting longer still just to connect online (NZ bandwidth isn't exactly the best), I got far too frustrated to continue playing.

> I miss the days when we could simply install a game.

When was that? A decade ago my games required me to put the CD in the drive to play. And two decades ago my games required me to find random words in the user manual to make sure I wasn't a pirate.

I hate the game needing me to stay online. And it's a stupid strategy to hurt legitimate users to try to stop pirates. But to be honest, that's much less bad than what came before it :P

No, it's worse; in 5 or 10 years, you may no longer be able to play these games. With CDs / manuals, it's not a problem.

I'm currently playing (or rather, trying to play) Assassin's Creed. It's a series I never got into, so I bought the first two on Steam. Guess what? The servers at Ubisoft have been turned off. This leads to multi-second pauses every 60 seconds, and after various game events - http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33046... . At least the game still sort-of works, but if they "improve" the DRM any further, they'll be completely broken in the future.

You lose a CD or Manual (with install code) and you're SOL when it comes time to play the game again.

I hate DRM as much as the next guy but installing from server accounts is amazing.

In principle, I agree. But I haven't lost any CDs or manuals; if anything, they've become collectible items. Importantly, I have control over them; and no-cd cracks aren't exactly rare.

But with servers, there is no control. And it seems an obvious further development of DRM is to host some of the application code remotely, so that no simple workaround will be available to your children, should they want to see what games were like in your youth.

Luckily, the games of our youth will still be playable 10 years from now, and they are better than the current crop of games.

Keeping the CD in the drive to play seemed acceptable to me. Product keys in a user manual weren't so bad. I always made sure I had my original packaging. I could compare it to registering an account and having a persistent internet connection and some may see the latter as a better option but I don't. I frequently timeout here in NZ and I need to be within a wifi area, a secured wifi area, just to play.

Just be happy it's not being remade as a FPS

I suppose I should be glad they decided to continue making a full game and not just build something akin to Sims Social on Facebook/iOS/Android.

Somehow this looks a lot uglier than other tilt-shift photos I've seen. I wonder why that is. Bad blurring algorithm?

In the trailer, they mention "experimenting" as being a big part of the game. As a programmer, I would love to have a tree of save points, like in git. So I try out something, change a second thing, revert the second thing, try a third thing, revert it as well, revert everything back to the start. Wouldn't that be fun for ordinary people as well?

Hmmm I wonder if you could make a game built around this core idea, not just of save points, but taking different branches and even merging choices.

Read up on the recent re-release of Tactics Ogre for the PSP, and Radiant Historia for the DS.

I'm quite excited about a new SimCity game. One thing I do wonder about is whether there will be an 'In-App-Purchase' type marketplace in the game. EA, on mobile at least, seems to have fully embraced the freemium model, and has been quite successful at it monetarily speaking.

I hope any IAP aspects don't get too out of hand.

I hope this is optional, as I've always had this powerful irrational hatred of tilt-shift.

It's totally rational to hate fake tilt-shift, which is actually just fake tilt, as "shift" isn't involved in the process at all; it's just thrown in there by people who have no clue what they are doing, and just at blur indiscriminately to make their pictures "artsy".

Looks beautiful, but I admit I am not a fan of removing the pipes/subway/electrical grids

I can't get hyped about this game. It will become the always only failure that Diablo III became.

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