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I own two of the Cities "XXXXXX" series already. I _KNOW_ they are poo poo. But then I watch stuff like this trailer: http://www2.citiesxl.com/en/news/03-life-in-the-city-trailer and I also _KNOW_ I'm going to buy the loving thing, enjoy it for about 20 minutes, and then be very, very sad. gently caress.
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Jan 16, 2015 21:57
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That's silly. Just don't buy it.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:13
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I'll mail you a bag of poo poo with "SHITCITY 2015 XX AWESOME GOLD EDITION" for $20. I really don't understand the mentality some "game consumers" have where they willingly buy lovely games. You go into these purchases fully informed, buy it or don't but don't whine about your horrible purchases or 2 year old level of self control.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:38
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Baronjutter posted:I'll mail you a bag of poo poo with "SHITCITY 2015 XX AWESOME GOLD EDITION" for $20. You guys sure have a lot of opinions on how other people spend their money. It was a post mostly in jest, for gently caress's sake, based on that trailer actually looking pretty decent.
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Jan 16, 2015 22:51
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It could very well end up being the greatest creation since sliced bread, and if it were to happen I'm sure everyone would be super happy to hear about it. But based on past performance a pre-order makes no sense. If you absolutely love giving money to shifty developers go right ahead, but it just validates their behavior.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:04
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If they fix the abysmal UI and the awful, awful camera, that'll be enough for me to buy it. Maybe even over Cities: Skylines. Yup, that's how low I've set the bar for a new city sim: Give me a game that doesn't put an incredibly limited population cap on the map. Heck, I'll tolerate small cities/districts as long as you let me stitch them together side by side in a SC4 style region. I just do not give a poo poo whether animations are pre-programmed or full agents.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:17
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I do because it's fun trying to untangle butterfly effects.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:41
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The Deadly Hume posted:I do because it's fun trying to untangle butterfly effects. SC4 got around this just fine.. click on a house, it overlays an arrow telling you where the person in that house is going and how long it takes. You can click on businesses too. Or the road and get a bunch of overlays telling you about all traffic that uses that road. Is super effective for figuring out congestion, and they did it all without agents.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:44
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The Deadly Hume posted:I do because it's fun trying to untangle butterfly effects. But computer technology just isn't there yet, as Baron pointed out. If it means I don't feel limited in the size or scope of my cities, I'm not too bothered. And if developers are dead-loving-set on having agents, maybe they should consider using the SC4 regional model to make up for small city size.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:44
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sc4's route query tool just hasn't been surpassed yet. If you clicked on a residential building it would show all traffic sources from it and where they work. If you clicked on a workplace it would show where all their workers are coming from, and freight going out. If you clicked on any road tile it would show every single current path running through it. The only thing it could have done better is have thinner/fatter lines relative to the share of traffic when a query gives multiple lines.
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Jan 17, 2015 00:25
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Agents are dumb. They're a good concept but computers don't have the power to handle it yet. An agent based SimTower 2 would be amazing but cities are clearly just too big to do it properly now. Stop trying. I don't mind if they abstract it and an apartment tower only has ten actual agents operating in it representing 2000 people or whatever.
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Jan 17, 2015 07:02
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smr posted:But then I watch stuff like this trailer: Somebody notify U2's copyright infringement department. edit: vvv less than three fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 07:05
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Hell, look at this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVdOHaei_uQ Looks good, shame it'll suck on so many levels. Also a shame that colossal order is part of paradox instead of focus home. Then again, maybe focus home will get it fixed up eventually. They have done well supporting giants with their farming sim series.
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Jan 17, 2015 07:12
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JuffoWup posted:Hell, look at this trailer: I get a different trailer when I visit. The U2 ripoff? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHoXR80-M1M
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Jan 17, 2015 07:23
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less than three posted:I get a different trailer when I visit. The U2 ripoff? The video on the page is the one you linked. I already forget where I saw the link for the teaser trailer. JUst that it showed more at city level as well which looked nice. Shame the gameplay won't be nice.
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Jan 17, 2015 08:09
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Grand Fromage posted:Agents are dumb. They're a good concept but computers don't have the power to handle it yet. An agent based SimTower 2 would be amazing but cities are clearly just too big to do it properly now. Stop trying. Yoot Tower definitely has some sort of agent-ing going on. At least during trips. Most of the time, the agents are sleeping in a room, though, so they don't need to be simmed a whole lot. However the pathfinding for a tower, as modeled by YT, is quite a bit simpler than for a full city, and I don't think it attempts to take traffic density into account, so it takes nowhere near as much CPU.
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Jan 17, 2015 12:13
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Roller Coaster Tycoon also had agent simulation way back in the 1999. It's a fine enough way to handle simulation for small populations.
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Jan 17, 2015 17:26
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Poizen Jam posted:Roller Coaster Tycoon also had agent simulation way back in the 1999. It's a fine enough way to handle simulation for small populations. RCT agents also tend to spend most of their time doing a random walk or standing in line, as far as I remember it was pretty rare they were actively pathing to a specific attraction. So again a simplified model.
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Jan 17, 2015 17:29
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nielsm posted:RCT agents also tend to spend most of their time doing a random walk or standing in line, as far as I remember it was pretty rare they were actively pathing to a specific attraction. So again a simplified model. Even when actively trying to path somewhere, they would simply choose the direction that brought them closer to their desired coordinates at every intersection. They never actually did real pathfinding. This meant it was stupidly easy to get them stuck for all eternity.
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Jan 17, 2015 17:50
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JuffoWup posted:Hell, look at this trailer: This is supposed to be a "new engine" but I can see that the bridges are still as hosed up as they have always been. Physically impossible, lopsided, uneven bridges.
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Jan 17, 2015 18:46
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If there's one thing that I hated about SC4, it was bridges, and the complete inability to build them on a diagonal without a workaround/hack. So of all the things to gripe about for Cities XXL that's on the bottom of my priority list, considering the gold standard of city sims (SC4) had an abysmal implementation.
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Jan 17, 2015 19:13
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nielsm posted:RCT agents also tend to spend most of their time doing a random walk or standing in line, as far as I remember it was pretty rare they were actively pathing to a specific attraction. So again a simplified model. It's worth noting though that agents in a city simulation will spend most of their time in a building and not pathing anywhere too. A city simulation of comparable sophistication to RCT (is there one? I know Caesar III had agents but didn't truly track all residents) would probably handle the same number of agents I reckon. E: I suppose it's also worth noting that whereas RCT agents are constantly changing destinations ion tyre whim of decisions, a simulated citizen will spend most of its time doing the same journeys, so depending on how well the simulation is coded there would be fewer calculations. And rather than being on the fly, the morning commute could be calculated while the city is asleep, rather than at the moment that everyone leaves their driveway. But then, that would blatantly be more sophisticated than RCT so the comparison would probably be lost by that point. Vvvvv a very good point. RCT never really had to deal with "traffic". Microplastics fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 19:44
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I guess it also helps that they never really gave a poo poo about agents clipping through one another for the sake of path finding.
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Jan 17, 2015 19:47
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Poizen Jam posted:I guess it also helps that they never really gave a poo poo about agents clipping through one another for the sake of path finding. True, both Yoot Tower, RCT and Caesar III only have pedestrians (and pack animals in Caesar) where it's reasonable to not have to bother with traffic lanes and intersection management. The closest thing to congestion any of those games have is full elevators in Tower and that's still rather simple. At least the agents there don't even attempt to find an alternate route if they're lined up for an elevator for too long or they discover they're approaching a congested service.
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Jan 17, 2015 19:54
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nielsm posted:True, both Yoot Tower, RCT and Caesar III only have pedestrians (and pack animals in Caesar) where it's reasonable to not have to bother with traffic lanes and intersection management. The closest thing to congestion any of those games have is full elevators in Tower and that's still rather simple. At least the agents there don't even attempt to find an alternate route if they're lined up for an elevator for too long or they discover they're approaching a congested service. Actually, they'll go to another elevator if it's available. It's sort of like the entire floor holds X people waiting for elevator, and they dog pile on to whichever is available, though there's also a queue. I never bothered to look closely at it, but I know if Person A is waiting for elevator B, and Crowd C got on Elevator D with one space open, Person A is getting on Elevator D instantly even if it's 10 minutes of walking away. On Cities XL though, I doubt they've even fixed their horrendous UI which was really not professional at all. Just look at this poo poo:  -The text overflows the buttons. -Text descenders are cut off like the 'g' in Immigration. -You probably couldn't tell right away, but those four road pieces in the bottom left? They're labeled in like size 1 font. As I recall, you could resize the UI sort of, but it mostly resized the text, and you got overflow like that button for large text or you got microscopic unreadable text. Descriptions were just as bad. Oh, and if you thought it was easy to change the size of text, HAHAHA NO. It was a slider that went from extremes but if you wanted something middle of the road? There was more game in the precision needed to get the UI looking normal than in the rest of the game. -Also notice how some icons look jagged and messed up from the scaling. It's like they thought they could do webdesign with the UI but managed to fail spectacularly in making things respond to different screen sizes. Bel Monte fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 21:23
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Minor point, but you don't have to say Yoot Tower, the original Sim Tower uses agents as well.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:28
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Bel Monte posted:Actually, they'll go to another elevator if it's available. It's sort of like the entire floor holds X people waiting for elevator, and they dog pile on to whichever is available, though there's also a queue. I never bothered to look closely at it, but I know if Person A is waiting for elevator B, and Crowd C got on Elevator D with one space open, Person A is getting on Elevator D instantly even if it's 10 minutes of walking away. The steam page says it has a new UI, but none of their videos or screenshots show it.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:29
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ToastyPotato posted:The steam page says it has a new UI, but none of their videos or screenshots show it. 
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Jan 18, 2015 00:48
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Bel Monte posted:Actually, they'll go to another elevator if it's available. It's sort of like the entire floor holds X people waiting for elevator, and they dog pile on to whichever is available, though there's also a queue. I never bothered to look closely at it, but I know if Person A is waiting for elevator B, and Crowd C got on Elevator D with one space open, Person A is getting on Elevator D instantly even if it's 10 minutes of walking away. Thank you for pointing this out. I'm going to remember this post when I need to pull up a screenshot to explain to people what I'm talking about when I say the UI is total poo poo and they have no idea what I mean. Other things that bothered me: Widow words and bad localization/terrible spelling. Jesus... that game. What a joke.
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Jan 18, 2015 07:10
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Can anyone familiar with the XL series comment on the actual simulation engine? The animations and buildings look mostly wonderful (albeit I'm a little iffy with the weird stretchy building thing. I would like some actual construction animations other than a Game of Thrones intro style pop up), but I could never get past the god drat awful UI to play the game more than 20 minutes.
PoizenJam fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 07:44
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I've sunk way too many hours into the various Cities XL games. The simulation is pretty abstract in terms of traffic, it seems even more abstracted than simcity4 and it's hard to tell who is working where, just which roads are jammed. There is no zoning, every building is plopped and many of the buildings have zero intuitive connection to their stats. So you have have a big lot-filling 7 story building that looks fairly nice having the same wealth level with a smallish duplex, it's all over the place and really annoying. Also since every building is plopped it never changes, that mid-wealth house will be a mid-wealth house for ever. If you want to up-zone or change the class you have to demolish and hope your mouse lets you place another building of the same size on top (you're often blocked placing things by like mm imperfections). The demand system is much more complex than RCI and is sort of cool in theory. There's like 5 wealth classes of residential and 3 densities for each, but the stats of every building within each category are exactly the same and stats are abstracted to population units. So a low density building has 1 unit, medium 2, and high density 3 (no matter if it's a skyscraper or a villa). Where it really differs from simcity is that there's many more types of work-places, and they all produce resources which are demanded by other things. There's heavy industry, which is demanded by manufacturing, which is demanded by high-tech, and all of them demand "office services" and power. Retail sells food from farms to the population, and there's a bunch of other interactions. This would be a cool system but everything is totally static, nothing changes, everything is plopped so it's just a matter of plopping everything in set ratios. The only challenge to the game is actually having time as a player to keep building your city, the maps are HUGE and can take a very long time to come close to filling up. The UI is absolutely horrible and the game has (had? no idea if they fixed) some serious memory leaks and performance problems and awful bugs. The real challenge I guess is just staying motivated to deal with the interface and keep plopping buildings. If you can stay motivated you can draw some pretty cities, but you never feel like you've grown or managed or earned anything, just plopped enough buildings. I still think it's a better game than simcity 5 though. I've sunk a shameful number of hours into cities XL making massive map-filling cities that really feel huge and have a sense of style and design to them, something you absolutely can't do in simcity5. A slick interface is useless when there's no real game to interface with and the maps can be filled up in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.
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Jan 18, 2015 08:20
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Properly "building" buildings is a favorite thing of mine in games and sadly I never see it. Not Sim Cities, not this, not Banished, not Anno, nothing. It is always overlooked and they just kinda appear. Only Settlers has had somekind of building where foundation, frames, masonry and such arise on their own. It would be cool in city builders if cranes and trucks would fill the plot out instead of just growing out of the land.
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Jan 18, 2015 08:30
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Thanks for the write up Baron! I'm not sure if I'm terribly interested in a game that doesn't grow organically- so I'll wait and see with XXL. And Vahakyla- I agree. It seems like an intuitive way to bootstrap demand for industries as well. Obviously construction crews are needed for construction, so maybe the density of industry/contractors in your town affects build speeds of buildings. And the amount of new projects underway in your city could in turn cause industrial demand. If you make construction, even of roads, take time and have consequences, I think such a system could create a neat meta-game of making sure your city is gradually expanding at a reasonable wait so as not to create a boom/bust cycle (By overzoning construction/industry, or not expanding fast enough.)
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Jan 18, 2015 08:51
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Vahakyla posted:Properly "building" buildings is a favorite thing of mine in games and sadly I never see it. Tropico has it. People need to reach the site first, then they build scaffolding and then they tear it down again, revealing a new building. It's very basic as you never get to see half-finished buildings, only scaffolding. The gameplay purpose here is that you need to have enough construction people working for you to handle all the construction orders that you give.
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Jan 18, 2015 17:18
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Vahakyla posted:Properly "building" buildings is a favorite thing of mine in games and sadly I never see it. Not Sim Cities, not this, not Banished, not Anno, nothing. It is always overlooked and they just kinda appear. In Stonehearth they bring each log over, build scaffolding to reach higher areas, and so on. Its pretty entertaining just watching them build.
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Jan 18, 2015 18:19
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The district dev diary once again filled me with "uhhh..." . It feels super inconsistent how they're using districts vs zones. Things like height and density should be part of the zone system, no district system. There's a highrise ban, which essentially puts a cap on high-density zones. So why not just have a medium density zone? Why not have farm zones and forestry zones instead of having to use districts? And if districts are used for everything why not tie even more of the zoning into it? Also the no-pets thing is still in, something no district anywhere has ever done. Plus they have a smoke alarm ordinance, something standard in buildings for like the last 20 years. What next an ordinance to finally move away from knob and tube wiring (better fire safety!)? Indoor plumbing (improves health but uses water!)? The bones of the game feel solid but it really looks like they're just rushing and tacking stuff on in poorly thought out and inconsistent ways. UI still looks bad too.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:02
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Maybe an ordinance that doesn't allow for more than one child. Population control ordinances! Seriously though what is happening to this game?
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Jan 20, 2015 19:53
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Yeah, I went from cautiously excited to reinstalling SC4 on my computer and settling in to that because this isn't going to give me what I want.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:20
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I'm going to buck the trend of this thread and say that I think the districts thing is pretty cool. I would really like to see it use "ordinances" instead of "policies", but maybe this is the same thing in Finland. For example, it would be nice to set one of the ordinances of a certain district to use an Asian theme or Old West theme to give that section of town a really unique feel similar to how other large cities have done it. I would also like to see some more policies that actual cities employ, such as "no smoking", "plastic bag bans", and "mandatory compost collection". In some pie-in-the-sky idea, it would be fun to be able to zone some districts historical, forcing the buildings to stay there as-is even if you rezone, so old factories might become commercial storefronts and urban condos. That sort of thing. But maybe something like that will be included in Cities Skylines 2.
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Jan 20, 2015 22:31
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Vahakyla posted:Properly "building" buildings is a favorite thing of mine in games and sadly I never see it. Not Sim Cities, not this, not Banished, not Anno, nothing. It is always overlooked and they just kinda appear. I'm not sure what you mean by saying Banished doesn't have that. Is it just that the animations aren't as detailed as you'd like? Because actually constructing the buildings is like one of the main points of Banished.
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Jan 20, 2015 22:32
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