On March 14 2013 06:36 jinorazi wrote: since day one i never expected "real sims" but rather just an animation emulating them as sims and the actual thing that matter are just numbers. this seemed to have made some people unhappy but i never had such great expectations lol. unless EA fully advertised as such.
Yeah I don't really get it either...I did not expect every single sim in my 100,000 population city to behave as an individual, I don't think that's very realistic. But if the numbers that that individual represents are accurate, i.e. his wealth corresponds to where he lives, his occupation corresponds to how educated he is, and he lets me know when there are things he likes or doesn't like about this city I have built for him, I don't care that the animated dot in my city doesn't go to the same job every day. It's just not relevant to the game experience.
What you have is basically the uncanny valley in simulation form.
SimCity V is attempting to be more accurate in the visual representation of the simulation. I haven't played a SimCity game since 2000, so all I've seen are just a bunch of cars that indicates high traffic congestion. SimCity V is trying to do something more accurate.
The problem is that what they're doing, while having higher fidelity, is laughably bad. Before, the traffic "simulation" was basically a graphical indicator of a problem. So obviously it's not going to look like reality.
Now, you have sims leaving a house and making trips. You can track the progress of individual people, so we naturally expect them to behave like individual people. We don't expect them to randomly go into and out of homes. We don't expect them to swap wives and houses. We don't expect a line of cars to be in perfect synchronicity.
In short, by providing higher visual fidelity, they made the visualization less realistic, not moreso. By not getting all of the details right, they took something you could abstract easily (a graphical indicator) and turned it into a nightmare Communist dystopia, where families are ephemeral and people roam aimlessly, bunking in whatever house happens to be nearby.
The closer you get to reality, the more obvious the flaws are. And the more those flaws detract from the experience.
So apparently, modding the game is not only possible, but not very hard at all. This makes me very hopeful that there will be lots of community bugfixes in the future to make the game about a thousand times better.
Let's just hope that EA won't try to ban everyone who uses mods..
So apparently, modding the game is not only possible, but not very hard at all. This makes me very hopeful that there will be lots of community bugfixes in the future to make the game about a thousand times better.
Let's just hope that EA won't try to ban everyone who uses mods..
So with a little bit of package editing within SimCity thanks to the modding guide posted to Reddit earlier, and a little playing about in the code, it's possible to enable debug mode. I linked the activation to the "Help Center" button in the main menu for ease. Most developer debug features are disabled without having an actual developer's build (they have terraforming tools etc. available in the full developer build!), but a few things do still work - including editing the main highways.
Not only that - but you can edit the highways ANYWHERE - even outside of your city boundary... and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it's all saved safely on the server.
This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too, potentially (since you can place roads and rails that snap anywhere on-screen).
Edit: And yes I also modded out the disconnect timer (can now play "offline" indefinitely - but no saves/syncs or region related stuff, not yet anyway... but the simulation can carry on with no connection indefinitely). And I modded out the "fluffed population count", just shows the real population count now. Both very minor/easy tweaks.
Already got a refund by using a dxdiag from a 2002 Dell that someone posted on Reddit, otherwise I'd be interested in playing with some of these mods to see what can be done offline.
Fuck you Maxis, fuck you very much destroyed one of my favourite franchises from my childhood. Patched and fixed you say? It took the guys around a week to crack the initial version. I'm sure they'll crack the new patch. However it definitely confirms the artificially restricted city sizes and probably will have "bigger cities" DLC, for only $19.99!
On March 15 2013 07:47 fuzzy_panda wrote: Fuck you Maxis, fuck you very much destroyed one of my favourite franchises from my childhood. Patched and fixed you say? It took the guys around a week to crack the initial version. I'm sure they'll crack the new patch. However it definitely confirms the artificially restricted city sizes and probably will have "bigger cities" DLC, for only $19.99!
Yes, but wasn't it known/published long before release? Besides, no one forces you to buy dlc. One could argument about how much more you could have got, if they developed it without microtransactions. But even at the actual state of the game, it's worth its money as a computer game.
On March 15 2013 07:31 Am0n3r wrote: Already patched and fixed.
"Last year, SimCity Creative and Art Director Ocean Quigley said the game was being "built to be moddable" at a GDC panel. He reaffirmed that stance in a tweet just last month, indicating modded package files would be allowed (but maybe not directly supported) once the game was released. "
Now: Oh, hey... we know you modded the game and that we designed the game to be moddable... but we are going to go ahead and patch and remove your mods whenever we get the opportunity.
Yep, taking the right direction there Maxis/EA! -.-
EPT
destroyed one of my favourite franchises from my childhood. Patched and fixed you say? It took the guys around a week to crack the initial version. I'm sure they'll crack the new patch. However it definitely confirms the artificially restricted city sizes and probably will have "bigger cities" DLC, for only $19.99!
