
Electronic Arts bringing back ‘SimCity’ franchise after 10-year absence  - rickdale
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/electronic-arts-bringing-back-simcity-franchise-after-10-year-absence/2012/03/07/gIQAJfHkwR_story.html
======
philwelch
What I really want is a SimCity where I can build a "New Urbanist" city.
<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism>

The SimCity games I've played in the past rely too heavily on separated zoning
and car traffic, often with broken transit AI (sims don't go backwards to
reach a nearby transit stop) and no concept of walkability. While I don't
think you should have to build your SimCity in a new urbanist style, it would
be nice to make it an option.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
That's what really annoyed me about 4. The lack of new traffic and urban
designs. I really wanted:

\- Roundabouts

\- Traffic Circles

\- Shared Spaces (no separation between road and sidewalk)

\- Light Rail

\- Street Cars

\- High Speed Rail

\- Bus Stops that didn't take up a whole block space

\- People Movers (like the one in Miami, FL)

\- Bike Lanes / Bike Paths

\- Bridging neighborhoods together with sidewalks

\- Walk-able Plazas that residents would actually use instead of being lazy

\- Small 2 lane highways

\- Bridge control

\- Better street control so that every intersection doesn't force cars to stop
and go.

And why on earth did they claim the Mono-Rail was the fastest public transit
and best for intercity connectivity?! Monorails are notoriously slow and
terrible for anything other than amusement park transportation.

~~~
philwelch
What's the distinction between roundabouts and traffic circles?

~~~
qntm
The terminology isn't fixed, but in my book, a traffic circle is where traffic
on the rotary has to yield to traffic entering, whereas traffic on a
roundabout has priority over traffic entering.

Roundabouts are typically smaller (down to a mini-roundabout with an island
just a metre or two across, compared with traffic circles which can be
hundreds of metres in diameter). As a result, roundabout traffic typically
moves slower, and they're MUCH safer.

~~~
philwelch
The "yield to traffic inside the roundabout" rule is the safer and more
efficient rule, more or less regardless of roundabout size.

------
NathanKP
Is it just me or was SimCity a better game back when it was still 2D?
Personally I lost interest in the series when they switched to full 3D. I
might be willing to pay for an advanced SimCity game in the style of OpenTTD
([http://www.openttd.org/en/screenshot/1.0/20101010_panswat_to...](http://www.openttd.org/en/screenshot/1.0/20101010_panswat_tongvorarat))
I really like OpenTTD but you don't really have direct control over the city,
only the transportation.

~~~
andyking
I don't think they ever did switch to full 3D, did they? Certainly, SimCity 4
was still in the top-down style. There was a competing game, Cities XL, which
was fully 3D but never really gained much traction (partly because it was
pants).

~~~
SimHacker
Well, SimCity "classic" was 2D top-down square tiles with flat terrain.
SimCity 2000 was orthographic with terrain elevation but essentially 2D sprite
graphics.

Maxis announced that SimCity 3000 was going to be full 3D, and in fact
demonstrated early versions of it to the press, but the project was too
ambitious, took far too long, and the technology was not quite there yet.
Maxis almost ran out of money before they could ship it.

At that point EA bought Maxis, fired all the people who had been fucking
around for years trying to implement the full "VR Cyberspace" experience
instead of just the next version of SimCity, reverted to the original design
of a sprite based version of SimCity instead of full 3D, invited the reporters
who they'd shown the 3D SimCity and explained that now it was going to be 2D
like SimCity 2000 but with higher quality graphics, and they finally delivered
SimCity 3000.

Going 3D at that time in history meant that the quality of the graphic would
take a huge hit, as well as the rendering speed, and fewer people would be
able to run it because it would require a high end computer, so it was just
not worth it.

Using 2D pre-rendered sprites means that the artists can use as many polygons,
rich textures and lighting techniques as they want in 3D Studio Max, and tweak
them until the sprites look perfect, and that's exactly what the user sees.
You just could not approach anywhere near that quality with 3D graphics at the
time. Of course things are a lot different now!

That was during the time that The Sims was also in development. One reason The
Sims was successful is that it did not try to be full 3D, and ran well on low-
end computers (the old computer that little sister inherits from big brother
when he upgrades to a gaming machine). It used a hybrid 2D/3D system of
z-buffered sprites, with an orthographic projection constrained to four
rotations, three zooms, and only the characters were rendered with polygons
into the pre-rendered z-buffered scene, using DirectX's software renderer.

I developed the character animation system and content creation tools for The
Sims, and when the EA executives were reviewing the technology to decide if
they should buy Maxis, to justify our approach I bought them a copy of Scott
McCloud's book Understanding Comics, which explained a concept called
"masking" --
[http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anim...](http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anime_links/mccloud.html)
...

Hergé's Tintin comics are a great example of how that works: The idea is that
by making the background environment very realistic (i.e. rich pre-rendered
sprites from high poly models), and the characters themselves more abstract
(i.e. efficient real time 3d texture mapped low poly models), the readers
(players) can more easily project themselves into the scene and identify with
the characters. Much in the same way an abstract happy face can represent
everyone, while a photograph of a person's face only represents that person.

The other fortunate consequence was that it was easy for players to create
their own characters and objects by editing the textures and sprites with 2D
tools like Photoshop, without requiring difficult 3D modeling tools like 3D
Studio Max, so that enabled a lot of user created content by kids instead of
professional artists, which was essential to the success of the game.

After looking at the "SimCity Announce Trailer Insider's Look" --
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T70evBJE93s> \-- I have high hopes for the new
version of SimCity, and I think it could be better than even the original
ambitions of SimCity 3000. The best indication that it will be great is that
Ocean Quigley is still the creative director, who's the original art director
from Maxis, and he's also the one who came up with the hybrid "holodeck" idea
that The Sims used.

He's giving a talk about it at GDC called "Inside the Glass Box":
[http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/13473480/Inside_the_Glass...](http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/13473480/Inside_the_GlassBox_%28Presented_by_EA%29)

~~~
jonnycowboy
Anybody have a link to a presentation or PDF of the "inside the glass box"
panel that is being discussed this morning?

~~~
winthrowe
The quality is poor, but these appear to be from that presentation.

[http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7183/Sim-City-5-Inside-
th...](http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7183/Sim-City-5-Inside-the-
GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-1of4)
[http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7186/Sim-City-5-Inside-
th...](http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7186/Sim-City-5-Inside-the-
GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-2of4)
[http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7187/Sim-City-Inside-
the-...](http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7187/Sim-City-Inside-the-
GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-3of4)
[http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7188/Sim-City-Inside-
the-...](http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7188/Sim-City-Inside-the-
GlassBoxEngine-gfx-not-final-4of4)

------
viraptor
I like the idea of multiplayer, but I'm not sure how interesting would it be
for cities to interact... sounds a bit too forced IMHO.

But then I had a crazy idea. Could we have a sim-city + transport tycoon in
one massively-multiplayer game where people choose which variant they want to
control? I'd pay lots of money for the possibility to play that. Imagine the
situation where you actually have to look profitable to other players for them
to invest in further development of your city by providing their services...

~~~
cahrens
I imagine that multiplayer interaction would be similar to the 'neighbor
deals' system in Sim City 4, with a few additional features.

------
thetrendycyborg
What led to the demise of games like this? More time-intensive, slow, thinking
games; simulations like these have always held interest for a lot of people. I
certainly didn't become less willing to buy them. Combat flight simulators are
another thing that seems to have disappeared.

I'm far more excited by this then by another mindless space-marine-kills-
aliens game.

~~~
philwelch
Once you get off the low-hanging fruit like cities, small countries, and
civilizations (SimCity, Tropico, and Civilization, respectively), simulation
games require domain knowledge in order to be fun. Since commercial games are
aimed at a mass market and require higher costs for things like 3D graphics
engines and game assets, this means that anything that narrows the addressable
market, like requiring tons of domain knowledge to play the game effectively,
makes it a less profitable investment. So you have to go for things that lots
of people have domain knowledge about already, something like professional
soccer. Which is why one of the best selling time-intensive, slow, thinking
games out there is Football Manager.

I'm counting Football Manager over other sports games because in other sports
games you actually control the players, whereas in Football Manager you only
get to be the manager, and most of what you do in terms of buying and selling
players, dealing with contracts, selecting players for a match, designing
tactics and so forth are all classic sim-game stuff with lots of going through
menu systems and toggling switches and moving sliders and none of the arcade
stuff. Even matches you just sit there and watch (in abbreviated highlight
form, or with an eye on match data), and occasionally make substitutions or
tactical adjustments. If you didn't actually like soccer a great deal, you
wouldn't really care; if you did, you might be willing to pay for new features
and roster updates every year or two.

------
binarycrusader
Excited, until I remembered it's published by EA, and will likely require
their new digital distribution service, Origin. Bleargh.

~~~
binarycrusader
To add to this, buying the "limited edition" won't get you all of the content:
<http://www.31012.com/images/games/12/scpreorder.png>

Instead, you have to dish out $80 for the "deluxe digital edition" which is of
course only available on Origin.

------
runn1ng
Why do I see pictures of iPads and Steve Jobs on the side and top? Seems like
a glitch in WP system.

~~~
ilcavero
I was expecting that that the game was aimed to iOS devices because of those
pictures, kept reading waiting for the revolutionary touch interface to be
mentioned

~~~
m3koval
I never thought about SimCity (or any city planning game, really) on the iPad.
In hindsight, it seems like a great idea. Most of the game is placing long
strips of transportation and utilities, like power lines and roads, or zoning
large areas. Both of these tasks are well-suited for a touchscreen display.

Unfortunately, it sounds like it will be PC-only (or PC/Mac, depending on
which article you believe).

~~~
thehigherlife
There is a version of SimCity out right now for iPhone and iPad.

~~~
estel
Yep, there's a port of Sim City 3000 available on iOS and Android. It's not a
bad port at all, to be honest.

~~~
uptown
The reviews of the iOS version are less than stellar.

~~~
thehigherlife
I haven't had much problems with it, and have played it for quite awhile. It's
crashed a couple of times, but never lost more than a couple of mins of
gameplay. Definitely worth a couple of bucks.

------
davidjhall
The article references that it will be in 3D -- not a big deal to today's
games, but I remember buying SimCopter because it allowed me to take my
SimCity(2000 I think?) city and fly around in it -- including running missions
through it. I hope they do something similar with the new build.

------
adrianwaj
I'd prefer to see a SimForum.. "will your online forum thrive or merely
survive?"

------
ajpiano
I was super pumped to see this headline, as just a couple of weeks ago I was
browsing the wikipedia articles for the original series of games, and
considered getting on some old school action, so I'm psyched that there's
gonna be a new Sim City. I'm not psyched that the official site with the video
links and new features, etc., is a gigantic mess of Drupal errors :(

<http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/overview>

~~~
ajpiano
Looks like they got that straightened out.

------
jcromartie
> Bradshaw said the new title would simply be called “SimCity.”

What's up with this trend? It seems like it's happening with every movie,
game, and TV franchise more than 10 years old.

~~~
freehunter
It's called a reboot, they use it to start the series over with new design
principles and modern technology. Calling it SimCity 5 would imply that it was
successor tos SimCity 4 or 3 or 2000 etc... when it might not be.

To take an existing example, Star Trek (2009) is not a sequel or a prequel to
Star Trek (1966-2008). It's a new piece of work rendering the old line as
complete.

------
cahrens
I had an idea a few years back to build a multi-layer sim-world game

You would have players create families of Sims, where they would have full
control over their individual Home and families, then add on the ability to
get elected to a sort of community leader role with control over
neighborhoods, then elected Mayor with full control over the entire city.
Maybe even add Governers that have some power over collections of cities to
for a state and wold be able to build certain infrastructure between cities.
Maybe add another tier above that where a few selected players would be able
to become Leaders of Nations and create laws and create national
Infrastructure and the like. Of course in this system, all players are elected
to positions, creating a sort of Sim Government kind of thing.

Theoretically such a game would appeal to a wide range of gamers, from the
casual gamer just creating a couple Sim families to the hard-core gamer with
being able to manage huge and complex societies amde up of other players.

~~~
pessimizer
I've been fascinated with that idea for years - multi-layer largely
independent games that affect each other. I've been playing with the idea in
the board game space, for example, having a board game where the players are
gods fighting each other, being played at the same time as a board game with
the players as men competing against each other, with events in each game
effecting the other. Does anybody know of any games (board or other) on the
market that operate like this? I'd be curious to check them out.

~~~
SimHacker
Well, Spore is a multi layer game, but it's "Massively single player", and it
didn't manage to couple the layers as well as was originally hoped.

One problem is that the different layers want to run at different time scales,
so you have to decouple the flow of time of each layer, and somehow reconcile
things when you move up and down between them. And of course a multi player
game can't have the same clock for everybody, so players will get out of synch
with each other. Spore avoids that problem by not synchronizing player time,
just sharing user created content asynchronously.

~~~
pessimizer
Wow, time _would_ be a big problem when designing something like that. You'd
either have to decouple or market the different games to different types of
players - for example a slow 20 minute a day empire-building game layered on
top of an addictive grinding World of Warcrack type thing. Something to think
about.

Thanks for the slicecity link.

------
jack12
I don't get the Post's headline. EA published 'SimCity Societies' in 2007 and
an expansion pack in 2008, they even mention it in the article. With the
inevitable impact of The Sims' mass appeal, and the industry-wide interest in
broadening their market by making games, well, simpler, perhaps the article
writer feels that nothing has been a "real" SimCity game since Sim City 4, I
guess?

It's an important point, whether the series is returning to it's roots of
complexity from ten years ago, or if it will be a continuation of the
franchise's modern-day releases. But the article leaves a very confusing
impression.

I suppose they might mean to highlight this is the first SimCity game
developed by Maxis themselves since 2003, but with Will Wright gone and 10
years of staff turnover, is there really much difference between a SimCity
game being developed by "Maxis" instead of by any other outside developer?

~~~
thetrendycyborg
SimCity Societies doesn't count. That's like saying "The Sims: Urbz" was a
part of the Sims series. Different developers just using the brand, it played
more like a really dumbed down version of Civ crossed with Spore.

~~~
SimHacker
Oh, owch. You had to go mention "The Sims: Urbz", didn't you? I was hoping
that was long forgotten. But yes that's a very good analogy between SimCity
Societies and Urbz. An unfortunate case of brand dilution: Societies was
developed by an outside company, and it didn't have much to do with the
original game.

~~~
simplefish
To be fair, SimCity Societies was an excellent game. But it was very much a
spiritual decendent of Ceasar III and Pharaoh. I think the branding did it
more harm than good; the people who love Maxis-style city games disliked
Societies, and the people who love Impressions-style city games never bothered
to pick it up assuming they would dislike it.

------
raarky
I really hope they dont make this an Origin only release

------
thetrendycyborg
I'm really looking forward to this. Simcity was my one of my first
introductions to a computer, actually. (Yes, I'm young.)

------
tar
I am really excited about this game.

------
j45
And I was just starting to get productive....

I was having a chat with a friend about Minecraft and how it's an "on ground"
version of SimCity, at a much simpler level of building (literally) from the
ground, out, and up.

------
aggarwalachal
tried to watch the trailer and other things on <http://simcity.com> but landed
onto a fatal error.

I would really like to make a swimming pool without a ladder and a sim swim in
it, and watch it drown _evil laugh_ on the ipad.

~~~
citricsquid
Youtube link for trailer: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kztNWdhRdnw>

------
bane
All I want is SC4, but with curved roads and properly lined up zones and
buildings.

------
verelo
ohhhh this is terrible news!!! I am quiet possibly going to get NOTHING done
as soon as this comes out.

So long progress, relationships and work...hello lost hours and regrets.

------
georgieporgie
SimCity 4 still brings my current laptop to its knees. If it wasn't for the
inevitable graphics glitches (which may in fact be my video card overheating,
who knows), I would still be playing it regularly.

~~~
cahrens
Its probably because the game itself was designed for single-processor
machines and was never adapted to SMP systems. The graphics glitches are
likely because the game depended on certain features of older GPUs

