Water, water everywhere!

Hello SimCity Community! Following in Dan Moskowitz’s footsteps, I’d like to thank you for all the positive responses to our videos so far. I hope you found them interesting and instructive.

As lead gameplay scripter on SimCity, I’ve had the honor and pleasure to write large parts of the game’s simulation and am now leading our very talented team of scripters to make this the best SimCity ever. I also was a tester on SimCity 4 Rush Hour and have played more SimCity over the past 20 years than should be considered reasonable.

In this video, we talk about how the water system works, from the pumping of the precious liquid to its distribution to your thirsty Sims. This system uses almost all the tools that our simulation engine, GlassBox, has to offer: units, maps, agents, paths and resources.

When the team starts on a new feature, we usually spend some time researching real-world examples in books, movies, the Internet and also look for examples in our local environment. From here, we give the information to Stone Librande, our Lead Designer, who then boils down the whole system, abstracting internal processes and writing a one-page design containing only what really matters.

In the case of water, a unit (the pump) pulls a resource (water) out of a map (the aquifer) and sends it on a path (a water pipe) via an agent (a flow of water) at a regular rate to consumers. In order to do that, we created a simple set of game rules that take care of each step, adding various properties so that our tuning designer can easily change how much water is pumped, how often it is sent, as well as how much of it is consumed in buildings. This way, while a house may use one hundred gallons per day, a big factory could use a whole lot more.

From SimCity 2000 on, the player had to lay all of the pipes independently from other networks, repeating the same pattern over and over again in every city. In this SimCity, much like in real life, the water pipes are placed underneath your streets and roads, so you can focus on the management of the system at a higher level.

This time around, we also changed the effect of ground pollution on your water system. Instead of lowering the amount of water your pumps and towers get out of the ground, pollution is now sent along with the fresh water as “germs” to your Sims, making them sick if they consume too much of it. Sick Sims can’t do much of anything and become a drain on your economy until you have a hospital to cure them. A healthy Sim is a productive Sim.

Figuring out what’s going on under the ground surface will also be much easier in this SimCity, both through the terrain coloring and the gorgeous visualization layers. The water table is drawn as green in the terrain, deep blue in the visualization layer where water is plentiful and brown where pollution is creeping up. Similarly, the amount of water and its color varies in the water towers based on the exact same parameters.

That’s it for this time! Check back soon for the next video, where we’ll talk about fire. It will be hot.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Hro0BEquiPE

Source:
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/water-water-everywhere

The lead designer of the new SimCity says the game will be an "internet-dependent experience," so if you're not connected, you don't get to play.

The new SimCity looks awfully sweet. A lot has happened in the decade that's passed since SimCity 4 and the new game looks set to take advantage of that, with fantastic visuals and a far deeper simulation of a living, breathing city than has ever before been possible. But with the good comes the bad and that means you'll need a full-time connection to the internet in order to play.

The new game will be "the first truly multiplayer SimCity," Lead Producer Kip Katsarelis said earlier this month, with interconnected cities creating a greater "SimCity world" that will be impacted and influenced by individual, city-level decisions. That sounds pretty fantastic; the problem is that players will be forced to be a part of this world whether they want to or not.

The game will be an "internet-dependent experience," Lead Designer Stone Librande told Joystiq, which means that players will need to be connected to Origin when they play, even if the game was purchased elsewhere. The need for an always-on connection is necessitated by SimCity's "emphasis on multiplayer and regional impact, and the use of a global economy that all players can influence." But more relevant to a lot of gamers is the obvious DRM aspect. No internet connection? No play.

To be clear, this isn't the same as the usual quickie call home to Origin that drives so many people to distraction; that's not really a big deal, relatively speaking, since it's exactly the same thing Steam does and nobody seems to have a problem with that. What makes this particularly onerous is that the connection has to be on all the time, so if you're traveling, living in an area with crappy service or just plain don't want to be connected to the internet all the time, you're out of luck.

EA Maxis Creative Director Ocean Quigley also revealed that SimCity won't support mods at launch, although it's a possibility in the future. "After we ship, we'll make decisions about how we can and when exactly we'll support mods. But it's worth pointing out that the reason people are still playing SimCity 4 almost ten years later is because the modding community essentially re-created it and filled it with new content and fixed bugs and made it as much of a hobby as it is a game," he said. "We're very cognizant of that - we're not idiots."

How about an offline, single-player mode while you're at it? That'd be swell. The PC-exclusive SimCity is expected to come out sometime next year.

Source:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116537-New-SimCity-Will-Require-Always-On-Internet

Watch it and learn more about the GlassBox engine. :)

Link:
http://videos.pcgames.de/video/7420/Sim-City--Insiders-Look-Glassbox-Engine-Part-1

The new SimCity, due for 2013 on PC and Mac, is powered by a new proprietary engine called GlassBox. It is described as "a new data-driven simulation engine" that is Maxis' "bet for the future." At a panel during Game Developers Conference, the studio detailed how GlassBox will power the upcoming SimCity "reboot" and promised that the modding community will be able to get their hands on their powerful new tools.

"We're huge fans of our modding community," creative director Ocean Quigley told the audience. "We've designed all this stuff to be moddable."

"We know modding is hugely important to our community," Quigley noted. "We know the reason why people are still playing SimCity 4 ten years later is because the modding community has kept it alive. GlassBox is built to be moddable, but beyond that we haven't announced anything"

While coming short of announcing full mod support for SimCity, Maxis did add that "we're using the same package format The Sims and SimCity 4 used," showing Maxis' desire to make it easy for Sim fans to transition to GlassBox tools.

Source:
http://www.shacknews.com/article/72768/simcity-designed-to-support-mods?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Hello!

The showed movie from SimCity is in the "debug mode" that means you see just put on graphic features to show how the GlassBox engine works, not the final gameplay with beautful graphics...
Watch the movie and have fun - commentary is in German, the video presentation of SimCity in English.

Source:
http://www.pcgames.de/Sim-City-5-PC-84820/News/Sim-City-Praesentation-der-Glass-Box-Engine-Erste-Eindruecke-der-Spiel-Basics-im-GDC-Video-871918/