SimCity Series
SimCity Amusement Park DLC?
May 16th
French simming site SimCookie has posted images from Greenman Gaming of what appears to be SimCity Amusement Park DLC, with rather thorough descriptions of what it would include in gameplay. It states it’s for North American release on May 28th, so hopefully we will hear more about a worldwide release when it’s confirmed. It seems like a lot of content for the $9.99 price tag, but that may be a place holder ala Sims 3 Store.
I’m kind of digging what this could do for Tourism Cities, making you rely less on Casinos and really pricey landmarks. It also feels a little Sim Theme Park, which was my favourite PC game for the longest time when I was younger 
Pillars:
Mayor or Park Designer? You’re in control of the layout of your Amusement Park. Will you focus the aesthetic look or maximizing your profits? Perhaps you can have the best of both worlds!
- Amusement Park Lights & Sounds: All the lights, sounds and life of a crowded amusement park can be found in this pack, with all the familiar sights: ferris wheels, roller coasters, go-kart tracks and more!
- Lively Tourist Hotspot: Casinos and landmarks aren’t the only way to attract tourists. Mayors can now live out their dream of having a massive theme park in their cities.
Key Features:
- Massive Entrances: Choose from three large, impressive themed amusement park entrances, allowing you to choose the entrance you like the most or customize your park with multiple entrances.
- Customizable Paths: Lay out your amusement park how you’d like it. Just draw the pedestrian path between your amusement park’s entrance and the rides, adapting to your city’s layout.
- All Aboard!: The Wheels of Wonder amusement park comes with a mini-train station and rails that you can lay to direct your Sims around your amusement park.
- Fun for All Ages: Whether you’re trying to excite adrenalin junkies, provide family-friendly fun, or going for the classic Amusement Park feel we’re got you covered with different types of rides and different styles of ticket gate.
Shoppers Spend Money: The large influx of shoppers that amusement parks bring benefit local commercial businesses. Happy tourists will even stay in local hotels to shop or visit the amusement park another day. »
SimCity Update 3.0 Is Live
May 9th
Along with a host of fixes and tweaks (the full list of which can be viewed here), some servers have gotten full upgrades!
And just in case your tourist cities were looking a little similar, they’ve also included some new Hotel designs with Update 3.0, including this one below. What do you think?
SimCity Blog – Balance Designer Ross Treyz
May 7th
Wanna know how to recover from Nuclear Fallout? Maxis’ SimCity Balance Designer Ross Treyz tell you how in a new blog!
At first, things went really well. I set up my processor factory, added more assembly lines, and then used the profits to buy a second factory and even more assembly lines. I wasn’t too worried about pollution, even though I was starting to feel the effects. I just kept planting trees and watching them die, hoping one day they would clean up this mess I was making.At some point, I switched over from buying more processor factories to buying consumer electronics factories for making TVs. Of course, I was making so many exports that the basic trade depots started having trouble getting all my goods out of the city in a timely fashion. I was already running my budget in the red, so if there were any hiccups in getting my goods out it could have been disastrous for me. So I put down a Trade HQ and started to level that up along with my Electronics HQ. Getting the electronics storage lots for the trade ports really made a difference for me. I went crazy and built multiple trade ports on both sides of my city so that I could import and export goods by both boat and rail.
Will Wright Speaks Up about SimCity DRM & Other Problems
May 7th
You’re like; I thought Will liked the new game. And Will’s like; I like the game, but I predicted the backlash from the DRM. Then I’m like; OMG I KNEW IT! And then you read the rest below…
From our perspective in early May, the server debacle surrounding March’s launch of SimCity seems like a bad dream. That hasn’t stopped series creator Will Wright from recently looking back on the latest game’s rollout with a rueful eye.
“I feel bad for the team,” Wright said when asked about the troubled launch by GamesIndustry.biz following a lecture at the University of California Santa Cruz. “I could have predicted—I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It’s a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot… [but] that was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”
Wright founded SimCity developer Maxis back in 1987 and left in 2009 to start an independent venture known as the Stupid Fun Club, so he had nothing to do with the development of the latest SimCity title. His comments go against the official line from Electronic Arts that SimCity‘s online requirements had nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with providing a persistent connection to the worldwide trading markets and regional interactions in the game (never mind that hackers have opened up the potential for offline play without much issue). “It’s not [DRM],” EA Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore said last month. “People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer—it’s not.”
But Wright seem a bit nonplussed by the argument that a persistent online connection was absolutely necessary to support gameplay in a game like SimCity. “I think people care if it doesn’t work,” he said. “If you can’t play it on planes, stuff like that… I think there are some very valid concerns about it. Also there’s a perception; I don’t expect to play World of Warcraft on the airplane, because my perception is it has to be on the ‘Net. SimCity was in this very uncomfortable space, like the uncanny valley, almost; [it was caught] between ‘was it a single-player game or was it a multiplayer game?’”
Despite the server issues, Wright doesn’t seem ready to jump on the always fashionable “let’s bash EA for absolutely everything” bandwagon. “It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire;’ there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it,’” he said. “It’s hard to talk about EA as this monolithic thing with one agenda. If you move back, it’s like all these different studios going in slightly different directions; it’s almost more like a loose federation. It is going through a lot of restructuring right now, but I don’t even have the time to tune into it.”
Source: Ars Technia
Tip via Jud Hudson
SimCity Update 3.0 is On The Way!
May 7th
Update 3.0 already? Sweet! See below for details! Currently In Development
Hi Mayors – below you’ll find the notes that will appear in Update 3.0 scheduled for release later this week.
Update 3.0 Notes
• New: Added more Hotel models to increase hotel variety.
• Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter.
• Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic.
• Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won’t move causing traffic to back up behind it.
• Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic.
• Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers.
• Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources.
• Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
• School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor’s city or arcology.
• Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station.
• Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman’s Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley.
• Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city.
• Trading: Made gifting more reliable.
• Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant.
• RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home.
• RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours.
• RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present.
• RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in.
• Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution.
• Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously.
• Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations.
• Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night.
• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them.
• Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement.
• Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets.
• Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently.
• Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage.
• Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighborhood athletes at the sports parks.
• Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers.
• Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks.
• Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.
SimCity mod support is “a possibilty” says Kip Katsarelis
May 4th
It looks like Maxis hasn’t turned their backs on the modding community as Kip Katsarelis, Senior Producer on SimCity, has said mod support is “a possibility”.
Speaking to us earlier today, SimCity’s Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis commented on how they are watching the community and possible ways to tackle modding. A Steamworks-like system for SimCity would appear to be the most obvious choice to bring mods to the community.
“From a development perspective, we’re not anti-mod. We’ve actually brought in some of our modding community before launch. We’ve talked to the modding community for both SimCity and the Sims, so it’s one of those things that, we need to get the core product out the door.”
“Valve’s Steamworks didn’t happen right away, these things take time and so we’re already watching what people are doing.”
“Yesterday I saw that someone has already decomposed some of our texture systems and re-textured some of the buses. We’re watching that stuff which is cool. We’re just not in a position right now to talk about modding in any real way just yet. We want to get the game solid and we’ll move forward from there.”
When we pressed Kip on some sort of Steamworks like system and more support for SimCity modding he added that it was ”a possibility”.
Having talked to Kip today, there’s lot in the pipeline for the game and you can read more about what’s happening with SimCity in our full interview which will be going live on Monday.
SimCity Special Edition – $2.39 via GOG
May 3rd
Ah, the very first SimCity I ever played way back when… That translates to a long time ago, which is when I was a kid. And no not a goat, but a child. lol Anyways, online retailer GOG has SimCity 2000 SE for only $2.39! This is a weekend only sale. It’s usually around $6 or so. Oh and not only do you get the game, but also the Urban Renewal Kit and the manual too!
New SimCity Community Blog: The Workers Of SimCity
May 1st
Gameplay Scripter Jason Halvorson has written a new Community Post about the “rules” that govern how Sims in SimCity find a job and increase their wealth. It’s neat, but I feel like a lot of people in cyberspace are going to comment that this system is one of the ones that is broken or forever flawed.
Regardless, interesting read I think
Hello, my name is Jason Halvorson. I’m a Gameplay Scripter here at Maxis. As a Gameplay Scripter, I’m responsible for writing the logic that drives the systems of the game. One of those systems being what we call the “Sim Flow Rules” of SimCity. In order for the citizens of your city to thrive, they must work to earn money and then spend that money to receive happiness. I thought it would be fun to expose the logic that went into these rules. In this post, I’d like to focus on the work system. I’ll go into detail about shopping rules in a future blog post.
There are two methods in which the simulation sends Sims to work. There are “requested” workers and “extra” workers. Every workplace has a minimum amount of workers needed in order for it to become active. The requested worker system is responsible for spreading your workforce throughout the city to meet the minimum requirements for each workplace. Otherwise, all of your city’s Sims would simply work at the business nearest to their home, leaving the work places further out without enough workers to function.
The workplace sends out a request agent that contains information regarding how many workers it needs. Think of this agent as a recruiter, traveling door-to-door signing your Sims up to come to work. If the agent finds workers within walking distance, the Sim will walk to work. If not, the Sim will drive.
After some time, the agent returns to the workplace with a count of how many workers will be arriving by foot and how many will arrive by car and then opens up spots for them accordingly. This ensures Sims walking to work will target the nearby workplaces while Sims driving will target workplaces further away. Also, since workers do not drive to workplaces nearby, having workplaces nearby residential units will reduce traffic significantly.
Once the request system has distributed the required workers throughout the city, the “extra” system begins. Businesses have a bare minimum amount of workers needed in order to become active, but your Sims need jobs to survive and workplaces are happy to employ them if need be. This system takes the remaining unemployed Sims in your city and sends them out looking for any workplaces that have extra positions available. If a residence has eligible Sims, they will walk to a nearby workplace or transit stop. However, if they do not find something close enough, they will drive if a car is available.
From time-to-time, a workplace opens up in the middle of a work shift after everyone has already settled into a job for the day. In this instance, the worker request system will fail since there are no Sims at home looking for a job. Therefore, when the request agent returns and reports that it hasn’t found the minimum required workers, it will try again. However, this time instead of targeting homes with idle Sims, it will target workplaces with extra workers. These extra workers will then leave their current job to fill the required spot at the new workplace. Now, instead of having one business with an abundance of workers and another without any, you have two businesses with enough workers to work efficiently. Everyone’s happy!
The worker request system doesn’t end there. If the request agent returns again, still reporting that it hasn’t found enough people, it’s fair to assume that this city’s population doesn’t meet the demands of your workplace. Therefore, the third and final request will be sent to your city’s neighbors. If the request agent finds eligible Sims looking for work in neighboring cities, they will commute into your city to fill the job. This allows you to have a two neighboring cities working hand-in-hand. One city can be where all the workers live and the other city can have all of the work places.
So that is how we spread Sims out to each workplace. There’s still the matter of workers returning home with the wages they’ve earned for the day. Much like the minimum workers required in a workplace, residential buildings require a certain amount of money each day in order to pay their rent and to shop. Therefore, we need to make sure Sims are spreading the money they return with amongst as many residential units as possible.
Essentially, there are two work shifts. A day shift and a night shift (technically, there is a 24 hour shift, but really that’s just a day shift and night shift combined.) When a Sim leaves to work the day shift, he reserves a spot to return to at night. Therefore, a Sim returning home after working a night shift will be unable to take the spot of someone who just left for work. As the day shift ends, the residential unit unlocks and now accepts people who are returning home from working the day shift.
Also, every worker who returns home is ineligible to work again until they are rested. A Sim returning from working the day shift will ignore all work requests until the night shift ends. This prevents Sims from working both a day and night shift, allowing all residents a chance to work and earn money for their household.
Buildings are often built, destroyed, upgraded, demolished by garbage-starved monsters, etc. This means workers are constantly in flux, going from job to job trying to meet the most current needs of your city. Sims are selfless little troopers, working at any place they are required. Even if their home was destroyed, they will take up occupancy in a new home all in the name of keeping the city running as effectively as possible.
Look here in the coming weeks for the Sim Flow Rules for shopping. Thanks for reading!
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Island Paradise
