Jeux de gestion addict!
A bunch of good stuff from Guillaume in the "few questions about game content" thread:
Q : Will there be high-tech industry popping up as education level increases? Will education have to increase in the entire region for high-tech industry to develop?
A: Having a university in your or a neighbor's city will make you factories tech up, yes.
Q : In addition to high-tech industry, will there also be an option for manufacturing industry and factories to come up instead of just dirty high-polluting industry?
A : Yes, those develop when you or a neighbor have a community college.
Q : Can we plant trees in our city anywhere there is space?
A : Interesting idea.
Q : In addition to modifying civic buildings, can we modify non-civic buildings in our city such as by adding a radio tower to a skyscraper, changing building or window colors, planting trees next to buildings, adding pools to houses, etc?
A : RCI buildings do their own things, so no.
Q : What will the different stadiums or sport parks be?
A : I can't give any details on them yet.
Q : Will there be a mall or shopping center available? If not in the city, can a mall or shopping center be one the "Great Works" that can serve the region?
A : Some commercial buildings are pretty large and look mall-ish.
Q : Can a research park or industrial park be another "Great Works" included in the game?
A : We'll talk about that soon
Q : Can we build beaches?
A : Beaches naturally come in as part of the landscape, so I'm guessing you mean coastline parks?
Q : Will there be a mayor house, and can we modify our home to our liking like other civic buildings?
A :We'll be talking about that soon.
Q : Can a huge garbage dump or waste disposal facility that serves the region be built as another "Great Work" so we don't have to make room for it in the city?
A : Not at the moment, but it seems like it would be a waste of a great works spot, no?
Jeux de gestion addict!
Some questions are better answered by Guillaume, but I will answer the ones I can.
Q : No terraforming. Why was terraforming removed from single player? I want to be able to have the control and freedom to create any landscape I want?
Why were subways removed? I see no reason for this other than to include it in a future dlc that we will have to pay for.
A : There's an implicit assumption in the phrasing of these and other similar questions that's probably causing a lot of undue resentment in the communications between us and the community: to remove something implies that it already existed. Please remember, this is a reboot of both the franchise and the technology underpinning it. What may have existed in previous iterations of the franchise don't necessarily exist now because we haven't rebuilt them. We have nothing to announce regarding either of those questions other than we are prioritizing our efforts to deliver the best possible gameplay experience with what we already have in the game.
Guillaume can elaborate more on some of the gameplay rationale behind our prioritizations as well.
Q : Why aren't cities adjacent to each other?
A : I don't have an answer for this, but I am curious about one thing: how would you want adjacent cities to work in this new SimCity? Do you expect adjacent cities to simulate concurrently with your active one? Or would they just be static representations of the city? What do you want to happen if you don't own the adjacent cities and the other owner isn't playing simultaneously with you?
In previous SimCities, having adjacent city tiles wasn't as costly because the simulation boiled down to formula number crunching in the background (which to me personally means I might as well have been playing with formulas in Excel) and rendering was basically drawing tiles. With the level of detail of simulation that GlassBox provides and the orders-of-magnitude higher cost of real 3D graphics, simulating a single city box is not trivial, nevermind having potentially 8 other boxes to simulate at once.
Of course, if people are happy with just a static image representing an adjacent city tile with no simulation running other than what we already have for the region, then that'd be an interesting data point for us.
Jeux de gestion addict!
édité le 21 oct 2012 à 12h34 par dave8888 [membre]
Q :Much talk has been made about city tiles being the size they are due to performance constraints. Does dynamic lightning et al contribute to that?
A : Absolutely. Take our vehicles for example; in order to keep their costs reasonable, vehicle headlights are simulated using a single truncated spotlight. Even with that, in a city with a meager population of 4,000 and an employment rate of 50%, that's 2,000 (!) unique spotlights to update and render when the sims leave from work in the evening.
Q : Seems like city-builder tilesets would be one of the perfect things to use baked maps for to lessen the load.
A : Baked lighting also doesn't scale at SimCity's level. From a technical standpoint, there are several issues:
We have probably a few hundred buildings at this point (remember, modules need lighting too). Of those buildings, the RCI ones also have the ability to vary their color schemes so that you don't just get uniform rows of the same houses and what not. To convert all those to fixed textures with baked lighting would probably more than double our texture memory usage.
Because we have a day/night cycle, we would need both a lit and unlit version of the baked texture. That just doubled texture memory usage again.
Lightmaps also don't scale well either. They require an additional UV set per-vertex, don't compress well with GPU compatible formats (causes lighting artifacts), and are annoying to integrate with an HDR lighting pipeline like ours.
Visual quality of baked lighting isn't particularly great as it becomes dependent on texture resolution, which can fall apart pretty quickly with a non-fixed camera. Plus, in a highly dynamic world like ours, the illusion breaks down pretty fast when sims walk under a street light and remain unlit.
There are also gameplay considerations, namely lighting reflects your power grid. If you have rolling brownouts at night, you will see unpowered sections go dark and come back on. Similarly, for buildings that are unoccupied or abandoned will appear dark and will be easy to see at night.
Q : Or are things like the dynamic lighting just options that can be turned on/off so that isn't an issue then?
A : We are still working on the level of control we expose in tweaking graphical options; we want you to be playing the game, not spending your time trying to figure out what combinations of settings will make the game run well for you.
Jeux de gestion addict!
Alucard XIII a.k.a. Benjamin Crewz - Fondateur des Lamas D'Or TSC
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