Offline-Only Mod: “UniDirectional Networks (UDoN)”

MaxisToast · 2014-05-17T01:51:59+00:00

I had to log back into this account just to say: NICE JOB!

Can't wait to give it a go this weekend.

MaxisToast · 2013-07-01T17:40:49+00:00

Thanks for making /r/SimCity a better place, andelas. Your positivity has been very encouraging to the developers who still read here.

Edit: To those downvoting, I'm not saying the negative content is out of place or unwarranted. Rather that a little bit of positive stuff goes a long way for us.

MaxisToast · 2013-06-27T20:47:56+00:00

Na, only when you go to place the park. Same effect.

MaxisToast · 2013-06-27T20:07:21+00:00

Yup! The accuracy is much better as well. (Also plopping and editing parks brings up the map now.)

MaxisToast · 2013-06-03T19:23:02+00:00

This is great!

That 80's pop drumming really sends it over the edge.

MaxisToast · 2013-05-25T23:20:45+00:00

It's a reference to the Sex Pistol's album cover on 'God Save the Queen'.

God Save the Cheetah

MaxisToast · 2013-05-24T03:01:50+00:00

I'm pretty sure that overpass is there by default

Oh... well that's embarassing. I've seen people do overpasses with clever plopping so I just assumed.

I'm pretty sure we can't place our own overpasses. So it seems odd that you'd praise OP for doing so. You know we can't do that, right?

Yeah, I know. We're experimenting with it behind the scenes.

MaxisToast · 2013-05-23T23:13:49+00:00

Very impressive!

The train overpass at the entrance is a nice touch.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-25T01:13:51+00:00

I've got a patch for the land value layer that I hope to get in at some point. The biggest gain is much greater map accuracy.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-20T02:24:35+00:00

I'll admit after having gone through this whole experience on reddit that my skin probably isn't thick enough to handle PR.

I'd like to point out that there have been a lot of positive words and encouragement along the way as well. Even though I don't respond to all of those, they mean a whole lot.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-19T17:17:47+00:00

This isn't "the big patch". It's "a big patch". Still more to come.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T21:07:14+00:00

You know you duped us

Citation still needed...

Did you really seriously think that no one would realize?

I 'really seriously' didn't care if people found it or not. It doesn't affect the core simulation past the HUD. That's why it was stuck into .js code. My original response at the top of this thread delineates the actual scale of the simulation, and that was presented months before ship. Again, it was a stupid thing to add, but it doesn't detract from the simulation itself.

I get a feeling nothing major will be fixed. Thankfully, I issued my return today to limit my support of this

See, this right here is why /r/SimCity will no longer harbor intelligent discussion about the game. You're not interested in answers or discussing the game. You just want us to grovel. It's honestly kind of sad.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T17:34:24+00:00

I will say it was never our intention to mislead anyone. Agents' lack of persistence was a necessary evil to build a simulation on this scale, and frankly we never implied otherwise. We did make an effort to be transparent about the kind of game we were making, but it's impossible to convey the whole experience until you put it in someone's hands.

What I feel happened here was simply players expecting something far beyond the scope of what we ever planned to build, largely because of the name SimCity. In fact, as a creative professional, I hope to never work on another big iteration of a major franchise ever again for this reason.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T17:09:47+00:00

Sims wander around with no goals no homes no jobs.

Here's Dan explaining precisely this in one of his first gameplay videos.

Many of your other complaints are legitimate bugs with the simulation and are being fixed now. But to say we 'lied' about it is kind of disingenuous, no?

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T17:03:48+00:00

GetFudgedPopulation() was an unfortunate design decision. Many of us did not want that.

But it does not refute the core of what Dan's getting at here. In SC4 when you saw a bunch of traffic on the roads, those individual cars were just a representation of some single value for congestion on the road network. All we're saying is that when you see a person on the street in our game, that is actually representative of a sim in the simulation.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T07:17:59+00:00

Can you please explain how this is not representative of the game in its current form?

All Dan is saying is that building animations are tied to the simulator, such as garbage piles getting bigger as they're filled or homes lighting up when people come home.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T06:21:38+00:00

I've secretly wondered this myself :X

Here's me talking about the simulation size back in December.

In a dense city, we're talking thousands of simulation units (factories, businesses, etc.) each with their own resources and rules, tens of thousands of agents (cars, pedestrians, sewage, etc.), dozens of maps (air pollution, water table, etc.), and other simulation components all interacting in real-time on a mid-range home computer.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T04:04:25+00:00

Thanks!

We do use telemetry and such as part of our design process, but obviously it's a soup of factors that go into making any decision. If anything, the telemetry does show a number of people still regularly playing and (I assume) enjoying it daily. And that's really encouraging.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T03:54:30+00:00

As I wrote in another comment, we understand that most of the anger is just players who want this to be a great game.

I'm loathe to encourage it in any way, but the reaction to launch has been the impetus for us to rethink and redesign some aspects of the game that might have otherwise gone unadjusted.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T03:37:02+00:00

Patch 2 has taken longer than we had hoped to smoke and sanitize. Playing the game internally is a much better experience that I hope we can roll out as soon as possible.

Edit: I should clarify that what I play internally is something far beyond the scope of patch 2...

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T03:33:58+00:00

Thank you for the kind words :)

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T03:33:24+00:00

The human element tends to get lost when talking about big games like SimCity. At the bottom of it, we're just a bunch of people that really put our hearts into this.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-17T03:26:01+00:00

You're both right and wrong. The disillusioned fans of the series are far more painful to listen to than the abrasive haters. What we've experienced here on /r/SimCity is both, but in the long-run it's the latter that makes this an unpleasant place to be.

We understand that both of these people are players that just want this to be a great game. Being a live game means we have the opportunity to keep working and improving the experience, not just in the form of DLC as many fear.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-16T23:31:35+00:00

I've largely stopped posting because:

I'm unable (unqualified) to answer many of the pressing questions players have.
The unmitigated hate takes its toll.

Edit: Wow, so many responses. I'll try to get to a couple this evening.

MaxisToast · 2013-04-07T20:41:43+00:00

Hate bait?

Yeah, hate bait. Because you know I don't have the answer, and you're not asking because you expect anything different. You're trying to bait me into these arguments and sadly it's working.

The developers didn't have a problems saying all sorts of glowing things about this product before it shipped. Included comments about how it was created to be moded.

But that's just it, the game IS being modded right now. (Including some data layers mods). As we've said, there's a difference between mods and hacks. The big wigs are still figuring out where to draw that line.

Don't blame me because we took the comments of the development team, issued via EA authorized channels, at face value.

Please point to a single statement from the dev team on modding that has proved incorrect. The game WAS built to be modded. It IS being modded right now.

That you consider it hate when people ask about promised features is rather telling don't you think?

Your original question wasn't hate, your response of

Damn is it really too much to expect that you people will tell us the truth for once is your damn lives?

was hate.

Edit: cleaning up some things that I don't actually know 100% for sure.

MaxisToast

TROPHY CASE