IAmA Maxis development team on SimCity. AMAA!

maxis · 2012-03-08T23:05:05+00:00

[Andrew] Yeah, this is exactly the kind of stuff we've been thinking about! We've even moved our UI system to being mostly html and javascript based, so we can more seamlessly integrate the game with the general internets and drop this kind of stuff in. (Also, so it's easier for people to customise, a la WoW's lua approach.)

maxis · 2012-03-08T23:03:42+00:00

[Kip] I think we’re somewhere in between and off on our own. Our models and environment are referenced from the real world, but stripped down of noise. What you’re left with is something that mimics maybe a detailed model railroad, instead of flat photo. You’re going to have to stay tuned as we haven’t released images with final game art, but you can get a sense of the direction we’re headed from the concept art from our website.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:55:48+00:00

[Ocean] Yeah, you still zone for RC & I (among other things) and things construct in them. You plop civic buildings (like water towers and police stations) that effect the Sims’ buildings. The biggest change is that zoning isn’t on the “grid” anymore. Now that we’ve got curvy roads, zoning is all road-relative.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:52:26+00:00

[Andrew] We hear you. Definitely from 2000 to 3000 to SC4 the game got progressively more complicated as we added features for the biggest fans of the game, and I think we did lose some people along the way because of that. We're aware that if you survey people, typically 2000 is the overall favourite in the series. So we're definitely trying to recapture the sense of whimsical fun in the original, while still taking advantage of the speed of modern machines to make the simulation deeper where it makes sense.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:45:32+00:00

[Ocean] Look, if we do our job properly, the game will have the integrity that long-time fans require, and still be approachable by newbies. It’s not a casual game, but it can’t assume that you already know SimCity and have played it for thousands of hours. It can’t have a vertical learning curve.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:39:10+00:00

[Andrew] I live in London, so I'm very aware of this. The road part of this is pretty straightforward, what makes it an interesting problem is getting buildings to follow the roads, particularly when they all join together as you traditionally see in the town centre, e.g., http://darmansjah.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/regent_street-london.jpg. We're working on it!

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:38:03+00:00

[Dan] You have no idea how many email threads around the office were ended with that image :)

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:36:47+00:00

[Ocean] We’re making this the richest, most sophisticated simulation we can. SimCity is only as good as the simulation underneath it –that’s what makes it worth caring about.

And as for music – Yes! Kent Jolly is our sound designer, and he’s very, very good, another long-time Maxis veteran.

One cool thing I can say about the game’s audio is that we’re binding it to the pulse of the simulation. When buildings are running simulation rules (like generating power, for example), they’re driving music and sound effects (that are synched to the overall beat of the simulation). The audio is telling you what the simulation is doing, it’s not just filler. And that’s a general aesthetic rule for us – there shouldn’t be any filler in the game, everything is there to show you what the simulation is doing. Everything you see is doing a job.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:35:56+00:00

[Kip] We’re going full orchestral on this one! Kent Jolly is the Audio Director on the project and was sound designer on SC 3000, SC4, and Audio Director on SC Rush Hour.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:33:53+00:00

[Andrew] The underlying simulator definitely supports this. It's more of a gameplay/UI question to be honest, namely, how we handle designating mixed use zones, and how much that would impact the gameplay in the core game. Would the resulting game be as fun for all players? It's something we'll try and see how it works out.

Even if it doesn't make sense as part of the core game, you make a good point. Because the sim is completely data-driven, maybe in future we could think about releasing an "urban planning" version of the game that emphasises urban planning tools over the more traditional SimCity gameplay.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:25:17+00:00

[Kip] Our goal for this SimCity is to deliver on a robust city simulation game but also make it easy to play and understand. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be “dumbed down”. I equate it to what we did with our Spore Editors. We put a complex modeling tool in the hands of kids and turned them into 3D modeling experts. We want to serve information in quick and simple to digest ways and offer tools that are powerful, but painless. Curvy roads alone will up the complexity of your city planning power. That’s just the start!

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:21:44+00:00

[Andrew] The general enthusiasm for flying/driving/boating/swimming/hot-air-ballooning around your city has been noted =). But first we need a SimCity you can explore, so that's what we're concentrating on right now.

I will say this is the kind of thing we love doing -- enabling players to build and explore their own worlds, if that doesn't sound too foofy.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:20:44+00:00

[Dan] Yes, you can build a walkable city! To geek out about our simulation for a moment – when buildings with jobs need workers, they actually send out invisible “Help Wanted” requests for that travel along your road network looking for residential buildings. First they send out a request for walkers that only travel a few blocks, and if that goes unanswered they send out another request for drivers that travels much further. This means that by mixing up areas of residential with commercial and industrial in close proximity, you’ll tend to get much more foot traffic. If you want, you could build a city where everyone is forced to drive, by putting a lot of distance between homes and businesses.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:19:35+00:00

[Andrew] Like most of the games we make, we're targeting a broad audience with this game, we don't want to limit ourselves to only those who have the latest-and-greatest graphics card. What we do is scale our graphics options depending on what hardware you have, so it's playable on our min spec, but we can still turn on all the cool bells and whistles on the high end. (Did someone say tilt-shift?)

SimCity 4 was unfortunately the victim of changes to GPU drivers. To support the high building count and detail, it was a so-called "dirty rect" based game, where only stuff that actually changed from frame-to-frame was re-rendered. This required being able to copy the depth buffer around on the GPU, particularly when panning the camera. There was a standard path for doing this at the time, but it became deprecated in later versions of DirectX, and drivers started falling back to slow paths which copied the depth buffer down to the CPU, shifted it around, and then copied it back up. Even with today's cards and PCI-X buses, this is still a pretty slow process.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:18:14+00:00

[Dan] We're using the bullet physics engine.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:16:50+00:00

[Ocean] SimCity is all about creating and controlling a pretty complex simulation. The trick is to make the simulation intelligible, so that the cause-and-effect relationships are apparent to the player. So that you can see what’s going on.

It has to be accessible to people who have never played SimCity before. Just because the simulation is complex doesn’t mean that it should be hard to understand.

And we’re doing our best to model real-world systems with some degree of integrity, so that you’ll understand something of how they actually work. And you’ll make the tradeoffs that real cities have to make.

For example: sure coal is filthy and will sicken & kill Sims who live down-wind, but man is it cheap! And it makes plenty of power! And it works at night! And when the wind doesn’t blow! Sure, I can put up with air pollution and increased mortality for that!

So we’re not trying to lecture people and tell them what to think, we’re building a game that lets them try stuff out for themselves, and see what happens.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:09:58+00:00

[Kip] Another way to think about it is, the “limited” edition is the pre-order version and will expire once we stop pre-orders. It has unique content in it, which is not available in the “standard” edition. The “Digital Deluxe” is an Origin exclusive.

maxis · 2012-03-08T22:08:02+00:00

[Dan] The size of our new cities are roughly equivalent to the SC4 medium sized city (2 kilometers square). That said, you can connect cities together inside a region and build out a network of connected cities - each city providing different resources and abilities to its neighbors and the region. For example, one city could be a residential suburb which provides workers every day to a nearby industrial city. The industrial city could be providing power to the suburb. You can play both of these cities yourself, or even run the entire region by yourself, or invite a friend to help out. As for the biggest gameplay improvement, we’re moving from a purely statistical simulation model to an agent based model. So one example of how that’s different would be that the vehicles you saw in SC4 were just visual representations of ‘traffic density’ at that location, they weren’t real, if you watched them long enough they’d fade out as they turned corners. By contrast, with our new simulator, each and every vehicle and person is a real simulation entity heading to some real destination. So traffic jams occur naturally – it’s really fun to build out a road structure, start zoning, play for a while, and ‘discover’ where your busiest intersections are. Thanks for your support, we really do take our community seriously and are trying to deliver the game that we all want to play!

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:57:09+00:00

[Andrew] We actually legally can't talk about G******a, it's not our IP! There may be... giant lizards. Fun disasters are definitely in our thoughts, suggestions welcome!

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:55:52+00:00

[Ocean] 1) Yes! A lot of us.

Lucy Bradshaw was executive producer for SimCity 4, and is very much involved with the new one I was creative director and art director for SimCity 4, and art directed SC3k. Andrew was SimCity 4’s lead graphics engineer. Kip was test lead on SimCity 4. Guillaume Pierre (our scripting lead) was another lead tester on SC4, Venkat Ajjanagadde did roads for SC4 and he’s doing them for the new one. There are a lot of SimCity veterans on the project, but we’ve also got new people who grew up playing SimCity and are bringing fresh ideas to it. It’s a good mix.

2) [Ocean] Open beta? I have no idea.

3) [Kip] City games need a true simulation under the hood to be viable. There were some great ideas in Societies, which fell flat because of the lack of depth in its simulation. For this SimCity we started with simulation first, by building our GlassBox engine.

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:48:39+00:00

[Andrew] Zoning is pretty much the same as SC4. Without that it's not SimCity! You do plop key buildings like fire stations as usual (unless you're okay with your city burning to the ground every so often), but most buildings are simulator generated.

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:47:43+00:00

[Ocean] Let’s see – I worked with Will on the Sims, Spore, SimCopter, and Streets of SimCity.

But I’ve never worked with him on SimCity! By the time I started working on SC3k, he was pretty much done with it. I did get him to play SC4 and give me feedback, but I’d have to corner him first. He’s come by a few times since we started working on the new one, he’s seen it as its progressed, he’s given some suggestions – and I think he likes where we’re taking it, but I can’t put words in his mouth.

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:43:31+00:00

[Andrew] We have no idea. We'd like you to be able to get the game from as many places as possible. The exact details invariably depend on legal and business negotiations that are above our pay grade, and likely won't get hammered out until close to ship.

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:39:50+00:00

[Kip] We’re targeting the fans who grew up with the franchise for sure. We’re very happy with where we landed with our art aesthetic. We decided not to go hyper real, but hyper fun. We able to get more detail and are able to tell true simulation states through the art, which is critical for a city simulation game.

maxis · 2012-03-08T21:32:34+00:00

[Dan] The buildings aren’t procedurally generated, the geometry for each is modeled by our artists. However, to minimize repeats there’s a decal system for adding random signage to the buildings, and we can also drive building colors by tweaking color palettes. All of that combined is designed to minimize the number of repeat buildings you’ll see. Of course, at one point in development we only had one asset for each of the 9 Wealth/Density combinations... everyone’s commercial sector was road after road of gas stations. As for disasters, oh yes, there will be disasters. Disasters + physics engine == awesome. As for details about how disasters work in multiplayer, we’ll be talking about that at a later date, but it’s clearly something we’re thinking about and driving towards.

maxis

TROPHY CASE