The engine that will drive the next version of SimCity looks amazing

"SimCity Gameplay Lead Dan Moskowitz describes the concepts of Resources, Units, Maps, and Agents and how they affect the complex simulation behind SimCity."

SimCity Insider's Look GlassBox Game Engine

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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xzzy

That looks pretty darn awesome.

Hopefully they fixed the pathfinding so that sims will stop clogging up 2 lane back roads and leave a nearby 6 lane highway completely vacant.
- http://twitter.com/pilot Matthew Kramer
  
  Funnily enough, I’ve noticed some commercial GPS units with the same path finding issues, the route is shorter by distance but it ignores the speed advantage of the adjacent highway.
  
  If you still are playing SC4, I suggest looking into the “Network Addon Mod,” or “NAM.” It’s more or less essential to running a large city.
- dnebdal
  
  Hah, now I want to try my hand at coding a GPS pathfinder with tunable weighting of distance vs. road quality. (Something like A* with a cost-per-km that’s higher for worse roads, as a first approximation?)
  
  Not that this hasn’t been done before, but still. :)
Shai_Hulud

They should implement a “tilt-shift” filter shader. It will look so pretty.
- grimc
  
  Tilt-shift look has been confirmed by Maxis.
- grimc
  
  Concept art
http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11

I want a zombie apocalypse mode, where I can see how well my city fares in that scenario.
- EvilTerran
  
  http://www.neoseeker.com/news/18531-simcity-built-with-modding-in-mind/
  
  > “We’re huge fans of our modding community,” creative director Ocean Quigley told the audience. “We’ve designed all this stuff to be moddable.”
  
  I give it a week from release ’til there’s a zombie apocalypse mod.
thecleaninglady

I wonder if this could be taken in a direction allowing for realistic simulation of real-life scenarios useful real-world cities.

Like traffic, disaster response, resource distribution, proper planning for locations and amount of hospitals, stores, schools etc.
atteSmythe

I’d mentioned a few weeks ago having had a grand vision for a civ-like game. This is exactly how I’d hoped the city-level simulation of it would work. Agents moving resources, resource levels actually being shown in the units that have them. Granted, that came out of my experience with Caesar III…

Combine this with this and this (which I could’ve sworn was on BoingBoing, but I can’t find it), add turn-based strategic and tactical combat and a progression through the ages, and I may never leave the house again!
rikomatic

It’s all well and good until the computers plug us into SimCity and have us believe its “reality.” Is that “air” you are breathing?
- http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham
  
  I think I’ve seen that movie…
twency

I don’t care what it looks like as long as I can always get more cash by typing “porntipsguzzardo”.
http://tryingsense.blogspot.com/ R_Young

This is amazing. If I were a school administrator, or ran a tech school, I would be preordering a copy for every student I was responsible for.
Think of the benefits of a generation of citizens, a large part of whom are intimately familiar with the costs and tradeoffs associated with a given city plan. People who understand the idea of negative and positive enternalities as intuitely as we understand gold farming, or Strength and Dexterity stats. So many problems in the modern world relate to the agregate actions of a community, country or the globe, and how a community works for the common good while minimizing free-loaders. Pollution, traffic, congestion, food, water, utilities, entertainment, culture and arts, education; all these are variables in a SimCity game, and with a game that is both accurate and enthralling, you could affect a lot of good in a lot of people.

I just got really hopeful all of a sudden.
- Guest
  
  I await the extra levels of joy and exuberance that the modding community (including perhaps you) will bring to the game.
- http://twitter.com/Idle_Threat Eric Chapman
  
  In my high school in the mid 90s, there was a teacher running the original Sim City as an in-class teaching tool, believe it or not.
  - ocker3
    
    I do tech support for schools, and I’ve heard quite a few tales of SimCity and other games like it being used for all kinds of actually learning purposes.
Guest

See you in 2014
- grimc
  
  Just one year, huh? Amateur.
  - merreborn
    
    Seriously: somebody spent 3 calendar years developing a simcity 3000 city. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
Lloyd

This looks so very promising, but I won’t get my hopes up until the game is released. I’m kinda jaded on the whole sim / maxis thing since sim city 3000 and 4 were not much fun to play and the neutering of what could have been a great game from early concepts (spore).
I hope hope hope that this will be as amazing as it looks.
swlabr

I liked the original crude Sim Cities, but as the versions became more sophisticated, I eventually got bored with endlessly installing distracting infrastructure like electrical and sewer systems, which is fun if you like this kind of complete control thing, but you have to have the spare time available for it…
DevinC

Me, I am just thrilled I won’t be limited to the cardinal and diagonal directions for my city’s streets.
teapot

I am so keen for this game. Doubt it will have the gamer-nerds lining up for a midnight release but I’d be there.
- Guest
  
  By ‘lining up’ do you mean planning ahead and making a whole pot of coffee for when the download is done? :)
  - Guest
    
    or, you know, tea.
    - teapot
      
      In retrospect I should’ve written “making lines”… I can imagine tweakers getting heavily into a game that rewards meticulous attention to organisation.
RuthlessRuben

So have they let Will Wright out of the Sims-Expansion dungeon long enough to actually make a new game?

I’ve sunk weeks of accumulated playtime into SimCity 3000 when it came out, and Sim City 4 kept me for a while too, though I didn’t like the map constraints.
I’ll be keeping one weary and one hopeful eye out for this.
- DevinC
  
  I didn’t like Sim City 4 very much, comparatively. It was extremely tedious to make a new blank map, and in the late game traffic/transit issues came to dominate to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.
hostile_17

New Sim City. Sweet!

I do like them. I’m much more into complex building/trading games… but sometimes Sim City scratches a particular itch.

Sim City 4 is flawed in many ways… hope the new one is better and – importantly – not dumbed down.
hostile_17

2013? *Wah*
pipenta

Loved the first couple versions. I’m still pining for SimAirport, though I guess that was only ever a rumor. Never cared for the Sims. Got very excited when I saw the early publicity on the Sims, but the version that came out was so cute-cartoon character ugly, I couldn’t face it. I had been hoping that the early part of the game, at least, would be for biology what SimCity had been for city planning. Ah well.

I am cautiously optimistic. But holding back my excitement just enough so I won’t be totally crushed if it all goes pear-shaped, or should I say, Spore-shaped?
Blaven

Sweet! Looks like they finally allowed the roads to go off the 90/45 degree grid. Hopefully they will also add in a multiplayer network aspect like with Cities XL before those guys decided to shut down the server.