Frenetic Pony

Ugh, academia dissertations. I've no idea how it works in history as a subject, but in computer graphics they are the most long winded useless things ever. Actually useful research is usually just a blog post with a few paragraphs and code snippets, "here's a neat thing, and here's how you do it!" Done. The dissertations on the other hand a fantastically cross referenced, bibliographied to hell and back, codically organized messes of something that's not useful to anyone. So I'm wondering if it's any different where you are, is anyone actually going to read your dissertation to be interested in it or is it some nightmare meant to impress in terms of sheer analytic obsessive compulsiveness?

Then why did you choose it (And what is it for that matter?)

Guess I'll buy this eventually, a good story is good. Already got Bioshock the Subtitle (3rd) lined up for Levine though: http://patternbank.com/nasa-space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/ 1970's Nasa Spacy Colony concept stuff.

Faaascinating, I'll be in SF on Saturday next week probably, if any of you are still there. Wish I was going, all those graphics talks are useful every year, but I've got to wait until they're online

I really am waiting for reviews on this, is it some sort of vertically gifted Halo, or a bit more Deus Ex-ish in it's stuff? I've been burned by far too many FPS's lately (Halo 1 is still the best pure co-op shooter ever made, Halo 4 is boring) and I'm just tired of it as a genre. Give me something different please, even something like Far Cry 3 with it's crazy animals and wacky driving is preferable.

"Here, have some crappy games to make up for our crappy game." Ok, Sim City 4 is good, and BF3 might be your thing (it's not mine, BF2 is better). But otherwise, oh look an ultra cheap mobile game that's been out forever! Oh, EA CEO Riccitiello is "stepping down". I just wonder how much sales have dropped off of both Deadspace 3 and Sim City after week 1. That they have almost certainly dropped off precipitously makes me question the intelligence of both me and all of humanity, especially visa vis spending $60 based on previews; to which should be known by now as "Oh, I'm dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest (scam) to be dishonest, honestly." Not that they were ever anything besides PR, but that they've gotten so good in the past few years that they can make even the most awful of games such as Assassin's Creed 3 and Fable 3 look good.

Bah! You're all wrong, Saints Row 1 was the best and it has only gone downhill in linear line, at least from the perspective of interesting gameplay. While the "wackiness" factor has been amped up, and certainly 2's character creation stuff (which has continued) was fun, the actual activities and moment to moment gameplay feels like it's gone significantly downhill. Doing the robbery activity in one, where you had to take a bunch of fully physiced boxes from as store, into you car, and then drive them to a place while being chased by the cops was great! I remember robbing one place, doing the whole hostage thing, which means you have to hold them at gunpoint till they open the safe, and piling all the boxes I could carry into a pickup. Then suddenly the police were on me, which meant I had to drive like a madman, which spilt the boxes all over the road. I had to go back and pick them up to put them back in while shooting at the cops, but they battered my pickup which gave out before reaching the dropoff. So I had to steal a new car, while still shooting at the cops again, get the boxes transferred into the new trunk, which wasn't big enough, and then drive 3 more blocks carefully with my remaining boxes while the cops were still chasing me. It was hilarious and great fun, all from a little side activity. It was fantastic in feeling and mechanics. Everything from the car surfing, which wasn't a formal thing, to how the weapons worked, to the fact that you could chase down a car by running fast enough, to your terminator like health regen was fantastically fun from a mechanical perspective. As the series has gone on they've traded all that for being wacky from a presentation perspective. "Oh look, you're shooting a million dudes in a big bobble head, isn't that so weird!" And the silly wrestling melee moves and etc. have all traded being hilarious and neat from a substantive, gameplay perspective to one of being a "hilarious" in your face, flashy visual one; which isn't as fun to me. I vastly preferred when car surfing was an informal thing when where you were just messing with the physics rather than the mini "game" that gave you points and actually had less dynamics too it. There's two things that it brings to mind. Games like Just Cause 2 and Red Faction Guerilla give you the tools and an environment, and just sort of let you go for it. Saints Row has actually limited all its tools into giving you that "crazy OMG DUDE LOOK AT THAT!" experience "easier" at the cost of losing much of the unexpected things that can happen; and in its deliberately forcing you to have these "OMG CRAZY!" Moments, it also, for me, saps their appeal. When it happens because of the game mechanics coming together for that one moment it's more like something I accomplished, whereas with Saints Row it's something that the devs have done for me.

Well : ( Maybe she can get a similar job elsewhere, but maybe not. At least you've got something to be happy with, even if it's not the job you want

Wait where are you? I just assumed you were in Austin because you mentioned it. Maybe try a different place? The S.F. bay area is far less urbanized and has plenty of video game companies, go apply to Double Fine Regardlesss you will never, ever get what you want done accomplished unless you go for it. The reasons are all the same, they're all "perfectly good legitimate reasons that I just can't do X right now" and then X never gets done; because you there will ALWAYS be "perfectly good legitimate reasons X is too hard to do right now". If you want it, I'd say go for it regardless of how "good" or numerous the reasons seem not to do so.

I have come from the year 2016 to show unto thee Sim City (2016)! Jk but can you imagine? Look at all those transportation options, parking simulations, all that individualistic pathfinding, AMAAAAAZING.

Walk into Gearbox and yell "MY NAME IS SYNTHETICGERBIL AND I WANT TO MAKE BORDERLANDS!" At the top of your lungs. If that doesn't get you a job there nothing will. Also Crytek is making a stab at an Austin office, dude apply!

No it isn't, BTW there's a hacked offfline mode now that works fine. It's what they "want" the game to be about. This is a huge mistake I've seen any number of games make. "You have to do it this way, even though the rules should allow you to do it another way!" It's just the developer telling you you're wrong for having fun. I hated it in every Halo after the first one with their bullshit invisible walls that block vehicles. Getting a banshee or something into one of the indoor corridor parts of a level in Halo 1 is the best! Similarly, "the exchange of goods and services and guys" is boring, BORING. It means all that simulation and all my planning goes out the window because of convenience. "Ok I have to make sure these places where people work can be reached by anyone that lives in the city without taking too long and that there's enough jobs for everyone or there's unemployment, but where do I?..." is a lot more interesting that "oh off they go, good thing part of the game is taken care of by someone else, wow this got a lot less interesting!" They're wrong, it's funner to build a single player city and they should just acknowledge that they were wrong. Instead of getting upset that people want to actually have fun in a way they didn't think of. It's the equivalent of some dude preventing kids from mixing lego sets together because "that's not how you do it!"

Inside the toy there's a microphone, that plays "Waluigi numba one!" when you unlock him in a game.

Oooh cool, was wondering exactly what they were doing, had been thinking more like table of A*, assuming, you know, the agent goes the same route (to work and back) everyday, only have to calculate once upon moving in and getting a job. Though now that I think it through, changing a road could cause a big slow down in that case. Nice to know what they're doing specifically. Will watch later, don't have headphones now. I also wonder if they take traffic time into account, they don't seem to. As in, a sim gets angry if he's late to work, or a place goes out of business if none of the workers show up? It doesn't seem to, but I've never had bad enough traffic to find out. It would explain why that single road city works so well though. As long as traffic is "flowing" it assumes everything is ok. Edit - Yay found the D* lite paper! Is indeed based on A*, but using it the way they do, ughth. Still, supports the idea that much bigger cities could easily be supported. Honestly RAM is super cheap and most any PC that's going to meet their requirements of 2 gigs probably has a lot more. You can't even BUY a PC with less than like, 4 gigs today. Assuming large parts of this are static relative to city size, and of course at least a gig is always taken up by the OS, a city 4x the size should probably be no more than 3.5-4 gigs of RAM for your entire system. Maybe a lot less. Having a different "requirement" for bigger cities, especially as cheap a requirement as RAM, doesn't seem unreasonable. Of course, I'd love for them to modify their pathfinding in realtime to account for traffic, spread it out like would normally be. Shouldn't be that costly. Edit - In fact, starting in, this is what D* Lite sounds like! I mean, seriously, if they're using a similar scheme to the cell one they describe in the beginning why can't they count traffic as an untraversable cell or something similar to get traffic routing around?

Do it! It's fantastic. As well as Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. Gods that game is good. Really want to get your small scale simulation on? Rollercoaster Tycoon is probably the best ever made, one and two are near identical really, but 2 doesn't have nearly the choice of parks to play unless you get both expansions. Also, I'm totally going to do an analysis of their simulation now, yay AI programming! I honestly don't know that much about it specifically, graphics are my thing, but It'll still be fun to figure out. And no, it doesn't "take" it from your city. Trading gets you "copies" of all that stuff, even power gets "copied". Which really seems the antithesis of the whole idea behind simulating this stuff.

Sad true, but this is how it works, just playing the game and doing a little reverse engineering in your head reveals it as such. It's why you get a "copy" ambulance and other stuff to send to other cities in the region rather than actually sending "your" ambulance. It's all just asynchronous stuff that "interacts" via the highway and etc. Besides, there's a good chance the EA representative would have: A. regardless of having any idea how it actually works denied it all B. gone "no comment" or not commented because they don't have a position for this yet Not a real profit foreseeable from doing that, and besides, since there's severely good evidence this is how it does work EA can do it's own promoting and response. P.S. I can barely imagine how much friggen crashing there would have been if there had been ANY simulation server side. Depending on what was done you'd either see your game freeze every once in a while to just crashing every two minutes. P.P.S. they should probably modify their A* pathfinding stuff. A* is the standard pathfinding equation for most games, and just finds the shortest route navigable route between any two points extremely efficiently. But for traffic what they should be doing is taking traffic into account a bit, obviously a car with a huge backup in front of it will choose to go down a nearly as direct but open route in the real world. In Sim City this doesn't happen so far as I can see.

Well duh, we all knew that, or you should have if you didn't. No way they were doing some crazy hybrid thing like Notch wants to do with Ox10c, the cost alone would be insane, and they'd be doubly insane not to charge a monthly fee for such. Not to mention there was no simulation lag when they had all that server trouble, if they had been doing any simulation server side everyone would have noticed. By the way guys, if your PC can run Sim City on cheetah speed without a hiccup then we can easily run a bigger city as well! You just might, GASP have to turn down some graphics settings because that portion of the engine is poorly optimized (Tropico 4 runs like a champ on medium-high on my PC while Sim City scrapes by on medium-low). It just seems they became obsessed with this whole "you have to TRAAAAAADE man." Thing, which in my experience hasn't been very interesting. I don't want to "trade" for ambulances or whatever. I want to SIMULATE my ambulances. I want to have to decide where to put the clinic, and maybe a second one, or should I just add more ambulances to the first? That's ended up being way more interesting than "trading" and just having them appear off the freeway. That stuff involves a lot less thought and interesting interaction than doing it yourself.

This is sort of how I feel, I kind of just want to play Sim City 4 again. I appreciate a lot of what's been done. I do. I like the interlocking systems and whatnot, I like the simulation. It just feels too simplistic though. On Llama speed I just filled half a "city" within an hour. I could have kept playing, but I saw the end practically before it felt like I'd begun. It feels like a painting game, but you're only ever allowed the tiniest of canvases and the smallest of paintbrushes. Looking at the "school coverage" my sims seems to refuse to walk 3 blocks to get to a school. "It's down the road? Too far for me!" The entire game feels like it's been compacted for this tiny scale they want to present you, which edges out the notion of it representing a city at all. As if Maxis was more interested in it's own tiny scale experiments than presenting the idea of, to borrow a phrase, actually simulating a city. And as it's missing part of the conceit, or rather that the conceit is you're supposed to believe in these little people that refuse to walk more than a block away to get to anything at all, it's also missing part of the appeal. When I played Sim City 2000-4, a large part of the appeal was that it felt like you actually had control of a city, you were it's ruler and master, you could build whatever it came to mind. "Sim City' seems more interested in all the little workings of it's simulation rather than presenting you the idea that you are actually simulating a city, or that you're presented with a city at all. It's more like they thought it was an interesting veneer to paste over their interesting simulation, rather than an end goal in and of itself. Oh, and Tom Chick, whoever he, is probably one of only two people on the entire planet that enjoyed Sim City Society's, and for very good reason. What an awful not game that was, like Farmville but for people with even less imagination or intelligence.

Sadly, but I've already backed both so whatever. Sort of an XCOM/RPG type game going on here.

I'm calling it right now as a game that disappoints versus hype thanks to not enough time/money. Yes, I know that they actually spent 3 years on it, yes I know they have a huge budget. But they're promising something along the scale of Red Dead Redemption/GTA V without spending a hundred+ million and 5+ years on it. So I just don't see them delivering, and all to keep their artificial money making schedule. Zeus I'm cynical. Maybe I should go back to playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. Making a make believe theme park can at least cure part of that temporarily.

Ouch, really? First city, no industry, no one else in the region, and I was running a massive surplus despite the unemployment. Like the game was on easy mode and all I had to do was sit there.Oh, and why does the multi lane/streetcar stuff cost so damned much? It says 30 simoleons per... whatever, but you place it down and two second later your spending tens of thousands. Also, city size needs to be bigger, MUCH bigger. Each "city" feels like a little experiment, not a city, one play session and your city might be done. Four times as big and with proper highways (only way to manage traffic) should be called for. Still, my first experiment was fun, and I'll make another tomorrow.

Just bought it off the Origin India store, $30, yay! About to sim some cities.

You ARE Tyler Durden! In other news, maybe we'll get to see another tech demo at GDC? They said they're (finally) replacing Source. Which is a good move on so many levels. Outdated structurally, from rendering pipeline to multithreading, to etc. And it's outdated as an editor and toolset, with things like Unity and UE4 having as close to "all realtime, all the time, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)" Editing, which is really nice once you've used it. I still remember being amazed by the initial source tech demo all those years ago. A gray room full of physics and shit. And then there was the Half Life 2 demo, "Will this run on my 486?" Hard to believe Portal 2 came out in 2011, and Episode 2 came out 6 years ago! Still, at least they test all their levels on actual people. It's embarrassing to see all these other games that take years to come out and never seem to test on people, and then things that obviously shouldn't have gone in crop up and it's just "whoops! Guess we spent six years making a game that wasn't actually that great."

That's simply because video games are a prestige industry, as in what sounds more fun and more like what you wanted to do since you were a kid: Make video games, or improve a graph search algorithm? It kind of sucks a bit, there's enough money there to pay devs, at least triple A devs, as much as Google or Microsoft; but why pay more than you have to? At least for most, Valve apparently pays as well as any big tech company, which is why they can headhunt talent from any other developer. But most big publishers don't even care who makes their games, so there too there's no reason for them to pay more than they do right now.

My understanding is that none of the simulation is done on the server, but the simulation affects variables available to both the region and game in general. You buy coal from "the market", then that's something the server has to adjust too. 4chan came up with the idea of building a nuclear power plant, selling the electricity to others in the region, and then selling the power plant after everyone else is reliant on it. Boom! Instant power outage in all other cities in the region. Evil in the usual 4chan manner, but it demonstrates how the servers interact with the game. That the whole debacle seems unnecessary, mostly because the vast majority of players seem more interested in playing it as a single player game, clearly demonstrates that someone went amiss somewhere. I suspect, from reading pre-release interviews, it was the devs themselves. They got it into their mind that this sort of multiplayer interaction is something people would want, without ever actually testing it. It seems obvious in retrospect that they were wrong, and that they were vastly underprepared for the demands on the servers this would cause, as anyone that's launched an MMO could have told them. So it's a good game, somewhere in there I've no doubt. But to "delay the review' or other such tactics is to make an excuse for something that is utterly predictable, and that is launch day is always big. Assuredly buying too many servers can be costly, but if they were smart they would have used a public cloud to run everything, spooling up everything they needed as demand changed. Guess that probably didn't occur to them; though now that I think about it I can foresee the nickel and diming they will do to pay for the cost of the servers few want. Tl;Dr it's certainly at least partially the dev's fault, they're almost certainly planning on nickel and diming you to death for things that any other previous Sim City release would have had from the get go; and thinking all this through I'm not sure how bad I feel for them anymore. I guess it depends on exactly HOW they'll try to eak more money out. Still, I'd much rather see Valve's attitude of "build the best game you can first, figure out how to sell it after that."