Flynn

I'm still more excited by a simulation built up from simple low level behavior than the statistical approach of the former games. I really just felt like I was playing Excel after awhile. I have reproduced some of those videos linked above. The interesting thing is that the behavior seems to result from the fact that an agent does all its calculations when it is created. So you have a ton of cars heading down a crowded street because when those cars left work, that street was NOT crowded. Same for fire engines and fires -- all the fire engines choose the same fire when they leave. But any fire engines that leave after a fire engine is arrives at a fire choose another. So they could either update agent pathfinding on a quicker intervals, or have agents call 'dibs' on fires/homes/etc. On the lack of permanent homes and jobs: a 'day' in simcity is more like a year in a real life city. Sims graduate school in a handful of days. Whole new districts are built in an afternoon. Real cities don't change like these ones so I think it's reasonable they have to change jobs and homes so often. Though it would be nice to have some kind of default weighting so people prefer their old house I suppose, given a lack of other changes.

That does seem like a feature they could add fairly easily since it already exists when the roads happen to be at different elevations.

Did the official @simcity account really retweet this? Hilarious. https://twitter.com/hanknova/status/310490200172294146/photo/1

I'm surprised too. You don't see any tooltips or popups explaining it at all. It's incredibly easy to drop 4 way stops everywhere and be completely confused as to how you are ever supposed to handle traffic.

I really recommend this traffic explanation: It showcases how different types of roads meeting creates different types of intersections. You want to layout your city such that the biggest roads carrying the most traffic aren't a bunch of 4 way stops, but always have the right of way. It's also helpful to avoid having building entrances or exits on these main arteries. Some more useful road layout tips here:

What would really help is some kind of history when you click on sims or locations. So when a sim says, "There's no place to shop!" even though they live next door to a freaking shop, you have some clue. It might say they tried to go shopping but were caught in traffic for example, something that happens all the time. Or it did go to a store but it was closed because there were not enough medium wealth employees to staff it.

I just did some tests in sandbox mode, and it seems like they've tweaked the traffic a bit for the better. Which is also effecting where sims 'choose' to live, since they are considering traffic at least a bit now, I'm seeing fewer situations where they all aim for the same house (since if they do they cause traffic and sims behing them decide they live in a different house?) Wish I had saved my earlier test cities though, it'd be interesting to create perfect little test cases and then compare against the patches.

An industrial focused city often has a huge deficit, even to the order of tens of thousands an hour, but more than makes up for it with those sales.

You can: Basic trade depot -> build something that gets you resource like an oil well -> build the corresponding storage at the depot -> click 'Manage Global Market' on the trade depot -> set to export for that dollar amount. Direct income. You don't need any other cities in the region for that. Recycling plants are really profitable because they can turn trash directly into alloys and plastics which are higher order resources than oil and coil.

I think of the resources in the game as essentially nationalized industry -- you create mines, then you explicitly turn those into alloys or plastics, then you plop down processor plants or make TV or whatnot, and all of those structures are paid for by taxes. Whereas the general freight shipping isn't nearly as planned, industry just tries to deliver fright to commercial buildings to get money for themselves, which makes them happier. You can build a trade depot and hook into that system but it exists without it.

Every time I play this I wish I could dig in and start modding it. The agent based model has so much potential. I don't want to create new graphics, just tweak the agent programming and see what happens. The most notable weird thing you see now is that sims will all get out of work at the same time and then head towards the nearest residence that has the right qualities. But with a road system with a lot of connections this often means a huge group of sims all head towards the exact same residence even though only a few can live there. Then once the first bunch 'moves in' the rest have to go somewhere else. This is essentially the same problem that is obvious with emergency services where you can see every fire truck responding to the same fire when there are 8 more burning and spreading uncontrolled. I think this is also why traffic is so much more efficient if you really lock the sims down so they can't choose where to go, very few intersections, etc. This means fewer groups of sims will target the same shop/store/home and then cause gridlock and then have to reroute.

Someone was lamenting the lack of one-way streets in Sim City, found this tidbit: http://simcityhall.net/viewtopic.php?id=277&p=2

Awesome. I find that after I've been playing a Sim City game for awhile, my cities end up looking way too neat and min/maxed to feel like real places. Forcing a lot more constraints would probably make it feel a lot more organic.

Dead Space 3 is really pushing it on the DLC. Survival horror, the player gathers up supplies and has to slowly upgrade their weapons and armor over the course of the game. Or you can just buy all the raw materials you want and upgrade everything right at the beginning with some real money DL. Yet they still offer many different difficulty levels... why not just select a lower one? Such a weird fit in that game.

You guys were asking whether Mario is more fundamentally appealing or if the marketing and branding created that fundamental appeal in the first place. But the question isn't whether Mario is more fundamentally appealing to human nature in general - to any human culture - but whether Mario or Rayman is more appealing to our particular culture. Even if you removed all the marketing dollars from Mario... American or Japanese culture has preferences and tastes and quirks and so will have preferences for certain things over another. Removing the marketing doesn't zero out the existing culture. It's really a question of whether Mario or Rayman is more 'fundamentally' appealing to American or Japanese culture in the 80s and 90s, or whatever. It's fairly concrete, and not the same question you answer by traveling to a far flung tribe and showing them pictures of Mario and Raymen.

It's cool to see Gabe geek out about Navi and Dota for a bit in there -- you can really tell he loves working on this stuff.

I am a bit worried that they block user mods to sell that DLC. Super excited at the changes to the simulation. The more they can implement as individual people/agents the better. How deep can it go? Will we be able to see a cascading failure? Traffic accident causes worker to miss work, so a shipment of coal doesn't have a driver, so it doesn't make it to the coal plant on time, we get a small brownout in another business that has to shut down, etc. All traced back to a car accident from a badly designed intersection or whatever.

FTL is certainly much more a strategy game than it is World of Warcraft! I don't mind the pausing at all because even in the slowest possible run, when you pause at every opportunity, the game only goes perhaps 2 hours. There is only so much you can do while paused.

The reason to unlock all the ships + ship layouts, beyond the fact that they add a lot of variety, is that each one teaches a lesson in how to play the game. Start with no weapons. No shields. Ion cannon tactics. Bio-beam tactics. They generally force you to learn a system or technique you may have skipped entirely over. Note that alternative ship layouts are unlocked via visible achievements are are different enough to consider them unique ships themselves. The engi ship is quite powerful, btw, one of the best ones. Easy and early access to defense drones means you save a ton of scrap that would be damage. (when you see a missile fire you can pause the game after it is obvious that your defense drone is not going to shoot it down and divert power to evasion or engage cloak, you don't have to guess) The Red-Tail, the alternative version of the starting ship, is one of the easiest ships.

>I try to go in a straight line to the exit. Rethink that one.

You unlock ships mostly through random events, but you get one for reaching sector 5, and one for completing the game. Alternative ship layouts are unlocked through achievements that you can see on the ship select screen. You do want to grind as much as possible -- always try and fit as many sectors are you can in before hitting the fleet. The fleet is not instant death... if you can hit 3 more sectors and are strong enough, go ahead and fly backwards through them to reach the exit. It's just a hard battle with no loot reward.

Oh wow that RPS interview with the lead Far Cry 3 writer is bananas! The crafting system intentionally makes no sense! Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3 have the same theme! http://www.rockpaper...ure-and-satire/

Interesting to see a very similar split on Far Cry 3 over at RPS: http://www.rockpaper...alendar-day-24/ Game of the Year for some people, but with dissenters.

I didn't bat an eye at the gun vending machines... I felt like I had jumped into Just Cause 3, some toggle was flipped in my brain, and all popups and vending machines and whatever story just bounced off. This game was about fast traveling to outposts and replaying until you nail the stealth bonuses and chain takedowns. Upgrading your wallet has felt weird in every game all the way back to 16 bit zeldas. FYI, the most recent Far Cry patch lets you banish the popups: http://www.rockpaper...e-patch-is-out/ If you want to go further this will turn off more: http://www.pcgamer.c...ry-3-mods-best/ Really enjoyed the Cart Life discussion, I'll be checking that out over the holidays.

I've played just enough LoL and DotA to enjoy this episode. I like to see a deep drive once in awhile. If they did a show like this on Chess and they stopped and explained what pawns and what a fork is it would be excruciatingly boring to people really into Chess. But go into the intricacies of openings and modern metagame and everyone else would be lost. I can see how it sucks if you have no idea what the terms even are but I think a simple warning in front of the episode would have been fine. Or better, refer people to this earlier episode which DOES go through the basics of the genre: http://flashofsteel....2-for-the-lols/