Flynn
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Posts posted by Flynn
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That does seem like a feature they could add fairly easily since it already exists when the roads happen to be at different elevations.
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Did the official @simcity account really retweet this? Hilarious. https://twitter.com/hanknova/status/310490200172294146/photo/1
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You're right about paying for industry with taxes, but as far as I'm aware, you don't ever make a profit off of those same industries. So, you're paying for them with tax income and maintaining them with tax income, but you're not able to profit off them. If I'm ever able to get the intra-city, intra-region trading working, maybe then I'll see some actual revenue coming from my commercial/industrial sectors, but for right now it seems like I'm dealing with all of the negatives of nationalization with none of the positives.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Someone was lamenting the lack of one-way streets in Sim City, found this tidbit:
One way streets are pretty hard to do with the Glassbox agent system. Because everything is an agent and sort of persistent, you have to make sure those agents don't get stuck in one-way deadends. For instance, say you have a one-way from the highway connection to your city. All tourists, delivery trucks, etc. would be stuck in your city forever, with an ever increasing number of agents.
Also, with one-way roads you could make a city in different parts connected with one-way roads in such a way, that those parts are completely isolated from each other and the world, while the system still thinks it's all connected.
They really want one-way roads in, but it might take a while before we will see them. -
Maybe I've watched too many political intrigue shows, but I'd really love to see/make a mod for the new Sim City that implemented a bunch of the awkward, local-political issues that make real city development messy. For example, if each district had an alderman who represented that area's interests, and you had to get a majority of the city council to approve a set of new changes, sometimes requiring entirely separate projects to build up good will or to alleviate concerns. With good systemitization, there could be very interesting systemic challenges and unpleasantly realistic frustrations that lead to the sort of odd city development that's made our own beloved cities.
For example, imaging your city is having a power crisis, so you need to build a new power plant. The council agrees that something has to be done, but none of the aldermen want it done in their district - one doesn't want the pollution in the area, another doesn't want the eyesore lowering their property taxes, and so on. The alderman in the oldest part of town is most desperate for it - her constituents are suffering the most from the power shortage - but the one location that would be perfect, an old warehouse, is technically a historic location so you can't build there.
As the mayor, you might include a set of other local improvements to convince an alderman that the plant will be a boon to their neighborhood specifically (in addition to the city as a whole), or you might appeal to the council as a whole to build it in the district of an unpopular alderman. Or maybe you'll just cut the budget to the fire department near the historical warehouse and wait for an "accident" to happen, then swoop in and build on the still-smoking rubble.
Sim horse-trading and sim corruption at its finest!
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.
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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.
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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.
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FYI the second session of that talk is
(seem like it's the tail end of that session). There is a lot of overlap, but some new stuff, including specifically referring to killing Greenlight (in the context of this newer API-driven approach).I find his conception of the future of Steam to be incredibly exciting. Nobody has even caught up to Steam revolutionizing game distribution last time. This could lap everyone.
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.
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So I've got to be That Guy and point out that the theory of "This is a post-Zynga SimCity" is way off-base. The only reason I bring it up is because I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but it's actually a slam on Maxis to suggest that the exchange of ideas between SimCity and Cityville or Farmville or whatever was anything other than one-way.
Just about everything in the new SimCity (except for the cool data layers as in-world infographics) is a direct descendent of SimCity 4 and the "Rush Hour" expansion. It feels to me like they took the concept art and prototypes from SC4, combined them with the amazing scripted effects system that Andrew Willmott & Ocean Quigley did towards the end of the project, and then waited ten years until they could actually make an entire real-time city simulation out of it. (And made Spore in the meantime).
That's actually a big part of what's got me excited about the game -- the effects system started out as a side project to add some visual flourishes, and over time it became more and more powerful, until they could go from idea to having it in game in a very short amount of time. It ended up being as powerful as the system I'd spent almost a year making, and it was a lot more extensible. To see that basic idea driving the entire simulation is awesome.
It means that exchange of stuff between regions can be simulated and doesn't have to be as faked. The bit in
where he starts a fire in his city and the fire trucks come in from the neighboring city is the best thing.Plus it means the behavior of the simulation is modular, not just the buildings. That's what makes the Sims series so expandable. People all over the place are complaining (predictably) about greedy old EA forcing expansion packs on innocent victims, but I think that the prospect of being able to add entire new industries or new types of services to SimCity -- instead of just cosmetic changes like new building sets -- is amazing.
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.
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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.
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FTL
in Video Gaming
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.
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FTL
in Video Gaming
>I try to go in a straight line to the exit.
Rethink that one.
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FTL
in Video Gaming
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.
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Oh wow that RPS interview with the lead Far Cry 3 writer is bananas!
I thought we went so extreme in such a huge number of ways, that we had been totally exaggerated. I’ve played all of these games, so the shocking thing for me is that people would think this is serious.he sex scene [at the midpoint] – first Jason is shooting at that gigantic monster. He kills the monster, and it jump-cuts to him orgasming with Citra! He’s firing sperm at this gigantic monster, and then suddenly he’s on this alter with Citra, having sex with her, and then he thinks he’s the leader of the tribe and makes the big speech, and it’s his power fantasy! That’s the other thing – it’s all from first-person, so it’s completely unreliable. There’s a reason why Jason is a 25 year old white guy from Hollywood – these are all ideas that are in his head. You’re seeing things through his eyes. That’s why the Alice quotes are there, and why Willis’s database entries are written from Willis’s perspective, and not written from a universal perspective. So the game is all from a series of perspectives, and I think it’s all there. And again, you could say to me, “Why isn’t this even more exaggerated?”, but why should it have to be? I don’t understand why what I did isn’t so insanely exaggerated already.
The crafting system intentionally makes no sense!
RPS: Yeah, but the way it’s delivered by the game, the mechanics of the game, don’t seem to be carrying the same satire. To the point where, when you ‘skin’ an animal its skin is left on and you seem to take a lump of guts. Do you think the delivery of the game in some places fell short of the message you were trying to convey?Jeffrey Yohalem: To me that helped the delivery. Games are built by gigantic production teams. So even if everybody on the team doesn’t understand what the point of the game is, what I understood was: here’s the direction that these people are going to go in. So to me all that continues to support the message of the game. Because the message of the game is, look at all these systems that we’re creating, and if they’re illogical, and if they’re not challenging you as an individual but are just things for you to do that pass the time, then see how that makes you feel. The crazier the things that you’re doing are, the more interesting it is that you’re not going and helping the friends.
People who have looked at the surface of the game think that the story and the game are at war with each other as they are in most games, with the story just plugging potholes and the gameplay is going along its merry way. I think it’s very exaggerated that, “Oh, go save the friends! Go save the friends!” but most people are out on the island doing all this other crazy stuff and experiencing the gameplay. And that’s actually the point of the story.
It’s not a game about go save your friends. It’s a game about – doing a lot of picking skins from things, and wait, it’s just a pile of meat – this doesn’t even make sense, yet I’m still doing it instead of saving the friends.
Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3 have the same theme!
For me FC2, with the guns jamming and the malaria and all these systems that were considered not fun, it was about deconstructing the fun of a Video game. I thought Clint was very clear in a lot of interviews he did that that was what he was doing. He was trying to be philosophical about Video games, about their fundamental mechanics. If you have a gun that can jam at any point when you’re shooting it disrupts the flow. So he’s examining what makes a game fun, if I take away what’s considered traditionally fun.So Far Cry 3 is actually doing the same thing – and I’m surprised that no one’s referenced that connection between the two of them – it’s just that Far Cry 3 is saying, what if I give you so much quote-unquote fun that it becomes uncomfortable. It’s a different approach to the same problem – they’re both trying to approach building the same building, I think. Everyone keeps saying how they’re so different, but in reality I think conceptually he approached it from the mechanical side by disrupting the mechanics, and I approached it from the story side by disrupting the story.
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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.
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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.
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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/
SimCity: The City Simulator
in Video Gaming
Posted
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.