I'm in, but I'm not home to download it yet.
I'm a little miffed that they didn't send me a key, that I had to find one myself. I signed up on the first week of signups.
Also, for Borderlands, you can make your profile.bin read-only, if you want to cheat.
I only cheated a little.
They said they fixed that exploit Smash.
And they give out codes so often it's really kind of pointless to do it. I've got 23 unused keys right now.
Virtual Pilot 3D™ NEVER NOT SCAM!
No this one's unfixable - I played around with it last night.Originally Posted by Shooop
Huh. Interesting.
Well, enjoy then! I certainly see nothing wrong with that.
Virtual Pilot 3D™ NEVER NOT SCAM!
I played two rounds with the beta. I liked it, actually, but it's frustratingly limited, with lots of unavailable buildings. It's impossible to expand beyond a certain point.
I hope that this is not the maximum map size that the game supports. It's shockingly small.
It does feel and sound really good, though.
Anyone know? Is this the largest map tile in the game?
Does anyone else feel that we have a strange lack of information on the basics of this game considering how close it is to release? Stuff like maximum city size seems like it would have been cleared up a while ago.
Anyway, still holding out hope that this will be good, and I'm really interested with the specifics of the simulation and engine that they talked about so much when it was announced. I'll definitely be waiting on reviews though.
Got a key today. I... actually enjoyed that. So much so that when the hour was up I felt a little ticked off because my little town (hardly a city) got taken away from me. Kind of like a parent that says "You can play with your Lego for one hour. Then I break it and you can have it back."
Things I liked:
- No more power lines or pipes! No doubt some people won't like that removal but I sure do, laying pipes was tedious and power might as well have been irrelevant
- Little ambulances, fire trucks, garbage trucks, etc. I think the most important point is that they provide better visual feedback about why something isn't working or what sort of coverage your building actually provides, as opposed to the apparently arbitrary "big circle" method.
- Zoning and roads are more flexible (though pretty much everything has to be placed on a road now)
- Slightly better feedback about why something isn't working
- Cleans up a few UI issues with the other games, it's easier to query things now. No major backwards steps at least.
Things I didn't like:
- Small size. Maybe it's due to the increased level of simulation, but it does feel a little claustrophobic.
- Sometimes information doesn't go far enough. Why isn't happiness increasing anymore? I don't know, the game isn't telling me. Annoying when some other things are so well explained.
- So much is locked out that it's hard to tell how well it all works together.
- Few performance issues with the UI - the budget popup slows the game right down for me, don't know why.
- Cheetah speed feels barely faster than Lama, Cheetah needs buff
It feels promising but without everything to play with and without a playtime of longer than an hour it's hard to say whether or not I'm optimistic or whether I'd consider getting it. I did have fun, but I didn't get very far so I don't know if it keeps it up or dies out. I didn't get a chance to play around with buses (no other mass transit is available) for example.
If you would like to PM one my way, I'll do a 1 hour bug finding list and post it here for everyone (will link to webspace as it will be LONG). ;)
I really want to do one just to mess with EA. If they want to ask for all and every possible bug and feature not documented, they can have every one! :D
Edit. Ah sorry, you mean borderlands keys, not Sim City Keys. :(
Last edited by TechnicalBen; 26-01-2013 at 12:29 PM.
So, how's the "agent" mechanic in this game? Working perfectly or... is it hard to grasp?
Bah! My blog is fulla bollox! What? Don't believe me?Here! Just look at it!
Ok. I'm in a queue now. 20 minutes. Didn't know this was an mmo.
Hmm 30 minutes in a queue, servers crashed. So far my rating for the game is 0 / 10. Haven't gotten to play it so that might influence my opinion a bit.
The agents seem quite understandable - useful even. It's a little strange, in my opinion, that everything essentially functions like a truck: globs of water, chunks of electricity, segments of poo.
Going to play around a bit more today (assuming no server issues). That really is a bad sign for launch day, eh?
One good thing: I didn't experience any lag in the simulation (maybe some graphical slowdown on some overlays, as mentioned above) but the meat of it is clearly running locally (of course) not cloud-side. So no literally game breaking and unnecessarily introduced lag, like in d3
Last edited by Smashbox; 26-01-2013 at 07:06 PM.
Having played it, I'm torn.
On the one had, the new GlassBox engine feels absolutely amazing. Having every single element of the city simulated in real time, from power packets and water packets to individual sims and cars and fire trucks is utterly awesome to watch. I couldn't help but smile when I plopped down the power plant in the tutorial and watched/heard the power flow through the city. It's incredibly compelling.
Likewise, the absurd number of data visualization options is awesome. I love the aesthetic of it, how clean and effective you can read things. Much better than the ugly 2D maps of SC4.
I really like the ability to expand buildings, and stuff like schools having buses and the ability to then plop down school bus stops around the city is just brilliant. I'm very much glad we've gone away from the artificial circles of influence from the old SimCity games. I've not had the chance to play with mass transit (is it even available?), but I'm guessing the same thing applies: no more big buildings taking space everywhere, yay! They learned from the SC4 mods, it would seem.
The graphics are great, I like the tilt-shift effect. Combined with everything else, it really makes you feel like the game is some sort of toy town. Reminds me of miniature trains I used to play with.
However, despite all that, I am worried about city sizes. The problem with such an extensive simulation is that you can't scale it too much, otherwise it becomes impossible to run efficiently. I'm guessing the maximum city size is a direct result of that (and not, as some crazy people have said, something to do with always-online or DRM). Likewise, you can't speed up the simulation, as you'd need a large amount of headroom to simulate things twice as fast or more, or you need to run a more approximate simulation, which can cause instability (cf. Kerbal Space Program, where speeding up too much in the atmosphere can cause complex ships to fall apart from simulation errors).
I think I'll still buy it because it feels great. My hope is that despite their claims of no modding, people will find ways around the city size limits. I don't doubt that my computer is capable of running larger cities than their minimum or recommended specs, but for them it's probably logical to limit city sizes so as to avoid whines of "my city's lagging too much, it's unplayable!" I just wonder whether there couldn't have been some sort of compromise between obsessive simulation of every single thing to a granular level, and totally statistical modelling like previous games. Perhaps just not modelling things like individual sims or water/electricity/sewage/air packets, while still modelling cars and utility vehicles, could've helped things. Purely conjecture, sure, but I feel like they went too far in the opposite direction.
I got a code yesterday and so I spent the tutorial faffing around with the graphical settings and - well - those lovely, pretty videos they've been showing must have been on a pretty decent rig :)
I turned everything up to where I'd expect my lowly hardware to be happy and it looked pretty poor - so I ramped-up the settings and it started to look 'OK' but it was already starting to feel sluggish moving around the place. There were 2 more levels to everything - I imagine the pretties are locked in there - I also smell my GPU melting...
The 'Tilt Shift' thing seems to be the guiltiest party - set that to normal or 'more' and watching vehicles or people move is headache inducing - turn it down and the game loses it's charm...
Not played the game a lot but my initial feeling after the tutorial and 20 mins in the 'build a city' thing is that it's more "Sims" than "Sim City" - it's The Sims with mass data visualisation, it has the same 'neediness' which makes The Sims a grim thing to play AND it seems to have the slightly BONKERS demands on hardware too (says he having given-up getting The Sims 3 to work properly on an Ivy Bridge i5 laptop!!)
Hmmmm - not sure the hour limit is going to shed much more light on stuff either - and the whole 'MMO style' downloader added to SCORCHING loading times (OK, it's a beta - but I can still make a coffee whilst an empty scenario loads - or more often, fails to load) is offputting - and then there's the simply insane pricetag!!
Creator of Steam Greenlight LITE
I do not know if I should cry or I want to laugh. The future. We have seen it. And it's not good. :(
The servers seem to be really wonky today. Here's hoping it'll lead to a smooth release (as if). I've now played the beta map three times. It's enjoyable. I hope the beta map is not the largest one. Otherwise Friendlyfire pretty much said everything there is to say.
I can't get in this afternoon either.
Servers are up, but there appear to be temporary blocks on the actual players (number or something). "Hmmmm" again.
**Fires up sim 4**
Last edited by TechnicalBen; 26-01-2013 at 07:56 PM.
I lost connection in the middle of a game and I didn't notice any difference except a little warning in the top left corner, so while the online DRM is bad, it's not the worst possible implementation.
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