The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces • Hacker News Board

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#141

Post by eastbayjake » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #113

creshal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. It irks me how SimCity 5 is praised for that. The Caesar series had pure agent-based simulations in the 1990s, and somehow had none of the agent routing bugs SimCity 5 had. How can being worse than your competition 20 years ago be considered an ac…

I think you guys make it sound a whole lot more glamorous than it really is. I played those city-building games back then (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus). And do note, I absolutely loved them. Caesar 3 basically had delivery "serfs" that would move stuff from one place to another. Each building had it's own unit to get supplies (materials to do it's thing), and it would simply retrieve it from the relevant store, so…

Funny you mention "serfs"... wondering if you were referring to Serf City[1], which predated Caesar 3 by five years but had the same agent system of serfs carrying goods between waypoints. I'd completely forgotten about the game until you mentioned "serfs", but I spent a good chunk of 1995-96 playing it on a (barely capable) Tandy 1000 RL in my basement.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_%28video_game%29

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#142

Post by tetraodonpuffer » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

robwilliams wrote: post #132

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think skylines mods are non-sandboxed (meaning you can do what you want code-wise, note the mod that adds reddit posts to your game internal chirper) that would concern me from a malware perspective

They are non-sandboxed but most are open source. Additionally, there are so many users testing these mods that I doubt any serious malware could be put on Steam without being caught by the community.

assume I have a "good" mod, lots of people download it, which as far as I understand is a "subscription" in steam workshop terms, somebody breaks into my account and uploads a malicious update, now everybody will download the malicious update instead: unless there was a way to tie a code audit to a specific module that you download it seems like this would still be risky

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#143

Post by maskedinvader » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

I absolutely love this game, been playing this for a week now and cannot get enough of this game. My city is now really big (population of 175k).I have not played the latest city sim games, but have played the old games back in the day (like pharoah , pharoah2 ,sim city4 etc). Its amazing that this runs on Unity, supported to run on Windows, Mac OS AND Linux ! Not to mention its very reasonably priced at $30. Having the ability to start of with unlimted money (one of the mods available at release) makes this game really have a very low barrier to entry. You still have to unlock the unique buildings and monuments however. Speaking of unique buildings, to unlock some of them , you need to intentionally cause damage to your city (like cause 50% unemployment or have avg garbage pile up increase). I found myself trying to have throwaway districts intentionally built to be discarded once the unique building is unlocked. unlimited money after all :) all in all, great game, absolutely recommend this, however be prepared to lose a lot of productivity for a while ! you are warned.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#144

Post by simcop2387 » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

ffn wrote: post #117

toxican wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…

This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or…

I think you definitely hit the spot on what killed SimCity, but a 3D holographic city builder would probably be one of the best things ever. Combined with the street level view you can get in City: Skylines it'd actually be really really cool to see.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#145

Post by tetraodonpuffer » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

eclipxe wrote: post #131

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think skylines mods are non-sandboxed (meaning you can do what you want code-wise, note the mod that adds reddit posts to your game internal chirper) that would concern me from a malware perspective

http://www.reddit.com/r/CSModAudits

it is nice to see that they post hash values of what was audited, but how do I prevent the steam client from automatically updating the mods I have to a newer non-audited version? how can you compute a checksum of the module before downloading it? it seems the steam client only allows you to 'subscribe' to a mod, not to download/check/install it

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#146

Post by squeaky-clean » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

interpol_p wrote: post #32

I'm probably in the minority here, but for me the biggest appeal of the SimCity series was the aesthetic and music. The music in particular. I absolutely love what I have seen of Skylines so far, but it seems to be missing the SimCity charm — that urban soundtrack, the way the buildings light up at night, the unique architecture and art style. I'm hoping mods will fill in all these areas.

Same here, I love how relaxing and charming SimCity is. I think Simcity 2013 really nailed the charm (if nothing else). I don't know what the general opinion is on the cartoonish graphics and filters, but I really like them. I would often let the game run for hours just to watch, like a fish tank or something, because I think visually it is gorgeous and it looks so alive (and maybe because I felt I needed to get my money's worth somehow).

I'm very excited to play Skylines, the gameplay seems a million times better in every way. But the screenshots just aren't as satisfying to look at, and as silly as that may be, that's a big part of SimCity to me.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#147

Post by yourtoplessmom » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

tricolon wrote: post #69

Goronmon wrote: post #48

Skylines is a great game, with great mod support... ...that retails for $30 (can get it for less on sites like greenmangaming.com). That part blows my mind.

Do you think $30 is cheap or expensive? I, for one, think it's exactly the right price.

He thinks it is cheap. He would be willing to pay around $80.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#148

Post by VieElm » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

edias wrote: post #108

dsl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at Activision/Blizzard. They built essentially the same thing (Origin/Uplay) but being very customer friendly about it and have had crazy success with Battle.net.

You've never played their recent games then. Battle.net 2.0 is routinely called 0.2 and considered a step back in every single way, aside from FB integration I guess. It didn't even have chat channels until recently or clan support. Promises made for starcraft 2 5 years ago have yet to be delivered on. Diablo 3 was a terrible cash grab and mostly abandoned by players. After Activision purchased blizzard it has not be…

Blizzard has a huge fan base and have had much success with recent games like Hearthstone and the build up to Heroes of the Storm is also looking very promising. SC2 has stagnated and Diablo had missteps but they've made bold steps in trying to fix those problems. I don't think Activision's stewardship of Blizzard and EA are even in the same league. Blizzard has maintained a very unique and powerful brand with almost Nintendo level IP. There are a lot of characters from Blizzard games that are well known.

Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#149

Post by hobs » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

SlashmanX wrote: post #82

hobs wrote: post #14

I don't know if it is just my incompetence, but I wanted to mention is that it can be unclear what the citizens want unless you cycle through all the available overlays and check things out. I feel like they could definitely summarize important counters for you so you don't always have to click 10 times to get all the information on your city. This is especially true early game when your city is expanding by leaps an…

That's what the Chirper is for. Although some of that stuff does get "diluted" with the other random "chrips"

Yeah, I know that is what it is supposed to be for, it just seems to do the job a lot worse than in sim city. Many times I will notice my pop +/- flip from a large + population to a large minus, which is the only indicator I get from the game that I am screwing up.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#150

Post by cozzyd » Wed, Mar 18, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

KhalilK wrote: post #45

Not to mention the fact that it's the first decent city building game that runs on Linux!

The Cities in Motion series (same developer) runs on Linux too, but those are more transit modeling than city building (but if you build roads, buildings will follow).