SimCity's GlassBox engine shown off
SimCity gameplay lead Dan Moskowitz talks about some details of the Glass Box engine running the upcoming title.
We've heard some impressive details about next year's SimCity, but none of it would actually work without a solid engine under the hood. At Game Developers Conference, EA and Maxis showed off the game's new "GlassBox" simulation engine. Now, you can see a quick recap of EA's presentation in a new video.
In the video, gameplay lead Dan Moskowitz walks us through some of the features of GlassBox--although he notes that the graphics are simply placeholder. Every simulation rule will trigger visible effects, like a coal refinery that creates both power and air pollution. This way, players will be able to see every aspect of the simulation in action. "What you see is always a 1:1 representation of what the simulation is doing," said Moskowitz.
"Agents" carry the game's resources, and the most common of them are members of the population. To give you an idea of the game's scale, Moskowitz says the system is built to support "tens of thousands" of agents at a time.
SimCity is due for PC in 2013.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, SimCity's GlassBox engine shown off.
SimCity gameplay lead Dan Moskowitz talks about some details of the Glass Box engine running the upcoming title.-
Cool! I just hope the graphics improve significantly...right now it looks on par with, or worse than Simcity 4. Aside from that, this was a neat video.
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It seems like Maxis has never really been apt at making high end graphics, and the graphics they do have seem to run quite sluggish on all but the most high-end machines. I've always had the feelings their games are riddled with bugs and the performance isn't really stable. That said, I love me some Sim City and I'll have a slick new rig when it hits.
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And this so close to release. What were they thinking?
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jfc
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fuck notch
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This is why most companies never show off cool stuff like this. People who know jack shit about game development say dumb things like this.
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Most optimizations are made in the last few months before the game ships... or after the fact :(
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I'd imagine it will SC4 is pretty old, has pretty much no GPU acceleration. Also it doesn't really take advantage of multi-core CPUs at all.
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Not to mention the video itself says it's placeholder art. The game is still like a year off, it should be pretty damn obvious that it's not running with shippable art at a fully optimized framerate. Plus there's debug information enabled which is *never* optimized because it has no bearing on the final shipped product and is just there for, you know, debugging stuff.
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Yeah you tell him!
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Oat, you and Dahanese come off as us-versus-them in some of game/publisher related threads and a tad bit condescending because you work in the games industry and the rest of us don't, so we don't understand... I don't know where I'm going with this; so yeah, just thought I would point that out.
Just thought you original comment was overly harsh.-
It was harsh, because it frustrates me that people are so dumb. I'm not saying dumb as in "doesn't know how the games industry works". I mean dumb as in "human beings are incapable of knowing when they don't know something". This is not JohnnyRey's fault per se; it's a psychological phenomena of humans as a whole.
It just makes me sad that it's often not viable to put out videos like this because even if the guy in the video were to say a thousand times that it's placeholder graphics, and this isn't the full engine, and it's running in debug mode so it's super slow and everything else, many many many many average-joe gamers would walk away from that video thinking, consciously or subconsciously, "SimCity looks like shit."
So really my original post was just me lamenting the idiocy of humanity. It's not something that can be fixed; it's just how we are. We also like to kill each other! There are many reasons to hate our own species.-
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Yeah at the time I was just annoyed with him but then later I realized that I'm annoyed with the whole damn system!
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This is awesome.
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Haha yeah I was going to say no you do not want to see the code in a big budget video game!!
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In Game Developer Magazine they would have post-mortems every month and usually they would say how many lines of code the game had. I've always wondered how you manage a codebase with 500,000 to 1,000,000 lines of code.
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i just want flowing water ala from dust. imagine all the things you could do.
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Given how we as a collective drive perhaps it was hauntingly accurate.
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Driving straight through a line of pedestrians is the best part.
Although to be fair, the people/cars are really just visual indicators of traffic density in most circumstances, and pathing is incredibly expensive so I don't blame them for having a reasonably dumb implementation of it.
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Wow that looks awesome, hopefully some suit from ea doesn't show up in 2 months and tell them to broaden their target audience to include ages 2-95
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I hope they manage scaling of cities more appropriately than in the past and it would appear they are moving towards a much more intelligent traffic algorithm.
I never liked how a house didn't represent a single family dwelling but rather each house was representative of several families, which meant that a suburban area of 20 houses could have been over 120 people or something. It was confusing and I hope they move to a 1x1 scenario but allow for bigger tiled maps. -
That was a seriously impressive video. It's clear they've put a ton of thought into the inner-workings of this game engine. I love me some dynamic process simulation! Much more impressive than abstract scripting :)
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