Are You Interested in the Online World of SimCity 2013?

The 2013 reboot of SimCity will feature a simulation engine called GlassBox, in which the city's individual units (cars, workers, etc.) are autonomous agents, and it looks like this:

This update to SimCity will also allow people to play together online (up to 16), and house their many cities on the same server, so you can collaborate or compete with each other in the same larger world, like disembodied mayors. 

Comments

[Hitomi Tiponi]

Love the trailer - looks like fun. Sim City has a similar sort of creationist feel as SL, and I can see the two brands getting closer in what they do over the next 5 years.

[Iggy]

The good news:

The original series was a boon for educators. I had some VERY involved first-year writing students who got a common template, explored the success or failure of their cities from the perspective of the other courses they took or the majors that inspired them.

This could be (read on) a great development. Now the groups of four could log in together. Much better fit that SL or OpenSim for my courses these days. Except...

The awful news:

WIN D'OHs ONLY...bang goes my good mood about this.

Put it online and make it run on Mobile Devices, or students won't care these days. What are game makers thinking? It must be cross-platform and mobile-friendly to play on campuses these days.

[Christian Welles]

I doubt most tablets could run this new Sim City. I know when I played SC4 on huge maps with close to 1 million population my computer barely chugged along and sometimes took 2-3 minutes to save a game.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Tablets aren't real computers.

Its a phone, with a big screen, minus the phone part...

Pointless to spend too much developing for a device that may not have a future. Soon as folks realize they need a real machine - tablets are dead.

eReaders will live; that's a real market. eReaders with a browser in them, like the new Kindle and Nook - that's viable.

But the jump up from that is not a tablet, but a laptop.

As for Sim City Online. Meh. I'm more interested in worlds of people, not buildings.
- Sim City is a neat simulation, offline. But the value for me would be Sims Online. Something they botched, then killed blaming everyone but themselves for the failure...
- Kinda like LLs path with SL; blaming the 'whackadoodles' rather than the 'whackadevs'.

[Iggy]

@Christian, you cite a signature challenge for game designers. Back when, we had SC2000 run well stand-alone in Windows 95 labs. Students even bought the software to play at home.

Since then, the campus ecosystem has changed so much. Students simply expect services on their handhelds or at least in a comfy spot of their choosing for wireless connections on their laptops (at last count, 40% Mac OS on this campus).

With laptops and fast wireless the rule and tablets nosing onto the scene, I could not even consider something that tightly tethered to a lab setting. The student evaluations would be hellish.

[shockwave yareach]

Tablets are fine for people who just want to consume. To watch things, read, surf the web, and not create anything.

To create something requires better UI than the tablet offers. Nobody is going to type a novel on a virtual keyboard. And drawing? Not enough fine resolution in the tablet screen.

If all you want is a computer for Granny to buy movies and surf the web without needing to know a thing about computers, a tablet is great. But if you actually need to enter data in excess of a few sentences a day, a laptop or desktop is in order.

If I had a dollar for every time someone said the desktop was dead in the past 20 years, I'd be a very rich man right now.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I've got a version of Sim City on my phone. It sucks. You just can't get a good overview of a city on that itty-bitty screen.

Some games, and especially virtual world simulations, don't lend themselves well to the small screen. Tablets? Perhaps, but not so much that you should compromise the core design to accomodate them.

But as an add-on project after the main (PC) version launches? Go for it.

[Aurelia Chauveau]

I love Sim City, Ever since my best friend showed it to my on her Super Nintendo. Since then I've bought every game and every expansion pack. I have it on my phone, yeah it sux on there, also have played it on an iPad and that was a little better, but my fingers always get sore trying to zoom in and around. I don't own a tablet, I have a laptop and a desktop, I really don't see the point in a tablet, as it seems just a gimic to me. It has that "want" and "cool" factor because it's easy to carry around and looks pretty! But I wouldn't even use it to watch movies on in bed, you have to hold onto it! Laptops sit there with the screen upright while I relax :D

[Nyoko Salome]

the trailer cracks me up ;0... the super-small forced-focus makes me feel like i'm in 'mr. roger's neighborhood!!' ;0

that being said, i haven't yet played a version that really satisfied my sense of 'play' without being forcibly reduced to micro-managerial minutia... i kinda much prefer the 'mass-command' of multiwinia, or of old myth II, for that matter.

[indexnwn]

Maxis is focusing on a PC release for now. It's a major core release. Stop acting as if you are game developers who knows how to make cash cow games. Maxis knows what they are doing, like they've always done in the past decades.

The simulation engine is scalable, so it's still a possibility for other device versions to follow. So who knows?

If you are too impatient, then go for the casual Facebook version: SimCity Social. It'll be out in a few weeks. Or stick with SC4. Simple as that.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

"Maxis knows what they are doing, like they've always done in the past decades."

Three words: The Sims Online.

"Stop acting as if you are game developers"

Everybody who creates content for Second Life is a developer. We might be junior members of the fraternity, but we're members nontheless.