Coming off of this morning’s post of an updated SimCity game for the iPhone (SimCity Deluxe) is 5 new pictures from EA!
What’s this? A new version of SimCity coming to the iPhone? Celebration is to be had! ElectricPig reports that EAmobile is working on SimCity Deluxe, expecting it to arrive some time in the summer of 2010. They label this as an “update” but it’s a bit unclear if this will update our existing game or if it’s a whole new game featuring many improvements. According to the article, the UI has been revamped and cities based on London, Tokyo, Cairo and Paris, complete with essential landmarks like Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower will be included.
Special thanks to SimsDomination for the find!
It saddens me having to report that long-time Maxis employee and friend Caryl Shaw has moved on from EA. Caryl has always been one of my most favorite people to deal with and was always kind and took a moment to listen when I had to contact her for various reasons (although I tried my best to not bug her much because I make it a high priority not to contact unless I have something absolutely important to bring). Not only that, but in person she is an entertaining and very outstanding speaker.
If your a long time Maxis fan, then you may remember her as MaxisLucky. I first met her over at the official Sims 1 forums (actually, many of us did). She helped with the management of the official site, as well as launching The Sims 2 website when the hit sequel was released. Her list of games include The Sims SuperStar, Makin’ Magic, SimCity 4 Rush Hour, The Urbz, The Sims 2 (and up to Open for Business if I recall correctly) then onto Spore (Senior Producer and manager of the Web Development Team)
She will still be with us in the game industry though, so not all is lost! We can now follow her progress with ngmoco, a developer for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I can’t wait to see what her first project will be! Best of luck with your new job, Caryl. Readers, if you remember her from past games or would just like to share your farewell wishes, please leave them in the comments. She may end up reading this 
InfiniteSims has been keeping an eye on the various posts that Ocean Quigley, former Maxis employee, has been writing on his project blog (site contains nude drawings, so please be aware). His most recent posts contain information on how he designed the roof system for The Sims 2 as well as the graphics technique they used for SimCity 4 buildings. Read below for the full scoop!
SimCity4 was a proper 3D engine, with the view constrained to an orthographic perspective.
Buildings were rendered by projecting textures onto very simple 3D geometry. This allowed for sorting and interaction with terrain, that wouldn’t have been possible with simple sprites.
The buildings were basically imposters, a graphics technique that I’d seen at Siggraph back in 2000.
They looked pretty much normal if you saw them from this angle:
But if you rotated the view, the illusion was blown and everything looks weird.
I was hoping to use the underlying geometry to attach details like signs and water towers, but we ran out of time (and in any case, we didn’t want to create an authoring pipeline for sticking them on)
You can see what’s really going on with this view from below
My first experiments with imposters were for Simsville. In that game, we had a perspective camera, so they had to hold up to a little bit more camera motion. You can see some artifacts where the texture is projected through the roof, but all in all, it holds up pretty well.
Simsville didn’t come to fruition, but the stuff I learned while prototyping it fed into SimCity, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Probably the second hardest thing I ever had to design was the roof system for the Sims2.
The roof geometry had to be completely clean, and everything had to snap together perfectly, vertex to vertex and edge to edge without any overlaps (because we had to be able to hide and reveal different roof sections without any ragged edges showing).
And we couldn’t just solve the problem with CSG, as Irfan Zaidi quickly informed me, at least not with realtime performance.
It seems like it would be perfectly straightforward, but dealing with all of the crazy intersections and permutations felt like taking a 2 month long IQ test.
Here was a mockup I made in Maya while trying to think through the problem.
And this was just for the straightforward, rectangular roofs. The tricky problems came up when the roofs were rotated 45 degrees off of the grid.
Old school gamers will love this and hopefully those who never played Mario Paint will want to take a look into it. Mario Paint was a game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System which allowed users to paint, draw and doodle much like Microsoft Paint. It wasn’t only a paint program but also an audio composer program as well. Many fans loved this part of the game, and it even sparked a PC program to be created called Mario Paint Composer. YouTube is flooded with tons of videos featuring this tool varying all kinds of music genre. Below are a few songs from our favorite Sim games. I tried to tackle this awhile back but I didn’t get anywhere…I’d love for someone to try to create The Sims 3 theme on it. Any takers?
If wishes could come true, then I wish for this to be SimCity 5. This video captures New York City with various cameras to give it a ‘miniaturized’ look. Such an outstanding video I must say…watching it makes me think of SimCity 4 with many of the mods added on. I hope the franchise is not over yet. Maxis – please, please return to your roots. 
Ocean Quigley, the Art Director for Spore has shared with us more of his projects from his past time working on both The Sims 2 and SimCity 4. Credit goes to InfiniteSims for the find!
SimCity 4 had this neat feature (put in by Paul Pedriana) where you could have the game advance a single frame and save a screencapture, advance another frame and save a screencapture and so on.
It let me make little movies of the game as I was working on it, without skipping any frames, which was impressive for the time.
Here’s one movie that I captured while authoring an aerobatic flying team for the game:
The airplane movement is all scripted with Andrew’s particle system, which means that there’s really no flight model there at all! Just particles attracting and repelling each other, and chasing the lead particle. It was pretty sweet! I could even have them explode if they got too close to each other or hit the ground.
The camera was just another particle parented to the lead jet.I used that system in all sorts of unlikely ways. I think the coolest use was for the soccer games in the stadium. Eventually you’d notice that the team’s behaviour was a bit odd for soccer, but it held up to a cursory viewing.
The Sims 2 – Stairs
Here’s a design visualization I did for the Sims2 while trying to figure out how stairs should work.
It’s done in my favorite design tool, Maya. Doing visualizations like this is a great design practice for a few reasons.
First, it forces me to think through exactly how a system is supposed to work, step by step. So when eventually I ask an engineer to implement it in code, I’ve got a clear idea of what I’m asking for.
Second it’s way of expressing the problem to the other people who might care about it (designers, producers, engineers). And if it’s a good visualization, it makes the problem (and hopefully the solution) clear to everybody.
Duane Faust proposed a multi-million dollar development project which includes a hydrogen energy plant and a mass transit system. However, Duane ran into a few problems – one being the fact that he used SimCity 4 to illustrate his ideas rather than taking the professional route by drafting. Apparently the City Planning Services are having a huge fuss over this matter calling it absurd and an ‘early April Fools’ joke.
Not only that, but Faust also also stole an image used to illustrate a proposed hydrogen-powered subway system from hydrail.org, a “program designed to promote hydrogen-powered rail systems created by Appalachian State University.”
Guy is probably in deep water now, as he cannot be reached for contact as the telephone numbers to his firms in California and Atlanta have been disconnected.
It was also reported that, “Faust could not be reached for comment. Telephone numbers connected to him and his firms in Atlanta and California have been disconnected.”
Source: GamePolitics
If I hadn’t already own a custom license plate tag (it costs $70 here a year), I think I would go with TheSims, Maxis or SimCity – much like this one person has in the state of California:
Actually, it’s more of a play on the classic SimCity game, but it still would be extremely boring!
Loading ...
Sims 3 CAS Demo Mar. 26
Sims 3 WA iPhone Apr. 5 Sims 3 Ambitions Jun. 1 Spore Creature Keeper TBDSubscribe via RSS Feed stay updated with the latest news
Subscribe via email address:
Most Users Ever Online Is 103 On January 1, 2010 @ 3:46 pm
