If you’ve been following the latest SimCity news like a hawk, then you pretty much know about this.  However, G4TV has put together a nice little article recapping Maxis’ SimCity GDC presentation.  I just can’t get enough of it!

Leading up to GDC 2012, one of the big rumors as far as reveals was that EA and Maxis would unveil a new SimCity game. Well, as you’ve probably seen by now, that’s exactly what happened. However, despite holding a special press event to officially unveil the game, neither EA nor Maxis talked at all about the game itself or provide any details regarding its development, aside from showing a pre-rendered target concept/SimCity announcement trailer.

Instead, EA relegated said info that people wanted to a lately added panel entitled “Inside the Glassbox,” a largely technical-based presentation about Maxis’ new simulation engine that powers the SimCity. For someone like me (i.e. someone with zero understanding of the inner workings of a computer simulation engine), it was a rather dense discussion to wade through.
Here were some of the other big takeaways with regards to what Glassbox is allowing Maxis to achieve with SimCity:

  • Everything in the game is physics based now (i.e. people, buildings, vehicles, etc.).
  • “What you see is what you sim” and vice versa. Each sim in the world is an individual person. Instead of traffic density to represent cars, the game shows individual cars. You can see sims in their houses, at their jobs, going about their lives.
  • The level of detail the engine is capable of producing will make your cities feel alive and more tactile than ever before.
  • The engine is built with an eye on the future, and scalability is a major part of that vision, as it will allow the game to move from PC to mobile devices and back again without sacrificing the original quality.
  • Because the engine and game will include such a solid online infrastructure, it will allow Maxis to deploy updates and tweaks directly into the game very quickly; it’s also what allows the cloud save system to work so well, even if the Maxis servers take a dive.

catch the full article at G4TV