With the SimCity franchise approaching the quarter-century-old mark, developer Maxis decided it was time to refresh the series.

Wired.co.uk wanted to know what goes into reconstructing the world's best-known city builder, so we went straight to the source -- the California studio where it's being developed.

Rather than building on the infrastructure of recent efforts, such as SimCity 4 or Rush Hour, the new entry is a ground-up reboot, abandoning any pretence of being a numerical sequel -- "SimCity Begins", if you will. The most immediate change you'll notice is the new graphical approach.


Inspired by tilt-shift photography, the worlds you'll create have a distinct feel and style to them, inviting you to reach in and play with them. Buildings are essentially modular, having expandable components to allow customisation and creativity on the player's part. Add in architectural influences from around the globe and the possibilities for creating a truly distinctive, personal city are endless.

Engine power

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However, the heart beating beneath the surface of the re-imagined SimCity is the new GlassBox engine. "It's a new simulation engine that was developed here at Maxis to support agent-based simulation," Lead Producer Kip Katsarelis told Wired.co.uk. "It's not necessarily related to cities, it's a general engine; we've kept the code separate from SimCity.

It lets you simulate very simple objects that, when composed together, can do very complex things." "The genesis of GlassBox goes all the way back to SimCity 4," added Creative Director Ocean Quigley, "when [engineer] Andrew Willmott and I imagined what the ultimate simulator might look like. At the time, computers weren't powerful enough for us to implement that at any reasonable scale, so our ideas had to lie fallow until we finished Spore."


The final product is an engine that's both powerful and general.

Where earlier SimCity games performed all the background calculations involved in running the player's city, then translated them into a visual representation, GlassBox allows Maxis to effectively do the opposite with the new game. "With all of our previous SimCity games we were limited to fairly simple map-based and statistical simulations," said Quigley. "That's great for giving you the broad strokes, but it doesn't allow for the level of realism and behavioural richness that we wanted for the new SimCity. We wanted every single building, every Sim and every vehicle to have a distinct identity in the simulation, and we wanted the complex life of the city to emerge out of their interactions."

Thus, the "agents" referred to by Katsarelis -- little on-screen clusters moving around the city, representing coal, electricity, water, people, traffic, and more. Each carries its own packet of information that affects the greater simulation when they interact with each other, or with the larger 'units' in the game -- the buildings and structures you construct. They all affect the success or failure of your creation. The approach is similar to how real-world city planning software such as VisSim works, which was used to map out the impact the 2012 Olympics would have on London.

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SimLlama


However, as GlassBox's agents aren't solely dedicated to an urban environment, the same engine could feasibly be used for any other kind of simulation -- potentially opening the door for the return of off-beat Maxis classics such as SimAnt or

SimFarm. Or, as Quigley puts it, "at the root, underlying simulation level agents just carry information through the simulation. You could make an agent that's a llama -- SimLlama!"

While the idea of data visualisation may sound like a dumbing down to the SimCity hardcore, playing the game reveals it to be anything but. "Under the hood", there's far more going on than in any prior game, and the individual agents help make that more manageable. The early sections of the game start out invitingly enough, offering light tutorials in the form of basic objectives to achieve to help you get into the mindset but you'll soon realise there's countless facets of data to uncover and work with -- subterranean views to manage your drainage system, energy grids, terrain and more, all operating while you're playing. Poorly manage one or more of these intricately interwoven systems and you'll soon have a Town Hall bombarded by protesting Sims with a host of placards and petitions.

Click on any single unit -- a Sim walking to work or a car stuck at lights, for example -- and you'll get an appraisal of where it's going and what it's doing, right down to how the current status of the city impacts them emotionally. The graphical presentation also makes it clearer what's going on, allowing you to respond more quickly to problems. Activate a power station and you'll see exactly where the energy is delivered to, and if there's enough being generated. It's speedy and intuitive, and while it's shaping up to be the most accessible SimCity game yet, it's far from simplistic.

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Aside from the cities themselves, the locations in which you lay their groundwork has always been an important factor for

SimCity, and the wider environment has seen two major overhauls. The first is a hugely refined environmental system.

Outside of agents and units, the game reacts to basic real-world physics. Gravity affects water, forcing it to run downhill and pool naturally, while airborne pollutants will be carried downwind of factories -- an incredibly nuanced detail to consider when planning locations. What's more, these phenomena react to natural patterns, with the rain cycle affecting water levels and dry seasons bringing wind patterns to a standstill; potentially disastrous if you centre your energy needs on eco-friendly wind farms.

The second, and likely more dramatic, is that you're no longer necessarily striving to build an all-conquering megalopolis -- the three pillars of commercial, industrial and residential developments can operate separately. Players can construct multiple cities within the same region, and each will pull the resources it needs from the others. Fancy building a shopping and gambling mecca, a lá Las Vegas? You can -- but you'll need a similar city full of residents to work there, and another to provide utilities for them both.

Multiplayer

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The regions you settle in then factor into SimCity's multiplayer capabilities. The very presence of multiplayer in a

SimCity game is a controversial addition for some but from our experience, the online interactions will actually help make your cities feel part of a thriving world, rather than isolated urban sprawls. For example, if a region is shared with friends, resources and Sims can travel between them, leaving you free to focus on your perfect residential setting while a mate handles the industrial side.

While SimCity remains a "no win-state" game -- how do you "win" at cities, after all? -- there will however be elements of competition, though they're set to be well within the spirit of the series. Players will be presented with Challenges, some generated by Maxis, some created by community members themselves. "Say there's a Jobs Challenge," explains producer Jason Haber. "We saw that unemployment was really high so we made a challenge that basically says 'hey, how quickly can we create ten million jobs?'

There are also competitive challenges where you compete as regions, like who can increase their population by a million the quickest.

We can respond and create these as the game evolves and people play in certain ways."

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Leaderboards and rankings are also set to appear, with Haber adding, "You can see how your cities rank against each other. We have the standard leaderboards that you might expect, like who has the most money or population, but we also have more fun ones like who's the worst polluter, who has the sickest Sims." Multiplayer functions are truly global too, with PC and Mac gamers able to collaborate or compete with each other.

The end result of all Maxis' efforts is a SimCity fit for the 21st century, both in terms of its look and feel and its technological prowess. "This is definitely a reboot of

SimCity," concluded Katsarelis. "We really think we've done it justice, held true to the core values in terms of you being the Mayor, playing god. It's still got that puzzle-solving quality.


We felt like it had been long enough and the game was so awesome that it really 'fit' to kick off the franchise again."

We'd agree. The aesthetics are both charming and detailed, and the whole package recaptures the incredible specificity of the series' highest points and the subtle humour that has been part of it since the beginning. The only thing missing? Still no roundabouts for proper road networks.

SimCity launches in February 2013 for PC and Mac.