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We just wanted to share with you a small video we made earlier this week to show you how easily you’ll create curved roads... Or are they our first try with highways?!... More about it soon...
Monte Cristo is pleased to announce CITIES XL™ for Windows today. In this next-generation take on the city building genre, realism will be pushed to the limit with cities that are bigger, more realistic and more sophisticated than ever before. CITIES XL™ will expand upon all the features that make city builders fun and interesting, while also letting players take their game online, as they interact with others in a massive online environment.
CITIES XL™ allows gamers to develop cities on realistic 3D maps using an incredible collection of unique structures and monuments based on American, Asian and European-influenced architectural styles. The maps feature a variety of environments: mountains, hills, canyons, beaches and islands, all set in different climates from tropical to desert, Mediterranean to temperate. Players must create the right combinations of social services, leisure activities, special events and other job opportunities within their cities in order to feed, clothe, employ and entertain their citizens. Be it planning and building a new zoo, public park, residential neighborhood or transit system - there's always a fresh and exciting challenge for would-be city managers and mayors in CITIES XL™. “We believe that the level of detail and realism brought to CITIES XL™ answers the needs of city-builder fans,” said Jérôme Gastaldi, COO of Monte Cristo.
“We believe fans of the genre will definitely enjoy CITIES XL™ and many of those fans have provided us with feedback on our development so far. We are really proud to have such a cool and proactive community.”
The game’s online features and services will allow players to create interconnected cities on virtual and persistent planets. Mayors can share and trade with one another, specialize their economy and team up with befriended cities to create sprawling metropolises. Life on the planet will be punctuated by events and competitions - a concert held in one town may, for example, be attended by visitors from other areas who can also enjoy a walk around the city to admire the urban creations of multiple players. By combining a fantastic single-player game with the social and multiplayer aspects of an MMO, CITIES XL™ will shape the future of the genre by offering more variety, bigger cities and multiple gameplay layers.
For more information about CITIES XL™, which will ship in 2009, please join the continuously growing community at www.citiesxl.com
We're about to live a very exciting week ! You're the first ones to get the news: the game’s official title is CITIES XL™. At first it sounded strange to us… But now that we've been using it internally for a few days CITIES XL™ replaced Cities Unlimited in our discussions faster than what we'd have thought. We sincerely think we’re making the right choice as CITIES XL™ will be huge and, we want to allow people of different languages and cultures to understand and pronounce the title. As a token appreciation for the time you've spent with us discussing the game, we decided to grant ALL current registered community members with the « Founder » title. It will be displayed next to your profile in the forums and, in essence, bear withness to your presence from the early beginnings. We’ll make official the new name this week with a press release which should attract numerous new contributors to the forums. We’ll also update the website (you may find the website down for maintenance for a couple of hours). We’ll take this opportunity to update any reference to Cities Unlimited to CITIES XL™ wherever we may find it (including in your posts), to avoid creating confusing between the two names for newcomers. We're relying on you to convey the message. Stay tuned as we also have a huge surprise to accompany the website update !!! See you soon, and long life to CITIES XL™!
On the 31st March at 00h00 GMT+1 we closed the votes for the 1st CU Awards rewarding members and websites of the CU community.Many of you nominated candidates for these awards and even more voted for the nominees in the 4 defined categories. Thank you for your level of participation.Now, to get back on track: it's time to announce the names, or rather, the nicknames of the winners.
I’d like to take a few moments to explain the economy of Cities Unlimited to you. As the Mayor, you are responsible for ensuring that the needs of citizens are met, which includes overseeing the city’s financial health. The economy primarily revolves around entities that carry out exchanges. The game includes a number of these entities which enjoy freedom of choice in selecting among different behaviors, the one that suits them best. In so doing, they make decisions with their “well-being” in mind. The well-being of residents involves their level of satisfaction: it will vary based on the availability of a job that meets their expectations, the municipal services offered and access to goods and services for their personal consumption.For companies, well-being consists of the income generated, i.e., the difference between the money earned by the company when it sells the results of its production and the costs of the latter. For example, a company will set up shop in the city if it believes that it can generate income. Alternatively, it will leave (declare bankruptcy) when it has sustained losses over a significant period of time. A resident, in turn, will move to a city if he believes it will bring him adequate satisfaction, and leave when this is no longer the case.This essentially creates an ecosystem that develops and adapts on its own, with no need for understanding all of its details in order to oversee it. This ecosystem incorporates exchange flows among the various entities: cash (money) flows and flows of goods and services. We will consider a few principles to explain how the city’s economic system will react to your administration.
We don’t want to wait until the game is released to congratulate and reward the members who have been dedicating their time and their fingers (on their keyboard) on Cities Unlimited. Therefore, we are pleased to announce you that we officially open the 1st Cities Unlimited Awards.
Instead of selecting ourselves a few members we feel should disserve an award, we would prefer members to designate who disserves them. The CU Awards will therefore start with a Nomination Session during which every member can designate their nominee or candidate for one of the following categories:
Best Member Participation Award: Which member participates with quality to the different threads in the forums?
Most Welcoming Member Award: Which member welcomes the new members in the community or simply shares his/her happiness?
Most Helpful Member Award: Who is the one that answers other members’ questions or redirects the discussions to other threads when appropriate?
Moreover, we open another category for the Best CU Supporter Website award. This category won’t reward a cuplanet.com member but one of the numerous city builder fans websites. Of course, Worldsims.org is listed by default on this category but we are also asking members to nominate other community websites.
The nomination phase ends on the 14th March. Right after, we’ll open a page on which you’ll be able to vote for the nominees – votes will close at the end of March. The winners will receive an award, which will be displayed on their profile.
And we’ll give a unique medal specially made for the winner community website that they may display which should also drive visits to the winner.
Today, I'd like to discuss how we create a landscape, a three-part process that includes terrain, water and forest. Our ultimate goal: to have you share in the pleasure we derive from creating worlds for Cities Unlimited.
With City Life, we wanted to have a more realistic representation of human or societal interaction and to enrich the City simulation with a human factor. We came up with different population types with different needs, which we called Cultures. There were 6 of these groups - each had different levels of wealth and preferences for one type of civic service or another, e.g. a preference for education rather than police service. City Life players, who have been a valuable source of feedback through the official forums and community websites, debated the culture concept a lot: Even if they generally liked the idea, we also heard that they weren’t all that fond of the buildings being heavily impacted graphically by the culture they belonged to, and that they didn't like the conflicts that appeared between the different culture groups. We still believe that caring for the diverse needs of the inhabitants is an important part of city management – by inhabitants I also mean the companies within it - but especially the “human” residents. So we decided to review the concept of “cultures” from the ground up to in order to reach something more realistic.
I have a confession to make. It's a terrible thing, really: we've been shamelessly spying on our forums and we’d like to thank in particular all those who have contributed to the CUC (Cities Unlimited Conceptual) articles that tr0bl1 has been compiling on the English-speaking forum. If you’ve followed this blog, you will have noticed we've stayed off entering into design issues mainly because we did not want to restrict people’s creativity. But now the time has come to start explaining what concepts we've started to integrate into the game and you’ll see more of these blog entries in the coming weeks.
I would like to share with you today information about a relatively important part of our work related to graphics rendering and image cohesion : the illumination. Since the terrains and buildings have quite a realistic style, we had to make sure the environment was rendered accordingly. There are two steps for this:
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