A little more than two weeks after its big, albeit imperfect 2.0 update to SimCity, EA is preparing to roll out a new update that’s full of even more tweaks and fixes. Update 3.0 is coming this week. Will this be the one???
Patch notes, straight from EA-owned SimCity development studio Maxis:
Update 3.0 Notes
• New: Added more Hotel models to increase hotel variety.
• Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behaviour on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter.
• Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic.
• Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won’t move causing traffic to back up behind it.
• Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic.
• Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighbouring city has a lot of workers.
• Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources.
• Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
• School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor’s city or arcology.
• Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station.
• Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman’s Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley.
• Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city.
• Trading: Made gifting more reliable.
• Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant.
• RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home.
• RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours.
• RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present.
• RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in.
• Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution.
• Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously.
• Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations.
• Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night.
• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them.
• Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement.
• Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets.
• Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently.
• Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage.
• Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighbourhood athletes at the sports parks.
• Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers.
• Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks.
• Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.
I really hope the right-on-red thing is the big change that will fix traffic. Crossing fingers…
Comments
14 responses to “Here Comes SimCity Update 3.0, Which Lets Your Sims Make Rights On Reds”
Sounds like a great update.
GL to all Simcity Players.
I didn’t twig that they drive on the right side of the road at first.
Turning right against a red light isn’t a good idea here.
LoL. I was confused until I read your reply here!
Lol finally all the strange air pollution is fixed. I had this problem. Also the radiation was ridiculous. I build a nuclear power plant and not even 10 mins later there’s a melt down coveting more than half my map eventhough I build on the side away from all the residents and factories. The maps are too small or just the size of area effected is too big. Should see how it goes now.
affected. Is it affected of effected now I’m confused. Time for lunch.
In this case, effected.
I’d go with the maps being too small though. Would be nice if you could open up more land for your towns at a certain point or something.
Actually, it’s affected. Short version is that effect is the noun, affect is the verb. To convert a verb into an adjective, you add ‘ed’ or ‘ing’.
‘Effected’ or ‘Effecting’ is verbing your nouns. It’s a corporate thing, mostly. Wherein you ‘effect’ change. Google ‘affected vs effected’ for examples.
Certainly seems like a lot of small fixes there. It’s a pity they aren’t addressing some of the bigger concern.
EA need to drop the price on this one as a Sim City fan it feels like to much a gamble still full price on Origin and in shops, all the negative publicity/reviews makes spending $80 of $100 for the full deluxe version seem risky.
So, University students weren’t even smart enough to cross the street?
Where is the cheapest you can pick up Sim City at the moment? Keen to jump on board now that it’s looking more stable.
I looked into it and unless you want to VPN another countries origin or buy from dubious cd-key resellers, mail order sites from the UK are your best bet still over $50 or about $80 bought locally from retail.
http://www.gamecafe.com.au/Search/All/Sim%20City
This patch inspired me to go back to Simcity and give it another shot.
Then I remembered I just moved and won’t have internet for 2 weeks. GOD DAMMIT EA/MAXIS.
They’ll need all that magical server processing capability if they want to implement hook turns.