So, the latest SimCity patch including offline play has dropped…   What do you think?

After reading this thread and trying out Update 10 please use the following links for feedback and additional questions:

 

Update 10 Feedback Thread – http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/0/10023457.page
Offline additional Questions – http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/0/10023459.page

 

Q: How do I play SimCity offline?
A: The new Single-Player Mode allows you to play SimCity anytime, anywhere, without the need of an active Internet connection. For the full details please read our blog post here – http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-…y-now-available-for-pc-and-mac.

 

Q: How do I download the Single-Player Mode for SimCity?
A: The Single-Player Mode will be included as part of Update 10 at no additional cost. This will be available to all current and future players on PC and Mac starting March 18, 2014.

 

Q: Will I still require an Internet connection to play?
A: An Internet connection is required to download Update 10 when it becomes available on March 18, 2014. You will not require an active Internet connection to play SimCity offline in the Single-Player Mode.

 

Q: Can I still play the game Online?
A: Yes, the Online game and all of its features are still intact. This includes Multiplayer, SimCity World and Online Save Games.

 

Q: Will my previous Downloadable Content (DLC) be playable in the Single-Player Mode?
A: Yes. All of your previous DLC is available for use in both the Single-Player Mode and Multiplayer Mode.

 

Q: Do I need an Origin Account to play?
A: Yes, you use Origin to download and launch SimCity. Once you’ve installed Update 10, you can put Origin into offline mode when you are playing Single-Player Mode.

 

Q: How do I put Origin into Offline Mode?
A: To put Origin in Offline mode, log in to the Origin client and select: Origin>Go Offline

 

Q: Do I need to login to Origin online in order to play the Single-Player Mode?
A: No. If you do not have an active internet connection, you can put Origin in the offline Mode and play SimCity offline in the Single-Player Mode.

 

Q: What features are available in Single-Player Mode?
A: Single-Player Mode allows for a multi-city Single-Player experience without requiring an internet connection. All region maps are available in Single-Player Mode. Since Single-Player Mode does not require a persistent internet connection, Leaderboards, Citylog, Achievements, Friends List, Player Profile, the Region Wall, and region invites are not available in Single-Player Mode. The Global Market will be available in Single-Player Mode, but prices will be fixed.

 

Q: What are the requirements to play in Multiplayer mode?
A: The requirements to play Multiplayer have not changed. An Internet connection is required to play Multiplayer mode, Origin must be running in online mode and SimCity must be updated to the latest version.

 

Q: Can I transfer my regions between modes?
A: No. Single-Player and Multiplayer are separate modes and regions cannot be transferred between modes.

 

Q: Where are Single-Player regions saved?
A: Single-Player regions are saved locally, not on the server.
You can find your regions on PC here: \Documents\SimCity\Games\~ID NUMBER~\
You can find your regions on Mac here: Go->Documents->SimCity -> Games -> ~ID NUMBER~

 

Q: If I uninstall or change machines, can I transfer my Single-Player Mode regions to the new install or Machine?
A: If you uninstall SimCity, your saved games will still be available. However if you change machines, you will need to manually move your game files to the games file location on your new machine.

 

Q: Can I move my Single-Player Mode saved game from my PC to Mac and vice versa?
A: Yes, you can transfer your Single-Player Mode saved games between PC and Mac.

 

Q: How many regions can I have?
A: There is no limit to the number of saved regions a player can have in Single-Player Mode. The file size of your regions will vary depending on density and population of your cities.

 

Q: How do saves work in Single-Player Mode?
A: Autosave is on by default and saves your region every ten minutes. Your region is also automatically saved if you quit your region or switch to another city in the region. To disable Autosave, go to the Options menu > Settings > Gameplay tab and uncheck “Enable Autosave in Single-Player Mode”. Disabling Autosave will allow you to save at points you want to save at. If Autosave is disabled, you will be asked if you would like to save your region when you quit or switch to another city in the region.

 

You can manually save your region at any time by pressing “Save Game” from the options menu.

 

Q: How do I rollback my regions? How do I make a copy of my region?
A: If Autosave is disabled, you can save your region at a certain point and then experiment with your region. If you wish to go back to a previous save point, you can choose not to save your region when exiting the game. If you load that region from the main menu or resume page, it will load from the last saved point.
If you would like to make a copy of your region, press “Save As…” from the options menu. You will be prompted to name the copy of your region. This gives you the control to come up with a naming convention that works for you for your copied version. Once you submit that name, you will load the copy of the region. The original region will remain at the last saved point. You can access the original or the copy from the Main Menu in the Play tab.

 

Q: What cheats are available in Single-Player Mode?
A: Existing live cheats are available in Sandbox regions while playing Single-Player Mode. The following cheats are available in Single-Player Mode in non-Sandbox games.
Add §10,000 to City budget. Windows: CTRL + ALT + W OS X: CTRL + ALT + W
Add §5,000 per hour to City budget. Windows: CTRL + ALT + S OS X: CTRL + ALT + S
Add §100,000 per hour to City budget. Windows: ALT + W OS X: ALT + S
Disasters are unlocked in Single-Player Mode.

Remember we also have an active SimCity region you can join, just add Lonesamurai as a friend on Origin for an invite

If you’re a serious gamer, you’ve undoubtedly heard of DirectX. With a rich history spanning over 20 years, Microsoft’s home-grown graphics controller and drivers are still used in many games today – particularly those targeted at consoles and Windows PCs – to enable visual splendour, capable 3D graphics and more. But while it may remain a popular technology, the last version of DirectX officially launched by Microsoft, 11.1, was last updated in 2009. Five years later, with devices becoming more powerful and capable, the technology’s age has begun to shine through, leading many developers to ask Microsoft to supply the tools to take DirectX further and extract the most out of any hardware the games end up on.

According to Microsoft’s DirectX Developer’s site, the company is finally set to deliver on that promise. In a sponsored session at this year’s GDC, entitled “DirectX: Evolving Microsoft’s Graphics Platform”, Microsoft’s development manager for graphics at Microsoft – Anuj Gosalia – is set to reveal the company’s plans for DirectX12. The official GDC website offers the following description of that talk:

For nearly 20 years, DirectX has been the platform used by game developers to create the fastest, most visually impressive games on the planet. However, you asked us to do more. You asked us to bring you even closer to the metal and to do so on an unparalleled assortment of hardware. You also asked us for better tools so that you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of your PC, tablet, phone and console. Come learn our plans to deliver.

Nothing is yet known about what Microsoft plan to reveal – besides the increased power alluded to in the above description – but the talk appears as one of a number of DirectX-related talks planned to be hosted by Microsoft this year, which also apparently includes a talk on the future of Direct3D; and eight talks related to the current DirectX 11.

Stay tuned for more news as we hear it.

Four years ago, a new service called OnLive debuted, offering a whole new way to play and get games using online streaming. Rather than downloading games or buying them from stores, you streamed them from online servers and paid for the access rights – meaning low-cost, no-storage-required gaming that just required a solid internet connection and which promise to revolutionise the way we played games. The reality, however, was far less rosy. By marketing itself as its own platform – alienating both publishers who worried about game sales cannibalising those on established platforms, and players who were forced to decide whether to buy their games traditionally, via OnLive, or both; selling some games itself – cutting it off from retailers; and giving developers an extra step in the development process to support the platform, OnLive made an enemy of practically everyone; and in 2012, the company folded, its assets sold off and all the staff laid off.

Now though, OnLive is back and learning from its mistakes, thanks to a relaunch in the hands of the buyer, a new (legally-speaking) company also called OnLive. After 18 months out of the limelight, OnLive has returned under new management and carrying two new business models.

The key to the new OnLive is a brand new offering called Cloudlift. Thanks to a partnership with Valve, OnLive now has access to the full library of Steam games, bringing thousands of games of all different kinds to the platform. OnLive will now let you buy Steam games and add them to your Steam account through the service, solving the platform separation by potentially allowing the same game to run on multiple devices through both OnLive and Steam itself. The magic comes with OnLive’s streaming abilities. Once again, when playing a Steam game through OnLive, you won’t actually be downloading and playing the game locally – instead, the game is streamed to you over an internet connection from super-fast, super-capable servers hosted by OnLive, meaning no storage is required. In a genius touch however, slam in your Steam account details and as long as you’re using Steam’s Cloud Save feature, Cloudlift will grab your online save for each game as you load them up, so you’ll be able to continue the same game you have on your traditional Steam-enabled device. If you have a solid internet connection (2mb/sec minimum, 5mb recommended download speed), you may never notice the difference.

As Cloudlift is available as a smartphone app and as software for PC and Mac, the service potentially will allow Ouya and other Android-based consoles to get the full range of Steam apps and play them with high performance, instantly increasing their usefulness and the size of the game libraries; and also potentially means a game you start on your PC can be later played on the Mac at work, with little change in performance even if the power of all the devices is completely in different leagues – all you need is a compatible controller. Cloudlift comes with a heavy price tag, however, at $14.99 and £9.99 per month; and with only Steam games on offer at the moment, the choice is limited to your already-purchased and future-purchased Steam Games; you don’t get a whole range of games included in the price like with movies on Netflix. Along with this is the problem that not all Steam games come with cloud sync, meaning they can still be streamed but won’t allow players to pick up where they left off.

Luckily, OnLive are not resting on their laurels, as they have two additional plans in the works to increase the game library as they come along. First, the original OnLive game library will soon be relaunched, meaning the company will once again start sellings its own games too. While this will remain a separate service to Cloudlift for now, any games bought from OnLive will also come with seven days’ access to the same game on Cloudlift – whether this feature will remain or be enhanced in future however is yet to be seen, as the company are not committing heavily to the OnLive market to prevent it repeating its past mistakes. OnLive is also allowing games publishers to partner directly with them and deliver demos of their games to stream through the services, which will be a white-label service – so the publishers are free to credit the games however they like (expect names like “Sega Go” or “EA Live” to crop up, for example). Gaijin Games are one of the partners named to be on board.

Will the new strategy allow OnLive to succeed where it once failed? And will full online streaming become the future of, or a strong alternative to, both digitally stored and physical media gaming? Time will soon tell.

“Internal experiment” may pave the way to free, Chromebook-inspired Windows rethink.

Microsoft is at a crisis point. With calls to ditch their home-grown Surface line of tablets due to lack of sales; new installs of Windows 8 selling at a slower pace to its still-popular predecessor Windows 7 – to the extent that some PC makers now offer Windows 7 on their PCs instead and 8 as an optional upgrade; and a lack of smartphones being launched by third parties running Windows Phone 8, the company is forced to look at new strategies to drum up sales.

At the hands of new CEO Satya Nadella, it appears Microsoft are already on the works on this new strategy; and it may involve lowering licensing costs and setting less restrictions on using its systems in order to make them cheaper and easier to get onto more devices; thus expanding reach by targeting more markets including the lesser-tapped low-end market. Already we’ve seen Microsoft working on a new low-cost smartphone range with the Nokia X Phones; and rumours suggest Microsoft may even consider lowering the licensing cost for Windows Phone itself by as much as 70%, to make it more affordable for phone manufacturers to put on their models. Now, it sounds as if Windows 8 itself might get the same treatment.

According to reports by The Verge, Microsoft is experimenting with a new version of Windows 8 known as “Windows 8.1 with Bing”. This experimental rethink of Windows 8.1 is said to put Cloud services first, even more than Windows 8.1 does already with its SkyDrive OneDrive integration, emphasising services such as Office Online and Bing Maps, etc; in order to drive monetization through use of those, rather than through up-front software costs. In fact, the use of the Bing trademark in its name – which is also the name of Microsoft’s home-grown search engine and services linked around it like News, Maps, Social and so on – suggests Windows 8.1 with Bing could be geared mainly towards a browser-based environment and use of the Cloud as a platform, so what we could end up with might look a lot like Chromebooks, which seems to be Microsoft’s main competition of late.

The intention of Windows 8.1 with Bing could be to offer those still sticking with Windows 7 a free or low-cost upgrade to encourage them to consider upgrading to the latest OS; while allowing them to recoup the loss of licensing revenue through subscriptions to Microsoft’s online services. But other rumours suggest Microsoft is also pitching it to device manufacturers as a cheaper alternative for those devices where the cost of licensing traditional Windows would severely eat into profit margins due to low retail prices. Microsoft may reduce or even eliminate the licensing cost for devices priced below $249 if they run Windows 8.1 with Bing instead of a full-fat variety; this claim fits nicely with a previous rumour from The Gadget Show that Microsoft were looking at reducing Windows licenses to $15 on such products.

With the system said to be experimental, however – and with Microsoft yet to confirm, deny or even comment on the rumours – there is no guarantee as of yet that Windows 8.1 with Bing could ever become an actual product or is being considered for such. But with Google Chromebooks, Android and Mac OS X all eating into Windows’ market share due to the lack of any licensing costs – though only on older versions, in Mac OS X’s case – it makes sense that Microsoft may be considering such a move to remain relevant in 2014 and beyond. Only time will tell what becomes of these as-yet unconfirmed rumours.

While WhatsApp might be the most popular Mobile Messenger app in most of the world, in Japan there’s another name that’s making waves in the local market. Called Line, it works in a very similar way to WhatsApp; and given its success in its native Japan, the company is now gunning for global growth.

Line’s mission may have just had help in its goal thanks to this week’s occurrences to WhatsApp itself. After selling to Facebook for a proposed $19 billion in combined cash, stock and incentives, WhatsApp’s servers suffered a 210-minute outage that prevented people using the service, which many wrongly interpreted as Facebook either closing or doing behind-the-scenes work on the app following the purchase (more likely it was simply server overload). Following the deal and subsequent outage, Line saw its registered user account increase by over two million users over the next 24 hours, which Line claim is five times its usual user acquisition rate outside its home region of Asia, and specifically in North America, South America and Europe.

Following the news, the CEO of LINE Euro-Americas, Jeanie Han, issued a statement about the increased growth which makes a number of jabs at WhatsApp’s outage:

“Our growth strategy has always included providing a strong network that can handle unplanned and unexpected increases in network traffic … We pride ourselves on providing a safe, secure platform that will always work when our users need it the most.”

But Line isn’t alone in benefitting from WhatsApp’s woes. A third Mobile messaging app, Telegram, saw its user acquisition rate spike 3x after WhatsApp’s Facebook acquisition was announced – propelling it to the top of the App Store rankings and bringing it some 8 million new users in a handful of days. Many other similar apps also saw smaller growth levels, so it seems Mark Zuckerberg’s big spending may once again bite both Facebook and their new acquisition in the ass – at least for now.