Until you’ve read this article. It’s from Ray Mazza, who was on the Sims team. He has created the easel for both the Sims 2 and 3. His article gives an interesting view on how it works and how much work has gone into it!

One of the quandaries we had on The Sims 3 was a goal of making a deeper and more interesting game than The Sims 2, with more content to explore, but without an infinite budget and schedule (go figure).

I was emotionally attached to the easel because I’d programmed it in The Sims 2. It was a great object. I may have been in love with it. So I wanted to design an easel and painting skill worthy of players’ lofty expectations in The Sims 3.

@simcity: We’re focusing on The PC release of Sim City to make sure we bring you an awesome game. We have nothing to announce on the MAC front.

If the game will be ported by another company (like Aspyr) is not yet known.

Unfortunatelly for our English visitors the special is entirely in Dutch without subtitles, but if you are Dutch or if you can understand Dutch, it’s an interesting watch!

At GDC the Maxis team showed off their new game engine for SimCity, called the GlassBox engine. A visitor of the presentation has captured some video of it, which shows that this engine brings some pretty cool and unique gameplay with it. Check out the video’s below (thanks to SimPrograms).

And here are the results from the previous poll:
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Now that the trailer of the new SimCity has been released, we’re able to spot some of the features the game might get. One of the things I happened to notice is near the end of the trailer: something seems to be launching into the air in the back…

If you look closely, it looks an awful lot like one of the Arcologies from SimCity 2000!

Arcologies were one of the ultimate goals to achieve in SimCity 2000. They’re basically huge buildings able to house a complete self-sustaining city. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to build them right away. You’d first need a city with a population of at least 120,000 and enough funding to get these things constructed.

One of the arcologies was called the ‘launch arco’, which resembled a space ship. Once you’ve built 450 of those in your city, a message would appear saying ‘The exodus has begun’. Shortly after that all the launch arco’s ‘launched’ one by one into space (or rather exploded into space, since there wasn’t a launch animation) then another message would pop up, saying ‘Your launch arcos have departed into space to find new worlds. You have been compensated for the construction.’, which was basically an ‘ending’ to the game. Though you’d still be able to go on with your city.

Here’s what it looked like:

So hopefully, we might see a comeback of these awesome buildings which made SC2000 so great.

With the announcement of a new SimCity, EA has also release the first trailer of the game. Plus an insider look at the announcement.

With the announcement of a new SimCity, EA has also release the first pieces of concept art of the game.