SimCity E3 trailer and screens show off tilt-shifted simulation, a purple monster

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Education connection

This is more like it -- a quaint college town. And look at all those little people. According to Lead Designer Stone Librande, the GlassBox engine can simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time. They live based on flowchart logic: Do I have money? I'll go shopping. Am I broke? I'll find a job. Are there no jobs? I'll go to the park. And so on.

Like buildings, Quigley says that rendering all these little citizens required some vaguely-stated optimization cleverness: “For the Sims, we've come up with this rendering technique, where they look fully 3D—they're lit, they're animated, they're full-on models—but a technique where we can render them in the thousands.”