It's a blessing and a curse that in Skylines, you have to manually draw your own subway and bus lines. in SC4, you could plop them just about anywhere and they'd be used, and the game would figure out all of the messy mechanics by itself. 

In my skylines cities, I usually plop 2-4 subway stations in each district, depending on the size. People in this game seem to be willing to walk much further than the sims in SC4 were willing to walk.

I then draw a couple of generic large loops through the entire city first, each one taking slightly different side routes and stops. I then draw smaller north-south and east-west loops that are more localized, and hope that the CIMS just switch lines when they need to. Oh, and I found out the hard way, they all have to be in a loop, or else the line doesn't run at all. 

Bus lines are even more challenging for me, because you have to place the bus stops on a good, high capacity road. I've seen traffic jams putting them on side streets. 

Anyone got any tips on this regard? It's been a bit challenging for me so far. Otherwise, a fantastic game.

I've been playing Skylines quite a bit these past couple of weeks. And honestly, it's by far the best city builder I've ever played. And it absolutely blows SC4 out of the water.

My computer, however, is a toaster. It's a 2012 MacBook Pro with Intel HD 4000 graphics. This is basically one of the lower end Intel graphics chipsets, and newer CPUs have better integrated graphics than mine does. However, being that Cities Skylines specifically states that Intel graphics are not supported, I was worried the game would be rendered unplayable on my computer. This isn't so much the case. I can report it does in fact run, and it's definitely playable. And enjoyable. Even on larger cities, it renders about 15 FPS, which isn't unplayable for the type of game that it is.

I cranked all the graphics settings down to their lowest settings, disabled anti-aliasing, and set the resolution to 1024x640. I use a dynamic resolution mod that scales the UI resolution to its native resolution for the display, and only renders the game itself at a lower resolution, so I don't necessarily notice the dropped resolution as much. If you're playing on an older computer, this is an absolute must, and makes the game much more enjoyable. 

Also, despite having to crank all the graphics settings down to their lowest values, the texture quality itself doesn't seem to affect the frame rate significantly. I cranked the textures up to Medium with no noticeable effect on the framerate. Doing this helps the graphics quality a bit.

Doing this, I consistently get 15-20 FPS in smaller cities, and about 10-15 FPS in larger cities. I'm currently building a 5 tile city with 70K residents (relatively large city for Skylines), and my computer is still keeping up. I would say the frame rates are better when you zoom out a bit. Once you zoom in at street level on a larger city, your frame rates drop to about 10-12. It is laggy, yes. But not unplayable.

That being said, these aren't amazing stats by comparison. Someone who has played with a better card would find it unbearably low. For me personally, I find that despite it feeling a bit choppy at times, it truly is not too bad. Again, for the type of game that this is, lower framerates aren't a drag, and it's still very enjoyable to play. And it can handle large cities without too much trouble. The gameplay itself is so awesome that it more than makes up for subpar frame rates. 

So, if you've got an old computer with intel HD graphics or something similar, don't let that scare you away from playing the game. If you take a little bit of care with the graphics settings and you keep your expectations realistic, the game will still not fail to impress you, even on an older computer. Any Intel processor 3rd generation or newer should be able to handle it.

Also, if you have anything newer than a 3rd generation CPU (e.g. 4th or 5th generation or newer) - the graphics chipsets are vastly improved in these. It can handle higher resolutions on my backup computer with a 4th gen i5 and HD 4600 graphics. My 2018 MacBook Air (with HD 617 graphics) could handle the game very well and consistently maintained 30+ frames per second on medium graphics settings. This post describes performance on the older generations of integrated graphics. The newer ones are definitely decent performers on the game and will sustain 20-30+ frames per second on moderate graphics settings.

Now I am rarely on Facebook  these days I know a few people who use it but its not the same like it used to be like for ie Facebook people used to come online to chat with other people and make new friends nowadays Facebook their are barely any users online and or even chatting with each other. Instagram is most active social media alongside SnapChat. Does anyone have the same issue with Facebook or just me?

Hello King45Gamer here I heard of this forum a while ago on icyboards and FP but I decided to register now.

so for a long time I've had an interest in both the paranormal and space, especially astrobiology, what's actually real and known possibilities.

that being said there's a huge unknown since we've really only found partial evidence for ET's on titan, that being some kinda microbe using processes beyond us to consume in methane, ethane, and other natural gasses and expel hydrogen.

so yeah let's keep this on topic, if you want to discuss UFO's and the like, keep it to known science etc, or setup a separate thread for the more paranormal side of things.

that being said, the possibilities of UFO's and such and likely technologies is fine, just as long as it doesn't drift too far off topic, being possibilities and what we know of so far.


now that all this is out of the way here's the facts as I understand them.

Life can probably form with more than just carbon based neuclaic acids with carbon being one of the easiest building blocks.

for life you need a molecule than can form complex structures, and some sort of solvent to help shape/disrupt it.

for water based solubility you have Carbon, Silicon, Sulfer, Boranes, arsenic, phosphorus, and metalic composites.

for solvents you also have ammonia, methane, hydrocarbons, Hydrogen sulfate and hydrogen fluoride.

there's more but these are some of the more common elements based on what we know and understand from studying life on earth.

for example, there are fungi and algae that are arsenic based.

early in earth's history life forms existed that expelled oxygen and consumed Carbon di-oxide and methane which made up the atmosphere of early earth, these were the first life forms.

you can also use acids and things in place of more typical solvents.

so yeah you can even make life using battery acid of all things... provided you have the right complex molecules to bond with it.

please note, the "habitable zone" is a region where liquid water can exist in orbit of a star on a planet, thus allowing life similar to earth norms provided the right conditions are present.

this is a huge topic but I wanted to start with the basics for anyone interested.

Anyone else watching the Women's World Cup?

Exciting games so far! Most are on Fox or Fox Sports. Also can bee seen on Hulu apparently.

US plays on Tuesday. Watching England vs. Scotland right now.

Five years ago, phones were considerably restricted in their performance compared to their desktop counterparts. It used to be the case that raw computing power belonged to more capable devices, ones that could cool off high-power intel CPUs with larger fans and larger batteries. 

Today, this is not so much the case. Apple’s custom CPU designs are so powerful that they can literally outperform virtually any dual-core intel processor made to date. That is with turbo boost, significantly higher TDPs, full fan-cooled designs, hyper threading, and of course much higher clock speeds. The phone in your pocket can outperform almost all of them without a hitch, and that’s with a 2.5 GHZ CPU with a ~3 watt TDP. 

Apple has done a fantastic job of designing these new processing chips, and one of the latest rumors is that they will be designing these chips for Mac computers in the near future. Although this would break compatibility with current x86 compiled code, this would still be revolutionary because these chips would not only be more powerful, but they’d be much lower-powered as well, allowing for significant battery gains. 

But how is this done? How can a tiny, fanless cell-phone CPU outperform a beauty Intel dual core counterpart? Well, the secret lies in a number of factors, but one of them is in the term RISC, which stands for reduced instruction set computer. Modern X86 based processors are known as CISC, or complex instruction set computers. These processors have thousands of instructions. There is very deep circuitry involved in decoding them, and once they are decoded, they are actually turned into micro ops (or uops for short), which comprise a much simpler execution structure that is actually sent to the processors execution units. All of this decoding requires power and circuity. Intel processors actually decode their CISC instructions into simpler instructions on the fly, which somewhat resemble RISC instructions once they are decoded and executed. 

The difference is that RISC processors have code that is already compiled in this simpler format. x86 CPUs require heavily logical circuitry to decode these instructions real-time.

The origins of the Apple CPU.

Apple CPUs have always been ARM based rather than x86 based. ARM is an entirely different architecture, with radically different design principles. Interestingly enough, ARM, as a company, does not actually manufacture its chips. They merely design them, and allow individual manufacturers to license them and to manufacture (or modify) them as they please. Because of this, there is actually quite a large degree of variety in the ARM CPU market. ARM CPUs are common. Virtually every cell phone and tablet, and most cromebooks and a few laptops are powered by them. Despite their variety, they have a strictly defined instruction set, and one ARM CPU is binary-compatible with another. 

However, ARM CPUs are designed for extremely low power consumption and for high efficiency, which differs principally from x86 based designs. They are designed not necessarily for performance, but for efficiency. There are not many complex instructions that must be decoded into simpler instructions. Instead, the entire binary that gets sent to the processor has already been decoded into these simpler instructions by the compiler. There are generally more of these instructions, making binaries larger, but they are significantly easier to decode in the processor, thus saving time and power in the process. 

This, of course, is an incredibly simplistic explanation for just one of the reasons why ARM CPUs are much lower in their power consumption. In reality, there are a variety of reasons for this, many of which go beyond the scope of this post. Of course, the comparison between CISC and RISC goes beyond the scope of this article in many other ways as well, as there are actually advantages to both. For example, because CISC processors can accomplish more in fewer instructions, there is often an advantage of less memory traffic to worry about. ARM CPUs require more cache to mitigate some of this. 

However, as evidenced by the benchmarks performed on Apple’s implementations of the ARM architecture, ARM does have a lot of potential, and quite a bit of room to grow. And Apple’s A11 and A12 are the first implementations of the ARM architecture that have been able to outperform Intel CPUs in a significant capacity. 

Why are these CPUs so fast?

Well, Apple hasn’t published a whole lot of information regarding the specifics of their architecture. Little is known about many of the deeper workings of the processors, but we do know a few things that may point to why these processors excel in benchmarks. 

• These processors have a massive 8MB L2 cache on-chip. 
  
• These processors are incredibly wide architectures. So wide that no desktop CPU is even in the same class. 
  
• Due to their wide architecture, these processors can decode 7 instructions in a single clock cycle, and dispatch them to any of 13 execution units. For comparison, intel’s modern processors (6th generation and newer) can decode 5 instructions every cycle, and send them to 8 different execution units. 
  

Quote:A = someMath
If (E = 5): 
...A = 1
Else:
A = 5
B = A + 1
C = sqrt(B) 
D = C - 3
E = D
E = D + 1

Most of us probably remember the "blazing fast" pentium 4 CPUs that debuted in the early 2000s. By today's standards, they would barely handle any modern system if at all. Even on a single core, modern CPUs are several orders of magnitude faster. The pentium 4 was especially controversial because its architecture was heavily refactored from earlier generations (Pentium 3 and below) for exactly one purpose: to achieve the highest clock speed possible, largely for marketing purposes. This was actually done at a considerable performance penalty on a clock per clock basis. As a result, at the same clock speed, a Pentium 3 would considerably outperform a pentium 4. They were only faster because they could clock to 3GHZ and beyond, where the original Pentium 3 could only clock up to ~1GHZ or so.

This architecture was, as history has shown, released during a time when Intel was having quite a bit of trouble determining where they were going, and they were still figuring out the process of building a good processor. At the time, P4 based systems were fast, but they have not stood the test of time. Today, the pentium 4 is known as perhaps the biggest architectural flop in the company's history. It had enormous power consumption, heat generation, and was very slow on a clock-for-clock basis compared to every single architecture that came after it, and most of the architectures that preceded it. However, because it was the first processor from Intel to go far beyond the 1GHZ barrier and to go to 3 GHZ and beyond, it was still an important piece of Intel’s processor history. 

TL;DR: The pentium 4 was fast because it ran on uncharted territory and explored high clock speeds for the first time in intel's history. However, it was an architectural nightmare, was highly inefficient, and created an unholy amount of heat with unrealistic power consumption. It was an incredibly poor design, and was completely scrapped when Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo series, basing these new processors on the Pentium 3 architecture instead.

The original Pentium 4 was better than the revised versions that followed it.

Usually, when you revise a processor, the new one is supposed to be better than the one it is supposed to replace. With Pentium 4’s, this was not the case. The original Pentium 4 Northwood (edit: willamette, then northwood) cores were still considered decent for their time. They were fast, could reach high clock speeds, and were quickly a hit for the time. Despite having a worse clock-for-clock performance over a pentium 3, the higher clock speeds quickly made up for the difference. 

 A few years later, intel created a new version of the architecture revision known as Prescott to replace Northwood in all Pentium 4 CPUs. In the history of Intel processors, this is known as one of the worst revisions that the company has ever made. It was so bad that these Prescott CPUs actually generated more heat, required more power, and literally performed worse than the Northwood CPUs they were designed to replace. The goal was to clock the Prescott cores higher than their Northwood counterparts to offset this balance. However, the Prescott cores were so inefficient compared to the Northwood cores that it was highly impractical to raise the clock speeds high enough to offset this performance difference. Almost all Prescott cores, even when clocked higher than the old cores, were considerably slower than the old Pentium 4’s. Often the performance difference was 15% or more. 

Why would a newer core be slower?

The reason for this was primarily because of a term that is somewhat elusive in processor architectures, and that is pipelining. It may seem that a longer pipeline is better, but this is usually not the case. The pentium 3 CPUs had a pipeline of about 10 stages. The original Northwood Pentium 4's had a pipeline of about 20 stages. The Prescott Pentium 4 chips had a pipeline of about 31. Modern intel CPUs, for comparison, have pipelines of about 14-19 stages. Much better. In general, the longer the pipeline is, the slower the processor is. However, longer pipelines are often used to increase clock speeds, and shorter pipelines can't as easily achieve this.

But what is a pipeline? 

It turns out that CPU’s do not actually complete a single instruction in a single clock cycle. It takes many cycles to fully complete execution of an instruction. The instruction has to be loaded from cache (clock cycles), decoded (usually a few cycles), executed (at least one, sometimes several cycles), and written back to the registers and memory. The reason some of these operations take several cycles is because of complex gate circuitry in the processor. It takes time for a transistor to flip states from one state to another, and if you have very deep logic circuitry in a stage, a processor won't be able to reach high clock speeds because each stage will take too long to complete. 

A pipeline splits these instruction logic processes into a series of much simpler steps that can be completed much more quickly. Each step represents one clock cycle, and with smaller steps, the processor can reach much higher clock speeds. A pipeline loads many instructions at once in an assembly line fashion. As a result, even though a single instruction may take ~20 cycles to execute, the processor is also working on 20 instructions at any given time, so the effective result is that one instruction is still done every clock cycle. 

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_(computing)]Wikipedia[/url] has a much better explanation for this than I could provide here.

So why are longer pipelines slower if they are constantly being fed with instructions anyway?

The problem is the unruly branch statement. Consider the following code for a second here: 

So Great news guys!

I don't know if anyone remembers or played sim copter back in the day, but someone finally made it work on modern systems by literally creating their own patch!

http://simcopter.net/index.html

also they plan to update streets of simcity as well, this is super exciting, I loved both of these games back in the day and I'm super stoked to be able to play them again without them crashing on anything but my Pentium III!

Hey so has anyone heard or looked into the history of the Blue Öyster Cult's music and the story behind their strange esoteric lyrics?

apparently it was all either taken from or inspired by an unpublished work by Sandy Pearlman who in turn went on to become the manager of said band.

it's all really interesting stuff with the original being inspired by the works of HP lovecraft, various religions, and history as a whole.

I mean listen to this piece from their 1988 album imaginos


it's really actually kinda fascinating the story it tells when you really start listening to their work and finding the plot threads.

as near as I can tell it's a story involving aliens, psychic energy, a supernaturally empowered cult, and the world wars which were caused by a kind of psychic backlash leftover from medieval/colonial Europe.