A question about capacities for buildings

[Kell Pollard 0]

Something has been bugging me for years... How are the capacities of SC4 buildings determined?  They never seem to add up correctly.  I see single family houses with 18 people living in them and 43 floor office buildings with 1,000 occupants.  Is there some logic to this?  Here's what's annoying me:

I'm an architect working on a 6 story office building with 30,000SF per floor.  Pretty sizable footprint.  Per the Internation Building Code (which is obviously over cautious) I would end up with a maximum of 400 office employees on each floor assuming that 30% of the floor area was dedicated to bathrooms, stairways, elevators, mechanical rooms, etc.  At six floors, thats 2,400 office workers if the building is 100% occupied.  So how does a 43 story office tower wind up with 1,000 or 2,000 workers?  It seems like the capacities are being skewed in order to force more office buildings into existence.

The reverse is true with residential... I just finished a project for a 4 story loft conversion with 26 units.  In the code world, this building is calculated to have a maximum of 192 occupants in it.  But the actual number of occupants would probably never be more than 2 or 3 per unit (thats 78 residents.) A single family home should contain only a single family right?  Average family size is 4.5 people... definitely not 18.

In the game, these tendencies are reversed... any thoughts?

[bixel 1,221]

Yup, its because of game mechanics, you see if I were to actually make Portland OR (population 450,000) officially in SC4 it would require a GINORMOUS region size, thousands of homes, and all I get is 2 highrise skysrapers and about 10 midrise skyscrapers. Its to basically make players feel they accomplished something so we get residentials that pack em in tighter than a hongkong opium den and office buildings with low occupation count, so we all get to see the goodies.

[spa 968]

As Bixel said Maxis skewed things for the casual player. Sim City wouldn't be that accessible if they did things in a realistic way. Making it realistic would lead to non-stop griping from players about not having highrises since that's what many people play the game for. If it bugs you there are some mods out there that change capacity. There use to be one that halved residental buildings to make them more realistic. I don't know of any that increased office space though.

[Kell Pollard 0]

that kinda takes the realism of the cities out of it... huh? The point is well taken though. However, it would make region play more integral to getting highrise buildings in a major urban center. My current home, Lexington, KY is a large city (area-wise) with a small population of just 350,000 people. It has approximately 5 buildings over 11 stories. There are like 10 smaller cities with no high-rise at all (everything under 5 stories) that support this city. That feels like a good start for a region. And realistic too. As for region size being outrageous... maybe the problem is building scale? Are the single family residences too big for their lots? Should we actually see three or four houses on a 1X1 lot? I'm trying to remember what a 1X1 tile is supposed to be in reality (30' x 30' or 10m x 10m maybe?) I live in a nice neighborhood with homes that would be on 1x2 lots and our lot is average size for a partially urban neighborhood. Lets call it R$$. Some of the houses I see are enormous relative to other structures. We can assume they are large old houses that have been divided into apartments (this happens near colleges and a grand single family house ends up housing 12 or more students. But that would be the result of property degradation rather than design. Some of the houses on 2x2 and 3x3 lots are the size of apartment buildings with the occupants to match but they are designed like a single family house which should actually house 4.5 people unless some slumlord bought it and turned it into apartments lowering the value of the building and the neighborhood. Most low density residential buildings that are multifamily are the two, maybe three-story variety that crop up near single family housing... each building occupying a 1x2 or 1x3 space on a lot. I've seen a lot of those go up in single family home areas filling a 1x2 or 1x3 lot that used to contain a house. Mostly they are R$ type.

Maybe the idea is that you can get more detail at the closest zooms if the building sizes are exagerated? Maybe we just need more realistic low and medium density apartment buildings of all wealth levels. The residential building I mentioned above sits on about a 2x3 lot. It's definitely not a house and it actually houses more than many lots with 2x3 footprints. Are we just asking too much of our suburban style lots? You can put in a lot of sprawl, but those properties cannot support even a small city by themselves. There has to be buildings of higher density. I suppose if you had to account for all the apartments above urban businesses in mixed-use buildings that cannot be shown in the game, you could get them back into the population by adding them to other residential lots but that screws up the travel dynamics as they wouldn't be commuting that far in reality. *sigh*

Are there better solutions to this dilemma?

[Kell Pollard 0]

Originally posted by: spa There use to be one that halved residental buildings to make them more realistic. I don't know of any that increased office space though.quote>

I'll look for the one to 1/2 residential... but I guess it seemed like the low density lots were taking the biggest hit in exageration.  I'm much more optimistic about the numbers for denser lots.  The problem with office space might be the opposite that the number of people who work in a high rise is lower  than it should be while a low or medium denisty commercial lot is more accurate.  It'd be hard to make blanket adjustments to all residential and commercial lots... is there a guide for BATers on how to determine the number of occupants in a building they've designed?  Or do people usually wing it?

[spa 968]

At first people really did wing it for the most part and it was difficult because everything had to be put into hexes. It wasn't a simple matter of making adjustments. Adding to the problem is there really were no reference points for batters to know what stats were fitting. The result is that a lot of older buildings have hopelessly skewed stats that range from outright cheats in disguise to deadweight because of, most commonly, outrageous garbage consumption (T-Wrecks did a overhaul of a lot of popular older buidlings by providing new desc files). After the BAT was first released several editors were invented to streamline stat editing, but the real opening of realistic stats to the masses came with the SC4 Tool since it's easy to use and uses actual values not obsecure hex values. The general point of the SC4 Tool is that it lets you edit your stats while using Maxis buildings as a reference. So now custom buildings are more in line with Maxis stats. This makes custom content fit more seemlessly into the game. Stats are better now, but not better in the way you're asking. They're better at conforming to Maxis's set distortions! Given the way most people play the game, this is probably for the best since it keeps the balance, even if the numbers are skewed relative to the real world.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

When I mod a new building I get by e.g. the BATters of the Hong Kong / Asia BAT Team, I first make a totally designless and unmodded landmark lot for it. Then I decide what to make it - CO$$$, CO$$ or whatever. Once that decision is made, I use the Maxis buildings as props to put props of similar Maxis buildings next to my building to be modded until I find some that are of similar size. Then I use eiter SC4Tool or a site made by simforum.de member to identify the Maxis buildings and see their stats. At this point, I whip up the final stats, enter them into my database (one more set of reference stats!), and finally make the desc files using the plugin manager.

Needless to say, I don't worry about realism at all. I couldn't care less about realism because I don't mod for real life, I mod for a game. All I care for is that the stats will fit the rest of the game , nothing else.

[Kell Pollard 0]

That makes perfect sense to work within the game's reality. As an architect who computes realworld occupancies for buildings on a daily basis, that issue has always annoyed my professional sensibilities but, knowing that Maxis has set the standards for gameplay differently helps me get a hold of my geeky tendency to nitpick. I had been playing with converting some of my work related models to GMAX and when I looked at the occupancy I submitted for a building permit compared to the game standards. I kept thinking something was off and now I know why I think it's off... it is! Thanks for talking sense to me.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Hehehe, no problem. I guess when you know something about a certain topic, you sometimes want to cringe at seeing how amateurishly and inaccurately that topic is handled in other contexts. I suppose a real sailor will be between tears and laughter when he sees a pirate movie and realizes that all the names of sails and different types of ships are totally wrong.

[Andreas Roth 604]

Hehe, that's true indeed. Whenever I see a starry night in a movie, the constellations are plain wrong, and often you hear something like "Look, there's Cygnus, the Swan, and over there is Orion, the Hunter!" - which is impossible, since the Swan is a summer constellation, whereas Orion only shows in winter...