City exchange?

[Landdogger 0]

Is there some kind of a city exchange? I'm dying to take a look at some other people's work. Thanks!

[prince_of_sims 0]

no there isn't. with the huge amount of plugins and custom made buildings out there, it just wasnt a feasable idea. games crash when a required plugin is missing, and in order for there to be a city exchange everyone would have to have the exact same plugins, which is just not feasable.

[zzsim 3]

Welcome to Simtropolis Landdogger .  I'm sorry to say that there is no city exchange mainly due to practical reasons.  The main problem is that in order to run some one else's city, you would have to have there plugin folder (contains all of the mods/lots/bats they downloaded and use in their cities) to play the city.  Many peoples plugins folders contain upward of a gig of content, therefore it would not be practical (or possible) to just download them with the city.  However if you are interested in viewing other people's work, check out the city journal section in the forums.  You can view all of the excellent city creations by this sites members.  Its a great area to gain inspiration or learn new building techniques to apply to your own cities.  Hope that explained it clearly.

[Constantina 5]

We've got pre-meade regions in form of maps. I even contributed two of them, which you can find it here.

If we were to have a city exchange, then we have to have strict urles about plugins. They would have to be self-sufficient and have to be tested by a moderator beofre upload. It seems complicated when it comes to this.

[hamsterTK 93]

A city exchange could work, along with the city you would download their plugin folder(s).

The real challenge would be the huge file sizes involved as a huge city with a huge plugins folder could run up to 2 GB.

Something like Bittorrent could be useful for this, however it would have to be seeded on occasion which would become a huge effort as the number of cities available to download got larger and larger.

Lets just say if it was easier it wouldve been done a long time ago.

[Constantina 5]

We consider allowing only individual, self sufficient cities if we had one. Other rules could be:

- The only modd allowed is the Network Addon Modd (NAM)

- Only official Maxis Landmarks from the official SimCIty Website may be used in cities to be uploaded.

I have been recently studying this idea.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Notwithstanding all that, if you just want to see what can be done, go have a look at the City Journals section, here.

[Linda 0]

I would love, love, love to be able to download a functioning Boston(Especially if it included the southern neighborhoods: Dot, Rozzie, JP, Roxbury, etc, and the Northern suburbs of Cambrige and Somerville. )I don't have the patience to build a carefull model of an existing city from a region file (I much prefer experimenting and going off on tangents), but I would love to have a Sim-City Boston to play around with.

Even downloading an STEX-Free version of a real city-- the project of downloading (or creating) BATs for distinctive buildings in the city would be a much more doable project than building the whole city from scratch. (Cities with orthagonal grids wouldn't be *too* hard to do from scratch, but the more irregular ones are harder.)

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Unfortuneately, there is no such thing.  All things being equal, this is a construction game and not a play with finished product game.  Your chances are slim to none.

[zane900 1]

I must comment that you are all wrong in a way. City exchanges are hard to put into action. You need to have a lot of space on your website. That's why very few websites have city exchanges. However, I do know of one site that has a city exchange, and a good one too: Sim City 4 Network is a nice big community like simtropolis here (although it's not "quite" as big with about 20,000 members) and it does have a city exchange, and if I'm right it also has a region exchange. However, I must say, I'm not sure how big the exchange is.

[SC4Noobie 5]

Thats a great link, zane, but IMO, no offence to the site, the cities aren't very goood, with no custom stuff. I'll still download the 2 billion pop city, that's cooool.

[zane900 1]

Yeah, I had a lot of fun wioth that city even though the pop is sort of realistic and I don't know how they got it.

I didn't say the cities were SO good, but they were other people's work, which is what he wanted if I understood his post corectly.