dimensions realism in SC4

[chavez 0]

Good evening SC4 players,

I have SC4 since a few months, but playing just a little, because I am founding very discouraging problem. I mean the realism of the map vs object dimensions.

I found building cities very interesting, but I don't have a good space imagination nor urbanistic knowledge, what I discovered building my first region, never gone beyond a small 30K inhabitians city because always got my city cluttered with too many too complicated streets and the cities always gone disorganized, ugly chaos simply. I saw many beautiful, geniously planned cities here, so I guess such skills are possible to develop. I found that the way of learning some urbanistic strategies is to model the city you know well - your home city.

Ok, enough boring intro, now the actual problem. If I would like to model my own city 1:1 with subarbian areas, it would have to be approx. 20 by 15 kilometers/ 12,5 by 9 miles.

If I assume that one street unit is 10 meters wide including sidewalks and 10 meters long, then the big city square is about 2,5 km². Then to reflect my city I need 8 by 5 large squares. Damn big.

Anybody as any experience how will that consume the power of the Pentium 4 3Ghz computer with 1 GB of DRAM and 256 Megs of video RAM ? Worth to start with at all ?

The second problem is the scale of the objects. For example an airport.

Even a medium real airport has a 2,5 km long runway at least, which is length of entire SC4 city. sounds crappy in regards of this game, does't it. ?

Ok, lets try from different side. I tried to make a large city to reflect a about 5 km² area. What happened ? The north part of my city is seaside with canals and big islands with whole parts of the city. In 2:1 scale the islands detals become impossible to contain important things that is located there in real.

I would like to know how do you, experienced players, deal with the problem.  How do you scale your city ? In regards to the land real dimensions or in regards to game objects ?

Or something between ? What is the golden medium for that problem ?

Help please, because the lack of realism on that field effectively discourages me to play that game,  which I know is great !!

Excuse me my poor english or my ignorance if that subject was discussed.

Greets and have a wonderful weekend guys

[Joe 90 358]

Welcome aboard Chavez!

As you've seen, SC4 isn't perfectly to scale - who wants to see an enormous chunk of land wasted on an airport runway when you can take a few liberties with the scale and still make something that looks good? Airports are a good example - railway grades are also a bit extreme: a realistic railway grade is 5 tiles rise over the width of a large city (256 tiles)!

The map scale is 1 tile = 16x16m, so a large city is near enough to 4x4km. You'll find that almost everything in the game has at least one unrealistic dimension, so the only real advice I can give is to go with what you think looks good, and don't worry so much about the scale. A city covering 8x5 large tiles would have several million inhabitants in game, which is also obviously unrealistic for its size. Have a look at some City Journals to see how others have done it before deciding how big you really want to go. It's more about the scale you set for yourself rather than the game scale.

My rural region has a lot of small towns in it. In real life, they'd be several kilometres apart, but I can get away with having them only 1km or so apart and still make it look realistic. Its all in the eye of the beholder.

As for system resources, I run an 8x8 region on what looks like a similar setup to yours. Mine is mostly rural, which doesn't seem as resource hungry as urban areas, but I reckon you could still do it - just don't expect it to load really fast.

[sebastin 1]

how is it counted that 1 tile is 16x16m? right someone told me it was measured by the length of the automata cars compared to the length of real life cars. LOL!! surely it cant be judged by only that. u need to look the whole game and see what's the average! not only the automata cars!!

LOL

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Halt!  Cease!  Desist!  This is a game.  It was never designed to be realistic in any way except for the illusions of your imagination.  Talking about realism in SC4 and expecting to find it without a lot of messing about is like talking about a faster than light drive.

The grid is 16 x 16m because it is.  No rationale is necessary.

The sprites are way out of proportion to real life.  Most of them are nine feet tall.  This is for visual reasons in the animation.  The eye-candy of the animation is only slightly related to the simulation.

The You Drive It section of the My Sims is very poor.  I don't use it because I don't like the control system.  It is a matter of personal taste.

I also only use the My Sims section occasionally when I need some specific information.  I kill off My Sims when I have no further use for them.  They are a waste of time, generally, IMHO.

If you want a real city simulator for $15 U.S.  I have to tell you that this is impossible.  Such a simulator would cost you several thousands and would not be able to run on a PC.  It would not have pretty graphics, but only statistical outputs and graphs.  It would probably be written by a reliable company like CAE, who do the real aircraft simulation trainers.

[mrbisonm 1,620]

Originally posted by: N_O_Body Halt!  Cease!  Desist!  This is a game.  It was never designed to be realistic in any way except for the illusions of your imagination.

The grid is 16 x 16m because it is.  No rationale is necessary.

  This is for visual reasons in the animation. quote>

 

Well said, so it is exactly only it, a game. To make smaller things visible, you have to enlarge them, and bigger things are made smaller simply to enjoy them also at the same time.

Anybody as any experience how will that consume the power of the Pentium 4 3Ghz computer with 1 GB of DRAM and 256 Megs of video RAM ? Worth to start with at all ?quote>

 

No problemo with a computer like this, I have the same, except 2 gigs of RAM and I am running regions that are 5 times larger than that without troubleshooting.

[chavez 0]

Thank you for your valuable opinions, gentelmen. Yes, I should change my attitude to that game and look at it from some distance in regards of realism. I will try to terraform a big city to a 4x4 km area, before I assumed it 5x5 and some islands came out too small to put some recognizable landmarks on them, like many old town buildings and a part of the highway coming into the town. I think I can build an airport of the tiles and make it close to real scale.