Choosing City Tiles?

[Something_started 5]

Is it possible to have a mod for this game where you can "draw" your city tiles? And make them not square, more like real shapes. or make the region bigger. ect.?

[jplumbley 5]

Not possible. A square is a real shape. MAXIS will probably never differ from the Square city tiles, because it uses a x,y coordinate location system for the tiles and what is in them.

[Karybdis 34]

Well, they might drop the squares altogether and just have one giant region, but then that giant region would just be square

Anyways, as we can see from socieities, Simcity isn't Maxis anymore, and there doesn't appear to be a region or neighbours anymore, so its kind of a moot point.

And yes you can make the region bigger. You just edit the config.bmp in the region directory, and make it bigger (and then fill with the coloured pixels of your choice for the various sized cities)

[warrior 169]

So if we could edit the x,y we could change the size of the grid? But let me guess it's in the EXE?

[jplumbley 5]

@Warrior  The 3 sizes 256, 512 and 1024 squares per city tile in width are controlled by the EXE.  These are logical choices because Binary and Hex math have these numbers in common for threshold numbers.  Everyone knows 256 = 11111111 in Binary and FF in HEX.  If we had access to the EXE then maybe we could change these values to include 2048 or 4096, but imagine playing on a city with 16 Large City tiles, the lag would be horrendous since it already gets laggy in one large city tile.  So, to be honest right now this will never happen because its in the EXE but it wouldnt be too practicle either to increase the large city tile because each new increment will increase the tile size by 4x.

What we have is what we get.

[warrior 169]

Oh right, I thought this was city tiles as in tiles in a city.

[Something_started 5]

this is city tiles. not tiles in a city. the big picture. not the little things, the little things would not be possible.

here is how they are now; obviusly

This is what I was talking about. sorry It is kinda hard to draw on the computer, and use the right angles that match but I'm sure this is still understandable.

[jplumbley 5]

I have already answered that question. And no it is not possible for the reason I posted already in this thread. SC4 uses an x,y coordinate system. X,Y grids are square, meaning no strange shapes. You cannot have 2 grids overlaying each other using the same tiles.

What you have is what you get.

[Something_started 5]

oh. my bad. I didn't understand what you said last time. well that stinks.

[Ari Rahikkala 0]

Fundamentally, if you're happy with weak and inconsistent game features, and maybe a slight decrease in performance, it's quite simple to restrict the simulation to an arbitrarily shaped area. It doesn't even take much memory - in fact, at the simplest, one bit in the map array (i.e. one bit per tile), to tell whether you're allowed to modify that tile or not, suffices. You'd probably actually want something more like a byte to actually tell which region the tile belongs to, though, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Most of the simulation would remain easy to code. The actual rendered area would be best kept square or at least rectangular to make playing near the edge of your playable area look nicer. This means that the visible area would be larger than the playable area.

So as you see, while there are technical hurdles to playing irregularly-shaped maps, they're a lot more complex than the ones mentioned so far in this thread, and they're intertwined with concerns of economy (of Maxis), user interface and game rules. It's not that it's impossible, it's that adding this feature would have been a rather unwise decision. Note that with "unwise" I don't mean "obviously wrong", only that a company like Maxis wants to play it safe with their cash cow and not introduce too many changes which might have unexpected consequences. Especially not changes that, like this, would have to be made very early on in development due to the way they affect everything in the design and code.

SimCity 4's mechanics of city interaction are, to be honest, rather weak. Pollution doesn't pass city borders, commuters can path from one city to another but tend to lose a lot of their (already rather limited intelligence) when they do that, and of course there's the whole matter of cities staying in a frozen state when you're not playing them (which allows you to do things like use one as a garbage dump for hundreds of years for a pittance). The game itself remains quite compelling, though, as you can largely ignore these issues: Either ignore the problem with pollution or handle it in whatever way you find most compelling (don't pollute at city borders? Match up industrial areas with industrial areas, etc.?), don't create traffic networks with features like commuters having to pass through another city to get to their job (well, that's a good idea even in real life...), don't abuse the city-freezing rule, etc..

With irregularly-shaped cities, all of these issues become.. a lot more complicated. First and foremost, do you run the simulation in the entire visible area or just the playable area? If the former, how do you reconcile the changes occurring in the simulation to the other cities in the visible area once you switch to playing one of them? If a disaster strikes or spreads to the other city, who foots the rebuilding bill? What happens at the edge of the visible map anyway (this is equivalent to the question of what happens at the edge of the map in SC4, only even more difficult to answer)? If you choose to run the simulation in just the playable area, on the other hand... how do you handle traffic that might go through another city in the visible area? How do you handle the disparity in the development of the visible areas? Do kids get to walk over the border to the school that's plainly visible five meters away?

(and if you decide after reading that paragraph that it would be a good idea to have the visible area == the playable area... well, now you still have the same problems with city interaction as SC4 does, only they're more complex now especially since you might have situations where the best choice to route traffic around your city *would* be through another city. Oh, and screenshots at the edges of cities start looking really weird.)

That's not even considering the issues that actually arise when you consider actual map editing at city borders. Do you allow the player to raise and lower land behind a city's border? If not, you end up either completely unable to affect land height at a city's border (which will, due to the inflexibility of the smoothing feature, cause problems when you try to add traffic connections - how many times have you had to demolish an object that fixed its tile's height just to connect a street to an adjacent tile?)... or, alternatively, with a situation analogous to SC4's: You can pile up land or dig a hole on your side of the border but it doesn't affect the other side at all unless you click on reconcile edges when you go to the other side (and considering how buggy this feature is, using it with irregularly-shaped cities would probably end up demolishing the whole city). If you do allow the player to do it, well, that's a whole other can of worms to open..

Of course, we have a lot of people here on this forum who try to make their cities look realistic even at city borders. I can appreciate that they'd love this feature, especially if the visible area were larger than the playable area, as they could deal with all of the infelicities caused by the feature and be helped by seeing the other side of the border they're working on.

Cliff's notes: It could have been done. It'd have dozens of possibly negative consequences, and maybe one or two positive consequences, that only the kind of people who post on simtropolis.com would appreciate anyway.

[Something_started 5]

you missed my point. or i didn't put it on here, and yes i read that FREEKIN HUGE paragraph, with big *ss words and stuff.

well, dont we have a whole region terraformer? if we use that then we dont have to worry about them darn reinconal buttions. what in the world are you talking about the schools? off topic a bit much eh? but then again, i dont realy worry if people walk to school or skip town to go to another job.

i got what you said about the idea of maxis changing the game and why it might not get successfull, which is understandable. but this is simtropolis, not maxis. so if something doesn't work then it could easly be changed (maybe) and then re-released. (do you realy have to use such big words?)

besides it was just an idea... i dont know much .exe or sim city codes (any at that i think) so i wouldn't know what would work or what wouldn't. thanks for... explaining that.... in that way (i think).

are you smart, Ari Rahikkala?

EDITED PART:       i wasn't being sarcastic on the "are you smart" you must be, but i kinda didn't understand as much as i had hoped for because of all of your big words usage! um... ok then.