Unlimited City Size

[bluespottedhorse 49]

I'd be interested to know if anything is in the works to address the issue of city size.  The largest city in SC4 is only 4km x 4km.  If the size was unlimited can you imagine how cool our cities would be.  I'd still be playing it if it was.

[Vahr 341]

Nope, EXE locked... the usual legal stuff.

In short, no and probably not for a very very very long time.

[The Aberdonian 0]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

I'd be interested to know if anything is in the works to address the issue of city size.  The largest city in SC4 is only 4km x 4km.  If the size was unlimited can you imagine how cool our cities would be.  I'd still be playing it if it was.quote>

I thought so as well but I think, that even if that could be realised, we would face performace issues at some stage. Even on my system with 3gb RAM, I notice a difference in the performance of a city with 1,000 and one with 100,000 inhabitants. Imagine how much RAM a region of 40 square kilometers would need.

In general I would like to have such a playable massive city as well. I now play a big region and it would be great if it would be one city but I think standart computer systems won't be able to handle that.

The region play has a lot of disadvantages like the pollution which does not drift. Also a region of even 40 square kilometers would be fine with having just one International airport serving everything. Also two or three nuclear power plants would be able to provide energy for the entire region.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

I keep contacting EA to release a new version of SC4 using the original code and upgrading it. I think it would be a win win for everyone.

Hum...my system works fine. There shouldn't be any slowdown if you have a decent video card.

[masochist 111]

It's not the video card, it's the amount of processes that a huge city has to calculate: this building growing here will generate this amount of jobs and cause this amount of traffic on this, this and this street and decrease demand this much and require this many more sims to move and will get rid of this many jobs; this school will provide this much increase in EQ which will attract this many highly-educated sims which will increase demand for $$$-buildings which will then...see what I mean?

It can really slow even a high-end computer down to have a full large city with all those people and all those calculations to be made. Imagine having 100x that much room in a city and filling it up...it'd take a real-life month to get through a game month (exaggerating, of course, but you get the idea).

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

I keep contacting EA to release a new version of SC4 using the original code and upgrading it. I think it would be a win win for everyone.quote>

Contact them all you want, they ain't gonna do it. Besides, most of the debugging from the game is done by tweaking, not to mention the custom content out there makes the game complete. That's random though.

Anyway, really the only setback to this is computers. Maybe if you had a 50 ghz CPU it may be a good idea. Besides that, the game lags bad enough anyway.

Really the things in the game that people think that shouldn't have been there or stuff that needs to be modded (or wants to be modded), is not for our own good. A city that is 20x20 miles, if my XP system still worked, would be a toad to build on.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

Sorry 'masochist' but it's more the Videocard than the city size when your relating it to an older game such as SC4. The requirements are nothing compared to newer 3d games. As I said before, I don't have any lags or slowdowns on my system with a 1 gig card which is not a high end machine to say the least, just up to date. Now if as you say the city is 100x larger then even Nasa computers would choke. But I don't see their being a problem with a city being maybe...5x5 large cites. At least that would give you a city of 20km by 20km.

[Vahr 341]

The video card isn't really terribly important in a game like SC4, the graphics are highly optimized and you're only rending a small portion at a time.

What is important is the memory size and processing. As the city size increases, the amount of calculations required grows exponentially. You don't just add a constant rate (and end up with a straight line on a graph that slopes upwards), you get a curve, that gets steeper as you go.

Now lets look at a large city. 256 tiles x 256 tiles. That's 65536 tiles (tiles #0 to tile #65535 - which also, by the way, the highest a WORD (2 bytes - 16 bits) datatype can represent). SC4's savegame format addresses each tile using a 2 byte ID, so there's one issue right there, as you're already at the limit of addressing.

Secondly, if we multiply each dimension by 5 to get your 5x5 large tile number, thats... 1280 tiles per side, or 1638400 tiles total. That's a 25 fold increase in the number of tiles. You could say "oh, just push some calculations onto another CPU." SC4 cannot use multiple CPUs, it must reside on a single processor. That's due to how the game must schedule each simulation "engine" to work in sync. And as such, we cannot "mod" larger cities from both a performance standpoint and from a moddability standpoint - you'd have to edit the exe, which we cannot do.

The requirements are nothing compared to newer 3d games.

quote>

That's because Maxis was optimizing the game as best as possible to run on a 2003 spec computer. And yet, they barely made those. Heck, these days, running a large city with a large amount of plugins (often 3GB+) are still difficult for even today's high end computers.  Plus, if you think about it, if you look at a full 3D game of today, you notice that there's a lot of "kludging" going on. If you look closely, the detail level compared to SC4 for running at the same performance, SC4 outperforms most other games, only at the loss of a free camera.

As one software engineer/game developer put it - you can only have great graphics with either a limited view or high requirements, or cruddy graphics with free look or lower requirements.

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: Blue Lightning

Secondly, if we multiply each dimension by 5 to get your 5x5 large tile number, thats... 1280 tiles per side, or 1638400 tiles total. That's a 25 fold increase in the number of tiles. You could say "oh, just push some calculations onto another CPU." SC4 cannot use multiple CPUs, it must reside on a single processor. That's due to how the game must schedule each simulation "engine" to work in sync. And as such, we cannot "mod" larger cities from both a performance standpoint and from a moddability standpoint - you'd have to edit the exe, which we cannot do.

quote>

Yes, and imagine the bloat of 1638400 tiles on a single CPU. My old XP system has a AMD Athlon XP (1.6ghz), it couldn't handle barely anything I did in the game. When I first established a town that was a different story, but as you climed the rung up onto 100,000 residents (possibly lower), the game lagged extremely bad. You know, if you chose a city tile that was 20x20 and you tried to load 100,000 residents on it with my old system, that may be just as bad as a CPU stress test, and that old processor had a hard enough time running 3 programs at once!!! It has hard enough time running SC4 anyway without bogging down.

Now I am temporarly stuck with my dad's computer (2 CPUs) and I run SC4 on both cores and it runs fine, but that is because I run through command line and run it raw without any plugins due to circumstances. Alas it still lags. Maybe not as bad, but it still lags. I even overclock it and it lags! BOTH cores!

And imagine the folks with 3, 4, 5 GB of addons. That just adds to the stress.

So as you can well imagine, even if law or other circumstances allowed us to hack the EXE, it wouldn't be worth it anyway. Also imagine the annoying CTD that might come of it.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

But I can hope though. EA never comes back with a straight answer anyway...even if they were working on it.

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

But I can hope though. EA never comes back with a straight answer anyway...even if they were working on it.quote>

If you want unlimited city size though, have fun with it. Really it seems fun at first, but looking back on the stuff EA left out of the game, it may be good that they did. Before I learned all about computing I never knew this would be a hindrance. But should they do it, everyone would try it, and within a week, they'd be back to the plain SC4 once they find out that playing the game, lagging, and CTD and all that becomes unbearable.

Also tha'd be like running an old CPU at 100% for 2 hours straight, which is the amount of time I play SC4 a day. That would result in a short lived CPU, might as well run the piece of green metal to a breaking point while it is at it. I know technology is extremely advanced, but they haven't invented 50ghz processors yet.

[nycsc4 5,250]

I always thought that region play would be awesome too. But after playing this game for so many years, I hate to say it, it would be worthless. I run about 4GB of plugins right now (adding new ones daily) and my biggest city (Vancouver BC, large city tile, only half built up) already takes like 5 min to load, and I have CTD all the time, because the entire city is plopped with custom content (no Maxis, except for the plop maxis mod) I don't grow anything. Could you imaging loading the millions of props, bats, lots, and little details on every building and everything else for a 5x5 city tile. I have a brand new MacBook Pro state of the art and I can't even get the game to stop lagging. Region play is just a dream!

[Tysons4 68]

you can make regions pretty big, so what i would want is extra region tools; like data views for the region (traffic, garbage, education) and maybe a zoom feature.... keep the same size city tiles and when you go into a tile it would be like editing mode and when you go to region view you can see how your newly incoporated city effects the cities around it.

when i first got simcity 4 (without rushour) i thought "wow! this is a giant leap forward from 3000 because my cities could be any size i could imagine, that are connected though a number of different size districts... and you could see what the whole city looks like just by saving to region"

"then rush hour was released and i thought "wow, i can build avenues now, and not only that i can see them on the region view"

deluxe, combined the two but it left out the part that would really make the whole game sing... more data view in region mode

we don't need to have unlimited city size, just a way to better communicate the relationships between cities in the region view (which cities need more power, cities that have power to spare, garbage deals that are in place and cities that are drowning in trash, regional traffic flows (yeah i can see the roads, avenues, highways, trains and ferry lines, but what about their traffic volume from the region view)

i know there have been tools that can show my regional statistics but i want maxis to address this (along with the ctd and other errors in the game (sure industry goes to the borders, but what does it do when it gets there... it should flow to somewhere (maybe warehouses, pack houses or some other extra zone option that would give a destination for industry to go to (not just to the border and say its done)

i will continue to play simcity 4 because i feel it is a masterpeice but i still dont play with any mods because i feel this is what killed the game (after the lot editor was released maxis pretty much put the game on a shelf and said that is it) and im still pretty mad about that (this includes nam and all other addons you can find in the stex, lex or any other website)

simcity could have been truly a masterpiece if they ran with their ideas instead of saying that it worked itself into a metaphorical corner and abandoned it

i think simcity is more about that data views than it is about the graphics... simcity 4 gave us the region and all i want now is to show the cities relationships from data views in the region mode... i want to play god when playing simcity but it gets tedious when i have to load cities one by one and build my own spreadsheets to show city relationships. we dont need to have borderless cities (i still dig the variable city tiles) just more regional views and zoom and then this game would be something greater than it is (and them maybe add a 3rd person view where you control a sim, like grand theft auto, and can address more issues in the city (crime, education, traffic) first hand) and have time move in real time, not how it is now with days ticking by, even at the slowest speed,

ehh thats a pretty long rant, but unlimited city size? no... just give me more regional options and a 1st person perspecitve (oh and make the 3rd person view multiplayer) and ill leave you alone... im looking at you ea and maxis!! i would probably even pay a monthly fee to play such a game, no, im not looking at you cxl, your city games have always made a mockery of what simcity is and what it could be

[bluespottedhorse 49]

I'm not sure what everyones running but I have NO slowdowns on my desktop computer. If your running a laptop of course your going to have issues. You can't expect a laptop to perform like a desktop. Loading my cities only takes seconds.

I have lots of addons probably around 20ish, so that might be why my game isn't slow.

So you really wouldn't want to have cities larger than they currently are Tysons4? I think if we had a poll it would show more would want larger cities than what we currently have.

[toxicpiano 125]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

So you really wouldn't want to have cities larger than they currently are Tysons4? I think if we had a poll it would show more would want larger cities than what we currently have.quote>

It doesn't matter how much people want it, it's never going to happen. The game is over 7 years old and EA cut support pretty much after the Building Architect Tool was released (2004 as I recall). 

As for a community based effort, who do you think is going to enable this magical dream of yours? Everyone with the technical know-how pretty much deserted this site years ago (and SC4 Devotion for that matter) and no one was ever willing tackle the executable because of the 'legal issues' surrounding it (I'm not sure that EA would have even cared frankly, Rockstar didn't take much notice of the GTA modding community until the whole hot coffee thing happened and by then it was too late to do anything effective about it).

This community is pretty much finished as well as far as I'm concerned. I remember the time when there were 30 new plugins a day, you're lucky to get that in a couple of weeks now.

Unless there is a new game in the Simcity franchise within the next few years (or at least a decent attempt by another developer (I wouldn't say Cities XL was a terribly good one)), I'm of the opinion that this community will cease to function entirely.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

Originally posted by: toxicpiano

It doesn't matter how much people want it, it's never going to happen. The game is over 7 years old and EA cut support pretty much after the Building Architect Tool was released (2004 as I recall). 

As for a community based effort, who do you think is going to enable this magical dream of yours? Everyone with the technical know-how pretty much deserted this site years ago (and SC4 Devotion for that matter) and no one was ever willing tackle the executable because of the 'legal issues' surrounding it (I'm not sure that EA would have even cared frankly, Rockstar didn't take much notice of the GTA modding community until the whole hot coffee thing happened and by then it was too late to do anything effective about it).

This community is pretty much finished as well as far as I'm concerned. I remember the time when there were 30 new plugins a day, you're lucky to get that in a couple of weeks now.

Unless there is a new game in the Simcity franchise within the next few years (or at least a decent attempt by another developer (I wouldn't say Cities XL was a terribly good one)), I'm of the opinion that this community will cease to function entirely.

quote>

I completely agree with you grandpiano. Unfortunately, I'm not hopeful about CXL2011 either.

[Vahr 341]

Oh, did I mention we do have the hope of DLL based plugins? Aka executable stuff... simmaster07 figured out the meat of it after builderman and buggi disappeared, and generally there's been a good deal of behind the scenes understanding of the game itself (which so far has been lacking). So there is a glimmer of hope (well, a lighthouse compared to the hope of Maxis and EA doing stuff).

i know there have been tools that can show my regional statistics but i want maxis to address this (along with the ctd and other errors in the game (sure industry goes to the borders, but what does it do when it gets there... it should flow to somewhere (maybe warehouses, pack houses or some other extra zone option that would give a destination for industry to go to (not just to the border and say its done)

quote>

Psst, Maxis is dead.

i will continue to play simcity 4 because i feel it is a masterpeice but i still dont play with any mods because i feel this is what killed the game (after the lot editor was released maxis pretty much put the game on a shelf and said that is it) and im still pretty mad about that (this includes nam and all other addons you can find in the stex, lex or any other website)

quote>

Kinda have it backwards there, EA abandoned us after they released the stuff, then we picked up where they left off and did what we can given the scope that we can operate in.

Everyone with the technical know-how pretty much deserted this site years ago (and SC4 Devotion for that matter) and no one was ever willing tackle the executable because of the 'legal issues' surrounding it (I'm not sure that EA would have even cared frankly, Rockstar didn't take much notice of the GTA modding community until the whole hot coffee thing happened and by then it was too late to do anything effective about it).

quote>

Oh, so I (and a good deal of others) don't count? And plus, I don't think Will Wright would be quite happy to learn that we broke our promise to him back in 2003 if we did rip apart the EXE. Which is why we must try other avenues of approach, and right now DLLs are working towards that. And there's another thing to consider too. How many people these days do you see stepping up to the plate? The more experienced people can't last forever, we have our lives to go about as well (and yes, we do have lives contrary to popular belief). Overall the stream of new users willing to help out, learn, etc, is dwindling. Though at the same time I do see more people who just wish to play the game and download the stuff that's been made. I suppose that's how the balance of things goes.

This community is pretty much finished as well as far as I'm concerned. I remember the time when there were 30 new plugins a day, you're lucky to get that in a couple of weeks now.

quote>

One must consider the quality of workmanship. It takes a lot less time to throw together a lot in lot editor that's just a few trees and buildings than it does to BAT everything.

But one major thing to remember, before this dissolves into a mass argument over "mah ideaz r better dan urs," is that we all have our own unique style of playing, our own wishes, our own ideas about these things. And we must respect that. That's what makes any community whole. We're all brought together by the city simulation genre, too, and that's a point of union, no matter what our views may be about them.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

I'd be willing to help anyway I can if DLL's are the fix for city sizes.

[Tysons4 68]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

So you really wouldn't want to have cities larger than they currently are Tysons4? I think if we had a poll it would show more would want larger cities than what we currently have.quote>

im saying in city view have the zoning options and tools, however give the region more options to treat your

conglomeration of cities as a city in its entireity from the region view... maybe add a few tools like region airport that can be placed overlaping cities... and have first person view in a region type view showing all the region as a whole with the new regional tools working (that way you can see the mountain or skyline in the next city over) regional ordinances and data views would be the only thing simcity really needs to turn the simple simcity into a more powerful sim nation if you catch my drift

another idea would be to change the city shape (maybe like the platonic solids that can group closlely together...

oh i also want regional weather patterns, not just wisps of clouds (i.e. snow forming on mts in winter, melting, and forming rivers in the lower lands

simcity 4 made me dream big, just as the leap was from simcity to simcity 2000, as it was from 2000 to 3000 and 3000 to 4 i expect the next simcity to be just as ground breaking, i dont care if it takes 30 more years; just as long as i see it in my lifetime.

[packersfan 666]

If any of you check out the city journals section on this site you will learn that each city tile doesn't have to be a "SEPARATE" city but you can just run them all together as a large realistic sized city. There are a ton of downloads here on Simtropolis that you can use to negate having to have an airport on every tile, etc. It isn't perfect but it is the mindset you play in. It is just unfeasible for SimCity the way it is designed now to have even larger city tiles, our PCs couldn't take it. One suggestion I've seen tossed around is to have the area off the edge of the city tile show the next city tile for a little while, but unplayable and static and then click on it and load it as you would from the region screen. Obviously that is not something we can mod though, but would have to be in a future edition of SimCity or any city builder.

I didn't read your post closely enough be Tysons, but good ideas with region tools too and weather patterns.  I see your point that the next edition of this game should be a serious leap (Societies does not count).  SC to SC2000 big leap, SC2000 - SC3000 big big leap, SC3000 - SC4 really big leap, SC4 - SC5 really big leap would be nice.  Think about it.  We have been playing SC4 for seven years and it still holds up well (especially if you download a lot of the great mods like NAM!)

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

As far as loading an entire region as a city, forget it.  Even if you had a modified game that could do that, it would either be very slow or blow up on a memory fault when you ran out of swap space.  By the time you got the city populated you would have such large tables that it would take more than a high density DVD to hold the save, so your hard drive would have to be in the Terabyte++ range, and your swap file would have to be around 500GB.  I don't think any current operating system could survive that.

My biggest city currently saves at 6.2MB with only 160,000 Sims and about 1/8 of the large tile occupied.

Stuff like this is linear, so I expect the save to go to something in the order of 50MB when I have the tile fully loaded.

Now if you had a save for an entire region in one hunk and, say, 50 large cities, you are looking at 2.5GB if you don't have things like specialty airports, etc.  Run your system's disk benchmark and figure out how long it would take to write 2.5GB, and you'll have approximately the save time for such a city.  With a fragmenting file system such as windows, double it.

[mightygoose 92]

i believe the size has to to with the fact that a large tile has 65536 tiles, each tile has an 8byte string dictating is altitude at corners, location within the grid and moisture.. which convieniently adds up to 512KB.....

[paulmc 391]

Some people said that even the large cities are loaded in seconds, but i think the most of players of sim city don

[bluespottedhorse 49]

Alternatively, without modifying the city size I wonder how difficult it would be to have all 3 city sizes available for any part of a region. In other words, the region view wouldn't show any visible boundaries however, if you clicked on any part of a  region of the map it would give you 3 sizes to render; 1x1, 2x2, or 3x3.

Of course there would be other logistics to work out but it would be better for fitting different cities together when getting close to the end of a city map since it wouldn't be a static boundary anymore.  Plus there wouldn't be a reason to reconcile edges which never works right anyway.

My thought.

[nycsc4 5,250]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

I'm not sure what everyones running but I have NO slowdowns on my desktop computer. If your running a laptop of course your going to have issues. You can't expect a laptop to perform like a desktop. Loading my cities only takes seconds.quote>

Well I used to play SC4 on a desktop too.  Still had the same problems.  It runs better on my MacBook.  If your not using any plugins, which I infer your not using many, then obviously the game is going to work better for you.  I have over 12,000 plugins.  Imagine loading your cities on a desktop with that.  No matter how good it is (and my desktop is state of the art too) its not going to work well.  If you play SC4 like most of us do here, with lots of custom content, then its going to lag and cause problems on any type of computer.  No way around that.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

I thought my 20 was alot of plugins but I guess not! So I'd probably be able to have my larger maps then and be very happy. I'm sure I'm not alone though.

[DahMayorDefacto 1]

If there ever would be a new sim city (which probably never will come but hey, think positive! ), then i would like every city to be doubled.

The city wherei live in, has around 250 000 residents, and the dense area is 12 kilometres across, that's 3 Large tiles!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

For the benefit of people who want a single city, I have created a new map and placed it on the STEX.  It is one large tile with lots of terrain features.  It is called Nonnyland, and I hope people who want a break from regional play have fun with it.

[bluespottedhorse 49]

Dear Naughty moose,

I've checked the STEX but nothing came up searching Nonnyland.

How large is this city and how were you able to circumvent the size issue?

[joshriddle 29]

Originally posted by: bluespottedhorse

Dear Naughty moose,

I've checked the STEX but nothing came up searching Nonnyland.

How large is this city and how were you able to circumvent the size issue?quote>

It is at the top of the STEX list. And it isn't "Naughty moose" And the size of the map is the same size as the Maxis large city tile, it is just a region that consists of only one tile.