SimCity 4 in the Future: A Falcon Approach?

[LivingInThePast 364]

I noticed that Falcon 4.0, developed and published by Spectrum HoloByte (as MicroProse) was released in 1998. It had been followed by three predecessors but the company was eventually bought out and disbanded. The game still got lots of mods. Sound familiar?

Falcon 4.0 was followed in 2005 with "Falcon 4.0: Allied Force", a product created by a company composed of modders and licensed from the current holder of Falcon (Atari). It was mostly Falcon 4.0 with lots of mods. It came with a thick printed manual.  

It struck to me like SimCity in a lot of ways. Spectrum HoloByte, like Maxis, created a product that soon died as it was absorbed into a larger company. The fourth installment was considered by far the best and got lots of mods. It was a "serious simulation", no longer merely a "game". That was Falcon 4.0. That is SimCity 4.

I think it would be awesome if we did something like that. We create a holding company (if we haven't already), license it from EA, and sell our expanded product as SimCity 4: Virtual Metropolis, or something that sounds cool.

What do you think?

[Yonk 2]

What would be the point of selling it? Everything is avaliable, for free, on simtropolis and other similar fansites; no need to purchase anything, which is sort of the point. If you wanted everyone to get together and program some kind of Simcity 5, I'd be okay with that, but there's still not a snowball's chance in hell that EA would let us make any money off of something that's basically their product.

- Yonk

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The only way this would ever fly would be under the auspices of some outfit like the Free Software Foundaion.  The  actual community content is now much larger than the original game which only provides a framework and lots of limitations.

An endeavour to rewrite SimCity4 including the most popular mods like NAM sould only work with EA's blessing, and we know they are controlled by a bunch of greedy MBA's who would sell their mothers on the street corner if they could make a nickel.  You are much more likely to get a curse from them than a blessing.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Well, EA has been bleeding money as of late. If best-sellers like The Sims and Madden dry up, EA will probably be more than willing to license out some stuff.

Remember, we're licensing the software, not stealing it. SimCity 4 gets more popular, interest is re-sparked, and EA gets a royalty on everything sold. Maybe.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I have about as much sympathy for EA as I would for any corporate leech on the body politic.  Maybe a consortium of some kind could licence the source with rights to fix it, but I wouldn't want to try to meet their fee for this.  I think that I'd rather see them in Chapter 11, first.

[LivingInThePast 364]

I suppose that if EA loses enough money, they'll just dip into their cash reserves and buy out a more profitable company.

[halicem 16]

In my opinion, that's not a bad idea! If the major projects here agree to it, then that would be fantastic. Say if NAM, CAM, NYBT, HKABT, NDEX jump in, we could as a community come out nicely.

My idea is not to work against EA - futile, we all know how they are. But to work with EA.

It will cost EA little, mostly testing and packaging it. They resell it as Simcity 4: Unplugged for another $20. Interest sparks again, then maybe, just maybe, they'd go ahead and restart Simcity 5! Doubtful that will happen BUT that at least exposes the community to the world! Perhaps get more people doing custom content.

But if played nicely, the biggest leveraging power the community has is, at least if the groups mentioned above agrees, there could be a trade. Give, clean-up and release the SDK - even package it with the new box version, and I think most of us will be more than happy with that! The SDK would, presumably, unlock the core of the game for deeper mods. At least that's what it should do.

Imagine, having actual menus for the RHW! Less tabbing action! Less scrolling!

It's a sad situation but with SC4: Unplugged + SDK, I think most of the community will suck it up and pay for it. Translating to cash for EA with very little work from them. That also proves to them just how fanatical the community is and perhaps also enough to bankroll Simcity 5 with the regular $60 MSRP to be released 3 years later...

I can only imagine the headlines on gaming sites: 8 year old game gets another expansion!

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, I can see an interesting legal palaver here, but with the conservatism at EA, I don't expect any positive result.

[DahMayorDefacto 1]

Mister Moose is correct: This is such a good idea that EA never willl make it.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Yeah, SimCity 4: Unplugged is a good title. But the marketing this time around is more oriented toward hobbyists than the mainstream gamers.

The point of the rerelease of SC4 is not to release SimCity 5, because SC4U just prolongs the life of SC4 with modern updates and even new things not seen in the original EXE...an entirely new game. It's not quite SimCity 5, SimCity 4 will still be last of the "real" SimCity titles but be prolonged with the new updated expansion. That's why there's no Falcon 5.0...4.0's life has been prolonged and finalized with the numerous mods.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, you fellows have beat me into submission, and I concede that it is a very good idea.  Now you need a business plan to present to EA that they can go to their lenders with.  I am pretty sure that EA won't participate much in preparing this.

You also have to ask yourselves the legal question "Cui bono?" which is "Who benefits?".  There is no question that the community would benefit indirectly, albeit out of pocket by the price of the new .exe.  Of course there is cash flow for EA.  What about the authors of things like the NAM? 

Should the NAM be incorporated in the new package?  Or should all the stuff on the STEX just stay where it is, and give everyone the URL and an example, or maybe include or sell separately a selected second disk containing the most popular plugins, eh? (Income for ST??)  I think whatever switch buggi threw to turn on the "extra cheats" should simply remain on in the new .exe and the whole business documented as "commands" instead of "cheats".

One of the considerations will be where the programming talent will lie:  An external consortium of people who know this code well, or people inside EA who may or may not have looked at it ever,  If Paul Pedriana is still with EA, you might just get him.

And, do you suppose we could get a small variation in the way the game handles freight?  Let it cross city boundaries until it finds a sink of some kind.  So far, there is only the edge of infinity (with a revision, the edge of the region), and the Seaport.  I would like a freight/distribution depot which could absorb freight and push out some local trucks which could terminate at commercial/industrial buildings.  This would greatly improve realism.  Factories that make stuff would only output freight or rail shipments, but factories that make things could take in trucks with stuff on them and ship out trucks with things on them.  This would be a quantum jump in realism.  Another point might be pipelines carrying stuff to manufacturing points.  A lot of the factories would have to be transit enabled so trucks could use the loading docks.

UDI should be some kind of add-on to the MySims side.  I always turn it off.  I wonder how many others do.  Shouldn't be hard to add a hook for that and to enhance the Sims side to include other MySims add-ons.  A thing for EA which might add to their Sims income side.  The UDI interface certainly needs to be improved.

And, if we are opening up the .exe, let's do something about the exception reports.  If you don't include a load map, and the source, there is little point in always producing the dump.  A simple exception report of a few lines with the real cause of failure would be a lot of help.  Developers need a switch to set to get a dump.  A stack unwind would be better than what we get now.

Quick and dirty marketing estimate for deadline:  12 months from the start of project.  Price, SC4U alone $20. U.S.  with a STEX disk $45. U.S.  Income split on the second disk, 50-50 between EA and ST.  I think it would sell, and the second disk could be a second product on the general market with EA doing the marketing.  Of course any updates would be on ST's site.

[Loney 22]

If EA sees that they can squeez out some extra cash out of a dead product line without reinvesting in it by handing the source codes of SC4 to the hardcore fans, I certainly believe they would agree to that. By allowing mods to override the .exe files, it would overcome many of SC4's limitations.

[Tysons4 68]

I like the name SimCity 4: Unplugged....

maybe cause it's the title of my cj.... i call it this because i am going for the biggest region ever using deluxe edition with only maxis released plugins

it all started when i had a dream that simcity 4 was re-released with true 3d graphics and the ability to go though each lot that maxis created just like the sims (see a sims living room, or ride the elevator to the top floor of one of the highrises and go into any room... or just sitback in the stadium with masses of sims and watch a soccer match or baseball game)... even if it is never released just looking at my region makes my imagination go crazy...

i also thought of a way to incorporate custom content... have the buildings wrapped in packages, like they are if you forget dependencies, but only you could click the building and you could go into a construction mode where you could simply build any sort of building you want to create on the particular lot (like spore, only more sophisticated) same goes for networks not in the original simcity 4eluxe

the region would be 3d from a 1st or 3rd person perspective where you could drive sims cars or ride with them, fly helicopters, or planes, and troll around the bays in boats, and if you wanted to work on a particular tile it went to a classic isometric view way in the sky...

and there would be realistic weather effects as well, with snow forming on mountain tops, like when you play on christmas, and would melt and form impromptu rivers streams and have a light erosion over time

a guy can dream....

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

One other thing that would be of considerable benefit if we had our hands on the source would be to fix the CTDs.  CTDs are not a fact of life in application programming, and should never happen unannounced.  A crash is a programmer cop-out.  There is no error short of a power failure that should completely kill a program.  I am speaking from over 40 year of programming and operating system experience.  Programs can be made bullet proof with very little extra effort.

What ever brings the program down with that bogus ACCESS_VIOLATION excuse, simply needs to be fixed.  There are always ways to check any action that may fail.  If you write in C++ or Java you have the try ... catch ... finally mechanism, and in C you simply need to test conditions that may have occurred.

If we get a crack at it, I will be most happy to help.  I have poison fingers, and can cause almost any program in development to crash during its QA cycle unless the programmers are very thorough indeed.  The last serious application I was responsible for was a large conglomerate corporation's general ledger which managed over 3600 independent "cost centers".  The program could crash, but only after a diagnostic warning that there was something seriously wrong with the data base, and it gave enough information to allow such a thing to be fixed quickly.

There is nothng wrong with a program that can find out why it is failing and at least give a sensible report.  In additon to the "exception report" the program could at least output a dialogue box with the reason for quitting or an option for repair.  On such a panel could also be the option to take a dump.  The present dump is useful only to the long-gone developers.

[Yonk 2]

Currently, the only reason I notice for SimCity crashing is due to another program (ANY OTHER PROGRAM!) starting up while it is running. I'm not a programmer, so I can't make sense of it, but that's just the way it is. Last time it happened for me was when my antivirus software was doing a routine, daily database update. Since I'm running Windows Vista, which has a thousand automatic background tasks that are very difficult to find and kill, I get CTD about every other time I play; usually it's not so obvious as the AV program. It's a pain, but it's simply not feasible for me to turn off everything (including internet and anti-malware) before I start playing.

I don't know about all the rest, but I fully support any measure that results in a solution to that.

- Yonk

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I sometimes think a regular context switch between tasks does it if the task has enough priority.  My system runs a couple of hundred routine tasks, all needed.

[synyster31 0]

I think if there is a serious effort put into this it may get somewhere. Starting with a SC4 foums petition, covering all the big SC4 sites, to show the interest in a revamped SC4. If a good number of people show an initial interest in the idea, along with a serious & well put together plan to propose to EA they might take it seriously. Access to the SDK to be able to change some of the limitations of the current code would make a huge difference to the scope of the game & as has been said above, could cost EA very little to produce a 'new' game that will generate an extra income stream for them.

[parrotti 11]

ok, first of my english is not so well but i will try to explain my idea.

Why dont you try a sort of shareholder thing thats you ask people to deposite maybe about 10$ to the holding( i now its a risk) then when the game is finsh they get something extra of the game or a nice discount when they buy the game.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The idea of forming a contributory consortium (stock company) is right in line with the current capitalist system.  Someone other than a broken down old retiree like me who may pop off at any time should be the trustee.  I suggest a survey through the other major sites to ascertain interest.  A question should be asked something like:

"Would you be willing to beneficially contribute to a consortium to update SimCity 4 Deluxe into Simcity 4 Unleashed?"

Together with a description of the proposal.  This amounts to a prospectus if it is phrased legally.  We could actually be looking at a partnership with EA under another company name, and with an IPO.  This will take about a year to get going.  We'd need some up front money to hire a corporation lawyer.

And, please, no petitions.  Get a survey done, and make an offer to EA to join in.  You need to be a partner, not a supplicant.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Under our company, should it be American-based or Canadian? American-based might avoid some international stuff in dealing with EA, but Simtropolis is Canadian.

[Tysons4 68]

Why not take it world wide. not american-based, or canadian, or any other one nation.

SimCity 4000

3d U-Drive-it missions

Muiltiplayer regions

In-game building creating

Please ea... give us the source code... SimCity 4 deserves the attention

[nathanthemayor 1,263]

I would only buy it if it had all the stuff that the fans have been requesting(I.e 3D graphics, NAM,etc).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Originally posted by: nathanthemayor

I would only buy it if it had all the stuff that the fans have been requesting(I.e 3D graphics, NAM,etc).quote>

Then I guess you wouldn't buy it.  We are talking about a general repair, not about writing a new game.

[GMT 389]

uhm... dont wanna be the spoilsport here, but you guys did notice that simcity-ish games are, for the time being, a dying niche-genre, didn't you?

there's a reason why these games land on the budget aisle more sooner than later and that the variety of games in this sector is shrinking and shrinking.

there's gotta be a hell of a good business plan to compensate for this marketing fact and, concerning the licensing, some folks very willing to pay for it. Honestly, I doubt the latter will happen, unless we got us a Forbes List evergreen hiding behind one of the many users here, because I don't really see a chance to amount the possible licensing costs EA might rise via donation.

[DocRorlach 25]

GMT: Sorry, but I don't think it is a dying niche game; the fact that it still sells online and over the counter 10 years after its arrival attests to that. Know of any other game that can claim that without franchise rehashs and silly sequels (such as StarCraft's recent failure)? Just look look at the currently active fan sites, the amount of downloads still generated daily, and the various specialized communities that have (and still do come) arrived. Moreover, this idea, while difficult to work out as a reality, does not only have merits but might be workable. What prompts me here is that the SimMars guys just received a PM from one of the developers at EA. While that might be a drop in a bucket and perchance an individual effort rather than a corporate stance, it may open a dialog. what would be needed is:

1) some of the heavy-weights from two or more sites get into the act;

2) there would indeed have to be a monetary incentive for EA to plug in resources - we might deride the corporate model they use, but it is the only one we have to work with;

3) we immediately forget about consortiums, share holders and the likes, that is not going to happen and would only waste money - if you want to spend some, donate to ST;

4) said heavy weights do reopen the dialog via that SimMars PM and see what is possible; the least expectation would be a patch to fix some of SimCity 4's most obvious flaws and anomalies (there is quite a bit of stuff in the game files that was never activated - some mods are exploiting this);

[GMT 389]

I don't think you got my point.

As a matter of fact, the business simulation games where sim city more or less belongs to, has turned from a very big genre with loads of titles in the 80s and early 90s, for several reasons, to nothing but a niche for a small amout of people (in relation to all "gamers" out there), being replaced with mainly shooters, action games and sporting games (there's more to why GTA4 blew all records in the entertainment industry than just marketing, it's the gamers interest in such games), where shooters and action games converted from jump n run and shootem up to more "serious" games, while sporting games pretty much stayed where they are (same accounts for tactical simulations like Starcraft, although I think they dropped a little).

Just take a stroll through gaming stores. Except for some xyz-tycoon games and the occasional tropico, cxl and the likes there's quadrillions of more or less *****ty shooters, action games, sports games and the likes.

Or take the recent german charts according to gamestar as an exsample, the top 20 only has civ 5 and the sims 3 and a sim3 addon as a game that might count for what genre sim city falls into, while there a, e.g. 7 shooting games. the top 15 most wanted shows not a single game of the likes and almost only shooters, same for the reader charts top 15.

Or go deeper: the best selling franchise (worldwide, alltime) of the category simcity belongs to is actually sim city itself at position 52 with 18million units sold in all installements 1989-2007 (acc. to EA) and with the RCT series on P98 and The Sims on P03 that completes the list of this genre in the Top100 of all time sales in the franchise list. Adding the Anno series, Civ and the Settlers we got all related franchises that actually made it in the list which only states franchises with more than 5 million units sold.

Maybe you can catch my drift now as to where I wanted to go with this statement.

EDIT: also, I guess we can count any SimCity released after 4 to what you identify as "franchise rehashs and silly sequels" ;-)

I don't wanna say the community is of minor quality. Au contraire, it's a very active community with lot's of interest and a rather strong cohesion and therefore helps this genre to stay alive with a) their own effort and b) the occasional game aiming at their interests. But that's about it. Measured at the entire industry, it's the occasional game. Even worse, I strongly doubt the folks with serious interest in this are any more than 50% of the size of the total community, which amounts to maybe a million registered - not active - members (compared to a recently announced 12 million active gamers in WOW, that's really not that much). Therefore I can see why fast-paced streetracing and shooting is much more interesting to most gamers than tediously building up and micromanaging your simulated family, company, city, country or civilization.

Nor do I want to say that there's no market for these games. Like I said it's a strong community that might generate a strong market, but nonetheless it remains compareatively small.

The latter brings me to the question wheather both the hourly and monetary effort to create a Sim City 4: Unplugged (which, btw is THE name to award to this idea) stands in any relation to the final result or not.

For EA, a couple thousand wellspent bucks that turned out as a failure on the market are less a problem then for a conglomerate of diehard-fans trying to renovate their beloved game by any means necessary.

No doubts here that it's at least worth a try to initiate as this whole thing is a very good idea with potential for the community; all I'm trying to do is to shed some light on the whole picture and the resulting risks.

[DocRorlach 25]

Apologies if I hastend to reply. Still, your 3,600++ posts here speak for themselves. Methinks it is worth a shot - if (very big IF) the right folks get involved. I recall a similar thread on another site, a couple of years ago, that was pretty much shouted down by the powers that were. Hope that does not happen here. Looks like some at EA are watching indeed.

[GMT 389]

and my 3600+ posts say what?

[DocRorlach 25]

That there is a solid fan base out there. You obviously have been "hooked" since 2003 - that is a long time for any game genre.

If you really thought there was no future for it, you would not even bother with the issue. As you said yourself.

[CommodoreTech 5]

I think there is potential for a decent change, but there's several opportunities.

You can, for instance, with the large ST modding community, 'edit' SC4 to make it very marketable. I mean, SC4 would likely be SC5 if only it had been 3D, however the game was too ahead of it's time for a 3D simulator, as we all know. This means that having the rudimentary four-point view makes the game seem backward to most customers. Because SC4 pretty much is the city simulator genre (there really hasn't been much penetration from cxl, no one knows about it) that means the genre as a whole is disappointing to most potential gamers. Top it off with what is a steep albeit small learning curve for SC4, that means that the whole genre's reputation is seen as boring and lacking in excitement. But if SC4, which is actually a very accurate city simulator (not that i'm a programmer, i'm speaking out of game experience) was updated, then i'm sure it would reinvigorate the whole sector. Of course, not on the scale of the Sims or GTA IV, but it would liven things up a lot, especially after the CXL disappointment. Even being 3D and a quick overhaul of the transport and water files (whoever has heard of every body of water in the world being tidal?), it would be so more deep and interesting.

Whether EA would be interested in something like this is difficult to tell. If we try to create a new game, like write a SC5 and we say lets share the profits, they'll likely still seem suspicious, entering a dead market sector with an obscure gaming community as a partner, to compete with it's own game. If they somehow accepted, they'd argue they should have all profits because the core of the game is theirs, like wipers for a car. So, this would mean, don't re-release SC4. That would shoot the product down immediately. What you could try to do is release as an expansion pack. This means you don't really have to tread new ground, as the market is potentially everyone who's bought SC4 (some 20 million people) but the game is vastly improved. This means EA needn't worry about it flopping (i.e, they're guaranteed SOME sort of return on their licensing) and we're all happy.

If we at ST volunteer to do most of the work, and all we ask is to legally do it (in a way, that being our price) then EA sells the next 'expansion pack'.. something like SC4000?and keeps most of the money (ST can keep a small percentage, not large as lets face it, we're a fairly insignificant group of gamers, not a massive organized group of wealthy people) then i'm sure they'll at least consider it. This way it benefits them, and if it doesn't work, they haven't lost any money, only licensed their product to a group of people who are actually law-abiding. By this I mean, if any 'new code' was written, EA would demand it would be destroyed or whatever, and because we haven't pirated it (we're not like that ) then we won't shoot ourselves in the foot either. That means that if it fails no one loses out other than the new game... so a lot of wasted effort, but EA doesn't care about that, and we have to remember that.

This would of course require a contract to be written up, with lots of clauses and jargon and stuff, that protects us from EA simply going 'Nope, it's failed, destroy everything' after one week. This does leave us with a problem though: what if EA does do something like that? They're a very wealth company with goodness knows how many lawyers, and we are a group of loosely-connected gamers.... who wins? EA, of course.

So, any attempt is likely very risky and potentially a complete shot in the foot for the ST community and all other players of SC4 if they have to keep playing a game that is so little but could be so very much more. There's a lot to do, but if we all suceed i'm sure it will be a new stage in the gaming world, where the community actually plays a part in the development rather than just being given a game and playing it....

Well, that's my two cents...