Future of SimCity Official Discussion Thread

[Firebird 40]

I found THIS  picture when I was searching for Sim City 5. For all I know it could be a fake, but I think not. Who would go through all that trouble to render such a good fake.

[topcliff 1]

there's no picture (for me, anyways). it says Cannot Find Server maybe you typed in the wrong link or somethin'

 

EDIT: i have something to say: at the rate the members of ST are advancing in terms of modding, batting, etc etc, we will have totally revamped the game so much that eventually we'll actually DELETE all of the games original contents for our preferred BATS, mods, etc. as a matter of fact, dhamp over at SCC has created a mod that when you incorporate the files, blocks(yes, i wish it fully deleted the files) all Maxis RCI. all residential, all commercial. however, there is something about industry, like due to its erratic tile sizes, but its a step FORWARD. eventually we'll call it STSC: SimTropolis SimCities. what do y'all think?

[toxicpiano 125]

me to

 

[Firebird 40]

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=61548  This should fix it here is the URL and link.

 

[BaKeD-aPpLe-PiE 0]

Hey everyone,

I thought up a great idea (I think it is) on the way home from my cousins house in Issaquah. There was an avenue seperating Renton and Issaquah, but a shop on the Issaquah side had an entrance/exit to the avenue in the other city. Perhaps something like this could be in Simcity 5, if there is one.

 

For instance, on the edge of City 1 you build an avenue. City 2 is adjacent City 1, next to the avenue. If you were to zone commercial on the edge of City 2, the zones would use the avenue, instead of having to drag another road in the city. This might be achieved if on every side of the cities, bordered by another piece of the map, there could be a kind of fade-off of the city next to it, kind of like a shadow on the edge of the city there. That way you could see roads and avenues and shop or houses zoned that would need a road to exit/enter from, in YOUR city.

 

Z = Zone

| = Border

R = Road

> = Indicates where Zone is facing

 

ZZ>|R

ZZ>|R

ZZ>|R

ZZ>|R

ZZ>|R

 

Did anyone follow that?

[Compromise 1]

Date: 12/31/2005 2:00:35 PM Author: fire_bird. Who would go through all that trouble to render such a good fake.

A lot of people. Unfortunatley people will do anything to attract attention and with loads of people crieing out for SC 5 the temptation is even higher. Also better software now makes making fakes easier than ever. If that is SC 5 I am quite inpressed but until I see more evidence of that picture been real I really have my doubts.

 

Also it is rule of this site to have pictures a maximum size of 800 x 600. Please resize it or the moderators will deleate it.

[Firebird 40]

Good point. I'll keep looking. And those people who would make fake snapshots must be idiots.

[semajvic 0]

Edited for all-caps post.

~zel~

[dussin23 1]

SimCity hasn't made money?  It seems pretty popular to me.  Or is it an opportunity cost thing?

 

Anyway, I don't know if someone has posted this idea, but I'd like to be able to see a ground view of my cities' or regions' skylines.  For all I know this already exists (some genius making a program to read the simcity game, but reading them differently...does that make sense?).

 

 

[Jonathan82 0]

Well, I'd been thinking bout this a good bit. more than anything I'd like to see subdividable lots (and in actuallity, I've been working on a program that does this... not relevent to SC4 but I wanted to see what it would feel like to draw roads and let the game make it's own irregular lots to fit the road angles... I can't get it to look quite real, but it's still cool.

I'm sure a big company like maxis with well paid programmers could do it

Anyway, Id love to see angled, curvey roads with lots to match. Culdesacs with houses around them, etc, and the ability to build at any angle (or rather, build roads at any angle and have the buildings built along that road follow it.)

I'd also love to see more options for traffic control... speed limits, light placement, lane counts, etc. in the above described scenario, we're totally dispensing with anything resembling a grid, so roadways could potentially be any width and therefore any number of lanes.

I really think this would make for some incredible realism... just my opinion though.

[jere90 0]

Transport

- Ability to make curved roads. A good example would be the rails in Railroad Tycoon 3.

- Customizable mass transit. It'd be cool to be able to choose what ur busses, trains etc would look like without having to download plugins for that purpose)

- More lanes. Or maybe even a tool to select amount of lanes. Upgradable roads (building wider roads without deleting the smaller one first).

- Underground roads. The straight tunnels in SC4 are pretty ok. But I'd like to see an underground roadmaking tool similar to the subway tool. As most of my cities are overcrowded (several freeways with 20 000 each and avenues the same) I'd really love to make underground freeways with exits going to the surface.

- As many others, customisable fares.

 

I'm pretty sure I forgot something, hope it'll come back soon.

 

 

Zones

 

- Someone already mentioned it but I'll repeat it.

I'd like to limit areas from developing into a mixed lowmediumhighwealth 1-2-3-4-5 storey house mess.

Under residental zones there would be as there is now Low, Medium and High density. When u click on of them a little box would appear with a pile of tickboxes for selecting if u wanna limit the zone to one-family 2 storey houses or bigger ones.

Another alternative would be to remove the low-medium-high density and replace them with either amount of storeys or how many people the house/building can house (amount of employees in commercial and industrial)

- Limit commercial zones from developing into mixed bunches of office and shops. It really pisses me off when I try to make a pedestrian shopping area when half of the buildings that rise are crappy office buildings.

- Someone also mentioned he wanted buildings with mixed res and com.

I love the idea of having 1-3 storeys of shops below and then aparments on top.

 

Once again I'm sure I had someting more in mind. Not that there ain't already enough ideas here but it's so damn annoying when u can't remember stuff u were thinkin about a couple of minutes earlier, especially when u have the topic in front of you. Aight I'll cut the crap and go on.

 

Safety

 

- Growable stuff, lots of it.

I hate building ten thousand hospital to cover every single squaremeter (approx the same as yard for the americans) in a large city.

A solution for this would be growable hospitals. Why did Maxis only make airports growable, why not other buildings too, especially the ones that get crowded as the city grows.

The same system could be applied to jails, why have the 800 inmate prisons when the most I've ever reached in a prison is around 250.

In this context I wanna mention once again an idea that has already been posted. The one giant city region. I love it.

But IF the makers of the game still decide to keep the several smaller cities line, PLEASE don't make every city have a City Jail. Make prisoners a ware of trade as electricity, waste and garbage is. Like this there would be not one prison in every city but one larger prison in one of them.

 

I'm sure there's something more I wanted to mention....

 

Others

 

- Telephone lines

- Mountains

- Terraforming a region at one time, not city by city.

- Unregular lots. Every lot is either a square or a rectangle. I don't like it. Use of imagination would be more than welcome.

- Misc things that affect other things

Strict laws -> more cops, more money. Less crime

Easy laws -> less cops, less money. More crime

The laws would of course be customizable.

Bad weather -> more accidents, more emergency crew work, more money.

Good weather -> less accidents etc.

Control the media -> weather reports would acceft traffic and how people drive.

The media has a very big variety of ways to affect people so find it unneccesary to list it all.

... and a lot more. Once again use ur imagination. Make it as realistic as possible.

- Random catastrophes. The riots in SC3 were nice. And if they would be random along with hurricanes, fires, acid rain, u name it, that would be much more realistic than the car robots and ufos in SC4.

Of course let's say acid rains don't appear in Siberia of what I know. Why? Because. What I'm trying to say here is that the city would affect its enviroment.

The city would also affect its citizens. Like the riots in Paris in the end of 2005. They didn't start out of nothing. There was a reason for it.

 

On the other side, let's not forget that the game is not only for the more advanced players in Simtropolis.

When I was let's say 10 which was about 6 years ago, I played SC 3. Back then I just wanted to create a bunch of big houses.

I didn't have a clue of what pollution was nor did I know how a city works.

A possibility to choose between simple and advanced mode would be very appropriate for this.

 

It's been almost and hour that I've been writin this text now.

Please excuse me for my English, I know there are a lot of errors. English is my 3rd language after Finnish and Swedish along with French.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

//Jere

Finland

 

 

Now that I've taken a shower I just came to think about a couple of things.

 

- Customizable view. Look at Railroad Tycoon 3, they have a very good camera system. It can be turned in all directions, up down right left, where ever u wanna go.

 

- Restriction of same buildings in a certain area(optional). I hate getting 3 or 4 Mc Donald'ses beside eachother.

 

[Kid 0]

There are some really great ideas in this thread, and I hope Maxis would make this happen in Sim City 5.

Vector-based Map instead of Grid-based Map. Someone proposed about having roads that can go any degrees, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. That is what they should have done for SC4 instead of dwelling further in the graphics. With 3-D graphics getting better every day, one has to wonder why the buildings are comfined to grids. Yes, most American cities are planned to have grids, but it would also be great to build cities that inform the landscape, or cities that were grown in a more organic manner.

 

It's easy to propose things but hard to find a solution for it, so let me share a few cents. With my user experience with softwares such as Flash and Adobe Illustrator, I would propose that Sim City 5's map data should be in vector instead of grids (which are bitmap-like). With vectors, we can virtually draw any curves or angles. With a [shift] key we can draw in 45 or 90 degrees so we can lay grids. And the roads can detect nearby roads or terrains intelligently to draw parallel lines to them.

 

Like how we can choose Stroke sizes in Illustrator or Flash, we can choose the width of the road: be it a one line countryside path, or a 10-lane mega highway. When we first build the road before zoning anything, we can choose how much space to leave for future road expansions. So as the city grows, we can right-click or query that section of road, and choose Expand to make it wider.

 

Being able to choose the type of pavements would be cool, too. Dirt would be the cheapest way to build, while nice brick tiles are the most expensive.

 

Computer-Generated Buildings and Zoning Envelopes

So it brings up another question... If the roads aren't always straight and pointing the North Pole, how would the buildings work? As an architecture graduate, I would propose that, though we can't control how buildings would look as a mayor, we can probably decide some simple zoning laws, e.g. the Set Back Law used in New York. If the player is meticulous enough, we can decide the minimum or maximum height or floor space, whether the buildings should set back to give light and air to the streets, or should buildings contribute public plaza areas in exchange for a taller height.

 

One very crucial and interesting idea is the ability of the A.I. to generate generic building forms by itself. The game artists can draw the textures for the wall facades, ground floor and roof, and let the computer to determine the shape of the building - whether the building would adhere to the street line, or be its own individualist form. Such wonderful A.I. will be able to bring us a great deal of variety from row-houses in Brooklyn to the Gherkin in London - and they can be aligned to curves not just grids.

 

Mixed Zoning

This is probably one of the most important aspect of a high-density metropolis that is missed out from Sim City series, though one can argue that adding such feature would add too much complexity to the game... but imagine the possibilities: You can charge tax from the commercial stores inside a train station, or have residential towers on top of a shopping arcade (tons of them in Hong Kong), or on top of a train station again, or allow residences to be built on top of a neighborhood police station to save spaces, or be able to see the slow transition of New York SoHo from a district of industrial warehouses into artist residences and into an area that only rich people can live in.... the possibilities are endless!

 

Imagine if one can drag an area of residential zone, and then drag commercial zone over the same area... tada! Mixed zone!

 

Immigrants: Where did all these people come from?

I think my biggest question about Sim City, as always, is where do the people really come from. It's a flat piece of land, with no visible connections to the rest of the world. So I wonder if the Sims actually swam to this new found land.... No! So in the beginning of the game, there should be at least one road connection, or a pier, or some more tangible source of immigrants, to the outside world (aka SimNation), so at least people can walk or drive to this new land to set up their new homes.

 

Birth and death rates play crucial roles too as the cities have grown up. Would it make the gameplay more realistic if there will always be some sort of baby boom after a great great disaster? Dunno.

 

Be able to have an easier gameplay for users who just want a pretty model of a city. Being a Sim City 2000 player for years, I loaded up Sim City 4 again last night after leaving the box of the shelf for years, but somehow the learning curve is so steep that the game just isn't as enjoyable as SC2K. For me, playing a game is for fun, some sort of more instant rewards (comparing life), and not torture. I wasn't too happy when 200 years passed and I still got a city with 20K pop - something that I can still do when I load up SC2K or SC3K and play for an hour or two. To add to the torture, it loads sluggishly despite my computer doubled its recommended specs (well, I admit this computer isnt very new either). So, generally speaking, Maxis should balance the gameplay, or have different difficulty modes, so that new users can come and enjoy the fun of building a city.

 

I'm really looking forward to Sim City 5 (or any new city simulators)!! And thanks a lot for everyone around the Simtropolis community!

[Kid 0]

By the way, I think the screenshot shown above (in the link in the top post of this page) of 'Sim City 5' is a fake. It is a fake UIs put on top of an architectural rendering of a real project in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It's called The Palm (or something) by the developer Nakheel: http://www.nakheel.ae/  (though I might wrong in pointing out which developer it really is from)

 

There are just really a lot of people out there spending all these time rendering cities and buildings. They are called architects and city planners. I think I won't believe that it is a real Sim City screenshot until I see an actual video of how it works.

 

...so somebody is really doing some crazy cities out there... you never know.

[Simguyuk 0]

I think its a fake. And if you're thinking about when SC5 will be out, the earliest it would come out is January 2007, as four years was the gap between the original and SC2000(1989-1993) and the gap between SC2000 and SC3000 was 6 years (1993-1999) which would mean a 2000 release date for us.

What I would like is a remake of games like SimCopter and Streets of SimCity. Not only were they fun in their own right, but you could choose tomplay the game in one of your own simcity 2000 cities, giving you a first person view of driving or flying in your cities.

[rctshack 182]

Why does everyone think that because the last games were released 5 or 6 years apart that this one HAS to be released that far apart. I doubt maxis is saying, WAIT... we have finished the game now and we have to wait a year and a half so that we are consistent on releases. So will everyone please not refer to that, it really is annoying. Maxis has apparently been working on SC5 for 2 years now. I have two things to back me up with that, the slip up of the maxis guy saying that the game started production in january 2004, and the fact that is is exactly 2 years since the official website stopped updating, meaning they moved on, and not to sims 2, they would have stopped a long time before that moment if that were the case, but it seems they litterally grabbed the whole sim city team and said, NEXT... start work on the next one, forget the old one. Which i am happy for. I am going to say that the game will be announced shortly after the new Windows Operating system is announced later this spring or right before christmas season this year. That is my guess. They have been REALLY secretive for 2 years now and usually it takes about 2 to 3 years for a game to be made, and this game is probly being pushed real hard now that spore is about to be released and the sims 2 is cooling down. Chris talked about the game in october, which means he is feeling like it is near time to start promoting the game. I am surprized no one has found any more info on this game, the last game had stuff leaking out for the year and a half before release.

My thoughts on the game... Well since the new technology for spore came out, i think it will be added to the game to make it run a lot faster and have much more in the game. I really hope the game isn't complete 3D where you can spin the camera around and stuff. Anyone who disagrees with that obviously hasn't played a game where you can do that, it looks like death made those games and they are so unrealistic that my head spins and I puke up green slime everywhere. Although I will give them credit on the sims2 and their 3D stuff, but if sim city had those graphics, all our computers would burst into flames. I am curious to know what group they will be thinking about when they make this game. I heard it will be simpler than the last so i guess they are thinking of the random gamer who buys the game because it looks pretty, so nice graphics and less micro-options. I just hope they make it more real life like and that all the options work together well and that things like a monorail can go over a F-ing highway, god knows that would be IMPOSSIBLE in the real world.... Ok... my 2 cents.

[rctshack 182]

ok, the lack of information about sim city 5 on the internet is frustrating me. I wish they would give us a tiny bit of detail about it. I know they have it under way, give us a teaser to make us excited about it or something. Or explain what will be added or fixed in the new one. I know they want to keep it under wraps, but they have no big competitor that i know of making a game to match, so i don't see the problem with giving a few things out. It is just going to make me explode not knowing anything about it. Or tell us if it is going to be made with the code that spore is made with, that would be amazing.

[Micah 16]

The photo looks fake. And yes, tons of people go through trouble to create hoax.

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

I agree it is pretty fake any way even if it was real my graphics card could not handle somthing like that. There are things that are missng that we could do. Like a school desgised as a post office and desiarbilty would be low if there were no post offices. But there are things we cant do too. Anyway i think that SimCity 5 should be 4-D. You may think 4D??  I am talking about the universe classifed in einstein's views with a 4th demsinon of time. Not only would you be able to pick the climate and location of the city but also the time period. For example if you picked the medival age you would have dirt roads and hoses for transport. which wolud be slower, it wouldn't matter because the jobs would all be in the cites anyway, and it would have more tendancy for I-A. If you were in the progressive era the buldings would be like tennamets and there would be more people than jobs and a lower enviorment score. The future would be devoid of roads and would instead have skywas and much taller buildings. Also i thnk that they should intergrate the Sims into simcity and give your sim the ability to leave the house and go out into the city. They could go find a job in the game's premade cities or they could start with only a small house in the middle of nowhere and get a job as a mayor. And u-drive it would be intergrated into this kind of like GTA where you get a car and drive around town but without the stealing and guns unless you ran into a gang. It would bascailly be more legal and realistic then just taking a car and driving off with it. And you would actually see the other cites in proximty to yours intead of the void. I mean it is use ful for trash dumping but it is not realistic, the world is round people, cant you get that?!?!?!? (maybe the medival times would have a void i mean they did not know it was round at that time)

 

And if none of this happens, i just want anoter city simulator that is better than this one like with nam included or somthing, they are probably are going to improve on what the coumminty makes and make them better or make new things based off of where we left off. But somthing is happening, they are working on somthing else (mabye spore or somthing) if they are not bothering to update their websites.

[miss neko 0]

Just a thought - considering how many talented and devoted people are here, has anyone ever considered getting together in a group to make a completely new city simulator rather than waiting for EA (which of course mostly makes sports games) to get around to it. If a group of independent people can write an operating system, I'm sure it could work for a city sim.

 

Anyway, I personally would want stuff that makes things seem more accurate, like people will travel sometimes large distances in commute like 60-70 miles at times, or that the area the city is in will work better cooperatively rather than a bunch of small cities that *all* want an airport and the traffic all leaves on the two-lane road that has been around just because it's been there longer rather than the wider road I created as a bypass so I *don't* have to tear down a zillion developments - nothing ever seems like it works together. I don't mind the whole region thing as it keeps system requirements lower, but it's crazy how nothing ever seems to go right when I know it would make sense in reality.

 

The original simcity was better in some ways because the graphics were simple - you could imagine things to seem real, and then came more and more fun eye candy and a multitude of options - which seem more and more like an alternate reality. I've never been in any city in my life where all the bus stops were half-acre plazas - normally they're a sign at an intersection. Nor are there landfills everywhere which fill up like crazy. Transportation takes time, a helluva lotta money and a considerable amount of planning to be constructed - there's no way a subway could just be plotted along any conceivable path on the whim of a city planner, and freeways are massive undertakings to seriously change traffic patterns. And can't the fire department put out fires on their own? Why must I do it? What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this?

 

So yeah, there's all the little new features everyone wants like more kinds of trains and lanes and landscapes, but I personally think things should just kinda make sense, and then people who haven't even played simcity will be able to play and things will just kind of seem obvious what they do. And everything should work together better so nobody will be guessing if their plans will have the desired effect or not. To me having a better-functioning city sim would be more fun and playable than having an additional freeway option or even more detailed graphics. But it wouldn't hurt to make the game more easily customizable, because we know players are more enthusiastic than the executives who release the software and its expansions.

 

[Buggi 685]

Contrary to popular belief Maxis is not working on Simcity 5. I know this from contacts inside Maxis.

There are people who whisper a wish to stoke the idea fire for a new version but currently everyone is maxed out on time. Spore is set to be released this year so expect lots from that.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

I think I made a post earlier in this thread describing it, but here's some illustrations showing how I think to solve the problem with dynamic lot sizes.



First off, each lot is really big. The white in the middle is the shape of the building for reference, the dark grey is parking lot asphault, the green is grass, and the grey is normal sidewalk. The black dot in the middle is the rotation point.





The lot is rotated by the game and placed within those roads (the grey with lighter outlines). The roads themselves act as a barrier for the base texture, and the lot is designed so that the base texture continues in such a way that it looks good and makes sense contained within a variety of sizes and shapes. As you can see, the lot would look fine at any rotation or placement. In the game the lot would be much larger so that it would be harder to make a space too big for it, and maybe by the edge of the texture it could be tileable so that you'll never run out of base texture.

After the development generates and places the base textures and building, they are disassociated, so that bulldozing part of the lot doesn't cause the rest of the lot and the building to be demolished too. Likewise, bulldozing the building won't really affect the lot much, although redevelopment might, it might even reuse the same landscaping too. And maybe every few years the lot gets relandscaped or something too.


edit: miss neko: yea, some people from the sim city community are making a new city simulator, and they got somewhat far, but last time I checked their forums they weren't very active, and now when I checked the forums to give you the link, the link was broken. I think the project might have died.

I definatly believe that they aren't working on SC5, but I think that they will make it eventually. Right now SC4 is still pretty active, and it's not slowing down much, so it wouldn't make sense for them to make it now anyway.

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

And if you intergrate the sims into it why stop there you could add in another aspect, interior design it woulkd allow you to go into any of the cites buildings instead of just your own. And then there could actually be a corparte version of sim city 5 for real estate peple and such you could tour the home and the neighbor hood or a building they are planning to construct. But it would be diffrent with some cost tools and minius some of the distaseres. THere are some they would still keep like to see fire or flood damage to the buildding but some of them are unessasry, like who would care to see the efects of a giant robot on property value while house shopping?

[AnarchoPlanner 0]

Right on miss neko! I need more realism. I want to see little sim-ELF anarchists coming out to sabotage my bulldozers when I try to build an expressway! And how come no sim city has ever incorporated the concept of eminent domain taking? If you bulldoze a huge office tower, that should be seriously expensive.

[rctshack 182]

will you please get us more information then magical monkey? I would like to know why they wouldn't be working on a new sim city, but come out with a millon sim games inbetween. Please get more information about what their plans are for sim city's future.

[officer 6]

This has probably been said about a hundred times already, but I think there will be a SimCity 5 - the developers (hopefully) be taking their time because they want the game the be very realistic and for it to have amazing graphics. Although i'm not sure my PC will handle the next SimCity , oh well,

[MadMax410 1]

 That...looks...amazing. It has to be fake though: they haven't made a computer that can show such amazing graphics. Even if its real, my computer will expload. Its pretty old and can barely get the graphics on simcity 4 right.

[MadMax410 1]

Sorry I didnt add this in my last post. rctshack is right. That site has been abandoned. If I didnt see an old post there talking about simtropolis, I would of abondoned simcity 4, too.( I was checking out the website because I was bored and started playing simcity 4 ) They must be doing something so important they pratically shutdown the website. Maybe they will have the game made in a more realistic way, such as elevated rails over roads and stuff like that

[choco1 4]

Fire_bird, that is not simcity 5, that is a game called City Life. Look here.

[jmjselect 0]

2 things I would want in SC5

1. non-linear roads
2. non-linear zones

okay 3 things,

You know those scaled-models of a city when someone is proposing a new skyscraper or building, you know the white buildings modeled after the city, I wish there was a view like that in SC5

[Firebird 40]

Date: 1/28/2006 9:32:21 PM
Author: chocolatemax285
Fire_bird, that is not simcity 5, that is a game called City Life. Look here.

quote>
It could be. Maxis might actually have a rival.