64-bit SimCity 4

[Tysons4 68]

I've been just imagining how this would be and it saddens me that Maxis decided to scrap all they worked towards up till SimCity 4 to release their "Vision"

 

With this topic i would like to imagine SimCity 4 64bit.

 

 

I'll start...The city sizes could be overwelmingly gigantic

[z1 566]

The city sizes could be overwelmingly gigantic

 

No, they couldn't be any bigger than they are now.  City sizes are limited by the exponential growth in CPU consumption of the traffic simulator, and that wouldn't change a bit (no pun intended).

[Tysons4 68]

i meant more like showing surrounding cities when working on a tile instead of floating in space. not necessarily simulating the cities

[z1 566]

i meant more like showing surrounding cities when working on a tile instead of floating in space...

 

Well, that's something you could do right now, if you had the source code.  When the game came out, it had a minimum memory requirement of 256 MB, so such a feature was quite impractical.  But a 32-bit program can access 4GB of memory, and memory is awfully cheap these days.  It would slow the game down at least some, though.  There's a reason that the city tiles in SC 2013 are only the size of a medium tile in SC4.

[Tysons4 68]

I would have never gone fully 3d with simcity but instead left that up to simcopter and streets of simcity dlc.

 

but yeah, i want to imagine if simcity 4 was written for current gen architecture

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Wouldn't be much different.  I think keeping the 2 1/2 D views would have to remain.  A good chance to fix the main .exe bugs and maybe multitask it to use multiple cores (probably 2, maybe three).  Also, change it over to default to OpenGL instead of D3DX would now (not then) make life better for modern graphics cards.  Figure on 128-bit machines by then (some exist now).

 

I figure a little project like this might take about five years with a small programming team of about three or four.  Much longer if more programmers were added.  So, let's see what this might cost with three people using the Chief Programmer team technique:

 

Five years of Chief Programmer - $500,000

Five years of two programmers - 2 x 80,000 x 5 = 800,000

Equipment costs - negligible.

Publication cost (web site) unknown in five years but say 200,000.

 

Estimate to get this to 128-bit (by then) decor with alternate 64-bit/32-bit versions $1.5 million.

 

Any angels out there??

 

P.S. Pretty much all the custom content could be retained since it is almost all data files.

 

We should also have quantum state chips by then, so the hardware cost should be about the same as now.