Are donations for BATs kosher?

[matias93 7,535]

Also, as was noted a few weeks ago in other thread, now the  community itself demands more quality both on the content created and in city building: years ago, long time players could show a medium tile spiked with skyscrapers and be praised for that, but now even begginers are advised to put realism first, and to avoid vanilla content as possible.

More time and dedication is now a requisite to keep up with the community, and both speed and quantity are giving pass to quality.

[Bombardiere 591]

17 minutes ago, madhatter106 said:

Taking myself as listed in the example above, I am probably an anomaly - the only reason for those 900 downloads was because I released a new pack of stuff, and most of those downloads were probably that.  (There is likely a little bump in my other stuff, too.)  But you will notice that the gaps between pack release dates are longer and longer on these more recent offerings.

To follow along with the "cooking" metaphor, there is still some action in the kitchen, but some of the old chefs have moved on long ago or are cooking at a much slower rater - we aren't seeing nearly as many uploads as, say, five or six years ago.  We probably had pots on all four burners of the SC4 stove back then - we might have a kettle on one or two now.  Which is not to say that the quality is down; I like to think that it's either the same or the bar has been raised.  But I would venture that the quantity of custom content being released has slowed, which is entirely natural considering all the other stuff that has come along since (city builders, as well as other stuff).

Yeah Madhatter is right. (as if anyone would doubt him. ) The game is still there and activity is alive, but not as it used to be. And if someone wants to get few bucks out of the BATs, he or she must show serious talent. The quantity is in Cities Skylines and in SC4 quality is needed today. Hey this game has survived 13 years and I think that is almost a record in modern gaming environment.

 

I would say that the bar is raised. I have been thinking that if a legend such as Simgoober would return today and offer similar content than he used to do back then, today barely anyone would take notice. 

@madhatter106 's 900 downloads are no fluke and I think he will quickly double that. But there are reasons. Not only his work is high quality, but he is offering very useful buildings. These fit well in the game enviroment and gives needed variation to the Maxis buildings.

 

So, yes I see a crowfunding as a possibility. But one would need many factors. Skill yes, but one needs to create something that a large number of people will want and advertise it so that s/he can get people to commit. Sure I would pay 10 Euros / dollars for a nice London building, but it needs to be a complex builidng and at high quality.  As it is a lot of work, s/he must sell many model before s/he can get reasonable salary. As I am not being paid, I model what I want and get satisfaction from my own work, but what I like may not correspond to what an average SC4 player wants. Fow example, my recent London Clerkenwell townhouse got about 1500 download in total. Which I am very proud as I was thinking that 1000 would be great. But same time my recent historic recycle centre has got barely 350 download. It is good, but it shows that what I find useful, doesn't mean that everyone else finds useful. So as a paid Battist needs to be on top of the demand and even to do a market research.

 

Anyway. I am not worried about the dead of the SC4 due lack of interest, but as Robin @rsc204 I am worried that the Autodesk 3DS MAX policy will kill the Batting. If we cannot get older version and there are no guru's left to adjust the render scribs for new version, then I am afraid  that one day the changes in 3DS MAX will too much and we content creators cannot anymore offer new BATs.

 

 

 

[Fantozzi 4,067]

1 hour ago, Bombardiere said:

The game is still there and activity is alive, but not as it used to be. And if someone wants to get few bucks out of the BATs, he or she must show serious talent. The quantity is in Cities Skylines and in SC4 quality is needed today. Hey this game has survived 13 years and I think that is almost a record in modern gaming environment.

Yes - in my opinion this has to be considered too. There are over 18.000 downloads on the STEX, and there are still other active sites around the world. How much downloads may there be in total for SC4? 30.000? 40.000? What the community did over the years is simply stunnig. But after a certain plugin folder size is reached, the game becomes slow. There might some kind of satiation. There isn't downloaded every new thing anymore. There may be users who say: well, I already have ten goodlocking fire stations, why should I have eleven?

When you saying, custom content is going  for quality, I share this opinion, but this maybe could explained further. The strange thing is, quality means mostly those outstanding building models, those extraordinary architectures. But generic buildings in good quality, they became a rarity.In my cities most of what is growing are residentials. What may the percantage be? 40%? But most of the time spectacular architecture are monuments or commercials. I just converted many of the commercial stuff into residentials. So on one hand I think, I really have enough commercial skyscraper, but on the other hand I think - there is still so much sensational architecture in the real world that could be done for SC4.

So will I ever be satisfied? Most prabably not. But theres enough content for endless playing - things I really miss are a few.

So reading what @rsc204 wrote I became a little bit sceptical about my initial thoughts. As what people desire and what they need often can be completely different things.  What people desire may be a specific building, maybe because it's from their hometown maybe because they've seen it once and felt in love with it. But then - there will never be big crowd to pay for that. These desires are very individual. Regading real needs - well, with estimated 30 or 40 thousand items to download, one had to assume, they should be nursed. And that's why I lastly got doubts if crowd funding could work on SC4.

And even if the great days of new custom content may be gone. You can't equalize custom content creation with the community. With so much content to download the community is fine for a while. 

I remember 15 years ago an "expert" called  Norbert Bolz wrote a book called "the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy" (a term Marshal McLuhan invented) and this Mr. Bolz explained that with computers and internet soon there will be no books anymore.  But still the book market is growing. Would be courious to know what the meaning of the word "soon" was in his use. They said with typwriters mankind will soon forget how to write with their own hands, they said YouToube will kill TV.

If I would collect all those small and big apolyptic thesis - I could fill a book on my own. And well, yes, a book.

So, just for the equilibrium of my feelings (don't want to live in permanent 'angst'), I make an anti-apocalyptic thesis: SC4 will live forever.   And who wants to make payed custom conted, well, at least he should try. Maybe there are bigger markets. But if you're the only provider, why not deal with a small market? Still you can purchase needles for record players. Everybody would give the advice, don't make needles for record players, make digital encoders. And to me, this advice seems legitimate. So what do I know? At the end, I have to confess: I can't see all of the future. There are things you have to tryout first, to see, if they work.  

 

 

 

[rsc204 21,808]

1 hour ago, Fantozzi said:

If I would collect all those small and big apolyptic thesis - I could fill a book on my own. And well, yes, a book

You bring this argument up on the day they stopped making VCRs entirely .

[LivingInThePast 364]

So if I'm right, it looks like C:S players might be more willing to fork up cash for new models. This is all fine and good, and I frankly doubt it since my skill is lacking (much to my frustration), but is it possible if I make a C:S model, to also easily "port" it to SimCity 4? That's possible, right, or is it not going to work because of the poly counts/subtle aesthetics of the two games?

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

On 23/07/2016 at 5:12 PM, Jasoncw said:

Gmax/BAT is used for generating .SC4Model files, but those scripts are just text files that you can open and look at and edit yourself. It would be entirely possible to recreate the script for 3ds Max to completely eliminate Gmax from the workflow. As far as I know it's not a technically difficult task, but we don't have anyone around now who knows how to do that stuff. And back when we did it didn't make much sense because it would be a really big headache to redo the script, just to replace the Gmax part which literally takes less than 2 minutes to finish. Still it would be a great thing to have, since we're actually under perpetual threat of losing gmax.

Do you think SC4 players start to think about chip in to pay someone who can do it is a good idea?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

@JP Schriefer It's hard to say. To bring in an outside professional and charging normal rates would be too expensive because this will take a lot of time to look through and understand, and then recreate, and then do test for and stuff like that. I mean I'm guessing it would cost at least $1,000 to just hire someone to do it. Although maybe it would be a lot less than that, the code looks really complex but maybe someone who knows the subject would be able to look at it and understand it. Or maybe it would require some specialized knowledge that most don't have and no one would be able to do the job even if we had the money.

If there was someone who had the skills but was a fan of the game, but didn't want to spend a massive chunk of time on this project, then maybe the community chipping some cash in might change that.

However it would be really nice if we could get a professional because while they were at it they could clean other things up too. The way the BAT stuff is in a rollout in the utilities section is kind of weird. We could have the render settings redone and futureproofed, and a nice new UI.

 

@LivingInThePast You can definitely use CS content for SC4. You'd probably need to do a little bit of work on it first but in general yeah. The nice thing about CS is that if you're modeling things to look good in perspective at close distances then you're modeling things with accurate dimensions. And if you're modeling things with accurate dimensions then it should look good in SC4. And since SC4 is at a smaller scale than CS the details will compress together and the result will imply more detail than maybe there actually is. In SC4 when you're doing ornament you're usually just putting in a rough texture or a really sloppy model and when you render it small it looks detailed, but if you start out with something more accurate like you would in CS then it should look even better.

The things you'd have to redo though are materials. You'd have to redo all the materials with the arch & design material and while you were doing it you'd have to give the materials physical properties (for example you could make the glass reflective), and then you'd have to work on the textures because repeating textures are more obvious in SC4. You would probably want to work more on some of the other textures too, especially glass textures, since you're no longer limited by texture size. In general though a CS model would work well as a base model for making a BAT.