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A quick sneak peek of the new Turbo Roundabouts for the NAM , fresh from the presses. Here's a proof of concept in-game. Video preview made by NAM Team member Mandelsoft.

Simtropolis has grown by over 100k members in the last 10 months! Is a lot of this growth due to SimCity (2013), or perhaps due to a SimCity 4 resurgence post-SimCity (2013)? Perhaps both! I wonder if we'll ever reach a million...

For the first time ever, the NAM Team has decided to surprise people . . . by not surprising them. The 31st Network Addon Mod release will be made available to the public on March 1st, 2013. Mark your calendars, as this will be one you don't want to miss.

First, thank you Maxis and EA for having us down there, our host and hostess were awesome. We had a great time, there just wasn't enough of it! We appreciate the opportunity to connect with you! Fellow Simtropolians, these impressions are for you (this is not a review). Sorry for the posting this a couple days later than intended, got distracted with some server stuff, and I also wanted to give it some more thought. If there's a topic I didn't cover, please feel free to ask and I'll try to get an answer for you. Do keep in mind, these are really early impressions, and I'm sure lots of things are going to change. Please share your thoughts, let me know where I'm wrong, or what you disagree with. ---- Oct 2012 Maxis Studios Visit, Thoughts and impressions In the hands of Maxis SimCity is back in the hands of Maxis. And last week, we were invited to visit their studio in Emeryville with an opportunity to interact with the team and to to get a detailed inside view of the development of the new game. I have a few thoughts and impressions to share with you guys, but I want to make it very clear that while we enjoyed lots of candid, insightful conversation, we simply did not have enough time to fit in an extended play session with the actual game. So it made writing this difficult because I wanted to be honest with what I saw, informative for you guys, but fair to Maxis, knowing that I didn’t really get a full experience with the game. What I did get was a brief exposure to a limited tutorial, and while I tried to take in as much as I could given the constraints, I just couldn’t get enough out of it without time to play freely. Again, this was just the unfortunate result of scheduling not conspiracy (I think). Anyway, even though our time there was condensed, it was packed with plenty of information, lots of demos were shown and plenty of discussion. I’ll share what I thought was interesting, but I’m not going into specific gameplay stuff that has already been shown or talked about. Before moving on, one caveat: given that what we saw was all based on early software, some behaviour we discussed was undemonstrated, and what in-game art we saw is not final, I may totally change my mind on any of these things as new information arises. The very limited tutorial I went through amounted to little more than click here, drag down this road, put down a zone and that’s about it. It’s a serviceable tutorial for a new player, but I didn’t get much out of it. I got a chance to draw a couple of roads; yes, it feels pretty good and intuitive. Painting down zones feels just as you might expect. I like how buildings sort of swing around as you drag them across the terrain before placing them. Yes, all pretty superficial. Sorry to disappoint, but if I get another chance to actually sink my teeth into the actual game, I’ll tell you something more meaningful. City sizes, repetition, and why Glassbox could play really differently But we did get to some talking about city-building, and city sizes. Yes, it’s 2x2, sorry, no change right now. I brought up the issue of building repetition. So from what I understand, to help mitigate this a little bit, the idea is that each building will have some slight variation, I’m assuming texture, colour, props, so that even a row of similar looking houses, should at least have a little variety between them. That’s good news. When I asked if it extended any further than just cosmetics, for example, will the simulator be able to recognize that 4 car washes are growing next to each other and, maybe, you know, not do that? The answer was no. It will still be possible to still get a bunch of similar stuff bunched together, like 4 gas stations all on the same street. It’s a small gripe for me, but maybe not for you. As long as the underlying simulator is fun, I can overlook that. About the simulator, I think Glassbox, based on the demos we saw, will really make the new game feel and play very differently form its predecessor. You already all about it, but I like the idea that every car, vehicle or sim is an agent with goals, that they will use whatever infrastructure you’ve laid down, to attempt to get to their destination. And if for some reason they can’t, you will see where things screwed up naturally as a result of your own boneheaded networks. I like that. It gives your city a sense of real physicality because you will see sims physically using your transportation network, and you will be able to see exactly what isn’t working and understand why. In SimCity 4 the simulator was purely statistical so trying to get the current state of your city meant staring at windows with rows of numbers, and looking at a value like “47%” and then trying to figure out what that means, what affected that, and what you should do to move that number up or down. There’s usually a lot of guessing, and then you just stop guessing, and just spam bus stops (or whatever) everywhere and moved on. For me, playing SC4 sometimes felt like balancing a spreadsheet. So with Glassbox, I like how the data is presented like a real-time animated info-graphic style, allowing you to see what’s going on right now. It’s nice to not have to comb through rows of data while playing the game to understand a situation. I do see some value for having charts though, perhaps more like a summary, or annual report, where you can see a nicely plotted graph of trends in crime, pollution, population, what improved, what’s declining, that sort of thing. It’s info fluff for sure, but it would give the city a growth history. The complexity of buildings, and modding As we walked around the studio, nearly every wall it seemed was covered with large format print-outs of concept artwork. I was impressed with the attention to detail that went into the design of every building. This stuff makes a SimCity geek happy. And looking at them, I started to appreciate just how much more there is to consider for each building now that they are in 3d, animated, and can be expandable with modules. That’s going to take modding and custom content to a new level. There are still a lot of questions with modding and custom content support. I can tell you that Maxis is very keen to support modding, but don’t expect any tools until well after launch. Right now, they just don’t have any solid answers or solutions on how modding could work in a persistent world with these online regions. How does a modded building affect that global economy? Would it? Should it? What about other players in your region? Maybe if you play with modded or custom content, you play in your own region, and you affect nothing else, including the global economy. But should you get to access the global economy? Does that not just isolate you, you know, just as if you were playing a single-player offline game? The other thing to consider is the leap in technology and tools just needed to create a building. In SimCity 4 the buildings were essentially static sprites. Buildings in the new SimCity are fully 3d objects. And I’m assuming with the Glassbox simulator there’s even more to account for: Building have animations to indicate their state, such as doors opening, or conveyor belts moving. Lighting is now volumetric, no longer simply baked onto the texture as in SC4. Buildings that provide services can be upgraded and expanded with snap-on modules; those snap-on areas must be considered in the over all design. All buildings require road access, so the artist must plan where road connections on the lot would be ideally placed. I’m certain there’s more that goes into creating a building. Additionally, all models are now built in Maya (along with some proprietary tools and palettes that Maxis developed to work in Maya for the project). So if all the above requirements are true for Maxis-made buildings, it seems reasonable to expect that custom content makers must follow the same standard. It’s a lot to consider, but I know it’s on their minds. When the time comes, content creators can expect a big leap in both complexity and creativity. While Maxis doesn’t have all the answers to modding yet, they are open to a dialogue with the community and to hear your feedback. Road geeks win with 3d The other great benefit of everything in true 3d, is roads. Because roads are now full 3d paths, Road Geeks will literally have a whole other dimension to play within. Ocean Quigley gave us a demo of the road tool and it was pretty sweet to see just how easy he was able to create a three level overpass by using the free-form tool and dragging out an elevated road, dragged another one beneath it, and one on top. Elevated roads create their own support pylons, and if there’s sufficient space beneath, you can run another road or rail under it. The road tool is smart enough to try to solve bumpy or hilly terrain for you. At times it will suggest a bridge as a solution to span a gap, other times it might draw a road down one incline and up another. But if you want finer control, you can still create your own solution by inching the road tool along and clicking to commit as you go along. There seemed to be endless possibilities, and unlike previous titles, making these complex configurations looked pretty effortless. Also, I loved the fact that as you draw your road, you’ll see a dotted line hinting the optimal space required for zoning. So if you wanted to carve a winding road down a hill, the zone hinting line will make sure you leave enough space to zone your hillside houses. Zoning, changes and omissions On the topic of zoning, you no longer specify density for your zones. The density of the building that will grow there will depend on the type of road its adjacent to. Busy roads with lots of traffic will result in high density, but low volume roads will create low density buildings. There will no longer be an agricultural zone. No farms. When asked, the team felt that farm zones offered no real gameplay value. Well, two things to say about that: they may not add much to gameplay, but it did allow players to design a city with that distinct agricultural look so it’s a shame it’s gone, we lose variety. Second thing, what about actually adding a gameplay element to farms? Make farms produce goods that would be sold on the global market. Now people have a choice to specialize even further if they want to export grown goods for income. There’s a built-in trade-off since farms take up a lot of space and there are risks such as pollution, disasters, drought. If you get a good yield one year, you might make a lot of money selling high wine (or whatever) sold to rich sims everywhere. But you may not always get a profitable year, so it's risk versus reward. It’s also a challenge to operate a purely agricultural based city; you’d need to support it with neighbouring cities and deals to ensure your other needs are met. If anything it’s just more interesting choices for the player. In other words, turn agriculture into a challenge. People might enjoy the challenge of trying to sustain a profitable agricultural city. It could add another dynamic to both the global market and multiplayer regions. Anyway, just an idea. Speaking of multiplayer, when I first heard that the new SimCity will be an “online multiplayer SimCity”, I probably had the same reaction as some of you. Honestly, the term “multiplayer SimCity” must, to a core fan, confuse as much as it offends. Multiplayer and always-online So far, we have no real idea how online multiplayer, global markets and global economies will play out. I’m guessing the Beta is where we’re going to discover all that. My initial resistance was based on the fear that I would be forced to play in a region with other people and I had no choice. For me, leaderboards and group challenges hold almost no appeal whatsoever, other players might dig that. I hope the online component offers some surprising dynamic that we haven't already seen before and that serve to engage more than to annoy. So we know now that you can still play an entire region by yourself - though you still have to be online. So that brings us to a burning point of contention which has been debated all over the forums here and abroad. I don’t think I can add much more to the conversation, but I did bring up the topic with Maxis at dinner the one night: “Ok, so hey, let’s say I had a long day at work, and I just want to go home, relax and load up SimCity. In fact, I can’t wait to get home and work on my city. I’ve been thinking about it all day. So I get home, I load it up, and the servers are down. I can’t play… so… now what?” The only answer I got was about the only answer I deserved for such a loaded question. Kip shrugged his shoulders and offered a “c’est la vie” face. Really, what else could he say? We are told that online play is asynchronous, so temporary outages will not disrupt your game. And yes, occasionally Origin servers may be down for maintenance, and you won’t be able to login or you may be kicked out of the game, but we can be assured that plenty of notice will always be given. While not new, I still reject the idea of “always online” but I am accepting that it will be the way many games will go. Still at the risk of being obnoxious on the topic, I wanted to press the point another way: “Ok, so you look at SimCity 4 released 10 years ago, and I can still load it up today and play it. I can load it up five years from now and still play it. I don’t need to sign in, I don’t need a server, I just load it up and play. How can this always online requirement be able to assure me that I can still play my game, say, a year or 10 from now just as I can with SimCity 4?” As an answer, Kip hunched over and waved his fingers: “Hmmm… let me look into my crystal ball…” There was laughter, it was kinda funny. And really, what did I expect? Still, however glib Kip’s response, within it contained about as much truth and assurance as I could have hoped to extract on the matter. The honest answer of course is that no one really knows for sure, and there really are no promises. There was no answer that could have satisfied. Not to paint Kip as completely glib and dismissive (he’s actually very patient, great to talk to and good humoured) he did address my concern as best as he was able to: Maxis values SimCity greatly, it’s one of their flagship titles, and that we have every good intention of making sure it has a long life. Something along that line. So there you go, that’s the best answer they can possibly give us, whether that affects your buying decision is up to you. Final musings Some final thoughts, I have noticed that the SimCity coming out in February has a disconcerting lack of version suffix. We’ve just been calling it the New SimCity. Is it possible that this is the Final SimCity? From what I’ve seen, and I have not seen it all, the concepts and the intents behind the ideas all support a distinct possibility for a great game. While I am mostly, cautiously, optimistic by what I have seen so far, and despite a few points on which I disagree with -- if I have any meaningful reservations to share with you it would be the overall visual style. I’m not warming to it yet. It could be that I just haven’t played the game enough, and that I’ve only really seen very early builds and demos, but the truth is right now, I’m not connecting with the visual style which feels to me overtly cute, bright and cartoony. SimCity 4 had a clean stylized realism to it that felt right, at least for me. In the new SimCity, there’s something about the scale of the city in general, the look of the buildings, the awkward spaces between buildings (ugh), the way all the cities we’ve seen look and feel sparse. I’m not looking for realistic, just believable. So for what it’s worth, there’s my big disconnect right now, perhaps real gameplay may cure that at some point. Overall, Maxis is doing a lot to move the game forward. And I believe them when they say that having a deep simulator is important, we’ll wait and see how deep it is, but it’s looking promising. It feels like they want to make SimCity more connected, socially engaging, encouraging you to partner up to build “great works” and complete challenges. There’s lots of evidence that Maxis wants to make the game more appealing and more accessible to bring in new players without, hopefully, alienating the dedicated fans (too much). I can see this effort in some of the design choices, super friendly interface, the way data is rendered in a more friendly way, the new music is friendly and relatable (unlike the electronic, abstract mix of SC4), and mostly in the art direction; the brighter palette, the sense of scale. The tilt-shift style makes it all look miniature, like a toy … like a doll-house city, maybe? At the Maxis Live broadcast event, one thing about the presentation format did not escape me. The SimCity portion of the live event was bracketed by two major The Sims 3 announcements. I mean even the “promotional” mystery box for SimCity, required owning some Sims 3 expansions. Now there’s nothing wrong with this. It was just an observation and I’m not suggesting anything more nefarious than just savvy marketing and PR. Whatever the intention, I think it was a good thing. Maxis is known for The Sims and SimCity (what’s Spore?). The difference, is that The Sims 3 has approximately nine thousand expansions. SimCity 4, has one. If there’s any hope for the title to be a commercial success (and more than just fan service) -- which means continued support, more expansions, servers remaining online -- it’s got to appeal to more players than just us core fans. So, core fans, in February what we’ll see will be the next generation of SimCity. I for one hope that the game has enough in it for me so I can include myself in this next generation, too. That’s all I have to say for now. Thanks for reading. Dirktator

Half a million, what a milestone! Big congrats to the site staff who keep this site so stable despite the numbers. I wonder how many of that 500k are active?

Banished is a city-building strategy game that charges you with the task of starting a small town, growing population, managing crops. Place buildings to harvest resources and convert them into goods. There is no mass transit, or any kind of transportation network, but the small rural town simulator might appeal to some looking for a change of pace. The game is very near release with a 2013 ship date. More details at the site, and support the developer if you like it. More videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/ShiningRockSoftware?feature=watch Welcome to the world of Banished! In this city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland. The objective of the game is to keep the population alive and grow it into a successful culture. Options for feeding the people include hunting and gathering, agriculture, trade, and fishing. However, sustainable practices must be considered to survive in the long term.

So we have been invited to Maxis' studios at the main EA campus to get some first-hand impressions of the game and to interact with the developers. Up for this trip will be Zelgadis and myself to represent the Simtropolis community. We will be getting some hands-on time with the game itself, and some time to speak with the developers. We will also be attending the Maxis live broadcast the following day, where SimCity will also be a topic of discussion! This is super exciting and we're looking forward to seeing the new game in person and will be getting some chat-time with the development team. I'd love to bring down some of your burning questions to ask in person, so please use this topic to let us know what you want us to try to cover. I can't promise we can get answers for everything, but you know we'll try our best! Both Zelgadis and I will be visiting with Maxis Oct 8 and attending the live broadcast event Oct 9. We'll post frequent updates via the website and twitter, so let us know what you want us to say or keep an eye out for. We'll also give you a full debriefing when we get back, as well as our honest to goodness first-hand feedback of this new version of the greatest city simulation game. EDIT: Thanks for the feedback everyone, we'll take the top most voted questions down with us and try to dig up some answers as best we can!

I can't really see a comparison here... If you're thinking SC4 has the same features SC13 has you're going to be disappointed. -On the contrary, if you're thinking SC13 has the same features SC4 has you're going to be disappointed. They're two different games. SC13 is a reboot, not a successor to SC4. Also remember 10 years have passed...

NAM 31.1 is a full package, which improves upon the initial "open beta" that was NAM 31. It fixes about 100 issues that had been reported since the NAM 31 release in March 2013, improving overall stability and performance. Crash-to-desktop (CTD) on save and related performance issues from NAM 31 are largely solved: A number of users, particularly those with newer Intel Core Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs (e.g. i7, etc.) had experienced issues with the game crashing to desktop (CTDing) when trying to save, with NAM 31 in their plugins. This was tied to the much larger NAM Controller build that was contained in NAM 31, which also caused the game to use considerably more memory. The increase in size was largely due an attempt to "ultra-stabilize" some NAM override networks, including some RealHighway widths/heights and the Street Addon Mod variants (SAM ultra-stability had been in place in NAM 30). The code on these override networks has been whittled down for this release, eliminating stability for situations that users were much less likely to build. In order to address a wide variety of scenarios, the NAM Team is now providing two different controller packages--the smaller "standard" (or "s-series") package, and the larger "extreme" (or "e-series"). The difference between the s-series and e-series is that the s-series disables SAM ultra-stability, and the higher elevated RealHighway networks (Level 3/22.5m and Level 4/30m). The s-series is installed by default. Users who desire the larger e-series controller can select the option from the installer, using the Custom Installation option. It is recommended that if you are using the e-series controller on one of the crash-prone processors, such as a Sandy Bridge Core i7, and especially if you have a large plugins folder (at least 3GB), that you should patch your SimCity 4.exe file to be Large Address Aware. A suitable Large Access Aware patch can be found here. You should have more than 4GB of RAM if using Large Access Aware modde. Road Turning Lanes: As with NAM 31, the Road Turning Lanes are no longer automatically generated when a Road x Road intersection is built. The auto-build functionality was causing considerable complications with the functionality of the Network Widening Mod and new Draggable Fractional Angle Roads, and as the NWM and Draggable FAR have a greater impact on game functionality (adding capacity and new build angles, as opposed to mere eyecandy), the Road Turning Lanes Plugin has been redesigned to function in an "optional" manner, which doesn't interfere with other features and allows the user more freedom in turn lane placement, without resorting to Turn Lane Extension Pieces (TuLEPs). To add turn lanes to a Road x Road intersection, simply click the intersection with the Rail tool. As with all previous releases, the Road Turning Lanes only apply to Road x Road intersections. If you desire turning lanes on Road x Avenue intersections, you will need to use Turn Lane Extension Pieces (TuLEPs). New Street network functionality: Some new draggable wide-radius curves, and intersections along wide-radius curves, are now possible with the Street network. Credit for this new feature goes to Swordmaster from the NAM Team. Transit stations: After the first release of transit stations in NAM 31, a number of bug reports were received about these stations. As a result, all of the stations included with the NAM have gone through extensive retesting, and have been modified when necessary. Many of the modifications fix major bugs, while some of them simply improve the performance of the station. For PC users, any stations plopped in your cities from NAM 31 will automatically be upgraded when you install NAM 31.1.For Mac users, the replacement set of basic Maxis stations had to be modified, along with the Modern El Train Station by Brenda Xne. These fixes were necessary due to a bug in the Mac version of SC4. If you're a Mac user and you plopped any of these stations from the NAM using version 31, you will have to bulldoze them and replop them once you have installed NAM 31.1.NAM 31.1 also includes a number of new stations, which have gone through the same extensive testing as the stations listed above. Most of the new stations are optional, meaning that they are not automatically installed with the Complete Standard Installation; instead, you must select the Custom Installation and select these new stations on the Components page. RealHighway Filler Pieces: The RHW Fillers have been, at long last, restored and expanded for NAM 31.1. They were previously in such a broken state, that they had been disabled for NAM 31. Mac users: The separate NAM for Mac OS package has been discontinued as of NAM 31. It is recommended that you access a Windows machine or Windows installation (or use WINE), run the installer, and transfer the two installation directories (Plugins\Network Addon Mod and Plugins\z___NAM) to your Mac system. Alternatively, use Keka (http://www.kekaosx.com) to open the executable like a .zip file. If you are planning on using cosmetic additions, like the Euro Textures or the Maxis Highway Override (AKA "Project Symphony"), they are contained in the "$[65]" folder, which you should rename to "z____NAM" upon extraction. Please also note that the NAM--and most other Plugins--have compatibility issues with OS 10.7 (Lion) and later, due to the removal of Rosetta and the requirement to use the Aspyr Universal Binary patch to play SimCity 4 Deluxe in those OSes, which make the game prone to crashing. Installing over previous versions: NAM 31.1 may be installed directly over top of any previous NAM releases. It is a full release, not a patch or a hotfix. All future updates are planned to be in full package form, and there are no plans to issue patches or hotfixes in the future. Please also note that the NAM Team only provides technical support for the most recent version, which, as of this document, is NAM 31.1. We cannot assist users of the original NAM 31 release, or NAM 30 (or earlier). Special Thanks: The NAM Team would like to thank the following members of the community, who have tested the penultimate build of the NAM 31.1 controller and given their feedback on its stability, and/or assisted with other controller-related tests after the NAM 31 release, in an effort to nail down the game stability issues: A Nonny Moose, dyoungyn, Joe 90, mgarcia, mneonnew, shanghai kid, spot, and txrailcat74. Also, special thanks are in order to Haljackey and the Dirktator, for their efforts on getting this file onto the STEX. The file is also mirrored at SimCity 4 Devotion's LEX and ModDB.

The Maxis Highway get a great overhaul with Project Symphony! The NAM Team officialy reveals this piece of technology for the upcoming NAM 31 release and shows what it can do. Part 1 of 2 is a presentation of the basic functionality of Project Symphony. For more information about the NAM, check SimTropolis or SC4Devotion,com and stay tuned for more NAM developments! Stay tuned for Part 2, where we going to build some basic interchanges! NAM 31: Coming to you on March 1st! (NAM Team is the best pony ) Best, Maarten/MandelSoft

Lets kick off this adventure with a rail-ish oriented update. Chapter 1 - Hangover "Ugh... what the hell happened last night?" ... "Too many shots of tequila, that's what". A comforting voice hit Leon's ears, for her words paradoxically shrilly struck his aching head. "What time is it?" he groaned in response. "Time for me to get up and go to work." Millie wandered across the room to the blinds and pulled on the draw, much to the dismay of Leon whose bloodshot eyes were stung by the rays. Leon begged "Can't you stay a little longer?" "No, silly." responded Millie with a slight giggle. "You know this internship is important to me and I can't be late again. Now, I'm off to the station. I love you, dearest." Leon watched her walk out the apartment door. Like every noise, the closing of the door also discomforted his ears. At least he got to sleep in. Millie checked her watch. 11 minutes to the next train. She knew if she got this one, she would definitely be at the hospital by noon. Man, she missed Sunday afternoons off. The promenade was beautiful this time of year. Although there was a slight nip in the air as the bay breeze brushed her cheek, she took her time to enjoy the atmosphere before descending to the underground station below. A few minutes later, the train arrived at the Cremorne underground terminus. At least this line was frequent, unlike her home line which featured frequent unreliability. The train stopped at several stations, both underground and surface, to let passengers board and alight... ...but it was once the station reached Central that the most activity happened. People rushed off the train, only to be equaled with a sizable hustle of commuters eager to get the train to Kensington. Millie smirked to herself, "they have a ten minute frequency, why the hurry?" Such was the mentality of the person these days. The announcement read "STOPPING AT ST. LUCIA". A few people got off, presumably to grab lunch at one of the cafes that skirted the water's edge. The line also serves South Wharf, the hub of the city's ferry service. The train stopped off at a few more underground stops in Kensington, serving all parts of the inner city. Millie looked up. The all too familiar anouncement read through the speakers: "STOPPING AT WELLINGTON STREET. CHANGE HERE FOR SOUTH CITY AND ARIZONA BAY SERVICES. THIS TRAIN WILL TERMINATE". Millie checked her watch. 11:42. She had made it with 8 minutes to spare. "I guess no time for coffee, but oh well", she thought to herself. Her mind was now focused on what potential excitement would come barging through the doors of the ER this afternoon. "There's always something." Don't forget to comment or +1 if you enjoyed this update!

Q: Will Sim City (2013) be playable in solo mode without being connected to the internet?

A sneak preview of new features in development for the upcoming Version 32 release of the Network Addon Mod (NAM) reveals a number of new features for the NAM's RealHighway (RHW) plugin, including the new QuickChange system.

Plopping Fractional Angled curves and roads is now a thing of the past with the new DragFAR! The NAM Team officialy reveals this piece of technology for the upcoming NAM 31 release and shows what it can do! On behalf of the NAM Team, Maarten (NOTE: the plopable curves will still remain available in the next NAM, so don't worry if you can't get used to the new FAR construction method)

For the Eager, Yet Overwhelmed Newcomer New to SimCity, Simtropolis, or been out of touch for a few years? Wondering what the heck a NAM or a BAT is? And just what the heck is up with those brown boxes?! This article will take you through the basics of registering your game, whether from a hard copy of the disc or from Steam, the essentials of Simtropolis, and a jumpstart into the world of Custom Content, to bring your game to a level beyond what you could imagine is possible. I would like to thank A Nonny Moose for his contributions and influences on the creation of this article. Rush Hours, Deluxe Editions, SimCity Boxes, Oh my! Before starting on registration information, we should make a clarification on just what the differences in these versions are. The short answer is nothing. When Maxis released Rush Hour, the expansion pack to the original SimCity 4 game, they released two versions: one simply the expansion (SimCity 4: Rush Hour); the other, a version that included both the original game and the expansion pack (SimCity 4: Deluxe Edition). It makes absolutely no difference to the game whether you own the Deluxe Edition, or Rush Hour. Now, just what is the SimCity Box? After the release of SimCity Societies in 2008, EA released this version which contains SimCity 4, SimCity 4: Rush Hour, SimCity Societies, SimCity Societies: Destinations, and The Sims Carnival: SnapCity. The story here is the same with Rush Hour and the Deluxe Edition: it makes absolutely no difference. In the event that you happen to be a long time player who does not own Rush Hour or the Deluxe Edition, it should be noted that the expansion pack is required to make use of 99% of the custom content available on this site. I will explain that further later on. Registering and Updating the Game Before playing, you need to pick up the two (2) necessary EA-released patches to your game for it to work correctly. In recent months, it has been noted that the official EA SimCity 4 Deluxe site has been taken down. So as not to leave these players hanging, some mirrors have been set up containing the assorted official updates. Important note: If you purchased your game from an authorized download source, you may not need any further updates. Check the properties of the game's .exe file. If it indicates you have version 1.1.641.0 or if you already have version 1.1.640.0, you will not need further updates. For the standard, PC version updates, check out here: SC4Devotion Own the Mac edition and can't open .exe's? Check out this thread: Bought your copy off Steam? Steam comes pre-patched! Yay! You should apply the two updates to the game in this order: EP1 to fix bugs, and the BATupdate to allow nightlights. When you are finished, you should check to see that the version number of the .exe file for the game in Program files/Maxis/Apps has been updated to 1,1,640,0. This is proof that your updates worked. Optional Upgrades and Tools You may notice on the mirror sites, a number of other downloads available. Among these are new landmarks, new rewards, the Lot Editor, and Building Architect Tool (BAT). These are all optional, and are not necessary for the games function or the addition of but do add content, and functionality. So, just what do these BAT and Lot Editor things do? The Lot Editor allows you to construct new lots, using the buildings, textures, and assorted prop pieces included within the game. The Building Architect Tool (BAT) allows you to construct new 3D models, and is what is used to create new buildings, trees, seawalls, spaceships, and everything inbetween. Using the Lot Editor and the BAT in tandem, the world is yours to create. It should be noted that both these tools have a sizeable learning curve. We do have a number of tutorials here to get you started, the most notable of these being the BAT Essentials Tutorial in the Omnibus. Unleashing the Game At this point, your game is ready to go! The appropriate patches are in place, and the game is as optimized as Maxis and EA could make it. So where to now? Many players are happy to play the game without any custom content, relying simply on what Maxis has provided. It is indeed very possible to create beautiful cities using only what content Maxis provided. But, many would also point out that the game can be so much more. In the 8 years since the release of the game, the amount of custom content available brings the game to an entirely new level. Players can recreate their hometowns with stunning accuracy, watching roads twist and curve, with even the correct corner market in place. Players can build in the desert, in futuristic settings, or on Mars. The custom content community has taken a finite game and given it infinite possibilities. And the question I'm sure you're asking by this point is, where do I begin? There are a number of exchanges available for you to browse. Here on Simtropolis, the STEX is perhaps the largest, and one of the oldest exchanges devoted to SimCity 4. The other primary English exchanges are SC4Devotion LEX and the PLEX (now on the STEX). You could say that SC4Devotiion is the high-tech site, and that Pegasus is the theme site, and you wouldn't be far wrong. Most community exchanges both require free registration in order to download, as Simtropolis does. The SimCity community expands far beyond English speakers, however - other communities include German and Japanese sites. Growable? Ploppable? What? As you browse the exchanges, you'll notice these phrases on assorted files throughout. The answer to this could not be simpler. A growable lot means that it will grow on its own with the appropriate zoning, as if it were any building created by Maxis. Ploppable lots allow you to plop the building as if it were a landmark. Some ploppables retain their commercial/industrial nature and provide jobs as though they were grown. It should be noted that at early points in the exchange, you may run across residential ploppables. These do not work, and will abandon some time after plopping. So, I've Downloaded Some Stuff. Now what? Installation of downloads really is simple. This article by our fearless Dirktator outlines the process of installation. Some downloads now come with .exe installers, which simplifies the process even more - the installer does all the work for you. The next question you may have is where the heck do I find my ploppable items in the game? Some items will be pretty intuitive as to where they are located - Educational facilities are located in the Schools menu, policing facilities in the Police menu, etc. But what about that great skyscraper advertised as a ploppable? Those will generally be located in the Landmarks menu. Nearly everything else (parks, churches, etc.) will be located in either Parks or Rewards. And if you just can't find it anywhere, consult the ReadMe that should have been included with the download. It should state where it is located in the menu system in game. Brown Boxes, Everywhere! Uh oh! This may look tragic, but it doesn't mean your game is wrecked. You just missed downloading some dependencies. Wait, what? Dependewho? Dependencies are separate files that a lot uses to complete itself. If Download A cannot find the appropriate dependency, it reverts to the lovely boxes you can see in the picture above. It may not look like it, but each lot is actually filled with bits and pieces of other files to make the bigger picture. The trees, the benches, the garbage cans, the swimming pools you see on assorted lots are all individual pieces, that come together to create a house, a park, or a shopping complex. All downloads on the SimTropolis EXchange are required to list all dependencies needed to work properly. If you've looked everywhere and just can't find that dependency, or if the dependency package is locked, please make a post here, and one of our friendly members will help you out. You may have further questions in regards to dependencies. As with installation, I would like to refer you to another article that goes into much further detail. The Dependency Debate by north_country_dude goes into great detail about the pros and cons of dependencies, and answers a few of the common questions you may have about them. So what should I download? Building tastes vary from person to person. Personally, I prefer the drab, 1970's concrete buildings, while many prefer the sleek, glass modern skyscrapers. Because of this, I'm not going to recommend any particular buildings - but I can recommend some mods that are considered the best and the greatest. Network Addon Mod, or the NAM. This mod was first conceived with the discovery of an unfinished road network Maxis left in the game. The talented modding community has taken this and turned it into entirely new road networks, gave us roundabouts, and allows us to create true metropolitan cities with roads to match. This can be found here on the STEX, or at SC4Devotion. If you're interested, here is the "official" NAM FAQ Thread with links to the different parts used with NAM & answers to common queries. If any issues come up while using NAM, there's also a support thread here. Various NAM Team members including Tarkus frequent the thread and gladly help out. A terrain and water mod. When you first launch the game, the grass and water seems realistic enough. A bit off perhaps, but hey nothing can be perfect. Not true - modders have been able to create new textures for the terrain and the water, which makes the Maxis textures look like off-coloured drawings. Cycledogg has made a number of varying terrain mods, and there are assorted water textures on the STEX, each varying for the kind of water your city needs. SimMars. Certainly this mod is not for everyone, but this article would be deficient if it weren't mentioned. SimMars transforms SimCity to Mars, complete with textures, buildings, road networks and music to match. The work done on this is exceptional, and it sits with the NAM as the greatest projects to improve the game that SimCity has seen. Everything else listed here. Livin in Sim has created this top ten list of great mod's that should be essential. A few other members have listed their contributions as well, and I would highly recommend them all! From there you could look through the CJ section to get ideas or run through the STEX and other exchanges to see if anything "jumps" out at you. As I mentioned before, if you can't seem to find something, make a post here and someone is bound to help you out. How do I win? SimCity is different from most games, as there is no set end point. Your success is based on goals you set. For many, a balanced budget and proper governance of a successful city without "godly" intervention (ie. cheats) makes a successful game. For many, the accurate recreation of a real life city is the goal, generally with the assistance of assorted budget cheats. For others still, it's simply to create the best city they can. Set your own goals and adjust as you achieve them. For all flavours of player, however, we do have an assortment of tutorials here on Simtropolis to help you on the Omnibus. The sections that will interest you most are SimCity 4 Reference and SimCity 4 Tutorials. Check back from time to time, as we do continue to add articles! Hopefully, this article has helped you get started. If you have any further questions that this article didn't answer, the folk in the forums and the chatroom are always eager to help, and any member of the Simtropolis Help Squad would be more than happy to give you some tips to the right direction.

The long awaited version of SC4Mapper have been released It now works in XP, Vista, win7 and even in win8 It features a config.bmp editor so you can now tweak a SC4M to your liking

Update 50: Mosaic Mania Hello again, everyone! Welcome back for update 50. Last week we reclimbed Mt. Fuji. Since my main page submission seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle and the view count was rather low, you might want to go back and look at last week's update before this one if you missed it, since this week is the mosaics to last week. So this week, mosaics to last week. This is one of my most ambitious mosaic attempts: it stretches across parts of 4 tiles. (~reminder: Please Click For Full Resolution) 01. Going up Mt. Fuji. 02. And coming back down. Since this is update 50 (*cough* and i didn't have anything special planned *cough*) I figured I'd keep with the mosaic theme and showcase some mosaics of the pasts. 03. Pine Hill harbor and seaplane port from Crater Lake. 04. From the waaaayback machine we dig into Rip City, Powell cinder cone and hot springs. 05. The Zanarkand - East Crossing Industrial Area. 06. From the far north, the Tundraport Oil Terminals. 07. The slopes of Mt. Rainier. 08. And finally, lovely Cannon Beach. And that's update 50. I don't have any plans for the future, so we're still on a sporadic update schedule and i don't know when the next will be, so i'll respond in the comments below in a week or so. Until next time happy gaming and enjoy the spring sun! @Schulmanator: Thank you sir! Always good to see you around here, too. @Forthwall: Thanks! Aye, that little japanese bus stop in the middle adds so much for such a small lot. @grstudios: Thanks.....then get back to it! @vivapanda: Nature, nature everywhere. @PhatHead: Thanks, hope you get a chance to look around. @terring, ggamus, gugu3: Thanks for all your comments guys .

Screw the game, SimCity has become a cynically brilliant advertising platform So the good news is that Cheetah Speed has returned to SimCity, and some new content in the form of the “Attractions Set” has been released. Who doesn't love new buildings to add into their cities? So this is something that's free right? Or will we have to pay? Son of a $%&^!. So there's no way to buy the content, and it certainly isn't free. It's just a way to get people who like SimCity to buy toothpaste. This isn't a cosmetic addition to the game, as these additions - and I think a giant ball of twine is seriously an awesome addition - will give you an advantage during play. “The Attractions Set adds happiness to low wealth Sims,” the official post stated. “They will also bring in all three wealth classes of tourists into your city.” This is why I have such a deep loathing for EA at the moment. It's not that you get neat stuff for buying a certain brand of toothpaste, it's that the game seems designed around these sponsorship deals and monetization strategies. It doesn't feel like EA and Maxis sat down and tried to create the very best version of SimCity possible, it feels like they designed the game that would be the easiest to control, monetize, and sell to advertisers. Source: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/simcity-as-advertising-platform-how-ea-rewards-you-for-buying-real-world-pr

Well, let me explain the situation about this new game. When the new SimCity, often referenced as SC2013, was announced back in March 2012, a large portion of the community were excited about the new game. After waiting ten years and numerous, Maxis finally decided to pick up the franchise and develop a new game. Many of us hoped for a new sequel to SimCity 4, a true successor that will to continue what SimCity 4 started. Better, more beautiful, more versatile, and even more challenging... However, a few of us were skeptical, and most of the skeptical people, including myself, have witnessed the failure of CitiesXL (I don't fall for the Curvy Roads marketing trick again). CitiesXL was developed four years prior to SC2013. Many city builders had high hopes for this game, but in the last months of the development cycle, the developer Monte Cristo announced that quite a few of the original ideas (like an advanced road tool) were scratched and an online mode, the Planet Offer, would be available with all new content included... with a price tag of €7/month. In combination with little communication to the community (even shutting down their own forums!), this made quite some people upset and after the release this didn't get any better; the Planet Offer flopped in making enough revenue and Monte Cristo went bankrupt. The big complaint from the community was that they didn't listen to their customers. CitiesXL was then picked up by Focus Home Interactive to finish up the things Monte Cristo had planned, but not much has been developed since then and even most major bugs (like memory leaks) haven't been fixed to this day... Now, back to SimCity 2013. Some people had hopes that Maxis would make a better game than Monte Cristo did. After all, it's Maxis we're talking about, the original developers of SimCity! Not some unknown company. However, skepticism still remained and unfortunately, it looks like the skeptics turned out to be true after all; this turned out to be a reboot, not a sequel. The more things they announced about the game, the more eyebrows where raised about this game... The Glass Box engine: a really advanced game engine for the new game, as we have heard. Now, during the development, there were not much comments on that at the start, but as more features got in our eyes odd limits, we began to wonder if those limits were the price of the Glass Box. After the release of the game, the engine itself showed huge problems by design, like people switching jobs and houses on a daily basis, dumb mass transit and city services (five fire engines trying to put out a fire on a small house while a huge building is ablaze with no fire engines), a borked traffic engine and numerous of other design bugs, of which some are inexcusable.Map size and region coherence: when they first announce the map size to be "as large as a medium sized SimCity 4 city" (or 2x2 km), there were two groups: one that was OK with it and one that was disappointed that they couldn't get larger maps, something that was already kind of a limitation in SimCity 4. Most people from the first group were OK with it as long as they could build coherent regions like in SimCity 4 (ergo: you can build cities side by side with connections you can manage yourself, so you can create the illusion of a larger metropolis). The region play in SimCity 4 is a key factor of the game and it kept me playing this game for seven years. If SimCity 2013 had that feature too, we would be much happier...However, then came the news how regions were set up: all cities were separate with set connections and each city has to specialize. For a large number of fans, this combination was a huge game breaker! This means you have a set city size of only 2x2km (4km2). To give you a figure of how small that is: Basel (CH) has 170,000 inhabitants and a surface area of 22.75km2. If you would continue that figure you could only build a city of 30,000 inhabitants on that plot of land. But Maxis expects us to build cities ten times that figure. Furthermore, the footprint of all components seem to be increased, making the cities look even smaller. Besides with this restricted map size, you can't recreate existing cities in Real Life because the tiles are way to small for that (and it's not helped by the fact that you can only build on preset maps). The massiveness of SimCity 3000 and 4 is gone in this version... Art style: the first in-game screenshots showed us the tilt-shift style of the game, as well as the model work. People complained about the graphics to be "too cartoony" and colourfull. Now, the latter aspect has been dealt with with colour filters (a clever addition, by the way), but the first one is a deeper problem. Quite some models lack texture details making them look too clean. Little weathering and noise effects makes them look like cardboard to some people, and that breaks the deal for people hoping to create a realistic city.The Always Online issue: probably one of the most discussed issues about this game: you HAVE to be always online to play it. Saves are stored upon the cloud and you have interaction with the world all the time. Let me just sum up some of the consequences of this discussed on long and winding on other threads on this website:People with no or a bat internet connection are screwed; they just can't play the game because it can't connect to the server. This will also exclude quite a part of the market. Also, this game is ideal to play in lost hours on the road or in the train, but having no internet connection there often, this excludes another potential portion of the market. And then there's the issue that even in Single Player mode you have to be online, which doesn't make sense since you use none of the online features.Cloud controlled saves means no control over your saved files. What if you just want to experiment? What if you just want to use a disaster in your city and then want to roll back? What if you made a huge error and want to go back to where things go right? Or even raised a lot more: what if EA shuts it servers down? People will end up with lost work, and this happened quite a few times during the first week of the release.The game is ONLY available by Origin, EA's own online platform. Steam users were not happy about this, because some people didn't trust this new platform and it was another program bloating on your PC.And then there's modding. There are mixed messages about that: Maxis encourages everyone to mod the game while EA says they will ban you for cheating when doing so. This mixed message confused a lot of players. Is modding allowed or not? It could be a competitor to their own DLC addons. Furthermore, modding could potentially dis-balance the entire game online, making is way less fun for everyone. A solution to that is to allow modding in closed servers and single player games, but soe far, nothing has been said about it. Even worse: information about modding is still scarce and vague today...Why did EA come up with this Always Online DRM? To prevent piracy. Quite some people raised that this is not going to help anyway and instead they punish us all for what a select group of people do to this game (and DRM is not going to stop them anyway).The Price Tag: when the pre-orders gave up a price of $80, a lot of people found it expensive for this game. To compare: regular AAA titles cost only about $50-60 and SimCity 4 Deluxe costs only $5-15 nowadays. Because it's so expensive (and because the new game didn't turn out as we expected), a lot of people keeping their hands on their wallets and don't buy the game.The game seemed to be dumbed down. Instead of an advanced simulator for mature gamers, we have the feeling that this is a simplistic game for kids. Also, it looks like a lot more micromanagement is involved in this game than in SimCity 4, while this neglects macromanagement.Now, to make things clear, with all these things summed up, in general, old fans are not too fond about the new game. Heck, I've heard stories about people picking up this game, got frustrated about it, look up what its predecessor was and what it can do, got pissed about what SC2013 can't do what SC4 can and play SC4 instead without touching SC2013 ever again. Biggest complain of the community? The developers didn't listen to them. This is Cities XL all over again... I did play one of the closed Betas, but it did by far not convince me to buy the new game. The experience was as far as I can tell quickly boring and frustrating. I didn't want the game to fail, but in the current form it looks like a slowly moving train wreck and I've practically gave up hopes on this new game. Another game, Cities in Motion 2, seems to quite some people more like the new SimCity than the SimCity itself, even though the scope of that game is completely different. It looks like Maxis lost their grip on making a good city builder... A lot of these points have been raised a thousand times, but this is for me the most civilized way I can put it. Best, Maarten (MandelSoft) NAM Team and SimTropolis Staff Member

The Network Addon Mod (NAM) combines all transportation network-related fixes, additions and new creations that have been released so far. It will add countless new features to the existing network tools, such as new overpasses, highway onramps, intersections, ped-malls, a ground light rail network, roundabouts and turning lanes. VERSION 31 FOR WINDOWS FILESIZE: 206 MB New features in Version 31 (March 2, 2013)--Includes NAM Controller r169 New "Monolithic" package--all previous separate download plugins now included in the main package, including RealHighway Mod (RHW) Network Widening Mod (NWM) Railway Addon Mod (RAM) High Speed Rail Project (HSRP) Street Addon Mod (SAM) Rural Roads Plugin NAM Retexture and Cosmetic Mods (North American and Euro) Virtually all previously released bridges RealHighway Mod now updated to "Project 57" specs, with Multi-Height networking, and Wider RHW Bridges. New Draggable Fractional Angle Road system. Maxis Highway Override ("Project Symphony") by MandelSoft and jdenm8. For the first time ever, transit stations and hole-digger/raiser lots are included. Disappearing construction lots, making the use of starter pieces vastly simpler and less cumbersome. A few odds and ends for the Network Widening Mod. Two new styles of SAM Streets: Klinker Streets by squidi and jplumbley (Set 6) and Moonlight Japanese Streets (Set 10) Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool (TSCT) updated. Please note that some documentation is still forthcoming as of this writing.

I grew up with SimCity, and have been playing the games since the early 90s. Every single one of them got better and better until Simcity Societies when either I got to old for a Sim City game, or EA and Maxis decided they needed a new target audience. I played SimCity in order to create my dream cities, the problem is my dream has always been one a bit more grounded in reality. If I play Minecraft for example I build structures that might be able to realistically stand on their own rather than floating lava towers made of diamond. Every bit of who I am as a gamer today was shaped by those initial years of playing SC2K, 3K and 4. I remember calling in sick from school the day SC4 came out and from that point forward I devoted hours of my life to playing it, modding it, making BATs, and playing it some more. All of that love for the series came from the concept of achieving a realistic dream, a dream which could actually exist in the real world, one in which I could base my ideas on reality. Why is it that Maxis is so very afraid of realism? Everything from the costs of buildings and taxes, to the scale and populations are so far gone from reality. I know there is an entire thread dedicated to map size limitations, but seriously maxis don't you freaking understand anything about the idea of a city? My home town of 48,383 people would barely fit onto a 10x10km map..... ok so lets say scale isn't perfect and players tend to add less buffer area between zones and stuff than in reality so maybe we could squeeze that same city into a 5x5km map if we really tried.... NO, Maxis expects me to put 200k people on a freaking 2x2km area! just no. I understand that maybe processing power became a limiting factor because you are forced to calculate the dietary habits of a million sims in a freaking city building game.... I can understand that, but make it a population limit then not a city size limit. Heck I would be fine with a 10x10km area with a max pop of 500k people. Theoretically it shouldn't take anymore processing power to calculate the eating habits of 500k sims on a 100km2 map than a 4km2 map. If its an issue of graphical power then I am going to just laugh and say Maxis needed to rethink its graphics engine of choice then. There are tons of games out there rendering much larger areas with significantly more detail than what SC2013 seems to posses. Heck I wanted bigger cities in SC4, but I was never going to win that argument, at least not with the sloppy coding that made the game such a resource hog (ran nearly the same on my old old althon 1.4ghz with 1Gb of ram as it does on my six core I7 with 16Gbs of ram). Alteast there are regions though right? so that you can choose your own connections between cities and zoom out to region view and see your awesome creation from a single fixed perpective? Nope, seriously why in the world did you guys make connections preset and then add a 10 mile wide buffer between your city and its neighbor city? The question of scale bothers me even further. In SC4 they were moving in the right direction with the addition of suspension bridges that actually looked like they didn't belong in a cartoon caricature of a city. They still had some work to do though, airports for example were so small that even a real life aircraft carrier would have dwarfed them. Now in SC2013 they decided that the bridges needed to go back to looking like cartoon caricatures of the real things, and that airports needed to consume an entire city tile.... Seriously guys? Why can't you get them both right at the same time? its not like this is a guessing game, we have these things called measurements. On the subject of population, I have seen many screenshots showing cities with populations of around 200k, but some even showing 700k. Lets say that most well developed cities in the game would achieve a population of around 240k. That puts the density at 60,000 sims per kilometer. The densest city in the world is Manila, at 40k people per Km... New York city, still a fairly dense city even by european standards has a density of around 14,000 people per square km making it about 1/4 as dense as an average well developed SC 2013 city. Seems like easy math to me. Was the design decision basically that people like big numbers so we should lie a bit and say that 25 sims live in a house? Speaking of numbers, why can't things cost a realistic amount? Sure Ill take 30 schools at $5,000 each Bob! I just don't get it... a school costs a couple million to build. Cities rake in millions in revenue quarterly. We also calculate that revenue quarterly and even yearly in many cases, so why does maxis insist on hourly revenue? Are our attention spans that short that the thought of waiting for more than an hour of game time to balance our budget just makes us loose it? I know this is negative, and I am of a minority that wants extreme realism. However, I would love to see some middle ground here, maybe cities slightly larger with a population cap and the ability to only simulate traffic patterns, job needs, and income levels with 1 in 10 sims simulating everything and then extrapolating that data to the other 9 sims similar to them? That would dramatically simplify the processor load and give us bigger maps. If it is graphics limited then for crying out loud just give us simple lods again at longer view distances, and use that awesome tiltshift shader tech for something useful and just don't render those out of focus elements. Making data values like population and costs realistic is as simple as changing a couple numbers around, and you could even have a realism mode in the game! As for scale, there is just no excuse, if maps were the size they needed to be then you wouldn't be forced to make a suspension bridge 1/10th its normal size and still leave buildings their proper size. If you read this far then sorry for this massive rant, I just miss the game I grew up with, and the idea of being able to do things even somewhat realistically. That is what a SIMulation game is supposed to do right, realistically simulate things?

Since I just finished playing 2 games via the Beta (more like demo) and thought I would share my thoughts. I've been a pretty big critic of the game here on the forums. If you've read my posts you would have seen I made comments about how this game feels more catered to younger kids, soccer moms, FB game players and the like. I've also been vocal about city size and other features being lacking. I had a fairly negative outlook on the game to say the least going in. I've been playing Sims games since the 80s, I'm in my 30s now. I played all of the sim games from Sim Ant to Sim City and have purchased and played every single version of SC ever made like a lot of us here. When Societys came out I got the feeling that the people who were a core part of Sim City in the old days were long gone and the game was dead. Like many of us I still hoped for a revival of Sim City. Perhaps something where SC4 left off, a newer cleaner version of SC4 with more options than the last and an upgraded visual experience. We've come a long way in technology in the last 10 years, surely a new version of Sim City 4 could be quite an experience on todays hardware. I was fairly excited to get into the "Beta". Though I might have been a pretty hard critic I really hoped for the best, I hoped this "beta" would change my mind and I could pre order the game post haste. Upon booting up the game the first thing I noticed was that the GUI or Graphical User Interface looked fairly good (intiail view), but not polished. As a Professional Graphic designer I feel it could have been much much better looking. It's not terrble but it's not great. I'm not sure if I would call it good but I wouldn't call it bad, more like acceptable. While running through the initial tutorial I had a few thoughts like "When will this tutorial end already?" not that it was long and not that I was so eager to play but because I found it slightly annoying. I also thought "these graphics look pretty mundane" I couldn't wait to get into the graphics and up everything to the max which is exactly what I did before starting on my new map. My intial worry was this game was going to be like Sims 3 and during the tutorial all I heard was sims "babble" which did not set well with me. Once the graphics were upped I thought things were looking better. I still thought the lighting looked pretty bad but I had yet to start building a town. You only get 1 hour which is hardly time to build a town let alone a city. First, the city size is small. It's as small as I suspected even though many on these forums argued with me. I can plop a main avenue from one side of the city to the next without even remotely scrolling for about $10,000. The map size is small even for a town let alone a city. To be clear, there is absolutely NO possible way to build a city and have it look like a real city in ANY respect of your imagination. It will look silly to have a map size too small for a town with high rise buildings. To be honest at this point writing this review I feel like I am wasting my time so I am going to shorten this up without going into a ton of detail with this: 1. The graphics are bad, in some most cases terrible. You should NOT expect them to get better on final release. I guarantee you they wont be upped by much. 2. The town sizes are WAY too small. 3. This is a town simulator not a city simulator first. 4. No terraforming and bad / ugly pre terraformed land. 5. Not so great lighting 6. Lack of detail in modeling 7. Sims 3 babble 8. Graphical slow downs even on a high end system at random times for no apparent reason even though the game looks like it could be ran on a P4 machine from 10 years ago. 9. Jagged edges everywhere, generally bad AA. 10. Crappy enviromental effects (pratically none) For instance you wont see dust floating in the air or anything done to give you a sense of actually being there. 11. Unpolished in so many respects that it would be impossible to fix by release. 12. Feels strange laying out zoning and roads. Often leads to problems getting the right fix without destroying something. 13. So awkward to play. 14. Depressing to play, yes depressing! Mostly because how bad the models and lighting looks. Bad models under what feels like some sort of winter artificial light... 15. Mutiple little things that are annoying, such as the screen shaking when planting trees.. completely not needed! 16. Laying zones out is total guess work. No idea on how large zones should be between roads results in dead space, something you dont want in a lot this small! This is VERY annoying. 17. Business signage throughout the game looks bland and very uninspired. Hire a better graphics designer NOW and put them on full time fixing up graphics and making LOGOS! Make the city POP! 18. Lawns look bad, not just on low income homes but middle class homes as well. 19. Dirt roads have sharp cut off edges like paved / concrete roads. Playing this game no matter how hard I tried was not a joy. Not once did it bring a smile to my face. The only people who will enjoy this game are kids aged 8-15. People who grew up not experiencing SC4 who have nothing good to compare it with and lack the maturity or perfectionism you get with age. That's not to say that I feel many in that age range would even enjoy it, it's flat out bad. I had no desire to keep playing past the 1 hour mark. I'm glad it stopped. I hate to say it, I really do, I wanted nothing more than to be totally wrong, to be surprised, to pre order the game. The game looks bad, the game play is bad, the graphics are bad... bad bad bad. If I were forced to say anything good about this game I would say that their ideas with having sims go to work / home and being able to follow them was a good one but their focus on that aspect of the game ruined everything else. It is "okay" (not terribly exciting) to watch cars go back and forth. This is not a new Sim City to me, this more like... Sims 3 City, and done poorly at that. If you are a Designer, an Architect, an Engineer, a lover of all previous Sim City games and over the age of 15 you will very unlikely enjoy this game. If I had to pick a price point at which I would purchase this game it would ABSOLUTELY NOT BE $60! I would pay $7-$10. I'm not kidding and I would have reservations about paying that much. I highly recommend you do NOT pre order this game, if you have, get a refund!. On top of all these issues and the game being bad you are paying $60 and being treated like a pirate. Terrible. These guys should be ashamed of what they have made and how bad they have taken for granted the community that supported them for so long. As much as I disliked what I saw before playing the Beta I feel duped, the game is much worse than I expected in every aspect. I feel they took the best they could in screen shots and video and enhanced them to fool the customer.

The Simtropolis Wiki is an open, collaborative project with the aim to be the definitive resource for the new SimCity (2013) game, as well as a general resource for the SimCity franchise and its communities. Creating an account with the Simtropolis Wiki takes only a few seconds. Don't be shy -- dive in and start editing!

http://www.vg247.com...tion-to-origin/ So basically this means no purchase for me. Such a shame, the game I've been waiting for years gets announced and it's seems awesome, and yet they manage to screw it up with stuff like this. I could live with the always online requirement (even though it's idiotic and drives people to piracy), but no mods means no purchase. edit: after hearing from you and other EA/Maxis sources, it seems like mod support is on it's way. There's still the issue of the always online requirement. While multiplayer sounds exiting (I for one would love to build regions together with friends), it shouldn't be forced on people, and I'm also a bit concerned about the global economy thing they are implementing into the game. There should always exist the option of playing completely offline, having your own fun without anyone else interfering in your little sphere of city simulation. And frankly, that's what they should be focusing on the most, traditional SimCity gameplay, just updated to be as good as possible in 2013 and the years to come.

Update 40 Summer 1880 Stevens noticed the horses were a little agitated after the last bend in the river road. The group of census workers was visibly tired after months of traveling from one town to the next. Ben’s Bend lay behind them, as well as New SorGun and many of the comforts that sizable towns offered. The pine forests, small settlements, and the wild frontier were all that lay between Stevens crew and a successful completion of their task. Stevens’ horse gave another grunt, showing her displeasure as the group trotted along the dark and lonely path. Stevens knew this was the same path that the early settlers of Junction used to flee the impending onslaught of the native Indians over 25 years ago. Much had changed in a quarter century, but the eerie road still felt caught in the past. Perhaps this was how the early settlers felt as they fled for their lives that cold winter morning. Finally, flickers of light began to break apart the shadows and the trees gave way to open meadows and cleared land. “Welcome to Junction,” Stevens announced to his fellow travelers. New houses began to dot the road as the group moved closer to the town, but scars of the past were still clearly visible. Scorched rubble was slowly succumbing to nature’s incessant march, but 25 years was not long enough to hide the old wounds. The Indian uprising nearly a quarter century ago saw the town of Junction razed to the ground, and it would remain that way for over a decade. But in the early 1870’s, with the announcement of the railroad terminus and renewed faith in the security of the region, Junction began to slowly rise from the burnt ashes that littered the landscape. As Stevens rode into town, he couldn’t help but remember his experience with Junction 10 years earlier. The faint smell of burnt wood permeated the land, and the dark ashes of scorched earth contrasted violently with the surrounding cedar and evergreen trees. But despite the hidden reminders of the earlier destruction, today, Junction seemed to be reborn, in a sense. Over the next couple days the census workers made quick work tallying up the local residents. Stevens learned that Bufford Grills was one of the first pioneers to resettle the destroyed settlement. He now owns many of the prime town lots, including Bufford Stables, which is the largest employer in Junction. *1680x1050 - Click for full “I never knew my mother, God rest her soul,” Grills told Stevens, as the two men enjoyed a smoke after a filling meal. “And I wish I could say the same for my father, that drunken coot,” Grills continued. “The only thing he taught me was how to shoe a horse. The rest of the time he was getting corned at one doggery or the next.” “I’m sorry for your trying childhood,” Stevens interjected. “Don’t be. I wouldn’t be where I am today were it not for him. Growing up, I studied every rotten characteristic in that drafted man’s bones, and I’ve labored to do exactly the opposite. It has served me well,” Grills chuckled lightly. Stevens smiled. Grills rambled on, “The Kentucky backwoods provided me with a most excellent education for a life on the frontier, rotten father and all.” “And now, I can finally call a piece of this magnificent wilderness home,” Grills said, after a long drag of his pipe. After a few days of chatting up the locals, the Census workers were happy to check off one more town. Stevens glanced at his notebook as he packed his belonging for the next destination and was surprised to see how small his list had become. *1680x1050 - Click for full Stevens didn’t realize it at the moment, but he was falling in love with the wild Pacific Northwest. Ten years earlier, Fredric Stevens would have dreaded another horse ride through the forest trails. But as he and his crew trotted along yet another dirt path toward their next destination, Stevens felt enlivened by the smell of cedar, and the swish of the wind through the swaying evergreens. Stevens could sense the morale of the group rise as they rode into Arrow Ridge. The end of their journey was near, and for most of his co-workers it could not come soon enough. The crew set up at the Arrow Inn, right in the center of town. *1680x1050 - Click for full The owner, Mr. Paul Brittle, was excited to see new guests. Like Junction, Arrow Ridge grew from a simple crossroads on one of the old Indian trials that led north from the Portland territory to New SorGun. The road also split west, toward Materburg and a large swath of farmland. Brittle told Stevens that the Inn had done steady business since it was opened 4 years ago, and Stevens wasn’t surprised. From the looks of things, Arrow Ridge had grown steadily since Stevens’ last visit. After a few days, Stevens and his crew were about wrapped up. That afternoon a storm rolled in, and Stevens hurried to finish up the few remaining houses on his block. As he was walking along a fence housing a few pigs the sky finally opened up and a steady rain began soaking the earth. As Stevens began a mad dash for the next house he noticed the pigs going about their business as if nothing had changed. The sight stopped him in his tracks, and he walked closer to the pen while the rain spattered on his hat and face. Suddenly he let out a good laugh. “You’re right my friends… it’s just a little rain. It certainly feels nice,” he said to the grazing pigs. *1680x1050 - Click for full After sizeable towns like Steamer Bay or New SorGun, Arrow Ridge was like a walk in the park to Stevens and his crew. In a few days the town had been tallied and Stevens made one more check in his notebook. The work in Arrow Ridge passed quickly, almost too quickly for Stevens, and suddenly he found himself on the road once again. The census workers passed farm after farm on their way to Materburg, keeping tally as they went. Finally, the wagon train crossed over the final bridge and Materburg spread out before them. Farming continued to be the lifeblood of the town, and as more farmers moved to the region the town continued to grow up as well. As the federal workers made their way to the center of Materburg, Stevens marveled at how much excitement and energy the little town exhibited. *1680x1770 - Click for full Over the next few days, Stevens had never seen his crew work so hard. The finish line was in sight and the census crew began a mad dash to get there. But Stevens found himself at odds with their rush to finish. On one of the last few days of work, he walked along one of the dirt roads towards the outskirts of town attempting to finish up his canvasing for the day. He noticed the beautiful hills surrounding the town as he walked up to a particularly nice home that sat across the street from a cattle pasture. After knocking several times and receiving no answer, he peeked in one of the windows and noticed the home appeared to be empty. Stevens brought the matter up with one of the neighbors at his next stop. “That place has been empty for months now, the codfish aristocrats who lived there before were apparently too good for our town and moved to Steamer Bay,” said the woman who answered the door. “It’s for sale… I just hope the new owners aren’t as high-falutin as the last,” she continued. *1680x1050 - Click for full Stevens took the long road back to town and let his mind wander. As he walked along the old fence erected decades ago to protect from a possible Indian attack he stopped and looked toward town. Dusk was approaching, and he could already see light appearing from some of the windows. He turned his head and gazed across the cleared fields and forests beyond. “Well,” Stevens thought to himself, “I suppose that settles it…” *1680x1050 - Click for full A few days later, Stevens pulled out his notebook for the last time. The census of Materburg was complete and the wild journey over the past several months was now about to end. There was excited chatter among Stevens’ group as they began boarding the ship that would take them back to San Francisco and ‘civilization’, as some joked. Stevens and his close friend Jacob Brick were the last to board. “I’ve been dreaming of this day for weeks,” said Brick as he smiled up at the tall masts. “So have I,” said Stevens, and he handed his friend an envelope. “What’s this?” said Jacob, looking quizzically at Stevens. “My retirement announcement,” replied Stevens, smiling. “Tell the boss everything is in order… you are in charge of the official files,” he continued, as he handed over his leather satchel bag. Brick stood motionless with a confused look on his face. “Did you think I’d be counting forever?” Stevens laughed. “Now get up there, before you miss your boat.” Brick slowly walked up the gangplank, looking back at Stevens. His confused expression began to fade away, and was replaced with a slight smile. “Look me up next time you are in town,” Stevens said with a smile and a wave, as his friend finally stepped aboard. *1680x1050 - Click for full Replies to the last Teaser: Alex_1210, Schulmanator, Huston, NMUSpidey, dubaidude303, Hellken and spursrule14: Thank you all for taking time to comment, I always enjoy reading each one. Ace❤: Now that's how to reconstruct a town. Reminds me of the Great Chicago Fire. Awesome update SimCoug! Yes, city wide fires were quite common back then... jason leo: The city has changed so much, I wonder how it will look like in 1900. Stay tuned to find out... but it may be a while DUKE-OF-MAYHEM: Wow what a transformation! I can't wait to see how Junction, Arrow Ridge and Materburg are doing. Beautiful job as always SimCoug. Do you happen to know what the population of Middleton and Grill's Fork are? I've been marking down towns and their respected populations in order to do percentage increase (or decrease) charts similar to the ones you see on Wikipedia for cities and towns. New SorGun alone has increased in population by 120.96% from the last census! Wow, cool! I actually plan to make a region wide map for the next update that will include the populations of every town, (big and small), and it will include Middleton and Grill's Fork. Thanks for your interest!

Why has the SimCity story gone away? It’s a good question. And the answer for it reveals much about how both the games industry, and the games journalism industry, work. In March, shortly after SimCity’s disastrous launch (servers couldn’t cope, the game barely ran, features had to be removed, and the always-on DRM was seriously crippling the game), EA and Maxis’ PR went into damage protection mode. And one refrain we saw over and over was a line from Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, that the ‘single-player’ game had to “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers.” On 12th March, RPS revealed that this statement simply wasn’t true. Via a source from inside Maxis, we learned that the server was doing no such thing, and that the calculations were running on the player’s PC. Two days later these claims were confirmed by a modder who had the game running indefinitely offline. It was clear that the message coming from Maxis simply wasn’t true. (There’s no better round-up of the events than the one put together by Kotaku.) (One thing that’s important to note here: That the claims weren’t true does not provide room to conclude that Bradshaw was “lying”. Not knowing the circumstances within Maxis at all, there’s no way to know that Bradshaw did not believe what she was saying to be entirely accurate. Miscommunication, deliberate misinformation, we just don’t know, and as such accusations don’t help this discussion.) So what to do next? Via RPS, and much of the gaming press, the reality that the servers were not running offline calculations became widely understood. So how did EA or Maxis handle this situation? With silence. And if simply telling the truth isn’t considered an available option, silence is by far the most effective response in this industry. Full story: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/22/the-power-of-silence-why-the-simcity-story-went-away/

From Paradox Interactive, Cities in Motion 2 is a mass transit simulation game where you build transportation networks for cities. CIM2 brings new choices to building transportation networks. If you want to focus less on city-building, and more on transportation networks for cities, CIM2 might be worth your time to check out... Here's the marketing blurb: Cities in Motion 2 (CIM2) is the sequel to the popular mass transit simulation game Cities in Motion. Build, manage and lead your transportation network to provide cities with their ever changing needs. Cities in Motion 2 introduces new features including multiplayer game modes, day and night cycles, timetables and dynamic cities. Building the transportation network will directly affect how the city grows. Affordable transportation brings middle class housing and work places, while more expensive and exotic choices bring high end businesses. Take advantage of many different types of vehicles including buses, trams, ferries and more. Build alone or play cooperatively with a friend. Use the newly implemented bus lanes to build efficient traffic free roadways. Tackle rush hour by managing transportation timetables and meeting the needs of the citizens. Dynamic cities Player’s choices affect city growth Day and night cycle Manage the timetables Multiplayer, both co-operative and competitive modes Campaign and sandbox mode

This has cropped up on the forums one or twice recently, but anyone interested in transport type games should definitely take a look at the features list: Currently it is still looking for crowdfunding though the devs seem to think it will meet its target. I for one hope so, looks like it has great potential and greater depth than Cities in Motion.

Joerg! While it is a pleasant surprise to see one of the really old hands here again, the occasion could certainly be more pleasant... I read through your entire rant, and I can relate to it very much. The only point where I don't quite agree with you is the money amounts. It would be awfully cumbersome to handle 7-digit figures (and upwards!) all the time, and it wouldn't be that important whether your new college costs §25,867,750 or §25,499,628 - why not just leave rounded amounts and ditch the last few zeroes for the sake of readability? As long as the scale is realistic (tax income vs. plop costs), the particular figures don't matter that much. ----------- This makes me think of another factor that I haven't seen addressed so far in all the lengthy discussions about SC2013, but that IMO is relevant: It's been a while, and the game has been with us. We have matured alongside it, we have learnt new things on our own and in communities like this one. We have delved into the matter of city planning and building, of transport system layouts and building architecture. I remember when a BATter called lambsquirter showed his Central Plaza BAT. Back then, it was just another shiny skyscraper to me, and when another young BATter called paulvmontfort replied and said that the actual Central Plaza had a triangular and not a square footprint, I thought "Well, that may be, but is it that important? It's just a skyscraper for SimCity." And today? Today I know dozens of skyscrapers around the world by name, and not only that. Rail nuts taught me a lot about laying out rail lines, road nuts did the same for roads. Others have shown and explained how to lay out a realistic seaport, and not to forget the modular airport packs! Behind each of these mods, there is knowledge of the real-life counterpart that made the respective authors discontent with the default stuff and motivated them to offer something better. And with each of these mods, part of that background knowledge trickled into the community, slowly accumulating in the more eager custom content users and community followers - alongside their increasing age and general life experience. I think that all this results in higher expectations and a better eye for shortcomings. I don't like most of what I see of SC2013, either, but I sometimes wonder what I'd think if I were ten yours younger and didn't have any of the experience I have gathered through the custom content community... I guess I still wouldn't like several directions this game is heading towards, but other issues - realism being one of them - would probably not hit me as hard as they do now.

Well, here we are, ten years of Simtropolis -- and we're only a scant few months away from the next version of SimCity. Long-standing members -- thanks for sticking around, or for at least popping back every once in a while. And greets to all members old and new. This place is going to be hopping in March...! Can't wait! Happy Holidays, everyone... And Happy 10th Anniversary! The Trixies will start in January this year, and we're going to do something a little extra special for our 10th this time around. We're going to try to make it worth your while to nominate, and nominate often. More details in a few weeks... Have a great one! Free bunnies for the rest of the month... :bunny: :bunny:

EA has released information. => Users receive this information. => Users think about this information. => Users will have an opinion about this information. => Users will want to exchange their opinion with others via communication channels such as this very forum. That's what a forum is for, by the way Yell "HOLD YOUR OPINION" all you want, it's no use. (It's also funny how you voice an opinion yourself directly before screaming at others not to do so.) Imagine you had booked a beachside holiday resort with sports facilities, and now you get told that the resort is actually far away from the sea and doesn't have any sports facilities, but a spa/sauna. Yes, once you start your holidays there. it might be ok - different, but ok. But you don't need to travel there first to know that it's not what you wanted and what you expressly indicated beforehand. IMO, what's pointless talk is that constant "Oh, it's still 6 months". What exactly do you think will they do in the remaining months? Does anybody here really, sincerely, reckon they will turn the game concept inside out? Make terraforming possible after all? Introduce a full-blown single player mode? Totally change the region concept and the game engine? That would boil down to throwing out the entire game so far and starting from scratch. I guess the community has sensed rather well that we're beyond some points of no return already. The concept stands, the game engine stands, the game mechanics are standing, next steps will probably be general programming to put the concept into practice, artwork, fixing glitches, UI programming and design, testing and balancing, documentation. Don't forget the server back-end, which will require a huge portion of the entire effort, because it's basically a client/server game with heavy bias on the server. I seriously doubt that in 6 months we will be any more able to make a metropolis region out of seamlessly connected city tiles than based on what we know now. The same applies to terraforming, realistic-scale stations, railyards... heck, I don't even want to think about airports! Or sea ports, for that matter. Or even just the possibility to say "I want a highway connection to the neighbour city right here and right this way." If the concept so far is to your liking, then these points of no return don't matter, and the following 6 months can be full of excitement and more interesting details. If it is not to your liking, then... well... I have scarce hope that anything to happen in the following 6 months will make that fundamental change it would take to get you on board. ______________________ Back to topic, I was more skeptical than excited from the get-go, and for the third time now I find myself not really caring at all. If this continues, I guess my reaction to the next so-called SimCity game (or SimCity-style game) will be reduced to shrugging, turning around and forgetting about it immediately. Personally, I feel pretty relaxed. I mean, the cards had been lying on the table for 10 years now, and they were speaking a rather clear language - in this context it's almost amusing to see how one contestant after the other fails to acknowledge what's in plain sight and goofs it up. I must confess that this entertains me to some degree - the usual hullabaloo in the forums explicitly included. EDIT Whoa, I'm slow. Guess you shouldn't interrupt posting for other things. I was picking up the thread from nukeu's post, of course.

At last, the new Real Highway (RHW) Interchange Guide board has been completed! All RHW interchange tutorials throughout the SimCity 4 community can be found there. Each guide has been indexed by type, and organized in a way that it is easily accessible from the table of contents. ----- For those who are new to the RHW Interchange Guide, or do now know what it is, here is a brief introduction: With the release of RHW 3.0 (and subsequent releases), there is virtually an infinite number of ways you can construct your highways and interchanges. However, this is not a simple task, and takes quite a bit of getting used to. Many folks have looked at several pictures of RHW interchanges and asked "whoa! How'd you do that?" and have tried to construct something similar themselves, sometimes with much difficulty that eventually causes them to give up. This guide will show examples of various interchange types and will describe how they were made. Feel free to ask questions after a guide has been posted if you are having difficulty. I will attempt to show how to construct these interchanges as simple as possible, using only the necessary downloads. If you'd like to submit your own guides to this thread, please post your guide in the submissions thread to have it reviewed. Also be sure to follow the format set up in previous guides. Thanks!

Will we see flowing rivers, streams, waterfalls, rapids, or other bodies of water that are above sea level?

But you can contradict this by the fact that SimCity 4 still runs single core. SimCity 2013 can take the benefit of multi-processing as we know today, speeding up gameplay and making this less of an issue. Now, to prove how small 2x2 km actually is, take for example my home city Zoetermeer (the Netherlands). Population is 121,580 (a medium sized city to dutch terms) and it's build in one of the most densest populated countries in Europe. Most people here live in row homes, which makes this city smaller than an American city of the same population size. If you look at the city in Google Maps and you divide the city in squares, you'll get this. - Black = 1x1 km (small city tile) - Red= 2x2 km (medium city tile) - Blue = 4x4 km (large city tile) - Green = 8x8 km ("extra large" city tile) As you can see, even with not a really big city, you have to use 16 medium city tiles to re-create this city! With large city tiles, you only need 4 and the complete city will fit in one 8x8 tile. So what does actually fit in one medium city tile? I've looked further on Google Maps but most cities and towns were bigger than that. The closest I could get is Weesp (Pop. 17,529), but it's not much and it even goes a bit off the map: My opinion is that larger city sizes should be an option. With this schematics, I hope I made my point clear. Best, Maarten

View Album Spend a day at our little wildlife preserve... :-) click images for full size Pandas Tigers and Lions Elephants, Giraffes and Zebras Crocodile House, Deer Run WaterWorld Bears Rhinos Monkey Rock Aviary, Playgrounds, Restaurant At night Bus Terminal Xtra large mosaic (1280x2356)

I started my City Journal a little bit more than two years ago on SC4 Devotion, many updates, and here are some pictures from them. 57 pictures, might take some time to load ! If you want to, please tell me which entry is your favorite ! I'll be back soon with a new project ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Amazraou Isla Cornisa Generone - - - Chiesa Nuova - - Random grow - Presuntuoso - - - El Paraiso - Encerrado - - - - Viaduc de l'Oglio Livestock Farming - - Piedra en Oglio - Commercial District Main train station - - Truck crash Saint Tropez - - - Farming 2.0 - - Daventry Town Coos Bay - Beacon Hill - - - - Kinbasket Lake Kinbasket Old Mine - - Montbard - - Le Tour de France -

You: SimCity… Network… Not this again! What are EA up to n– Wait. SimCity 4? Network Addon Mod? Me: The latest SimCity might have been hamstrung by infrastructural problems, but there’s no reason your love affair with Maxis’ fair city-builder need end there. SimCity 4 has enormous cities. SimCity 4 had no internet requirement. SimCity 4 had… all the same traffic problems as the more recent release. But! It also had a vibrant modding community that’s still working on fixing problems and making the game better today. This pre-release (i.e. alpha release) of version 32 of the Network Addon Mod is testament to that. NAM improves the game’s pathfinding, fixes bugs in the base game, and adds “a myriad of new transport network items, ranging from ground light rail, to fractional-angle roads, to roundabouts, and much more” Roundabouts! Here’s an expanded list of features from the ModDB site, because it’s the nerdy detail of it all that excites me so much. And so on. NAM isn’t the only SimCity 4 mod worth installing, nor the only mod still under development. The SimCity 4 Devotion website and forums reveal a community still humming away with activity, and there’s a lot that’s worth looking at. That includes downloadable saved games, new buildings to turn your city into Tokyo or some other real world hotspot, and expansive mods and total conversions. Despite its age, SimCity 4′s high-resolution sprites still look fantastic. Time has even been kind, as today’s faster computers have a better time rendering all those hundreds of sprites than my machine did when the game was first released. If you’re looking for a spot of management and city-building this Christmas, you could do worse than dig out your old copy. Because no matter how hard they try, there’s hardly a single game developer that can match the ouput and commitment of their community. The Network Addon Mod is available from ModDB, and the SC4D Lot Exchange contains plenty more to browse.

Update, again ? Well actually some of you might already know this one, for some reasons I forgot to upload it here... But I have a mosaic to go with the other 20 pictures ! So here is a second update for Beacon Hill. After the Canadian MMPs, back with some growing action ! I'm working on the next entry which is almost ready, so stay tuned ! All I can tell you is that I just discovered a new amazing prop pack ! And again, thanks a lot for the comments ! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Following last year’s surprise Worst Company In America victory by Electronic Arts, there was hope that the video game giant would get the message: Stop treating your customers like human piggy banks, and don’t put out so many incomplete and/or broken games with the intent of getting your customers to pay extra for what they should have received in the first place. And yet, here we are again, with EA becoming the first company to ever win a second Golden Poo from Consumerist readers. After an astounding number of votes, Consumerist readers once again chose EA over Bank of America, with the video game company taking nearly 78% of the vote. Full story: http://consumerist.com/2013/04/09/ea-makes-worst-company-in-america-history-wins-title-for-second-year-in-a-row/

I got to play it today, I have to be honest, I didn't like it. WAY too simple, way too restricting. Copied and pasted from my Work/Uni facebook group. Names and pics of others removed. 34 minutes ago · Daniel R Tonks Firstly, I feel like how die hard C&C fans must have felt. Just to let you know what to expect from this... I opened up the game, the first thing I noticed was that the map was bloody small, I mean seriously small. The game map does not get much larger. If you want to build a sprawling Metropolis (very possible in 4), forget it. I zoned a few buildings, standard SC gameplay right there, no grid which is something the community has wanted for a while. I noticed I was losing money so I clicked on my Power Station to lower its funding. In SC when you have a new city, it's good practice to lower utility funding to provide only what your city needs as otherwise you are just burning money... I was provided with the option to turn the Power Station on or off... no micromanagement in Sim City!? Surely not! Zones overlapped, the things like fire stations and town halls took up too much space. You can't build a dense compact city in this game, you seem limited to US Midwest. The modding community can get around this though. You had the option to add bits to buildings which was a nice touch, credit where credit is due. They added the option to build Tram Tracks on your roads (but only big roads and no off-street running like the community modded into SC4). Whilst limited it was nice to have, though the tram tracks didn't match up visually at junctions, offset by a metre or so. A minor irritation I suppose but sloppy. Overall, I ended up telling people they were wrong to play it. I became 'that' guy. 34 minutes ago · Daniel R Tonks Essentially, EA have taken a massive, in depth game where the community has demonstrated time and time again in the 9 years since Sim City 4's release that they want to build massive, sprawling metropolises and micromanage the $%&^! out of them... then turned it toy town Sims extension. 32 minutes ago · Edited · Daniel R Tonks Now I know many of you are reading this and thinking 'Dan, get a life', but when a game manages to maintain an active community of this magnitude (a community I play a huge role in might I add) 9 years after the games release, I cannot understand how EA can get it so wrong. They have aimed this at The Sims crowd, completely ignoring the crowd which got Maxis where it is in the first place. Total abuse of a franchise to milk as much as they can out of another. This is Sim City, a geeks city builder, not The Sims. Rant over. Skyrim time. 29 minutes ago · How does it honestly play in a non ultra hobbyist way? I'm a casual player and I think societies was painfully $%&^!. Meta-critically, what do you think it would get? 25 minutes ago · "Firstly, I feel like how die hard C&C fans must have felt." YOU'LL NEVER KNOW OUR PAIN!!!!!!!! 24 minutes ago · I've waited for really niche simulators which have been ruined by spastic publishers. 22 minutes ago · Can you still zone, build schools and raise taxes for the poor? Or do you have to place individual buildings and roads? 21 minutes ago · Wait wasn't Sim city going to be a facebook game? 20 minutes ago · That's already out 19 minutes ago · Is it bad to the point where 4 modded is more worthwhile or is this game just a disappointment considering the improvements that could have been made??? 11 minutes ago · Daniel R Tonks You can zone, but it doesn't always work quite right with the curved road system (this will probably be fixed to be fair). The taxes/micromanagement system seemed to be missing/extensively cut down. Sim City with Mods (and a Computer that can cope with that large a plugins folder) is infinitely better if you make sure you don't unbalance it. about a minute ago · Like