Kid

By the way, I think the screenshot shown above (in the link in the top post of this page) of 'Sim City 5' is a fake. It is a fake UIs put on top of an architectural rendering of a real project in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It's called The Palm (or something) by the developer Nakheel: http://www.nakheel.ae/ (though I might wrong in pointing out which developer it really is from) There are just really a lot of people out there spending all these time rendering cities and buildings. They are called architects and city planners. I think I won't believe that it is a real Sim City screenshot until I see an actual video of how it works. ...so somebody is really doing some crazy cities out there... you never know.

There are some really great ideas in this thread, and I hope Maxis would make this happen in Sim City 5. Vector-based Map instead of Grid-based Map. Someone proposed about having roads that can go any degrees, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. That is what they should have done for SC4 instead of dwelling further in the graphics. With 3-D graphics getting better every day, one has to wonder why the buildings are comfined to grids. Yes, most American cities are planned to have grids, but it would also be great to build cities that inform the landscape, or cities that were grown in a more organic manner. It's easy to propose things but hard to find a solution for it, so let me share a few cents. With my user experience with softwares such as Flash and Adobe Illustrator, I would propose that Sim City 5's map data should be in vector instead of grids (which are bitmap-like). With vectors, we can virtually draw any curves or angles. With a [shift] key we can draw in 45 or 90 degrees so we can lay grids. And the roads can detect nearby roads or terrains intelligently to draw parallel lines to them. Like how we can choose Stroke sizes in Illustrator or Flash, we can choose the width of the road: be it a one line countryside path, or a 10-lane mega highway. When we first build the road before zoning anything, we can choose how much space to leave for future road expansions. So as the city grows, we can right-click or query that section of road, and choose Expand to make it wider. Being able to choose the type of pavements would be cool, too. Dirt would be the cheapest way to build, while nice brick tiles are the most expensive. Computer-Generated Buildings and Zoning Envelopes So it brings up another question... If the roads aren't always straight and pointing the North Pole, how would the buildings work? As an architecture graduate, I would propose that, though we can't control how buildings would look as a mayor, we can probably decide some simple zoning laws, e.g. the Set Back Law used in New York. If the player is meticulous enough, we can decide the minimum or maximum height or floor space, whether the buildings should set back to give light and air to the streets, or should buildings contribute public plaza areas in exchange for a taller height. One very crucial and interesting idea is the ability of the A.I. to generate generic building forms by itself. The game artists can draw the textures for the wall facades, ground floor and roof, and let the computer to determine the shape of the building - whether the building would adhere to the street line, or be its own individualist form. Such wonderful A.I. will be able to bring us a great deal of variety from row-houses in Brooklyn to the Gherkin in London - and they can be aligned to curves not just grids. Mixed Zoning This is probably one of the most important aspect of a high-density metropolis that is missed out from Sim City series, though one can argue that adding such feature would add too much complexity to the game... but imagine the possibilities: You can charge tax from the commercial stores inside a train station, or have residential towers on top of a shopping arcade (tons of them in Hong Kong), or on top of a train station again, or allow residences to be built on top of a neighborhood police station to save spaces, or be able to see the slow transition of New York SoHo from a district of industrial warehouses into artist residences and into an area that only rich people can live in.... the possibilities are endless! Imagine if one can drag an area of residential zone, and then drag commercial zone over the same area... tada! Mixed zone! Immigrants: Where did all these people come from? I think my biggest question about Sim City, as always, is where do the people really come from. It's a flat piece of land, with no visible connections to the rest of the world. So I wonder if the Sims actually swam to this new found land.... No! So in the beginning of the game, there should be at least one road connection, or a pier, or some more tangible source of immigrants, to the outside world (aka SimNation), so at least people can walk or drive to this new land to set up their new homes. Birth and death rates play crucial roles too as the cities have grown up. Would it make the gameplay more realistic if there will always be some sort of baby boom after a great great disaster? Dunno. Be able to have an easier gameplay for users who just want a pretty model of a city. Being a Sim City 2000 player for years, I loaded up Sim City 4 again last night after leaving the box of the shelf for years, but somehow the learning curve is so steep that the game just isn't as enjoyable as SC2K. For me, playing a game is for fun, some sort of more instant rewards (comparing life), and not torture. I wasn't too happy when 200 years passed and I still got a city with 20K pop - something that I can still do when I load up SC2K or SC3K and play for an hour or two. To add to the torture, it loads sluggishly despite my computer doubled its recommended specs (well, I admit this computer isnt very new either). So, generally speaking, Maxis should balance the gameplay, or have different difficulty modes, so that new users can come and enjoy the fun of building a city. I'm really looking forward to Sim City 5 (or any new city simulators)!! And thanks a lot for everyone around the Simtropolis community!