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So there's some actual good news, such as continued support for SC4, right? Right?

Ah, then in that case, perhaps I will reconsider how badly I really need that Farm Jobs x 50 multiplier.

Since I use a lot of the HKABT super-large buildings, I'm afraid I must pass on the CAM until those buildings do become compatible.

Are there any road-top lots that can feed residential zones? I've been trying to create a city whose transit is based entirely on Road-Top Mass Transit, but unfortunately it doesn't work for residential - at least, the avenue transit lots don't seem to.

I've decided that I'll try to think of some scheme of laying out my zones and avenues such that a RTMT lot is never on the front of any zone.

I spent most of my life in Newark, California, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area between Oakland and San Jose. The traffic didn't seem that bad except when coming to and from school. I used to take the bus to and from school but it eventually got even more expensive than driving a car, which is quite amazing considering the price of gasoline in California. Then, I went to the University of California, Irvine, which is in Orange County, which is south of Los Angeles. I was introduced to what is quite possibly the worst transportation nightmare ever seen. Public transport is a totally foreign and unknown concept down here, where people like their shiny gas-guzzling cars very much. During rush hours, even the local roads can be paralyzed by traffic, and I do not dare speak of what happens to the roads that lead to the highways. While driving up to Los Angeles to visit my uncle, I encountered the wonderful maze of traffic-choked splitting highways and triple-decker highways that are to be found in LA. Even though some of the highways were up to six or eight lanes per side, they were still full of cars enough to make me feel very uneasy. When I came back home during the vacations, I realized that my home area's freeways could be pretty bad during work hours too. After playing a lot of SimCity 4 with the NAM and various other mods, I'm thinking that I would fix up my hometown by extending existing rail systems down into the heart of the Silicon Valley and putting trams on top of the super-wide roads that lead to the various corporate offices and towers. There's not much that can be done about the sprawl because we are always afraid of a major earthquake, so building upwards is out of the question.

I don't even know of any under-18-year-olds who are interested in gingerbread houses and such rot. Mainly, they are interested in blowing people up into little red chunks with a big gun that is clearly compensating for something. And that market is pretty saturated already.

Ordinary 3-D might actually be a little easier than 17 pre-rendered views.

I did make sure to check my spambox, although a day later.

Laying down a freely-curved road section is easy enough. The hard part is later putting down another network section that intersects it.

I will not necessarily have any time to be an actual programmer, but I can advise you guys on a lot of the details. Organizational Structure: It's probably best to do this like how the real game industry does it: four main teams, each with its own "senior" people who are in charge. 1. Game Engine Team 2. Tools Team 3. Assets Team - models, textures, sounds, animations, etc. They will get to use the stuff made by the Tools team. In an open & free project, the purpose of this team is to set the standards that the rest of the community will follow. 4. Game Design Team - their job is to argue all day long with the Game Engine team about what can be done quickly by computers and what cannot be. =P Or, if the game engine is made just right, they can do almost all the game mechanics purely through some kind of scripting. Last but not least, there are project leaders who make sure that the four teams are working together and agreeing with each other. Technical Details & Limitations: First things first, I have something to say and you're not going to like it: if you want the game to run as fast as possible you will have to use grids. The reason is simple: computers can handle matrices a lot better than they can handle a free-form data structure. With matrices, we can apply algorithms that run blazingly fast. With a free-form set of points and connections, there is a lot more calculation involved every time you alter the network - the system has to take a lot more time to look up all the points and connections and figure out where the network has been changed. If you want to stick with a free-form system, you will need to brush up on your heavy-duty algorithms. With regards to the game engine, you are going to want to make it such that the actual programming is as simple as possible - basically, it should be just enough to provide menus, camera control, holding the buildings & transportation networks in memory, drawing the view as efficiently as possible, etc. You want to push as much of the game logic as possible into script. I reccomend either Python or Lua - Python is generally considered easy for non-programmers and Lua is very similar to C. Managing Code: You want to have at least three different, separate code bases - stable, testing, and unstable. The code starts with "unstable," then the people in charge of testing get to work on it in their own "testing" section. When they feel that the code is finally good enough, they put it into the "stable" section. It's possible to achieve a system like this by setting up three different SVN repositories, but lately there's been a trend towards things like Mercurial (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/) and Git (http://git.or.cz/).

I would post over at SC4Devotion if their registration system would give me a confirmation e-mail. Unfortunately, both their exchange and their forum have failed to send me an e-mail.

First of all, we should see if we can get any grants from any universities, real estate corporations, government agencies, or think tanks out there. I'm sure they are interested in having good software for simulating cities. For example, Mobility (http://www.mobility-online.de/en/informations/generalinformation.html) had two non-game-company backers. Secondly, getting the source code for SC4 would definitely be nice. A good example of how a strong fan community can really make good use of source code is the Jagged Alliance 1.13 project (http://ja2v113.schtuff.com/) which has done quite a bit more than simply fix some bugs.

If there's not even going to be zoning or electricity then this game will basically be worse than SimCity 1. Which is not a good thing! It looks like this game is going to be based on walkers / Sims, and if I wanted to play a game like that, I'd just pop in Emperor: ROTMK instead, because at least that game is shinier than the screens we've seen so far.

It's exactly how I thought SC5 would probably end up. EA wants to go for quantity of sales and to appeal to The Sims players. Something like this is how they'd have to do it. I'm sure that EA got a lot of e-mails from people who thought SimCity 1 was complex enough complaining about the complexity of SC4. Very sad and unfortunate, but that's what happens. With that said, I really hope that it will at least keep the SimCity style of being focused on placing zones, as opposed to plots. I really hope that, at the very least, the game mechanics will not be based on "walkers" (or, in this case, sims), but rather, based on the classic SimCity style of calculation. But we'll probably just get yet another walker-based game.

My favorite is SC4, because I'm crazy enough to enjoy having to manage all the traffic & water pollution & stuff. SC2 was a nice simple game but it gets old rather quickly.

Hopefully, whatever that is built will be resistant to big earthquakes. It's good to see that people are finally coming to their senses and learning that California can only take so much sprawl.

WOW. That explains some of the stuff I see in anime & other films about the dark side of Japan - secret trains that run in these tunnels as well as secret hideouts and clubs.

I'm guessing that you used the auto-zone tools. A good first step is to put paved Roads on top of the gray Streets.

I've come to a realization that the only reason why George Lucas had his initial success was because Harrison Ford was in six of his movies. That, and he had a bit of help on those six movies. Thus, for me, I only celebrate Star Wars as far as I celebrate the great character of Han Solo, and nothing else about it.

I would say that BART is my favorite, but the problem is that it doesn't go to very many different places right now. It was planned many years before Silicon Valley developed. The future of BART reaching into Silicon Valley is not looking so good, either. The bus system that feeds into BART is pretty bad where I live, so the BART stations are often full of cars with no place to park. It's definitely a good model for focusing on connecting a few very important city centers, though.

There's no way that SimCity 4 can play your iTunes music - and this has nothing to do with the file format. iTunes has to check the Internet to make sure that you have the rights to play the songs you have. iTunes music is encrypted with a bunch of stuff, too. One solution I found was to get a wire that directly connects two sound devices and plug the audio-out directly into the microphone jack. Another incredibly pricey solution might be to get an iPod.

Even more nice would be on-road trams and trolleys. That would give cities a much more "natural" feel, i.e. cities that started out as old 19th-century towns and later got so much traffic that they had to attach wires & rails to the existing roads.