MontyCXL

In the Middle East construction workers don't have any rights (or Unions), the salary is 200€, they have to pay 100€ to have a place to sleep in a small 2 dorm. apartment with other 25 people. That's why rich people can build this huge towers and make them quickly profitable. Build this kind of buildings in Europe or North America it will cost you 20X more.

CXL have great graphics and is a lot easier to build and manage big cities. But It gets boring very fast and the cities look dead. Bad Performance. SC4 have 'old' graphics but still fun and challanging. Cities are dynamic and alive but are harder to manage.

Simcity 3000 and 4 were the best. It would be extremely hard to make a better one. I had a lot of fun playing with them, CXL gives me more frustrations than joy.

Probably yes, but maybe what make this sofware expensive is their low sales. How many copies of CityEngine can be sold? 5000, 10.000? The Indie version has a 495 dollars price tag so if you can sell about 100.000 copies of a city builder the price can be reduced to $49.50, at least $60 or $70. GhostTown is free but it runs under 3D max wich is a very expensive software, I think just one dude created this plugin so it means that programming something similar for a game is possible with a small group of talented programmers. Also traditional city simulators need several digital artist to create hundreds of buildings but with procedural method you just need to create a limited set of building parts, some textures and the rule files, resulting in hundreds of different buildings. You dont have to model a 5 stories building and then another with 10 or 30 stories, the different building densities are generated by the software and all the textures of the different version are the same, the game don't have to load one set of textures for a the small building and other for the tall. I would really love to see this kind of technology implemented in a City Builder game!!!

Around the 0:40 mark time it shows how CityEngine can simulate the natural city growth How the soft allows you to edit buildings and roads easely. This one is long but it shows the true power of procedural city generators. Imagine a futuristic New York with 80 or 100 millons of inhabitants and don't have two copies of the same building! THe other soft is GhostTown a free plugin to generate procedural cities for 3D Max. What do you think? This is the future of city builders? We finally can say goodbye to square lots and repetitive buildings?

Hi everybody! I like to share with you some videos about very intersting software. This soft has the hability to generate Procedurally generated cities and I think this may be the future of the next generation city builders. Can you imagine te posibility of zoning complex street intersections or curved roads with totally seamless wall to wall buildings? or generate thousands of different buildings without compromising your PC specs? The advantage of procedural cities is that you don't need a set of textures for every kind of buildings. With a limited set of building part textures like windows, shops, doors, decorations and such the software can generate hundreds of different buildings with any lot size or shape following some rules like building age, height, lot size, etc, adpating perfectly the buildings to the street's layout. But to be more graphic and not to confuse you with my bad english here are the videos: City Engine - Procedural City Generator The buildings are not modelled one by one, they just modelled the main features and set the rules for them, then the sofware randomize them all, creating hundred of different buildings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9unXHC0WTR0 This one explains how you can create totally customized roads. I would love to see this features in a City Builder Game. I can't post more videos here, I'll continue in the comments...

I only can think of your RAM as being a problem, this game uses large amount of RAM, the last time i checked it used 1.3 GB of my system. IF you play for many hours continously the game take over all your free ram. Save and restart your game every hour to avoid this. Your graphic card and CPU are good enough to deal with this game. I play with mi laptop with is a lot less power tahn your PC and the game still playable. I run it at 1366x768 with 2xAA, Medium textures (with bump and specular maps), medium shadows 70% view distance for all items and it still playable, slow but playable. My video card is nVidia G103M 512mb, 4 GB RAM and a Dual Core 2.0 Gh CPU. I have cities with more than 1.000.000 inhabitants and the game run at 14 fps. Very slow but still playable. Your PC should handle this game A LOT BETTER THAN MINE.

I think (and I hope) that FHI is actually working in a new game or expansion pack. Why they asked what buildings we like to have in the next game? And about the weather. I think that even MC worked on that when the game was under development. Remember this videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvASfQFhrYM You can see clouds in the video. Maybe FHI is just putting togheter all the things that MC left out of the game.

City paying for leisure (heliport, bowling, ferris wheel) makes no sense. Other thing that REALLY bothers me is the enviroment thing. The reaction of citizens to enviroment and pollution it's very exagerated. Ok, nobody wants to live next to a garbage dump or an industrial area, thats a reality. But why they overreact to traffic/air polution? Why elites and executives refuse to live near big avenues or downtown center or even when they are far away from an industrial area? Think about a city like New York...Rich don't refuse to live in the fifth avenue just because the traffic and air polution!!!! There are industrial zones in the other side of the river and people just don't care, they live when the land value is high, not where air pollution is low. Air pollution is not directly related to land value -except in extreme cases- Cities like Paris, Tokio, Shanghai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin,, etc, all have high levels of air pollution, all over the city, and all these cities have high land values, and high density residences for the high class people....Air polution is negative just when it's extreme, and even being extremely high (Shanghai, M