dogma555

Hi everyone, I just bought the SimCity 4 deluxe version of the game i even have the receipt and everything and when I put the cd in the computer it asks for the serial at the back of the cd case. First of all, there is no CD case, and second its not on the back of anything. Then in the manual it says that the serial is on the back of the manual yet there is nothing there but the access code to register the game with. I'm absolutely furious because my son picked up an old copy of SimCity 3000 and he had a lot of fun playing with it and I drove pretty far to a local gamestore because most stores around me didn't carry the game anymore. So what am I supposed to do?! Any help is appreciated Just to assure everyone this is not a bootleg. I even registered the game using the access code but still no luck.

Good stuff here! Just keep an eye on Horseface and Ziggie and its smooth sailing !!

Stunning ^ ^

Man these are nice!! I'm almost ashamed to even post some of mine, but I guess they'll do for now:

Lots of inspiration here! Here's what I've been keeping busy with:

Welcome back.. I'm surprised there are people who manage to stop playing SC4. But no matter how good your specs are, you have to remember that the game's 2003 architecture is the bottleneck that there is no way to get around.. the game will simply never run as smoothly as brand new games hitting the market. It will run no better than you remembered it running, unfortunately. If you plan on playing SC4 a lot and as trouble free as possible, I would go dual boot and play this game (as well as all other "old school" games) in either Windows XP or Windows 7. Me personally, I have no interest in the frustration of getting older games to run on Windows 10 smoothly anymore. I prefer to just install and play. You can do it, but expect to spend a lot of time on workarounds.. my experience was the furthest I could get was where the game would run, but I couldn't get night lighting on custom BATS. Eventually I just continued to play it on an older OS. Hopefully someone here has had some success stories they could share though..

Truth is there is nothing you can really do.. Hardware upgrades will yield no noticeable results because the game's early 2000's architecture itself will be the bottleneck. Maxis simply never foresaw the sheer amount of modding that this community would bring to the table .. You can delete all the image files in your plugins folder (.jpg preview files that come with most BAT files) to shave off a minute or two at best.. All you can really do is wait. I have a 12GB plugin folder, and it takes about 8 minutes to load the game. I've found that NAM is the main culprit with long load times, but the game is obviously far too primitive without it. Just find something else to do in that time and then hibernate the computer with SC4 still running instead of shutting it down so you can just ALT+TAB right back in whenever you need to.

This is devastating to hear. Nonny Moose was such a great guy. He will truly be missed

Sometimes you just can't beat that organic growth look.. some of my favorite areas are like 90-95% organic and its certainly interesting that it just happened to grow that way.. but other times, you really need to be able to plop that certain skyscraper in the right spot of a CBD, and there's nothing cheating or even unrealistic about that. Plus the word "cheating" isn't really the right way to put it.. as SC4 is not a game you play to WIN and BEAT.. it's a game you play to keep it going! Especially considering the game ALLOWS you to open the landmark menu and plop from a laundry list of buildings.

Or better yet.. a government that can help provide JOBS to these people, not just handing them free money .. so they can have the dignity that comes along with having a job and earning their money. Something like a modern day version of what FDR did to cut the unemployment rate almost in half with public works programs, like a modern day version of the WPA. especially in manufacturing.. We need a whole lot more of those yellow tile zones HERE rather than in other countries! Caps on wages and hours is what we are going to need eventually if income inequality continues on to this extent. For a job that pays $100,000 for 40 hours of work, I'd rather have two people sharing that work.. at $50,000 a year with 20 hours a week each worker. More people will have disposable income to go around, less class conflict, more time for people to devote to various arts and hobbies. End the days where the economy resembles a game of musical chairs. But total removal of govermnent is just pure anarchy .. I don't want to live in some wild wild west where there aren't even laws, courts, judges, military, etc..

The peak memory usage I've ever seen anyway is 1.1GB. So , you might benefit from a wee bit more ram, considering my total machines ram usage (to run the operating system) would be about 1.5GB... and about 2.0GB with firefox loaded up with tabs. Dreaded crash people must not have disabled extra cores on their processors, put SC4.exe priority on high, or be playing in software mode! I've been meaning to try an SSD in the machine I run SC4 on. What were your load time differences like for say, launching sc4.exe, launching tiles with ~500k populations, and launching the landmark menu with a large plugin folder?

I'd really like to see this too.. I feel like with some tweaking, this has a LOT of potential to make a VERY nice looking tallest tower in a CBD.

This is one of my favorite things to do in SC4 and since I don't have others work to pore over I go back to cities and regions I did years ago. Many times as I am making improvements and changes I wonder "Why did I ever do that like that?" The answer is because that was where I was at the time in knowledge, plugins, and vision for that particular city. Hopefully we would all be able to see improvements we would make in our own cities, even from just a couple of years ago and especially ten years ago. A few years ago I downloaded a city that a player made available and while it was fascinating to explore I was unable to do much with it because of constant CTD's. Unfortunately it is hardly worth the grief. + hmm.. never really thought about all this before.. but this does seem like a cool idea.. also kinda like as if one city planner took over for another

Could have just gotten lucky.. dosen't the game have a certain tendency to grow the same or similar buildings? Or did I download a mod for that or something? Sometimes I've had to delete BATs because they would simply appear too much... So if you build enough, you'll eventually end up with a small area like that just by pure chance to make for a good screencap. You could also do things with your plugin folder.. like say.. make a folder full of "NYC" style buildings and limit the plugins to that, and temporarilly deal with the brown boxes elsewhere while the style or building you want is free to grow..and then add the rest of the plugins back once complete. Anyway, this isn't that "ghetto" but it's got that gentrified vibe to it:

You guys are awesome.. I think a whole slew of your buildings were used in an area that I wanted to resemble some type of fantasy Brookyln-ish neighborhood with that whole gentrification factor built in.. Thought I'd share .. hope this is the right place to showcase just SOME what people are doing with the great work you guys are putting out.. if not, hopefully this can be moved to the right place: What can really be done with Staten Island .. besides the Verazanno Bridge? .. and maybe some highway traffic generators lol

wow! you know your buildings!! ---- >> daTSchikinhed .. Thanks for the new building!! .. off to plop this bad boy in one of my favorite area's in my main CBD What happened to the first building? Did I miss something?

Many will insist money needs to be a motivator.. and that something like a basic income would lead to nothing but a lethargic society. but i dunno, I see thousands of thousands of uploaded free BAT's to sites like this, where the creator receives no financial compensation what-so-ever. Enough to a point where my plugin folder is double digit gigabytes! .. projects as complex and innovative as NAM .. and I've never paid these guys a dime for their contributions and everyone with the ability to seems to stay quite motivated and willing to contribute to the community at hand. Still, basic income is not the right answer to income inequality (at least to the extent of America).. we need a return to real capitalism where it's actually POSSIBLE to COMPETE against bad companies.. but in a corporatist oligopoly where they collude more than they compete, this is impossible.. only way to change that is to tax big businesses to death and give the subsidies to entrepreneurs willing to build up small businesses in their place. Transform every Wallmart or big box store into an entire strip of small businesses. But good luck electing an honest public official that *won't* agree to take bribe money from said big businesses and end up doing nothing. This just leads to a never ending cycle though... Government increases minimum wage.. it causes economy inflation .. because businesses, corporations, and conglomerates alike raise prices to offset the cost of having to pay their workers more .. just causes never ending economy inflation .. on and on and on. We need maximum wages and incomes, not minimums. I would argue the concept of even having "minimum" wages and "poverty" lines in itself causes a social stigma to these socioeconomic issues and conditions and just gives people an all too easy way of comparing each others values leading to a recipe for class conflict that should be done away with. EDIT: Except that in America, this is completely contrary to the principles that build the country.. and the people who want to keep it that way.. so what can we do? This is a country founded on protecting a wealthy elite who inherited money and wanted to avoid paying taxes on it .. and who decades later would have the most influential professors at places like Yale like Sumner spreading Social Darwinism to future business leaders. What makes the US's tradition to them is the survival of the fittest .. liberty, IN equality, and survival of the fittest. Absolute freedom of action. Taxes, welfare, etc are all seen as "unfair help" and nothing but an endangerment to the species where the "weak" will breed more like them and drag "their" country down. The super wealthy have enough access and connections to financial magicianship to hide all their taxes through offshore accounts, phony charities, and exotic insurance policies and tax code loopholes. All you need is a good lawyer, an insurance policy, and good financial advisory and you can pay almost zero taxes on almost all your income.. so the burden to paying these taxes falls on the shrinking middle class who can't afford these luxuries to support the lower classes that the higher classes are able to be exempt from. Instead of double posting, please use the edit button and edit your post to include your new thoughts. There is no need to post twice in a short amount of time when there are better options available. -ST Moderating Staff

Are you sure you didn't just hit the "More Reply Options" or "Preview Post" and accidentally think it was officially posted? Nobody, especially a mod from a community like SC4 would ever play dirty like that.

True.. but I always thought by the middle-end of 2014, 1080p would have been far superseded anyway! At least to the point of being able to handle the bandwidth! .. but imgur will take paint files in bmp's no problem and just auto convert them.. just hit print screen (aka Prt Scrn to the right of f12) in sc4 .. paste (aka hold ctrl+ v) into MS Paint and drag and drop the file's icon right from where you save it to in windows explorer right into imgur.com.. it's what I just did because I was too lazy to bust out photoshop and rescale everything all nicely The quality won't be that bad... good enough to get the picture for someone new to the game

I have the perfect place for this in my best area of Manhattan/Toyko like city ... what a great job!