City Planner

Why? Because they thought what worked in 1999 would work in 2009 and they misjudged. They stuck to some aspects of that "earlier" game very closely (usually the parts that would save them money and time) and used their expandable time on other projects in the game that sadly, haven't been well received as new gameplay.

I think it odder that the city owns things like ferris wheels and bowling alleys.

My honest opinion is that in this title (which many agree is NOT an mmo, but rather an offering where you are paying for content and hope that you get some every week, couple weeks, month, etc) is that the gamer that pays to use the planet offer should NOT be renting the content, they should be allowed to keep it and play with that extra content as long as they own the game. This sillyness of only renting the content as long as you pay for the planet offer is a bit ridiculous. It's quite apparent that MC decided to name this an MMO so that they could try to charge a monthly fee for it, and then take back all the content that we've gotten in the PO once the gamer stops paying for the PO. In my opinion, they should have the PO for free, and all major content should be in the form of GEMS that they sell. If they put out quality GEMS then people would have bought them, but perhaps they realized that GEMS are going to be extremely limited? I honestly can't imagine (after playing beta from beginning to end) and then the demo for another week, why in the world I would want a ski resort or a golf course in my city. Not only do I think that a ski resort would look out of place, it's just not something that would interest me in the slightest. Especially more so if it's anything like that which they had in SimCity Societies, where you might end up with this odd looking mountain placed in the map that was a ski resort. Blech! Let's face it, MC got greedy, and wanted a continued revenue stream, that's why they created the PO and made it a paying system. I'll conclude by saying that to me (To Me!) the game is far too repetitious because the game is static. Sure residents come and go, but the buildings stay the same, they never evolve like in SC4 (like how they change over time, and grow) so no matter how many cities I create in CXL, they all feel the same. They have different layouts of roads, but they're all the same, why would I want to pay a monthly fee to play something like that? The special curvey roads would be a good idea if they could actually make buildings of different footprint sizes, but having them all one size and always square means they don't alighn to the roads so you get those awful looking gaps everywhere and the fill in tools (that was iM sure designed to alleviate this ugliness) only works sporadically. Often times Im simply told that it can't be used because there isn't a border to use it in. Blech! And no matter what, it boils down to the same thing that City Life boiled down to... Constantly matching residential inhabitants to the jobs in the city (or matching jobs to the residential inhabitants of the city), which I'm sorry to say, is not in the least bit interesting to em. Now had they actually made this title (Im not even going to call it a game anymore, not unless they really improve it because a game is supposed to be fun, and to me this is not fun), really an MMO, it might have stood a chance for paying subscriber base, things like cities that really interact between themeselves, (example, perhaps influxes of residents based on whether your city is more attractive to live in compared to a neighboring city for one. Building cities together with other players for two. So many possiblities, none of which will ever be realized as long as MC is on the job (in my opinion), co-op building of citys or regions, etc. There were so many suggestions made, many of which when put into the context of an MMO for the CB genre would have gone a long way to make this a real mmo, none of which as far as I can tell were implemented. Anyway, Cities XL is Not an MMO, by any stretch of the imagination, it's Not an MMO (My opinion, yours will surely differ).

Hi, I just got done installing SC4 on my Windows 7 partition, I copied over all my plugins and regions etc. Started up SC4 in Win 7 and all was okay, extremely laggy, but I guess that's because it defaults to hardware mode and I should have changed it over to software. Anyway, I had it running fine, then I exited the game and now when I try to start it, all it does is give me the windows mouse cursor for being busy for just a second or two and then nothing. I opened Task manager to see if it's running or something but it wasn't so I started it again and it only briefly shows the simcity4 exe file running in task manager then it disappears again. So it was running fine, however now it won't even start up anymore. Any suggestions, or info that might help would be appreciated.

Nevermind. It was my mistake. What I did was to try to cure the lag, I set compatibility mode in Windows 7 down to WIndows 98, and apparently that stops it from running. Once I changed it back to just run without compatibility mode it starts up and runs like normal. The lag that I had was cured by simply switching to Software rendering (good thing they included that in the game, running it in Directx blows chunks with SC4 for me). So, never mind, my bad.

I've just always simply created a reasonably small neighboring island on my main islands square, take a simple bridge over to it, and then put a road over to the neighbor to do the deals. I know it's not what some people want, but it's usually so small that I don't barely even notice it there plus I need the neighbors to supply me with the rest of the stuff that I need for my city (like I wouldn't exactly put a massive power plant on an island with all the pollution they generate and soon enough outgrow windmills unless I want whole fields of windmills so I make the connection across the bay to the small island.). Obviously less than perfect solution and one that I'm sure everybody already knows and does so it baffles me why I bothered to write it up. LOL bored today I guess.

ign.com: "It looks like everything you would want in a city building game." It's not what everyone wants, but I think that's impossible.quote> I agree, it is impossible to get what everybody would want in the next gen city builder, but they seem to have only gone half way anyway. Curved Roads : Curvey roads being one of my pet peeves. I spend time making a really smooth curvey beautiful road, then decide that I should place some buildings along side of it and they just simply look out of place as square buildings that do not conform to the road system. Or how about wanting to upgrade that nice curvey road with a larger or one way road. Can't simply upgrade it (for one reason or another), so I have to remove it and try to replace what was there with a new road only the new road won't conform to the old road. It's this type of stuff that is only a half hearted attempt and something that I don't honestly ever expect to see change just like someone posted in a message that I read recently that the buildings are all one footprint size because of performance issues. I could only hope (for MC's sake) that the game produces enough money for them to keep it alive long enough that computers are capable of having many different sized buildings in them. This is one of the big game breakers to me to see every building both one family home and apartment building holding tens or hundreds (however many) have the same footprint size. It removes any immersion that I had while playing after a very short time. Game Vortex's quote is just plain bizarre. It's such a small genre, and not one that interests many outside of the genre. My better half still calls these games "your little people games" for all my city builders and which there is no interest in her playing any of them, the genre bores her to almost tears. So, even while she has watched me play CXL both beta and demo, she has no interest in playing it. Actually, I think she's a bit happy that I'll not be buying it as that's just 40.00 more that she can spend this month LOL.

Im quite suprised that they don't offer a "founders" lifetime rate. I know several people that took advantage of the Lord of the Rings Online founders offer when it was first released and have spent a ton of time playing it. Now granted many people don't think the game is even worth the $40.00 price tag but just as many as there are that don't must surely be those that do and that would benefit from a founders lifetime purchase price that gives them full access to the Planet offer for the lifetime of the game at no additional charge. If they chose the same rate as Lotro did they would only need to play for about 3 years to recoup their initial investment. No, I wouldn't go for it, It's highly unlikely that I will buy the game upon release, in fact I think I can safely say with 100% certaintity that I won't buy it on release, but if it's still around in 2 years and has matured into a quality single player game then it's likely I'll toss out the $19.99 that the game will then cost (if not less). I often find games in my local Big Lots store (aka Pic N' Save) for only $4.00. I picked up about 5 copies of LOTRO recently in the big lots store for 5.00 each and sold them for $15.00 each. So I don't suspect it will be far fetched to think that the game will eventually make it's way to the big lots store like so many other games for 4.00 or so. Anyway, I think they need to do something if they really want to make a go of this as all their current decisions have led them down a bad path with many gamers. edited out controversial content. no biggy. -swat

Originally posted by: Coastercraze Screw that! I'd much rather pay a couple hundred into my rig /quote> Yes I agree, if I was going to blow $485.00, I'd much rather go buy another new video card and really splurge and get one of the top of the line cards for $485.00

Originally posted by: sparky66 So, what do you think of these comments? quote> I think many of these sites I've never even heard of, and the ones that I do know of seems to me like they are using more of what MC uses, marketing speak, maybe in hopes of gaining some advertising revenue. After all, if you were MC, would you pump your ad dollars into a site that said, the game is complete garbage or would you put your money into the sites that say it's looking great/is great/ is everything a city building fan could possibly want. If it were me, the praisers would get my money, and the others would have to do without. Somebody said that we are the hardcore city builders and the reviewers are not. I'm only bummed that if the non hardcore reviewer actually likes this, and the developers and publishers are catering to them (because obviously they're not catering to us), then we'll never really see expansion in this genre if they truly think that CXL is the, be all, do all city building game, it's unfortunately far from it. It needs a tremendous amount of work before it can even be a true city building game in my opinion. The Internet and popular sites are a great way to let people hear your voice and for publishers to change things that are wrong. Look at what people managed to do with Spore and then The Sims 3 with it's DRM simply by flooding popular sites such as amazon.com with messages about whatever might disgruntle the gamer. Keeping word locked up at simtropolis even though ti's got like 350,000 users is rather pointless if you are trying to sway the developers/publishers, all those quotes need to have the users rebuke them on the same page and if they don't offer such things then shame on them. Letting people know about the game on popular "sales" sites (sites that will be selling the game) is basically voting with many peoples wallets since bad press by other gamers will often deter a sale. Anyway, Im not here to start some uprising, it seems people are quite capable of that themselves, I'm just perhaps stating or overstating the obvious.

Originally posted by: Androv 5 years = 1826 - 1827 days (depending on leap years...) $488 / 1826 days (the worst possible combination) = 26 cents per day. Far less than a cup of coffee. I guess it depends on how you want to spend your money quote> Actually, I used to use this type of comparison too, however it's not really a fair comparison unless you actually play every day of that 1826 days, if you only play a quarter of that, and I wouldn't imagine that's out of the norm, then your cost goes up to over $1.00 per day. When I use to use this type of comparison it was usually to justify my purchase of a new game at $49.95 and then compare it to things like Dinner for 2: (2 hours) $70.00 at least (game is a great bargain since it will likely be played 30+ hours) Go to the movies alone ($10.00 ea time x 5 times = roughly 8 to 10 hours), (game is still a great bargain). But i think if you're gonna try to justify it by breaking it down to cost per day, then it should be a reasonable amount of days that the player is actually going to play, and then even break it down to the hours since very few will actually play a 24 hour period in a day. So let me try my hand at my bad math 456 days played (a quarter of the 1826 days) makes the game cost $1.070/day 4 hours a day played during that 456 days total ($0.26/hour) Theres many ways to look at it. If someone feels like spending $488.00 on this game be it far for me to begrudge them to do so, if that's what they like more power to them. I paid my MMO fees in WOW and other RPG MMO's and they do add up over the course of a year, in WOW, I easily spent 30 to 60 hours per week playing it, so 120 hours a month at $14.95 is $0.09/hour But in fairness I played WOW a lot more than I would ever play CXL, there was always something new for me to do in WOW, where as in CXL, its just more of the same after you've done your first city.

Originally posted by: LivingInThePast As you may know, the development of what started as Cities Unlimited is finally coming to an end. For some of us (okay, a lot of us) the development is not exactly the next-gen city builder we all hoped for. If MC promised another city-builder, single-player, with player requests and all, would you give them a chance? Discuss.quote> No, I've already bought City Life, then City Life world edition, and now with CXL, I don't think I'd give them another shot at my opening of my wallet for them. They could promise the world but I'd really doubt that they'd deliver it. What was once going to be a supposedly outstanding next gen city building game has turned out to be a total and complete let down for me. They've missed the mark so far and I know how much has been made in suggestions and recomendations to them to fix it up, but which has been ignored so why would I want to give them a second chance? Fool me once shame on you, Fool me twice shame on me. No thanks. Also, quite honestly, I don't think they've got any game designers that are of the right frame of mind to create a modern era city building game. I mean, government run ferris wheel, or government owned hotels etc? No, I don't think they are from the right frame of mind to be creating any real modern era city building games (all my opinion mind you).

Since it's now been reported in a interview with MC somewhere on here that the bus system will also now be a subscriber only feature, then yes any hope that i had to buy this title have been removed now. It was the proverbial last nail in it's coffin for me. I suggest they just get rid of singleplayer aspect all together at this point and go online mode only and quit torturing us. Originally posted by: mrdazza_460 your are right sometimes things look out of perspective like you are saying, but thing like that will change over time with custom content, do you uses any maxis SC4 buildings, I don't anyway back to topic I 100% agree with gabry85 this would make lot of people happy. quote> We can only wait and see what kind of custom content can be created in CXL. Since MC seems to be saying that the only way of supporting CXL is with the planet offer, I don't expect them to give the content creators much in the way of creating things like we've all become accustomed to doing in SC4. I certainly don't expect that the size of the lots (reported as 40x40 or in my opinion 1 square screen inch) to be changed in custom content. Whether however people will be able to create smaller houses on that same sized lot and then fill the rest of the lot with incidentals will remain to be seen with what they allow us to create. I'm not holding my breath about it however and if I look at their past endeavors (City Life), world edition, it never took off, at least I've never seen any great depository of custom content for City Life. I can only guess it was because it never garnered any great following, which unfortunately it seems CXL is running down that same route. They've got a lot of issues in CXL that still need to be resolved but which will likely never be resolved, such as different sized lots instead of them all being the same is just one of the more minor issues. Curvey roads are nice and all but when you can't get a lot to absorb to that curvey road, it all becomes rather pointless and asthetically quite ugly to even place that curved road. The last home that I owned up in the mountans was a corner lot, it was aproximately 200 feet at the front street, and only 75 feet at the back yard fence, but it conformed to the street corner on all sides, it was "natural" looking and is what CXL is missing and that which to me is a big issue, almost as big as the lack of mass transportation. Honestly, I think the only thing that could save this game now is a custom content creation tools and an avid group of creators as that is what apparently works in SC4, The Sims games etc. People love to collect stuff for their games, and as long as theres enough of it, people will quite possibly buy it. With the way things have been mentioned in interviews however, Im half thinking that custom content creation will also only be for paying subscribers to the planet offering. Or at least very minor custom content for singleplayer, and the fat majority of it for subscribers only. Quite possibly putting in a depository of CC that people make and have to be approved by MC and then put on their own in game browser system so that people can't get it that don't subscribe to the planet offer. This is just my opinion since the developers have been pretty much silent on CC creation thus far, so I could well be wrong and they will allow full customization of buildings, mass transit etc in the single player version, though I'd have to doubt it at this point since Planet Offer is going to be their bread and butter to keep the game expanding as they've said on a more than a couple of occasions now.

Originally posted by: Mctittles Ok can't really say without RH because I just recently started playing sim city deluxe for the first time. I have not mods installed though. I am fully hooked. I haven't had enough time to play because of work, but even though I want to play CXL when it is released I think I would rather continue playing this until I get bored of it. Which from the look of these forums, might be never! Nah, I'll still save time for CXL, but yea first time ever on SC4 deluxe and it's great even by today's standards.quote> I fully agree. I too can't take it all the way back to SC4 Vanilla as I've disrupted my original SC4 disk and had to pay the $19.99 for the deluxe version. So I play SC4+RH=Deluxe version. Many people I know on the internet now for 3 to 6 or more years are still suprised that I play SC4 as it was intended, "Working with a budget?" they say, "Why do you still play like that?". Simply because SC4+RH is an addictive and enjoyable game that fully engrosses me into the gameplay. Sure I've had and still have a 4GB plugins folder, but I recently had to install SC4 deluxe on my new computer and played it just the way it comes for several months before I started to add in more CC and still found it totally fascinating and enjoyable and highly addictive. I don't even care to count the nights that I lay awake with insomnia that I ended up playing SC4+RH all through the night and could barely pull myself away in the morning to start work. With CXL, I've been in the beta and I've played the demo and quite honestly there is nothing there that can hold my interest for any long term period of time. The all powerful curvey roads I have no desire to build when you can't even get housing to align properly to them. It does indeed seem that they tried to include some new things in CXL but failed to include the necessary things to make it 100% functional. The fact that every building in CXL is a one inch (+/-) square is just shameful and boring to say the least. The developers have said that it's due to performance issues. If that is so, then it's obvious that more time should have passed before they released this game to the market. It's already dull and doesn't even compare in features and asthetics to a game thats been out for what, more than 6 years already? Im not talking about the huge CC that is available, Im talking about the base game and it's simulation core. The fact that MC wishes to moniker this game as an MMO is surely a death wish for their company to try to compete in an ever growing (and failing) MMO market is absurd in my opinion. Pushing an annoying chat box window onto my screen does not make it an MMO. Just because there are 19 other players playing the game at the same time as me does not make it an MMO by any stretch of the imagination. I was all hyped for CXL when they first announced it and with all the little bits of information that would come out. Now I i find it to be a disgraceful attempt to suck more money out of our wallets by calling it an MMO. Originally, I was against their whole GEMS situation, I felt that they would likely hold back many of the single player parts of the game and put them in GEMS. Now I see that I am wrong, they were holding them back to stick them in the planet offer. I for one refuse to rent my game from them. The sheer fact that I can only play with the "deluxe" version of CXL by continuing to pay them their online fees is unsatisfactory to me. The fact that after a years term of paying if I decide I don't wish to keep my wallet open to MC, I must go back to playing vanilla CXL is disturbing to say the least. I have opened my mind to GEMS and their ability to add more content to the game, but if they are (and all signs say they are) going to hold back on features and only offer them to planet subscribers, then I must say that Im really no longer interested as neither are any of my friends in real world or online. To sum it up, to purchase SC4 Deluxe now at the current rate of only $19.99 is still far more entertaining that the vanilla version of CXL is by far, and until we actually see what they put out in GEMS and what they put out in monthly updates (yeah right, even the best developers have a tough time keeping to that schedule unless the contents are little more than some minor tweaks), none of us really knows how the game will be unless we choose to open our wallets to MC, and I for one will not do that. Give me a solid single player game that is feature rich first, and has some multiplayer aspects as a secondary and I might subscribe (atleast for a little while), but what it feels like to me, is like Everquest, where you can play offline in a tutorial mode and then pay to play the full game online. Except that CXL doesn't have anywhere near the features that are needed to be an Everquest or WOW or any other MMO by todays standards. I wish them luck, however I and my friends, both online and offline have already written off CXL as a game that thinks it could have competed with the likes of SC4+RH Vanilla. It hasn't, I don't suspect that it will, and I suspect that perhaps they will sell enough copies of it, and gain enough subscribers that it will allow MC to keep in business since they are not as large as an EA or Blizzard by any means, so they may well have a success on their hands for thier small company. I didn't want a SC4 clone in 3D, but I did want the great features that were in SC4+RH to be built upon or added onto them, and I wanted those features in SC4 that were not so popular to be reworked to make them popular and above all else I wanted a solid city simulation at it's core, all of which we have none (in my opinion). Good luck to MonteCristo, I think they will need all the luck they can gather with this title. Edit Really about the only thing that is better in CXL over SC4 is the graphics. But only at close zoom. They are complete opposites in graphics in my opinion. Zoom out a fair amount in SC4 and it still looks outstanding today (my opinion and it's subjective with regards to graphics), but zoom in as far as you can in SC4 and it looks horrible (all jaggy etc), now take CXL and zoom out a fair amount and it looks horrible, your view is either obscured by blue fog, or if you zoom in a little the details are horrendously missing, but zoom right down close to the level that you can in SC4 and have high enough settings in CXL and the image appears very pleasant. But turn the settings in CXL to low and well.... The graphics are then actually better in SC4 in my opinion again. Granted the demo is probably not going to be indicative of the final product but I can't imagine it changing a whole heck of a lot in CXL at this point in time.

I've seen other threads on Vista and SC4 crashing and other nasties, however I didnt want to intrude on other peoples help threads by cluttering them up with my own SC4 problems so here is my Vista crash thread for SC4...... Hi, I've got Vista 64 bit, AMD Quad Core, 8GB RAM, Nvidia 8800 GTS, and the game crashes randomly for me as well. I've gotten so nervous about it now that I waste more time thinking about and saving the game with Ctrl+S that it's gotten quite annoying. Sometimes I might get in 10 minutes of playing it, other times I might get 1 hour or more. It is however almost predictable to tell when its going to crash since it sort of pauses the game and you can then sence that the crash is coming (I know, this is odd to explain). The game is also very jerky, watching the vehicles in the game jerk around is pretty unpleasant. They go smooth for a few moments then they jerk then they go smooth for a while, then jerk again. (Not to be confused with disapearing vehicles which would be normal in SC4). I generally alt tab to the desktop and set the affinity in task manager unless Im running SC4 Startup manager which does that for me. It's very strange since the game ran fine on my last computer which was only a dual core and was also running Vista 64 bit with the same video card and only 4GB of RAM. My SC4 Shortcut looks like this now: "E:\Simcity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1200 -f -intro:off -CPUP -EH:off But the CPUP and EH:off didn't seem to help any either. I have to now wonder if setting the resolution to 1920x1200 is causing SC4 to burp on me, maybe it's just more than the game and the computer can handle with a 9 year old title. I don't know, but I'd sure like to get SC4 back to the stability and smooth way it use to run on my old computer. Thanks for any assistance.

Wow, honestly I think this showcases CXL in it's "current" condition. One can only hope that the final release product will deal with these "little" things [laugh] Yeah I've seen most of those in the demo too, got to the point where I had so much grass leeching through the pavements it made me wonder if maybe I wasn't contributing enough funds to my highway department and they were letting the highways fall apart to the point where grass was growing up through the cracks. Oh wait, this is CXL, I guess it's just normal that way. Seriously, as I mentioned prior (or maybe it was on another forum, I forget these things), the demo really doesn't shine as a selling tool to bolster the consumers confidence in the product, not in my opinion anyway. Thanks for making me chuckle.

Same thing here, the beta tells me that my username or password is incorrect. Obviously it was not incorrect as I could log into the beta site. There was a thread on this in the beta forums, don't know if it got any official response or not. I've tried the beta again tonight and it was the same for me again, wrong username and or password when it's not. My only guess at this point is that they must have dumped me from the beta.

I don't mind paying a monthly fee for a quality game, to me both Eve and WOW were/are quality affairs so I didn't mind paying for either of those subscriptions for all the years that I did pay for them. However from my "demo" experience I can say without question (to me) that CXL is unfortunately, not going to be a quality game at release anyway. It doesn't feel MMO(ish) by any stretch of the imagination. What it does feel like however is that of a game that has had many of it's key features reserved for paying consumers only, but even with those features it doesn't have enough, and can't possibly supply enough to make it worth paying out $9.00 a month (I don't trust MC enough to buy on a 3 month charter even if it does lower the price somewhat). So, not only will there be a monthly fee associated with the "full" game but then on top of that they expect to sell Gems too. Im sorry but if that isn't gouging I really don't know what is. That would be like my paying Blizzard their $15.00 a month and then having them tell me that If I want to go into that Raid with my buddies, I'll have to buy that Raid Gem too. It wouldn't work in WOW (for me) and it won't work in CXL for me either. Perhaps it will work for others. When I pay full price for a game, I honestly expect to get the "full" game not a game that has had items reserved for online paying subsribers only. So it's not about paying the 9.00 a month, it's about paying the 9.00 a month for a game that isn't even a quality affair in my mind. Honestly, my cities look far superior and more lively in SC4 than they have in CXL by a long long LONG shot. CXL, much like City life still suffers from having too many repeat buildings and are even more glaring when in a game that is in full 3D (in my opinion). Curved roads or Grids, no grids or curved roads, I don't care, it's really not important enough to me to have curvey bendy roads when all my buildings are going to be in the same 1" footprint and end up leaving all kinds of unusable space along my bendy roads. While I've "heard" that it's performance that requires that the buildings all have the same sized footprint, what it really screams out to me is an unpolished game, a non quality game, a game that had high ambitions only to realize that the performance issues were going to hold it back in a major way. Just my opinion, Im sure many peoples opionions will be different. I had looked forward to the reported "hyped" version of the game but after playing the demo realized that its nowhere near it's hyped version. I'm also still struggling to figure out why people think that having a chat box and a tacked on trading system makes this an MMO, to me there is far too little interaction to make this an MMo, even if it is supposedly a hybrid MMO for City Builders. Really, it doesn't come close to having the interaction capabilities that most quality MMO's can and do have. It is however undoubtedly has a multiplayer aspect to the game that has now taken priority over it's solo play, so those that buy it for solo play are pretty much left without some core features (and Im not suprised to speculate that more will be added to the multiplayer side, scrap that, I can't even call it multiplayer as all that's there in multiplayer is the chat windows and a trading system that really still needs a great deal of work to prevent griefers, I'll just leave it as Citiez XL Online. Period, end of my part of the discussion, it's not an mmo, it's not really multiplayer, it's simply ONline version. For those that love it, that's great, please support MC in their endeavor, for those that don't like it, I can sympathise with you.

Hi, I've never seen this happen before, but then again I use to run XP on my old computer when SC4 was running top notch even with massive amounts of plugins (over 5GB packed), however on my new computer (running Vista 64 bit, Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, and 8GB of system RAM) the game is not nearly as smooth anymore. But one of the problems visually is that vehicles will disapear into the roadbed if I zoom to the 1st or 2nd level of zoom. Has anybody seen this before and or knows how to fix this? I know it's just a visual thing but it really just bugs the peanuts out of me. Any help on this appreciated.

Thanks, Yes it only seems to happen at zoom level 1 or level 2. If I move the camera slightly right, left, north or south, it will usually clear up until the vehicles move to another grid square. For example the bridge problem (which I didn't post a pic of as I didn't think to take one but will try later on) where only partial pixels appear for each square of the bridge, if I move the camera slightly to the right or left it might clear up and give me a full image of the bridge, but zoom into level 1 or level 2, and sometimes the bridge just disapears into a bundle of pixels of color (like what you see in the truck image above) where only parts of the item (in this case the bridge) shows up. Move the camera it all shows up as it should, move the opposite and it might go back into only showing parts of it. I am running Nvidia drivers (either the most recent or the one before the most recent) in my computer. Can't check with Nvidia as their automatic driver update checking shows service down at the moment. Maybe it has to do with running with newer drivers. I know that many people still run older computers and drivers for their boxes that run SC4, but Im sure many people run newer computers with up to date drivers so maybe they know something on that development front. I'm about ready to scrap my plugins at this point and start over redownloading all the newer ones as I don't really use the older ones but that's a big chore and time killer so again if anybody knows of a specific plugin that might cause this then I'd love to see if I have the plugin installed myself and I'll remove it to see if that's the cause. Thanks for the reply. P.S. A good percentage of my plugins don't have readmes. And if they did they have long since been scrapped as I don't keep them around. I download those dependencies that I need and remove the read me files so it would be impossible for me to tell what has a read me or what didn't have one at this point. Plus for me the game isn't that stable on my computer and placing a known good plugin like the MTS School house might cause my game to crash the first time placing it, but reloading the game and trying to place it a second time won't crash it. Obviously issues beyond just the plugins between SC4 and my new(ish) computer.

Attached is a screenshot of just the construction of a new highway, see the two red circles, the construction trucks disappear, you can only see part of them. if I move my zoom level out they reapear in full. I see this with cars on the streets too. And I've seen it with a bridge that I just built that when I zoomed in the bridge was just broken pixels, little bits of the bridge showing and then disappear then show again in the next grid square. I can't say this is normal, I've never noticed this in all the time that I've played with SC4 to my memory. However, with a 4GB packed plugin folder it would be near impossible to track down by the usual method of pulling out half of the plugins at a time, but maybe someone knows exactly (if it's a plugin that causes this at all) what plugin causes this to happen. Edit by tungston: And here is an image of trucks that disappear, but note I'm not talking about how vehicles normally disappear, that is normal, but these images show that vehicles only partially disappear into the roadbed or just in general partially disappear, then zoom out a bit and they reappear in full like they should be displayed Image16.jpg (263 KB) Please use the edit function instead of making sequential replies. tunston

Hi, I have a question or two about the Simcity 4 startup manager. In some of my regions the plugins are set so that not all of the plugins appear in the game, other regions have a profile so that all of the plugins appear in my game. Now the question... What happens if I start up the game NOT using the startup manager? Will all plugins be available in that game or will they be hidden? I ask because, when I look at my Plugins folders, there are some that have a green arrow next to the folder name, and other that have the typical windows explorer folder icon, this would lead me to believe that startup manager does more than hide the folders and files only when itself runs the game start, but I could be totally wrong. Also if I uninstall Startup manager will that then mean that all my plugins are going to be loaded with no mater what region I decide to play on? Thanks,

Thanks very much for that. I didn't know there was a SUM thread it was so long ago that I downloaded and installed it. Much appreciated. Another question then... Is there a simple way then to make all the folders that SUM has turned my folder icons into green arrows back to the normal folder icons? I know it's such a little thing but it really just annoys me when I look in my plugins and see all those green arrows for folders instead of the folder icons and theres so many of them now that I'd really love a way to turn them all back to the normal yellow folder icons instead of having to do it all one by one.

No, it would be impossible to ditch SC4 and move on to CXL. To me CXL has a tremendous long journey ahead of it before it can even slightly compete with the likes of SC4. There really just isn't that much gameplay value in CXL to me, I find it actually quite dull and too restrictive in allowing me to build my cities. It honestly reminds me of some of the 'cheaper' early "tycoon" games with the way it locks buildings and doesn't allow me to decide when I wish to use them and which to me is just *one* of the major failures of CXL. Add in the no mass transit for the singleplayer portion of the game and it's a dead duck issue for me, it's not worth picking up unfortunately. I had high hopes with the hyped version of CXL but now after playing it I see it won't come even slightly close to living up to what MC attempted to compete with (SC4). They've made terrible mistakes in their judgement of the market audience (assuming it's SC4 players) and what we wanted in a shiny new city building game. So, no, I won't be ditching SC4 for CXL, they're two products that don't even remotely come close to competing with each other, and quite honestly after all these years of custom content I don't believe theres anyway that they could even compete with SC4. We still see SC4 on the shelves in the retail outlets and I think this speaks volumes. It will be interesting to see in 9 or more years if CXL is on the retail outlets shelves or completely forgotten after 1 year. My guess is that it will not be seen on the retail shelves in 9 years, unless they do something completely drastic in the game to change it around and make it a great city building game.