TMTS

Super cool, seeing your work and video made me more relaxed =).

I liked your creativity, your city looks different and it does look like a Simtopian Dream. I laugh out loud when I saw your region with "The Simtropian Dream" at the terrain, it looks funny.

Like the buildings, it looks like Maxis Classic Style. Just one tip: Hide the menus while taking the pictures, even if we will always know that it is SC4 it makes the pictures looks less like a game and more like a real picture.

I like your european town and would love to see it get bigger and other cities like this. I have a small story to tell. I used to had a monitor with low contrast, everything looked so gray, but not the lifeless gray, some kind of gray which I cant find words to explain. And that included SC4.I used the editor and increased contrast, a lot, and it looked way better. But one day, after not getting what was said on the comments, I switched to a new monitor, and my edited images looked quite bad. I was ruining my pictures from almost every other monitor except my old one. So, my message with the story is: Try to look your images in a better monitor or TV, you will notice that your editing at contrast and/or saturation is way too heavy.

Press G to hide grid. Help the píctures looks better.

I like your skyrises, I like your transportation system, it looks sophisticated. Your city looks good, interesting buildings, really, and it kind of rembember a high density asian city. Keep up the good work! PS: Disabling the iDrive icons (is that how you call it?), I mean, the icons with the helicopter and cars, would make your pictures better. You also could send the request to get to the main page, I dont remember seeing your city in there!

I am a "retired" SC4 player, but I pass here times to times to take a look on a few CJs, and this topic caught my eyes on the first page. I took a time to read stuff here, and I think that my saying and suggestions would be relevant. My native language is not english but I think my english is enough to be understood. I think that it would be a good idea to have a content manager (a little bit like the content manager in assetto corsa), have a program that moves the stuff in and out of your plugins folders for you and manage all the files. We could have a very large pack, as much complete as possible (some GBs isnt a problem for a hard drive today, but could be a problem for servers). The user could do the download in a few hours (or in a whole night).And then, the user launches a program (the content manager) and from there, he(or she) could select what he wants to be active and what he wants to be unactive. With hundreds of buildings, managing one by one wouldnt be much efficient, so it would be way better if the user manages packs instead. So, if I want to create a New York Style City, I would select the New York Pack. If I want to create a city with highrises, and some houses, I would pick the regular houses and highrises pack. And so goes on. We could select the mods in another options area, so we could able or disable the mods included. It would be good to have some pre-setups made in this area. For example, "scenery creator only" would activate all cheats that works with money, demand, and all that stuff so you can focus on creating the scenery (supposing you are not interested in any kind of simulation). Or an option that deactivates any cheats and only keeps the MODs that doesnt mess with the game simulation. Then, the content manager moves all the files, including the required dependencies, and starts SC4. We should be able to save our configurations so we could load them later. Actually, if we could link a configuration to a city we wish to load It would be even better. Another cool feature would be if the content manager gets some of the SC4 Launcher proprierties, like changing gaming resolution and other more advanced stuff. The program could have a "begginers light setup" with only essential and fixes. I have not good skills at programing, I have no idea if a program of this is possible for SC4, but this program would be, at least in my opinion, a better solution instead of releasing several seperated packs on the website. And way more pratical and quite easy to use. About the question of ethics... Although I think the laws of patents are quite unfair for the inventors, but they got one principle that would be fair here. I think that, for the greater good, every author that created custom content should lose the copyrights rights after some period of time. Like the patents expire in 20 years, the BAT and MOD rights should expire in a certain period of time. Otherwise, as many mentionted, there would be loss for the community. I think 5 years would be a reasonable number. So, my suggestion, for the creation of the pack, anything X (lets take 5 for example) years or older could be included without any authors direct notification. Instead, before the MOD Pack releases, a topic would be created listing every old (>5 years) stuff to be included, and, if the author doesnt show up saying "hey, I dont want my stuff to be included", it would be taken that he agrees with the inclusion. Just for the old stuff, where most authors likely disappeared and doesnt care anymore. For the newer stuff, we could apply the copyright rules, and the authors would be asked for authorization. If they dont answer, it should be taken as "No, not authorized", because the BAT is not old enough to lose its rights for the greater good. Now, personally, I think that a Super MODPACK would bring me back. Not instantly, but I think I would be back playing SC4 after months of the MODPACK release. I had played some other games with MODs, and SC4 is the one which gave me more headaches by miles. Dozens of lost dependencies, things that doesnt work... The time downloading stuff and selecting your buildings are a pleasure for me, but the time searching for dependencies and figuring out why certain things are not working are a pain. Losing a whole city because the data became corrupted because you didnt know that X thing couldnt be used with Y is painfully, and, to be honest, it is not a good life experience go through that. SC4 plugin managent is quite a headache. I felt relief in this point when I stopped playing SC4. Sometimes, in the old days, I felt that custom content creators included dozens of dependencies so we would give up and get forced to buy the CD. I, personally, would like very much a complete MOD Pack, but one that I could manage. PS: Maybe the program (not the content of the MODPACK) could be "sold" for $1-5 dollars (but, please, international users should have ways for getting it) instead of selling the community CD. It would help keep the servers up (or perhaps give some few bucks for the creator).

Looks quite nice and convincing. Good job!

Mazda RX-8

Very nice, looks good and alive. It looks amazing actually. Im sorry to ask, because Im completely uninformed, but which game/simulator is this? It looks good, except the cars.

Although not pretty, the concept looks nice.

The city looks good and it is a good executed project, but what I like the most was the show of a growing city. Gas station and then the city appears, love it! That was creative and cool!

This is one of the greatests beachs ever made on SC4!!! Amazing job, really worth 5 star! No, wait, it deserves 6! Thanks! -korver

Looks good!

I really like it! It looks very pretty at night and it is, somehow, creative. The only thing that I didnt like was the outside map areas shown on the picture, I suggest you to use bigger maps next time!

Very nice pictures, your drawings let us dream what a true Sim City 5000 would look like!

NOTE: The traffic will be processed normally. The changes are only visual. Viewing cars in all cameras, the same for pedestrians, is a good resource for better picture taking, useful for video creating and make your city appear more alive. The cars will appear very small on the maximum altitude camera, which make this just a detail. But for SC4 everything is about detail, right? However, it will make your game heavier in high altitude cameras. On the other side, you can turn off all cars and pedestrians from appearing, without ruining any other graphic options, which is good for better perfomance, but bad for pictures. I had included a picture as attachment but when the vehicles are not in motion, they are very hard to notice and I dont know how to create GIFs on big resolutions (if someone can do this please post on the comments with an example). Ok, let get this done: 1) Go to your maxis Program Files folder (for example, mine is C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe). 1.1) Find your way to open the step 2 file with the notepad. If you already know how to do it, skip steps 3 and 4. 2) There is an archive called graphicrules.sgr, it can appears as "Graphic Rules" SGR archive type. If it is not there, it might be hidden. If you have just installed but never had run SC4 you wont see the file. You must had start the game at least one time to see it. 3) Select the file, then right click on it. Select the an option called something like "Open with" or "Open As" or similar ( my windows version is brazillian and the message in portuguese is "abrir como"). 4) This screen below will appear. You have to select the notepad (the icon is a blue notepad). If it doesnt appear, you will have to look for it on the windows. If you dont know how to do that there are more detailed tutorials about it on the net, just google something like "How to Open with NotePad". 5) Now open the file. 6) Surprise! Not encripted. You will see several options. The first phrase you should see is "property groups for options set via the UI", with several # coming before it. NOTE FOR ADVANCED SC4 USERS: I had not explored all things and stuff graphicrules.gsr can do. There are some stuff that can be explored that are not on this tutorial. 7) Look for: "optionGroup $CarsSims # Sadly, we have no off" What graphic options do you use on SC4? It all depends on it. Normally, everybody use high. Notice that for this to work you must know which option is selected for "Car Sims" or related. 8.1) If you want to make cars and pedestrians appear on all views, set "property minVehicleZoom" and "property minPedZoom" as 1. 8.2) If you want to make cars dissappear completely from view, set the same options from 8.1 as 6. P.S. : There is an unconfirmed possibility that your SC4 is inverted on this rule compared to mine. For example, your camera "1" could be my camera "6". 9) Now save your file. It is recommended to have a backup of this, however, most SC4s will re-write this file automatically if it is not on the folder. You probably be forced to "Save As" option and, when trying to replace the file, get "Access Denied" message. If that happens, move your old graphicrules.gsr to somewhere else then save the version you opened and edited with the exactly file name and make sure the extension keeps the same. 10) Open your SC4 to notice the changes. Everytime you edit this file you must restart SC4 to apply the changes. FINAL OBSERVATIONS I had not patience to explore this archive entirely and explore all its potentials. Be free to do yourself and to share your discoveries on omnibus and/or in the comments section.

So we are close to Christmas! Time to think about what we´ve done so far, time for peace, time for remembering others, time for gifting... In Swartzia, Christmas is celebrated seriously, with Christmas parade, big pines tree all over the city... In December, the hotels are always full of visitors, coming from several places of the nation and with some international tourist too. Ok, enough talk, lets get to the pictures. Merry Christmas and a happy new year! The end (?) As I mentioned on my back, my objective was to get this CJ done and I consider it is. However, I never know if maybe someday on the future Ill wish to play SC4 again, maybe get more inspiration and do a better "work". Anyway, I´d like to thank you all for attention and comments. For those who didnt saw yet, I recommend to take a look at my 3 "Articles", they are a good read (Article 1 is the best of them): Thank you all and happy 2016! Comments reply @raynev1 Thats a nice vision, I actually feel like I should stop gaming to do other stuff and in a decade or two get back... People on 2035 are going to say that their video-games are the real ones, that everybody before was fake,maybe they are even going to call them "simulators" instead, and they might say that our era sucked... Well, that´s going to be nice for City Building, really! <the picture below is a glitch and it appears by its own even if I edit the CJ post>

Here are some pictures about some cities around the country (actually, some of my experimental/incomplete works that I never showed/featured anywhere): Experimental Swartzia Decided that the forest need more flowers and less diversity of pines, even if maybe I exaggerated in the number of flowers in the actual Swartzia. Also, I switch some buildings to make a better fit. This is just a scratch, there is nothing around this scenery area. Saint Paul It is based in a more fantasy version of the Brazilian City São Paulo ("São Paulo" means Saint Paul in english), in the super small size map of SC4. The result was good, but a bit far from the real Saint Paul (São Paulo). I really thing that I should have took this far, it would be a good work. I used to have trouble at generating traffic with external plaza, but I happened to find a mod that would generate traffic right on the streets without needing a car plaza. (Unnamed) Multiple Islands City Not a bad idea, but not a new one either. It is commonly used in some racing games. The more common approach for islands is to make something rural, paradise style, with beachs, some trees, etc... However, the idea here is to create a big and dense city spread in several islands. The main problem I found was finding something different than a beach to put on the coast, something a bit more creative and functional. Not much buildings done that. Lierenopolis I could look on google for a more "Anselli" style name, but I decided to just put the one I used. It was supposed to be a creative medium size city, with the objective to be a vacation city to a big center. The final result was a bit weird...Maybe too much creative...In the end I decided that it was too exotic to render something interesting. Claire Coast I named this originally as "Bright Coast" in portuguese ("Costa Clara"), and it was supposed to be one of my two main cities (that had portuguese CJ´s of their own: "San Matheus" and "Arvoral", the first was completely reworked and redone once and has 2 versions). However, the city file corrupted suddenly and I had no backup, just very few pictures (in the end I just archived one). Some concepts were re-used for later cities, but the idea of big parks and important governmental buildings was reserved for the capital of Anselli (I was supposed to get it done last year but found no motivation to do so, I got tired of SC4 again after getting Viminalis and Swartzia done). Phoenix With portuguese name "Renascença" (Reborn in portuguese, Phoenix is a more elegant but unprecise translation), I decided to take a new style that I never done before. I think it is based on some poor New York Style, not sure. I actually not disliked the work, but I had a shot with it on a brazilian version of one of these images competition ("ImageVSImage") (originally started on SC4Devotion) and it was a failure. The city look kind depressive and not pretty, and, even having a style didnt compensated its flaws. Experimental sunset on San Matheus The idea was to create a different mix of colors, and create a blur effect on the ground that decreased with the highness. Not bad, but it wasnt an "oh!" work and it took too much work to get it done, and my photoshoping skills are actually not good (I know just the very basics for 00´s days). That´s it!

Article 3: Final ideas Builders VS Mayors Years and years ago, some people complained about “the cheaters”. They were talking not only about people that used money cheat (a.k.a simleon tree), but to people that would swap other things too, like using SuperDemand mods (its more than just one). In the other side, some other people complained about “the noobs”. These guys had kind of ugly cities, with some repetitive building. But they used to say “hey, at least I made it on the honest way”. The noobs were known as mayors. And the cheaters as builders. Everyone started playing SC4, or maybe any other City sim, as a mayor. Manage money flow, taxes, control crime and fire, build hospitals, and etc… This is the meaning of playing as a mayor. However, there is always a time where you get tired of these things – or better, tired of the engine that runs these things – and want to build the City of your dreams. Then, you will not want the engine holding you back. You just want to build and make things exactly – or almost exactly – like you want. So, you take the money out of equation, create or destroy the demand (or “plop” the buildings on your own), take out any problems related to crime, end any possibility of any fire, etc.. At this moment, you become the builder. It is just about what you want to do – and achieve. Have as much population as possible, or have as many satisfy rate as possible, is not everybody´s goal on this. Repeting: it is a question about what you want to do. Some people prefer to stay on the middle although. They try to build the city they want without doing engine “swaps”. That’s a way too. So, if you call anyone a “$%&^!” for having an ugly city, or if you call anyone “a cheater” for using the money tree, stop and ask yourself what the other people want. Maybe the idea was never having a pretty city, or the idea was never having the engine holding you back. Finally, it would be a good idea if anyone developing a city builders take note about the builders. It would be a great idea to have a mode that disables the engine – the money stuff, the sims processing – and create a builder mode, where you could create exactly what you want. Managing the traffic, when clicking on a street and setting it to “zero”, “small”, “medium”, “heavy”, no money, and anything like that. Even if we are full of mods trying as much as they can to make a builder mode possible, SC4 is going to always process traffic information, sims information, and always simulate everything – wrongly, with the mods. This will likely consume memory. With less memory, with no simulation, maybe this mode could generate larger maps – or, at least, lit will be a lighter mode. Expanding “Mayor Mode”: State and Nation management, different systems I wonder if someday there will be an expansion of the mayor thing. I mean: What about having a position as a president? Manage a whole state or nation? Just imagine how would be a “President Mode”. Problems to solve, currency, diplomacy, trades, managing transportation as a whole, solving trouble done by big disasters like flood, earthquakes, etc… Mayor Mode has a good potential for expanding in any City (Nation?) Builder Sim. And: Why capitalism only? Why not some variations of it or radical changes? Not for the sake of the efficiency but it would be fun and puzzling. “Mayor Mode” is something people don’t take long to get tired and a different mode, with different strategies and approaches would be nice. Future In the end, somehow, all the 3 articles I´ve made talks about the future. A big problem today on City Builder Sims is the proportion about detail versus size. Finding the right balance is hard. For most games that includes any kinds of maps, from racing games, airplane simulators, some action games, RPG, etc… There are always limitations at computing, and that influences on the map. If the map has too many details, it is too small. If it has huge, it is detail lacking. For example, do you know what the biggest map ever made on videogame history in any platform is? There are some RPG, Racing Games, but in the end, it is “Flight Simulator” rules… It has the whole world as a map, every kilometer/mile. However, 90% of the map is just texture taken from the satellites, sky images like on Google Earth. And it is like that since the 2000´s. In the other side, the new “Sim City” tried to process the commute of every citizen and barely end with 1 square kilometer… With the potential expansion of computing and hardware, with the natural evolution of technology, limitations problems like that might be solved, even if we could never reach the infinite. There always would be the limitations but they will get smaller than they are today. I really believe that the golden age of City Builders Sims (late and middle 2000´s) will come back in between 2020 to 2030. As I´ve shown on the others texts, there are some problems with map size and general appearance. With better computing, these problems are solved slowly. Just imagine: Bigger maps, like 10x10 or 20x20 km… Better, good looking and realistic graphics… Expansion of Mayor Mode… Even if these days have not been the best, someday the golden era will come back full with new concepts, new ideas, new ways and new possibilities. Comments Reply @Dedgren (Art 2): These graphics expansions and evolutions doesn’t happen from day to night, they happen slowly. Slowly we get some new possibilities… Slowly “we get there”. @Raynev1: Thanks. @kschmidt: Thanks. There are comments saying that my cities look busy, but I´ve always thought that the traffic in SC4 in general is not big enough. Sometimes, we see real ghost towns with big buildings… Even if I used to not be good at generating traffic it was better than nothing. Always tried to get balance on my scenery too…

Hello, guys. Yes, I have abandoned my City Journal for almost 2 years from now. I should not had done that, but at least Im back to get this done – even if it won’t be done as I initially planned. I had plans to introduce and show, in detail, 5 cities, however, in the end we are going to have 2-3 cities on detail. I had problems with my notebook (it did broke last year and I had to buy a bad one just to use internet and ms office), and, also, the Portuguese version of this Cj was completely lost by www.simcitybrasil.net (please don’t click). I´ve tried to restore it, but, by now, the Brazilian sim city website is completely gone. Well, Im going to start with the only thing the Brazilian version had and the English don’t have: The Article 1. First, I had to completely re-write it because I had no backup of it. Second, I pretend to release 3 articles about some interesting non-tutorial stuff. By now, I already have the article 2 done. Article 1 – Commute experiment As we known, Maxis use the metric system or international system to measure units of distance, time, and speed. It was posted more than a decade ago, somewhere on ST, that a Sim City square unit is 16x16 meters, the small map is 1x1 km, the medium map is 2x2 km and the big map is 4x4 km. I had done myself – two years ago – some “experiments” about commute and speed. First, with completely empty plugins folder, I´ve started with one house and one small shop. The first thing came into my mind was: “If a place is right near the other, is the commute is zero?”. Here´s the answer: No. As shown in the picture below: For calculating commute, the game counts 1 or 2 squares? I’ve decided to increase the distance between the house and the shop by 8 squares. If the game counts only 1 square in this case, the increase of commute would be 9x. If the game counts 2 squares, then it would be 5x times. An 9x increase means that the new commute would be 9x6=53. If 5 then it would be 6x5=30 minutes. So: This dramatic increase indicates that not only the game counts just 1 square or less in this case, but it also counts some time for the sim to leave his house or the count is less than a square. However, in order to not create unnecessary overcomplicating, lets count as 1 square. Before proceeding, I found something odd about the house and the shop. The game states that the whole city has 5 inhabitants, but the shop employs 7 people! Switching back, what about sims walking speed? Well, if you pay attention, they took about an hour to travel a distance that doesn’t look to be big. Think about it – How long you take to travel 1 km by foot (0.62 mile)? 15 minutes? 20? Well, for sure is not an hour. The average speed of a walking human is 5 km/hour (about 3 miles/hour). The average of a Sim City sim is: (9 squares x 16 meters/square)/(1 hour) (144 meters)/(1 hour) (0.144 km)/(hour) 0.144 km/hour! That’s less than 0.1 mile/hour. Wow, how slow, huh? Are sims turtles and Maxis never told us that? Well, maybe turtles in cars can get really fast. So, I made an increase on the distance to 20 squares, put a decent avenue (that made the distance increase to 22 squares), and here it is what I got: Much faster, huh? About 13 minutes, with 2x the distance… So lets get back to our simple speed calculation: (22 squares x 16 meters/square )/(13 minutes) (352 meters)/(0.217 hour) (1622 meters)/(hour) That’s about 1.6 km/hour, or almost 1 mile/hour. It looks like that sims cars travel about 3 times slower than a regular human being walking! How slow are they? Im really starting to think that a turtle would easily beat a sim on any race. Even using a car the sim would still lose for the turtle. Lol. What about a sim, in a car and on a highway, or in one of many Simtropolis sunken Highways, how much speed? It looks like that our poor, or better, slow sim, decided to buy a Porsche (the red car), so he would go faster. However, how can a poor ($, not $$$) sim can buy a supercar? This is just interesting evidence that SC4 generates the cars on the highway, without considering the wealth of the houses around. Getting back to the speed, here it is the new commute due to the highway: About 7 minutes. Then, the speed of a sim on a highway is: (1622 meters)/(7/13 hour) (1622 meters)/(0.54 hour) (3 km)/ (hour) 3 km/hour, or almost 2 miles/hour, is enough to win the turtle, but still too slow to win a human being walking. I made a similar experiment with subway, and the sim did took 8 minutes to take 20 squares. Something like 2 km/hour. What can we say about this? Well, sims are slow. Very slow. Very very slow. Now comes “my opinion” part. I really don’t think this is a mistake from Maxis. I believe they are very aware of this. They know. The real problem isn´t the fact that sims are slow. It is because the maps are too small. Here are some examples of city sizes: Tokyo = 2,188 km^2 London = 1,572 km^2 Ciudad de Mexico = 1,485 km^2 Johannesburg = 1,644 km^2 Toronto = 630 km^2 SC4 “large” map = 16 km^2 In terms of speed, in the biggest map SC4 can ever generate, it would take about an hour to go from an up-left house to a down-right store walking. It looks to be big, but, actually, it isn´t. At street speed, about 20 km/h (about 12 miles/hour), it would take about 15 minutes. At 100 km/h (about 62 miles/hour), it takes only 3 minutes. If Maxis decided to put sims at realistic speed, then what sense would the Rush Hour expansion do? With such small map there is no need for any fast ways of traveling. The commute on a city with only streets would be 15 minutes at peak (with no heavy traffic). There is no reason for subways or highways. The avenues and buses would solve any heavy traffic problems. No worries about commute times. I believe that, in order to try to mask the problem of a small map, they decided to make sims go slow. So, they would make the gameplay better (sacrificing simulation), and hide the real problem. I really think that very few people ever noticed that sims are really slow, and maybe not even half of Sim City players are aware about how small the “large” map is. This is because, at least in 2003, there was no computer that could take a real size map. I really hopes that in the future, that changes, and really hope for some new City Sim with a 20x20 km map or larger.

If you havent seen Article 2, I recommend to do so before seeing this update: Comments @dedgren: Its time to wait and see... However, I think it is going to be 5-10 years, not 4-5 years... Article 2 - Complement Hi all, I expect that some of you enjoyed my latter article ^^. In this update (next one I go back to SC4), we are going to have a look at some scenario shots of two racing games: 1) DriveClub 2) Gran Turismo 6 You may ask me what kind of City Journal is, a weird one indeed. Well, I don’t have much idea where to put these content. “Make a topic” some would suggest. But I wonder if the topic would get lost in some other thousands ones. And these kind of stuff are not tutorials. So lets get started… 1) DriveClub DriveClub is all about driving cars on the road in some good-looking scenario. It is not simulation-intended. There are more environment shots than urban ones, and the only big city is the one that was shown on the last update. Here are some extra pictures of DC: All these DriveClub pictures were taken from: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/driveclub-scenery.320510/ 2) Gran Turismo 6 Gran Turismo 6 is a racing simulation game. It has some cities tracks, and more urban areas than DriveClub (also known as DC). However, Gran Turismo 6 is old generation on PS3, it has less graphic content than dc. Also, in GT6 the quality of the out-track pictures are variable. Here are some 10 shots from GT6: Heavy edited: All of these Gran Turismo 6 Pictures were taken from: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/scenery.292306/ Please keep in mind that these cities and scenario are not my work. DriveClub© is a work by Evolution Studios (http://www.evos.net/), released in 2014. GranTurismo© is a trademark from Polyphony Digital (http://www.polyphony.co.jp/english/), and its 6th version was released in December 2013.

Comments @dedgren: Thx. I dont have any yet. Im using a very basic laptop, just to internet and MS Office. Nothing heavy is demanding for now, and I dont pretend to get back to gaming at PC anytime soon. ------ Before getting started, let me let you know that there have been rumors over the internet about a new sim game that received little attention lately. In these last days, it was leaked the text and the images of this new sim homepage (front page of its website): Create your own Cities! Create your own towns! Create your own ghost towns! Create your own old (or scary) touristic area! Create your own movie! Create your own beautiful nature scenery! Create your own beautiful shot with image editing! It’s up to you! (end of the page) It is a surprise, isn´t it? Or not? Would you buy it? I would. I actually did. Sadly, for those who got a bit excited, and for the confirmation of those who were somehow suspicious about it (those who wondered: “Too good to be true”, “What kind of computer would run something like that?”, “I already saw that somewhere”), that´s not a new game, and it is not a City Builder. It is DriveClub, a non-simulation racing game. It looks good, right? Yes, and it is not alone. There are several others games with nice looking graphics. And some of them have nice looking cities. Haven’t you already noticed that city building games are having trouble with that? A City on Gran Turismo 6 Article 2 - About graphics City Building is a category of game that includes a massive quantity of details to be rendered, considered and done. The problem is not only get a big city rendered, but the fact that the city must be very customized (otherwise it wouldn’t be a city builder at all). And it just get worse when you need to process a huge amount of data to decide what is going to grow, where it is going to grow and why it is growing. The city changes all the time. It is “alive”. In some games, you walk through a scenario, or drive through it, but you always do that on a pre-made scenario, with no amount of data to be processed, equal for every user and usually it is not needed to detail every place on the city (unless you are on completely free-roam game, where you can walk or drive anywhere on the city you want). Even in the free roam case, the maximum speed of the user is usually not as high as the speed of movement of a camera of a City Builder. That it is the reason – or at least what I believe it is – for the fact that, when compared to games released on the same year or close years, city builders looks worse than them. But there is Sim City 4. If you compare Sim City 4 to others from its time, it is clear that SC4 look, at least a bit, ahead from them. But it is a City builder, shouldn´t look worse than the others from its time? Yes, it should. But SC4 got a trick: Camera restriction. What generated some complaints, the constrain of the camera to perspective view, allowing only moving horizontally and zooming, were undoubtedly the main factor for giving Sim City 4 an graphical advantage. If the camera were free, Sim City 4 would look far worse. Some BATters probably have a good explanation about why constraining the camera saved your money on not needing a Super Computer for the work and improved the appearance of everything on 2003 Sim City´s. Since I never got any serious BAT done, Im not an expert at this, so I cant get very far about this subject. There were some few discussions on a brazilian forum (used to be www.simcitybrasil.net, but now it´s gone) about how the Sim City released in 2013 looks when compared with Sim City 4. Maybe this subject come to discussion here too. Not all people were convinced that the new Sim City did look better in comparison of the old one. Indeed you were free to take your shots from almost anywhere you want, at any angle, and that’s a good evolution. But I believe it came for a price: In terms of graphic and appearance. Even if you say: “But, hey, I dislike the new Sim City”, it is very difficult to deny that the same phenomenon happens to the others. I believe that for that very reason SC4 is still alive and it is hardly and slowly being replaced. You can still get shots that looks fairly realistic from a game with 12 years old just because of the camera constrain (and, of course, a nicely done work from Maxis). Some of them look better than any other city builders competitors that try’s the very same angle of view. Following that, you got thousands of buildings, hundreds of mods, which fix some bad aspects of the game. It is difficult to “win” that, but someday, we will get something better. Some say we already did. But for now, we can look at other games, specially racing ones, to have an idea about what “graphical” future is coming for us. PS: The driveclub pictures were taken from: https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/driveclub-scenery.320510/ The picture from Gran Turismo 6 I took on my own.