RedImperator

So how exactly do the residential jobs work?

EA has turned a blind eye to EULA violations in the past--there are a number of Sims 2 modders who sell their custom content for a profit, an egregious EULA violation, and EA not only doesn't file cease and desist orders, it actually invited several to preview The Sims 3. I'm curious as to whether it's POSSIBLE to mod the .EXE without the source code. I thought it wasn't, but I know about as much about computer programming as I do about voodoo magic (the two arts often seem interchangeable).

Originally posted by: mayor_brando Originally posted by: RedImperator There are two different ways to do it, and one of the tools (which I think is a Maxis default) looks terrible, with a hump in the highway and the overpass doing a stupid and ugly up-and-down thing. The problem is those ramps aren't 15 meters deep, so they pull the highway up towards street level and (for some reason) make the overpass jagged.quote> The solution to this is to dig 15m, then raise the terrain a little bit and you won't get those nasty bumps.quote> Yeah, but that's a lot of fiddly, frustrating work and it still doesn't look as good as the puzzle pieces, especially if you have buddybud's walls and bridge skins.

There's a digger called "Hole Digger for Sunken", which will dig a 15 meter hole. Unfortunately, it's only one tile wide, so you'll have to widen it with the street tool. That should make your sunken highway perfectly flat going into and out of tunnels. Now, another possible issue is with your on/off ramps. There are two different ways to do it, and one of the tools (which I think is a Maxis default) looks terrible, with a hump in the highway and the overpass doing a stupid and ugly up-and-down thing. The problem is those ramps aren't 15 meters deep, so they pull the highway up towards street level and (for some reason) make the overpass jagged. The second way to make interchanges is with the single sided parallel/perpendicular ramps that the NAM adds to the highway menu. These are fifteen meters high and, assuming you used the "hole digger for sunken" tool and the service roads are level, they will be perfectly flush with the surface streets without any adjustment. The NAM overpass puzzle pieces are also designed to be 15 meters off the ground, so if you have everything terraformed properly your sims will have a perfectly smooth and level bridge across the highway and a perfectly smooth and level highway below. This is probably easier to illustrate with pictures. I'll see if I can put some up tomorrow.

Originally posted by: Ntq$310 Here´s a thought: if you want anyone to seriously consider these kinds of statements, don't ever link to a cesspit like freerepublic.com. quote> And im sure because of some crap on the site that automatically makes everything they say false, untrue, and lies?quote> No, it merely makes it the default assumption that everything they say is a lie. FreeRepublic has zero credibility. Frankly, an unsourced message board post is always worthless as evidence, regardless of the board in question, but a septic tank like FreeRepublic is even more worthless. Well there goes every source ever I like the phrase "debunk what is said not who said it" quote> Okay, fine: the post you copied verbatim isn't sourced at all, listing page numbers instead of sections makes it difficult or impossible to confirm, and we're supposed to trust the author to accurately paraphrase complex legal language he's almost certainly not qualified to interpret without seeing the original language. It's junk.

I always imagined myself as some kind of Mayor Daley analogue--yes, there are elections, and yes, there's a city council, but my party has a 5:1 registration advantage and my political machine controls the party. The only way to lose power is to mismanage the city so disastrously the state takes over (much like what happened to Camden, New Jersey) and I resign in disgrace. I also always figured there was some kind of state and federal government above me, with their own taxes and laws. And I rationalize the unrealistically low cost to provide services by imagining I'm subsidizing the city's operations with federal and state funds.

Originally posted by: dedgren I don't consider our mods and BATs even remotely close to SimCity 5.quote> Well, my friend- you are really hard to please. I, on the other hand, don't think the most meticulous and dedicated electronic game developer would put a fraction of the time and effort this community has on improving the game. The best of the MODs and BATs that have been created add a richness and detail to the game that would take years to replicate from scratch.quote> The best mods and bats also can't do things. They can't add an undo button. They can't create custom menus. They can't add weather. They can't add mixed-use zones. They can't add streetcars or viaduct rail without kludges like puzzle pieces. They can't fix the water textures bug. They can't add a free camera. They can make rural highways, but they can't make a neighbor connection with them without resorting to another kludge. They can't add disasters. They can't create real regional play, with realistic power plants and landfills and no need to daisy-chain neighbor deals. Don't get me wrong, the modders have moved mountains (literally, in the case of SC4 Terraformer), but they've done it all within the fundamental limitations of the program. We're all just lucky Maxis didn't build the traffic simulator into the EXE. I think it's perfectly fair to call a modded-out game SC4.5. Frankly, even if you have SimMars and the NAM, it's still not as much of a total conversion as, say, CounterStrike was of Half Life or Team Fortress was of Quake. As far as changes to core gameplay, the mods available for SC4 don't go even as far as The Sims 2's expansion packs did (if you've never played Sims 2 or don't know anyone who does, just imagine all the changes that Rush Hour made to Vanilla...and then imagine seven more expansions just like it). This isn't a complaint, just a statement of fact. The modders have done tons of great work, but it's not the same as a sequel or expansion. SC4 is practically open source to this community- we can MOD it to get it to do almost anything we want it to.quote>Except, you know, anything involving the .EXE. Which is really too bad; I'd love to see what the modders could do if they had access to the source code. But EA is still making money off SC4 in stores, and considering they haven't even released the source code of SC2000 yet, we can expect modders to have access to the EXE sometime in the year 2022. Now, all this said, I really am in no great hurry to see a SC5 (if such a thing ever is released). You are correct in saying no company is going to create as much content in-house as the modders have collectively made in the last six years. I'm not very excited about CXL and I rightly thought Societies was going to be garbage before it came out. It's kinda like how my girlfriend won't upgrade to Sims 3 because she'd have to give up the three gigs of custom content she has for Sims 2. You know what I do wish we'd gotten instead? More expansion packs. Keep a game that can actually run on a computer I can afford and all the custom content, but really expand upon the core gameplay (and fix the intractable bugs). That's where I really feel like EA let SimCity fans down. We got one pack and were promised more...and they vanished like dust in the wind.

Originally posted by: Tarkus Originally posted by: ROFLyoshi With the route query that tells you where people are going for work, it only shows people going to work. What it doesn't show is the shoppers at commercial service places. quote> Actually, arguably, it is. If you look at the purported population density in SC4 given the official "scale" of the city tiles, and compare it to real-life cities of similar characteristics, you'll find the SC4 population is about 2-2.5x higher than the real-life population. My working assumption has always been that this discrepancy was Maxis' way of creating an "ambient population" effect--population that doesn't actually live there but is necessary to make the simulator work in a realistic manner.quote> I've always assumed that SC4 cities are "selectively compressed", the same way model railroaders will describe their model main lines as "selectively compressed" (I got my start in city simulation on model railroads, so I know a little bit about this). In model railroading, unless you have club layout in an aircraft hangar, even a tiny scale railroad will have towns too close together and "main line" runs only a scale mile or two long. You have to suspend disbelief enough to pretend that it's actually ten miles between whistle stops and the main line is one hundred miles from yard to yard. I do the same for SimCity; in my imagination, a large city tile is 8km to a side and my 6x4 blocks are actually 12x8, while the population of the houses is halved (I tried the residential halver mod, but my custom content just crowds out all the Maxis houses it affects).

Snopes.com Internet petitions aren't worth the electrons they're made of. The short version is, since they take no effort to sign and there's no way of verifying signatures, companies and governments ignore them--in fact, it's good policy for companies and governments to ignore them, because there's no way to tell if it actually represents the desires of hundreds of thousands of people or a few dozen.

Originally posted by: evertonforever1 Hmm. i might get this bad boy... IS there such thing as a residenial reducer.. ?? .. Like halves the amont that live in R$ only... quote> There is a residential halver (https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=12383), but it affects all Maxis lots, and ONLY Maxis lots. That means that any custom content you have will simply crowd out all the Maxis buildings and your population density will be right back where you started, unless the custom content has realistic numbers (and almost none of it does, because otherwise the unmodded Maxis content would crowd THEM out). Now, if you don't have any custom R$ content and you just want to halve the residents on R$ lots, it's pretty easy to adjust slightlyslack's original mod. You'll need ilive's reader for this (available at https://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=656; you will need to register at SC4Devotion if you haven't already). Make a backup of residentialhalver.dat, and then open the reader and load the file. You'll see a list of 242 exemplar files, one for each Maxis residential lot. Numbers 0 through 88 are the R$ lots. Delete numbers 89 through 241, save as zzwhatever (the zz is crucial, since the game loads plugins in alphabetical order and later plugins always override earlier ones; the rest of the file name can be whatever you want), put it in your plugins folder, and away you go. Now, if you do have R$ custom content, you'll either have to take it out, block its growth, or dial down those numbers, too. Taking it out is only an option if you don't yet have any in your cities, or you're willing to demolish all of it. To block it, find the exemplar file for each lot (it's most often in lotname.dat). There may be two exemplars; you want the one with the OccupantGroups property. This property determines the tileset to which the lot belongs (Chicago, New York, Houston, or Euro). Copy the exemplar to a new dat file, called zzwhatever. Once you've done that, open the exemplar, find the property, double click on it, look for the numbers 2000, 2001, 2002, and/or 2003, delete them, and then hit "Apply". Doing that will leave all existing copies of that lot in your game, but since it no longer is assigned to any tile set, it won't grow under any circumstances. Repeat for each lot you want to modify. Finally, if you want to adjust them yourself, open the exemplar file and change the value Capacity Satisfied. Note that these values are in hexadecimal, not base ten, so if you don't know hex digits, open up your calculator, imput the value you want in base ten, and then convert it to hex. Do that for every lot you want to modify. It's tedious, but it will work.

The hardest thing for me to do was getting in the habit of hitting "Esc" after I was done with a puzzle piece, so as not to accidentally drag it over a transit-enabled lot.

I've found that if you have enough downloaded CO$$$ BATs and you're ruthless enough with the bulldozer, Wren Insurance isn't much of a problem. It's a shame it's so aggressive, really. It's probably my favorite Maxis building--a graceful, slender, and restrained Gothic Revival (it is possible for Gothic Revival to be restrained?) tower that blends in well with the cities I like to build. It's just when you get 30 of them, the charm wears off.

Yeah, I mostly just ignore the environment bar if everything else is green. This side of cheating, there's not much I can do about pollution from car exhaust, which is the primary air pollutant in my heavily-developed cities (even with an extensive public transportation system, cars account for about 2/3rds of all trips taken, not counting pedestrians).

Another night shot of Central Arcadia, this time without the orientation flipped (but still some chicanery with the perspective tool):

Originally posted by: Kusajika Yachiru I would spice things up by making my grids also go horizontal but as Redlmperator said buildings refuse to want to properly aling to that fashion... Oh yeah don't a lot of cities like London have bad traffic problems becuse the streets were made to narrow for todays cars and also because of all of winding roads and things you get bad traffic... right?quote> To an extent. However, Manhattan has wide, straight streets and the traffic is so bad they're considering instituting congestion fees, just like London has. Los Angeles, Houson, and Atlanta freeways can be twelve lanes wide or somesuch number, and during rush hour, you'll get to your destiation faster on foot. In very large cities, congestion simply expands to fill all available capacity--add a lane to a highway, and an entire lane's worth of traffic that had been taking public transit or driving alternate routes will fill up that lane in short order. It's not physically possible to build enough lanes to keep traffic always moving freely in places like London and New York, even if you eliminated all the bottlenecks--and good lord, if they tried turning London into Manhattan, the only way to fit it would be to bulldoze everything that makes it worth going to London in the first place.

Originally posted by: duack I agree with Nardo, it doesn't look like its been planned very well - more like something made by a ***** at SC4. Everything is too high dense, but very little W2W and like anything is being built anywhere.quote> Count me in this camp, too. They look good from a distance, but up close it's just an office park. That could just as easily be Dallas as Istanbul. Charmless glass boxes in the middle of parking lagoons. And that glass pyramid looks like that giant hotel in Pyongyang that they never finished.

SimCity has had churches since Classic, when the detail level was too low for post offices. If the designers had removed them, a large portion of the fanbase would have howled--myself included, since it's ridiculous not to include churches in a game designed to simulate Western cities, and I say this as a card-carrying atheist (if we had, you know, cards to carry around). It would have been nice to have post offices (providing CO cap relief, most likely, since business still move huge volumes of mail even in the internet age), but it would have been nice to have streetcars and football stadiums, too. There's a ton of stuff that got left out because EA had its deadline.

What's throwing me is that there are no backyards, which are probably 2/3ds of the reason people move to suburbia to begin with. I don't think the 1x1 zoning is doing you any favors.

muck: The trees on the cliff look very natural, and I like the overall waterfront layout, but some of those boats must have been airlifted into the marina. hawkeye9: I really like how the rocks look under the water. The lighthouse beam is nice, but most of the beams I've seen are tighter than that. terring: I generally like the composition, but I might suggest a water mod (since temperate deciduous forest doesn't work well with Carribbean blue water) and more variety in the trees. And now, muck, your wish is my command: a wider downtown shot. After some agonizing about it, I finally got rid of the Key Tower. The reason being that at this zoom level or higher, its nightlights look terrible. The windows are too bright and their random pattern serves to break up the outline of the building, like camoflage. Plus, it has a rendering error that turns it into a blur of pixels from two different sides at this zoom level (this picture would have been impossible). I like the building, but it's just not up to NDEX's usual standards. So I replaced it with the NDEX DRK tower instead.

I go with 4x6 blocks, generally with 1x2, 2x2, or 3x2 zones unless demand is high enough to support a 4x4. The majority of my residential blocks are zoned with alternating strips of 1x2 medium and high density, which forces rowhouses to grow. This won't lead to the maximum possible population, but I'm not really interested in that anyway.

My cities are strongly influenced by Philadelphia and Manhattan above 14th St., so my cities tend to be relentless grids unless there's some insurmountable topographical feature. Still, for visual interest, I'll break it up somewhat with multi-block parks, and for variation I'll have every x road be an avenue or even a boulevard (two one-way roads with a one-tile gap in between, filled with Marrast's avenue dividers or some kind of public transportation). The thing is, with Sim City, the grid is by far the easiest way to organize your cities anyway, since buildings won't align to anything else save for a handful of custom content with overhanging props.