AIX

Sadly, most people of the Millennial generation and younger have had leaderboards and achievements rammed into their poor little brains, so they think they are necessary. Look at all the crap games on Facebook and iPhone/Android.

You would think having some sort of "sync" between all the servers so saved cities could be available no matter what server would be Basic Infrastructure 101.

I LOLed so hard because they thought the White House has the time, authority, and concern over an online single player game!

I got a giggle out of the fact that the blog was written about something totally unrelated to SC2013, yet the comments completely hijacked it to gripe about it. Well played, internet.

I sure wish whomever wrote the petition took the time to proof-read for spelling, grammar, and clarity. Not to be a nit-pick, but on something as important as a petition that you want to be heard, those sort of details do matter. My apologies if the writer is not a native English speaker. However, he or she could have consulted someone on this forum for assistance if that is the case. I still signed this petition because I believe that refunds are due. Below is an edited copy of the petition text. This game has been entirely misrepresented. The EA servers cannot handle all the players and it is clear they weren't prepared to handle the bandwidth this game needed. They assured us that the EA servers were not going to be busy or unreliable, so there was no need for an offline mode. With 20 to 30 minute queue times, it is clear that the EA servers are in fact unreliable. Also, I have experienced game crashes with loss of cities and no possible way to save my game. Lastly and most importantly, they ensured features such as leader boards with achievements all being displayed online. Now this is being taken away because of server overload. Thus giving more evidence of how unprepared and misleading the EA company has been in this product launch.

EA has offered a chance to get refunds. I recommend that anyone who feels angry enough to request a refund and consider re-purchasing in the future once issues are resolved. If EA refuses to make good on its offer, dispute the charge on your bank cards. edit: spelling and grammar.

EA made Sim City 4 and they are free to do with it as they please. I do not recall how long copyrights last for video games, but for other creative works they can last about 75 years (please correct me if my fuzzy memory is wrong) in the United States. Personally, I think releasing the source code for older games into the public domain is a "good will" practice and if I owned a game company, I would implement that policy.

Texas is one of few states in which I have no personal experience driving. Further north of Seattle as you get into Everett and I-405 merging back onto I-5, they have a simpler HOV lane setup, but with barriers in key places to prevent people from merging across 4-6 lanes. IIRC, you can't get from HOV NB onto I-405 for that reason. I am taking my primary region on hiatus while the NAM 31 bugs are worked out and working on a side "mini region", where I plan to employ as compact a setup as possible with my infrastructure.

I have also not been able to replicate a bunch of the bugs that were reported. I assume a decent number of them have to do with faulty installations. Though I've not had problems with the 31 installer. Cheers Willy In my case, I completely removed all plugins (including NAM) before installing 31. I tested it out, then added back all my non-NAM plugins. I also exclude NAM from DAT Packing. I honestly cannot see where my installation could have been faulty and I have been able to reproduce every bug here. I think a number of them have to do with improperly/differently using the items in-game.

Way to inject politics into a subject that doesn't warrant it. Want to know what is great about capitalism? You have the free choice to not buy this game. You have the choice to not buy any future titles from EA or their "greedy capitalist mates" ever again. In fact, EA has said that it will offer refunds to those who want to back out of their purchase of this game. I suggest you take them up on that offer if you regret purchasing this game enough (assuming you did). This game shows great potential, so I am making my capitalistic buying decision to wait 1-3 months before purchasing. In addition, in our capitalistic society, you have the option to develop your own game that better suits your desires. In fact, several groups are attempting to do so. /end rant.

Nicely done! There are many real-world examples of little "helper islands" being constructed when spanning long water distances.

I posted a series of collector/distributor lanes many pages back in this thread. Two separate carriageways for each direction. The inner lanes could have been HOV, but there weren't appropriate HOV lane markings available at the time. I am going to re-visit it once NAM 31 is a little more polished. Edit: I dug up the old picture. Nicely done AIX. I love the look of it unfortunately it is too large for my application with the collectors. I am attempting to do it with a DD system. Right now I have 10S running on both sides on DD in the center. The problems is is that when that DD comes up to a massive interchange I have to drop it down to L2 and pray to god I can get L3 and L1 to get through there, then raise it back to DD. Another issue is that I need to account for entrance and exit ramps. To do this I have made use of the 8S split ramp. I run it down to 2 4S and then use the 4 inside exit and entrances to facilitate flow from the HOV lanes to the main freeway. The ultimate vision will be for commuters wanting off onto the intermediate surface streets to get off the HOV, on to the freeway, then off to those roads. At major highways, spurs, and other freeways there will be full incorporation of HOV access to those without the need to merge onto the freeway. Of course that is the ultimate plan. Implementing that is a COMPLETELY different story. As you can see from my earliest work - taken about 3 hours before this post - it's off to a rough start. This is the first major interchange to start construction in a fresh region. I tend to build my infrastructure very massively. For HOV lanes, a real-world place you might want to look at is Seattle, WA. Through their city centre, I-5 has a set of variable-direction lanes under the main motorway that serve as HOV lanes. Instead of having commuters merge from HOV > main carriageway > exit, there are exits directly off the HOV lanes onto main arterial streets (not as many exits as the regular lanes). Would reduce the need for potentially dangerous merging

Had to give you a plus-1 on the being drunk part (hey, some of my best creations were under the influence of gin). This is precisely why I shall never pre-order any game. I have no intentions of purchasing this until at least 1-3 months after release.

Here is one I did not see in this thread. I have Euro textures selected. As you can see, paths work fine - this is purely a cosmetic issue.

Well you should, because 1 is already been posted, and 3 is a feature of two-tile networks (those are paths for the construction vehicles), not a bug. My apologies. Also, the vast majority of the people who aren't regularly involved in transit modding (e.g. myself and a vast majority of this site's membership in general) wouldn't have known about the construction vehicles paths. As for 1 and 2, I did not see any images posted while flipping through the 7 pages of this thread, so therefore I posted them. I sometimes struggle with reading through longer and linear threaded conversations online, so I can easily overlook something is mentioned merely in text rather than an image. That said, unless you're a transit modder who plays with DrawPaths on almost all the time, the presence of the orange paths looks very strange. Heck, I remember when DrawPaths became available (right around the time I started transit modding), it surprised the heck out of all of us. They're automatically drawn by the game on the initial drag of any native two-tile network (Avenues and Maxis Highways), and go away after clicking around, generally. They're of the mysterious "Path Type 5", and basically allow the construction vehicles to down the other side in the direction of the drag. -Tarkus Thank you, Tarkus, for the courteous explanation.

I posted a series of collector/distributor lanes many pages back in this thread. Two separate carriageways for each direction. The inner lanes could have been HOV, but there weren't appropriate HOV lane markings available at the time. I am going to re-visit it once NAM 31 is a little more polished. Edit: I dug up the old picture.

Definitely following this thread, but haven't yet had the chance to read all the text. Below is an image of three RHW bridge issues I did not see reported up thread.

I just completed playing the third beta test for the new game, and it had me thinking. I was first exposed to Sim City way back in 1994 when my grade school just got computers that the students could use for the first time. They were Macintosh computers and most of the faculty were still trying to figure out how to use them. I was 7 years old at the time and "computer class" consisted of 23 younglings dinking around on these new-fangled devices. I opened up the "Applications" folder, found Sim City 2000, and played away. I was hooked instantly. Every chance I had to get to a computer at school or at my then best friend's house - we were building our metropolises. A year later, my parents finally got a computer for the household - a Compaq Presario. This was about the time a special edition of SC2K was released for Windows 95. I saved up my allowance money ($29.99 was a lot for an 8 year old in 1995) to buy it, but to my surprise, my father just bought it for me. I still have the CD to this day Over the years, I purchases SC3000, SC3000 Unlimited, SC4, and finally the Rush Hour expansion pack. I still have them all. I just turned 26 in January, so I have had Sim City with me in some form for 19 years now. That is what blows my mind away - I have had Sim City for 73% of my entire life. I couldn't even hazard a guess as to how many hours I have served as mayor. The latest Sim City of course has its issues and controversies. After all, it is the first major departure in the series. Every single version - from the original to SC4 - has maintained the same core principals. The major changes have been almost entirely technological - better graphics, more features - as computing power has increased since the 1980s. With that said, I am optimistic about the new game. Thank you for letting me walk down memory lane for a bit PS: It was heart-warming to see "Reticulating Splines" on the loading screens during the beta.

From the looks of it, you are trying to create some sort of rest stop, no? The ramps leading to/from the rest stop can easily be made with plan-old RHW - I in fact do this all the time. Observe: I am no BAT/Lot expert (hats off those who are), but from a logic stand point, I would approach this project by only working on something that fits within the red circle here and then transit-enable the lot to allow the MIS (or a RHW-x) to pass through. Would this not make the issue of creating your own textures a little easier to resolve?

@Nonny: I work in the financial industry.

I have always done the Boot Camp option on my Mac. The Aspyre port never performed to my satisfaction. It may be a "hassle" to have to re-boot into Windows for SC4 (and vice-versa), but it is well worth it in terms of speed and stability. The boot sequence takes about 20 seconds for me, and I am running an older 2007 iMac.

On mine, the default graphic settings were all set to LOW. Made some changes and it vastly improved

Sitting at 14% Processing Large Files status. I sure wish there was an indicator that showed download speed or ETA...

I don't mind DLC or micro-transactions if done fairly. Two things need to be done: A ) The base price of the game must be low. For example, SC2013 is retailing for $80. If I have to pay $80 at the start, and $5-10 a month on DLC, I likely won't buy into the model. Make the base game $30 and I would be far likely to buy all sorts of DLC - likely exceeding that $50 difference. B ) The price of the DLC itself needs to be reasonable. For example, in The Simpsons Tapped-Out, the DLC is outrageously over-priced. To get a single "extra" building, you must spend about $20 in buying "doughnuts" which are used as game currency. That is right - $20 for a tiny piece of the game. The saving grace for Tapped Out is that the base game is free.