stratusmonkey

I don't know what it is with SC Societies and now this game, but the roads are too big. I'm sure there are some places where the cars are adrift on wide, empty pavement and crosswalks are as wide as trucks are long. But the curbs / gutters of the sidewalks are almost taller than the cars. In picture 5, the scale looks okay, but still not great. I realize this is partly driven by how the scale of roads and cars to zones was fudged for SC4, but come on! It's not as if roadways only come in two widths: wide and double-wide. I know, I know. They're working on it. But I'd figure getting things to the right scale and making fundamental decisions about the transportation network would be at the top of the priority list.

Mein Gott in Himmel! There's only one picture that doesn't look like a photograph! What I wouldn't give to spend an hour in your plugins folder. What terrain mod are you using? What water mod? Where did you get those underpasses? (They're not the old Transit-enabled lot ones, are they?) I could keep going.

First. I can think of two modes of subsidization: Capital subsidization - city pays to build the facility but not operate it. New sports stadiums and convention centers are built on this model, as are some utility contracts. Operational subsidy - city can establish the facility at no cost to them, but wholly or partly pays to operte it. Some parks, schools and museums are built on land grants. Some utility services are contracted out to private sector providers. Second, what's the point of setting it up so some services are provided by the private sector, some are provided by the public sector, and some are publicly subsidized if the player can't decide which is which? You're still creating a game where the publisher decides which services are privatized and which are nationalized, and their choices may not reflect the way things are done in your country / community. Third, it's been borne out in interviews that SimCity developers aren't out to push an agenda -- that certain services should be privately run and certain others should be publicly run. The goal was to put features driving and limiting city growth in players' control. No two American cities have the exact same utility setup. Water may be contracted out, electricity may be city-provided and garbage may be wholly privatized, or vice versa. A city that operates a free clinic may have no public hospital, or vice versa. But if the developer is going to decree that the availability of certain services drive or constrain how your city grows, leaving the provision of those services up to chance (i.e. the simulator engine) would be unsatisfying. Imagine if your farm town becomes overrun with R$$$ because a plastic surgery clinic grew to satisfy pent up CO$$$ demand, or your skyscraper metropolis imploded because the doctor's office suffers from a long commute time. Sure, less extreme forms of this behavior happen all the time in America. But there comes a point when adding economic realism suffers from diminishing returns.

I don't know where to send comments on the surveys / survey options, but I have two so far. I think the ability to have any degree of user customization / user creation of reward buildings (contra SC4) would be immensely better than voting on how many of each generic type of reward building we want. It strikes me that a planning sandbox and an undo feature are substitutes. They both allow you to experiment with proposed developments before committing. But the planning sandbox mode is much more realistic than an undo. For a certain amount of money paid to architects and engineers, you can throw an unlimited number of ideas around for a development. But once you break ground in the real world, you're stuck. The only way undo would be at all comparable is if it merely automagically executed the proper terraforming and zoning steps to make the city as it was before one's mistake, and took a corresponding hit out of the city budget. Further, I think undo might appeal to those who use city simulation games as artistic canvasses or virtual model railroad layouts, while a planning sandbox would appeal to those who use city simulation games as games.

Originally posted by: asturianuAn overview of downtown tile..the valley area is not filled yet as you can see: Cristianquote> Zounds! That's an amazing use of curved avenues and roads. Especially up by what looks like city hall. Right in the middle of the screen: Is that an angled street, or a curved road joined to northbound and eastbound streets? I haven't got the hang of curved roads yet. The curved segments end up in the way of intersections or end up conflicting with uneven terrain.

It's crazy that the first mosque is in Norway, but all the writing that isn't Arabic is English. I'll try to get some pictures of local mosques whenever I replace my camera batteries (or camera).

Originally posted by: zelgadisPerhaps the Belgians will turn it into something drinkable.quote> I'll drink to that! I'm an American but I like good beer, especially Belgian and Belgian-style ales. My grandparents can keep their corn juice with its artificial woodchip flavoring. This is a victory for globalization. Insert your feelings about globalization here.

In light of the haze and soft-focus you add to your screen caps, your wide shots look like something out of SC3k. And on the off chance you detest SC3k, I don't mean my observation as an insult.

Originally posted by: SwitchbladeSaint I just have a singular question; does anyone have a recommendation for a design program that is particularly well suited for creating both subway and street maps? Or any mods of any sort that I ought to be aware of? Any suggestions are appreciated and will likely result in hours spent on cartographic endeavours. Thanks in advance.quote> People have said they use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP (free alternative to Photoshop), Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Fireworks, Inkscape (free alternative to Illustrator), and Microsoft Paint in various incarnations. If you use the Search Topic feature and search for those various programs, you can see what each is capable of producing. The quality of work depends on how much practice each user has with their particular program, though it's easier to get up to speed with high-powered commercial programs with online tutorials.

Gosh. Somebody on Wikipedia has already gone and re-labled them as cakes. Which is pointless if you aren't in the U.K. Or trying to get them banned from the U.S. And I love that in the U.S. they are "potato crisps" because they're so unlike potato chips (i.e. U.K. crisps).

Originally posted by: Duke87 My own idea which I have used in drawing out fictional cities before is as follows: have the city crisscrossed by parkways which travel mostly in straight lines, have park space on either side, and only intersect with major streets. Minor streets end to either side on frontage roads and perhaps some intermediate streets get an overpass or underpass, or two pairs of ramps. Pelham Parkway and Mosholu Parkway in New York (The Bronx, actually) approximately are this kind of idea. Anyways, have these parkways intersect at rotaries (or "roundabouts" for you British folks), perhaps with flyover ramps so parkway traffic doesn't need to go around the circle to travel straight through. Fill in the areas between these parkways with local grids of streets. Note how the orientation of the grid varies. Also notice how some irregularity is acceptable. quote> Wow. That's awesome on so many levels. It would seem, though, that you wouldn't want too much deviation from cardinal directions, so reference to cardinal directions would be more than arbitrary. Do the major roads follow the terrain, or how are their alignments chosen? Even makes me want to see The Bronx, and I have a Midwesterner's irrational hatred of NYC.

I always think of Pegasus as a chick, because the name is almost always shortened to "Peg". That could have been embarassing.

So... SimTown Societies? *shakes head*

Originally posted by: un1 Here's just a few ones I got from my CJ... quote> Which water mod is that in the above picture? I thought I'd seen them all. Or maybe that look / effect is from your graphics card or a terrain mod?

Neat. But I think it's Alanis Morissette Ironic that you opened this CJ exactly as I was finishing a satellite-based map of the Trieste region. Good luck!

This is for the last game I started on my laptop... The Justice River Valley. Objective: simply to build out a region without getting distracted by shiny things. This is for the first game I'm starting on my new desktop... If I can summon up some more persistence, and keep from playing Oblivion, these will get incorporated into CJ's. In the meantime, I'll confess to being a piker. P.S., mind the 800x600 limit on inline pictures. I don't know if everyone has the capability to resize their graphics, but I'd hate to see them get zeroed out by the mods. I'm personally crazy about flags because of their ability to be a medium for non-verbal messages.

Originally posted by: haljackey I started off with Sim City for the SNES. I can't believe no one above started with this above me! What a great game! If you don't have it, but have a Wii, you can download it from the virtual console.quote> I played SC on a friend's SNES. But the first version of SimCity I played was for P.C. in my grade school's computer lab in 1990. Us nerds fought to use one of the school's three or four licenses. The copy protection code sheet was up on a bulletin board. For my twelfth birthday, I got a copy, about five months after my first computer. Eventually got both expansion packs, too. I loved Ancient Asia and Future Europe. I remember writing a letter to Maxis, asking if they were going to do a version with 256-color graphics.

In the vein of increasing your Page File / Virtual Memory / Swap space... having a fixed-size Page File. where both the minimum and maximum values are set to be the same is a Good Thing. 4096MB (4GB) may or may not be optimal depending on your configuration. People recommend some integer multiple of your RAM size, variously saying twice, three times or four times your amount of RAM. Of course, if you run out of swap space at 2x, go up to 3x and so on. If you try to increase your swap file size, or set it to a fixed amount and Windows doesn't cooperate with the request, it's probably because you ran out of free hard drive space. Just don't delete anything you'll miss. Stuff in your Recycle Bin counts against your free hard drive space in this context. And having a disk sector overwritten for the page file makes the old data pretty much unsalvagable.

So, I have a modest dilemma of a technical nature. A year ago, I hatched a plan to build a new desktop to go with my 3 year-old laptop. It was going to be primarily a MythTV receiver. (Like a Tivo that would let me burn DVD's of what I recorded and that I could upgrade on my own.) This meant it would be running Linux, no question. Now this computer is going to be mostly a gaming and multimedia machine, the decision to go with Linux seems a little silly. I would like to avoid Vista, in light of experiences others have had. I could buy another boxed copy of XP, but that seems stupid, since Microsoft is shutting out the lights on it. I have to buy a copy of XP before the end of June, if I'm going to go that route. The one game I'm worried about not running well under Linux is Spore (why I'm asking here), which comes out in September. The way I see it, I have three options. Buy XP and install it now. Buy XP now and install it if Spore doesn't work under Linux in September. Wait and see, and buy Vista in September if Spore doesn't work on Linux. I welcome your suggestions.

I've been thinking about this, and I can't help but do a cost / benefit analysis. I'm assuming the value Spore adds to my operating system is its $65 list price. That the price of XP is $200 and Vista is $300. I'm assuming XP and Vista have no more intrinsic value than Linux. I don't mean that as my opinion of their worth, we're just playing "How to go from Zero to Spore with the least amount of expected cost." I put the odds that Spore will run under Linux / Wine at 20%. Scenario 1: Cost if Spore doesn't run on Linux under Wine: $135 Cost if Spore does run on Linux: $200 Here, I've laid out $200 for XP. If Spore doesn't run on Linux under Wine, I've recovered $65 of that $200. If it does, the entire $200 was wasted. Expected cost: $148 Scenario 2: Cost if Spore doesn't run on Linux: $135 + a weekend Cost if Spore does run on Linux: $200 Here, I lay out the same $200. If Spore doesn't run on Linux, I've recovered $65 of my money, but I'll lose a weekend to install Windows instead of Linux. Expected cost: $148 + weekend Scenario 3: Cost if Spore doesn't run on Linux: $435 + a weekend Benefit if Spore runs on Linux: $65 Here, I don't have to pay anything for my operating system initially, so I get a positive $65 if that holds. If I have to turn around and buy Vista, I have to pay $300, I've forgone another $200 for passing on XP. I've lost a weekend. And I've only recovered $65 of that expenditure. Expected cost: $335 + weekend So, yeah. I went ahead and ordered XP. When I finally took the plunge into Windows 9x, I got a computer that shipped with Win '95 OSR2, and an included upgrade to 98. I waited five years before getting XP. In each case, I waited until those systems were known quantities. Given the choice, I intend to wait out until Vista comes out with its own SP2, or Windows 7 surpasses it or whatever. That time will come. But it's not today.

You might want to ask Gingerblokey, since it would seem he uploaded the picture to WP.

I think the (hospital's decision / court's order) should have complied with (the laws of my home country / my ethical sensibilities).

I name every one of my cities Heresville! (There. That's my second April Fool's prank.) Though it took me ages to understand why that was the default city name in the original SimCity. Kept thinking it was a messed up way to spell Harrisville. Actually, city names are something I've traditionally had trouble with. Though I've had a few decent regional themes lately.

Originally posted by: wallaseyJust out of interest; what programme do people use when making maps like the ones on show here???quote> I'm drawing this map in Inkscape. As soon as I think the region has achieved critical mass I'll try and make a CJ out of it.

In your post of 03/20, in the final picture, there is a 3x3 road roundabout. Where did you get it? Great work.