rybolton

Hello fellow citizens, it has been a while since I have taken the time to address the masses. I come before you today to announce the arrival of a child. A child born of this community. Samantha and I are the proud parents of a beautiful baby boy called Nicolas Orion. He was born on March 18th at 18:05, he weighed just 5 lbs 14 oz (2.66 Kg) and was 19.25" (48.9 cm) long. I never envisioned that I would not only meet the love of my life on the Internet so it is even crazier to think that we would also become parents of a beautiful baby boy. If this site didn't exist, we would likely have never met and this new life would never have existed. I feel that I must thank our glorious Dirktator, may he rule forever, for that little miracle. Thank you to the community that was built here and that continues to thrive here for all of the support and kindness over the years. Cheers!

Step 1 - First you will need to get a program called MICRODEM. Get it here. Follow the link ’Complete Install’. Now install MICRODEM. Step 2 - Now that you’ve installed MICRODEM you will need to get a DEM (Digital Elevation Models). You can download them from this site. Click on the button ’View and Order Data Sets’ You should now see this map of the United States. Step 3 - The toolbar on the left hand side of the screen allows you to move around the map, zoom in and out, and select area to download. The zoom in tool is default. After you’ve found the location that you want to download, select the download by rectangle tool in the lower left hand of the toolbar. Download by rectangle tool Click and drag on the map to select the area you wish to download. The green box is the area we are going to grab. A new window will appear and after it’s done working you’ll see this: Summary page Step 4 - Click on the button ’Modify Data Request, and uncheck all boxes but the one for ’NED - National Elevation Dataset.’ Change the Data Format to TIFF and then click on the button marked ’Save Changes & Return to Summary’ Change data format to TIFF You should now see a screen like this: We are ready to download the file. Click the download link. Save the file and remember where you put it. (I suggest creating a folder on your C drive called ’USGS DATA’ and placing your DEM’s there). Congratulations you now have a DEM to play with. You’ll need to unzip the archive you’ve just downloaded. Extract it to your C:/USGS DATA folder. (It will create it’s own folder) Step 5 - Start MICRODEM. Open the .tif file you just downloaded. Opening our .TIF file we downloaded. You should now see something like this: Our DEM is loaded. Right click on the Image, and select ’Display Parameter’ Right-click. A new menu will appear. Select ’Elevation’ from that menu. Your DEM will now look something like this: Color-coded DEM. Your dem is now color coded by elevation, but you need to get it in black and white, so right click on the Image again and select ’Elevation Colors’ then ’Colors’ from the next menu. You will now see a dialog box like this: Converting to gray scale. You need to select ’Grey scale.’ If your DEM is on a coast line the check box ’Ocean Check’ will make all of the ocean water blue, while your terrain will turn different shades of grey. Click ’OK.’ This is the result: We’ve left the water blue for now. You’ll notice that the ocean check has left a section of this DEM (Puget Sound near Olympia, WA) blue, but that the shades of grey are a little too dark in the areas near the water that should be land. You can correct this. Right click on the Image and select ’Elevation colors’ then ’Specify’ from the following menu. You will now be able to tell MICRODEM where to start and end the shading of the elevation. The numbers you are inputting are in meters, and the first number is for the low elevation, or what height you wish to assign to black. I have reset this Image from -1 meter to -800 meters and the upper range from roughly 3400 meters to 2000 meters. The result is below: Gray scale is corrected for our purposes. Now you’ll need to save your modified DEM as a GEOTIFF: Save map as GEOTIFF Step 6- You need to edit this Image with a photo-Image editor. So start your favorite Image software. For this tutorial I’ll be using Photoshop. If you have any blue sections of terrain (Ocean) use the magic wand tool to select them and fill them black. Changing the blue water to black. Note that there are still blue sections in this Image. Now convert your TIFF in to a Greyscale Image. And crop out the elevation key on the bottom. We need to discuss Image sizes now. A standard region can be imported from a 1025x1025 greyscale Image. If you want to use custom region sizes you’ll have to create or edit a config.bmp file. There are some simple guidlines here. Now we have to resize our Image to 1025x1025, so resize the Image so that the shorter side is 1025 pixels long. Changing the Image size to 1025 high. Now you’ll have to reduce the Canvas Size to 1025x1025. Now you need to save this Image as a GREY SCALE JPEG. Convert to Greyscale before saving as JPG! Changing the canvas size to 1025 x 1025. You are now ready to import your terrain to Simcity 4. Step 7- Home-stretch. Start Simcity 4 and create a new region. After the blank region appears press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R, find your terrain Image and let Simcity 4 run. Note: Do not do anything else while your terrain is being loaded. This will take several minutes depending on the speed of your computer, so expect to wait. Here are the results of the terrain we used: A couple of points. You can import any grey scale Image that is 1025x1025 pixels. It doesn’t have to be real world terrain. Try taking any photo to make a terrain, it just needs to be in 8-bit gray scale and sized at 1025x1025. The elevation translation scale in Simcity 4 starts the water level at about R:61 G:61 B:61. Which is about a 75% gray. So everything darker than that will be deeper water. Happy customizing! A big thanks to Forkboy2 for providing a lot of insight.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw delivers his take on Simcity. Spoiler alert: he gives it a "meh." The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : SimCity

I’ll keep this short since almost everyone who cares is busy building cities and making friends in SimCity. Maxis continues to make huge progress in addressing the lag and server-capacity issues we experienced at launch. We’ve improved our server response time by 40x, we’ve doubled the number of players in the game at the same time and reduced server down times. The situation is good, but not good enough. And since my boss is one of the negatively affected (!) - we’re still driving hard to get everyone online, playing together, and no hitches. Tens of thousands of new players are logging in every day. For that support – that commitment from our fans -- we are deeply grateful. More than anything, we know that information is important to our players. Our Twitter chat today made that especially clear, and I want to say thank you sharing your ideas, your issues and for being, well, nicer than I thought you would be, given everything you’ve been through. Thank you.

Looking good!

That is really impressive SquidInABox! Here are a few more. I especially like number 3.

I believe that the sewage treatment plant turns sewage into water, it just dumps the water into the water table instead of putting it back into water pipes. So you can put your water pumping station right there. Be careful to keep an eye on your sewage capacity though because even a treatment plant can start dumping sewage into the ground water if it can't handle the load. You can solve that worry by using filter pumps at your water pumping station, but they cost a lot more.

If they designed the game to be a online multiplayer game that gets it's information from the servers then even if they wanted to do that I imagine it wouldn't exactly be easy to do. I don't see how most of the simulation is done on EA's servers when people have been able to play the game for 20 minutes without being connected to the Internet. Plus this is 2013 we're talking about so any modern gaming rig should be able to handle all of the computations. I am pretty sure they could release and offline patch if they wanted to. My current home PC pretty much is a server in terms of capabilities, though it is single proc, it has 8 logical cores and 24 GB of RAM. My next one (parts arriving Monday) will have 12 logical cores and 32 GB of RAM. There's no way they're computing, for me and my 15 region friends, more data with one of their servers than I can do for the group if I have a client/server system running on my local machine. The reason this is true, even if you don't have an extremely powerful PC, is that the server is also doing that (and whatever the hell else it's doing) for the thousands of other players that are connected to it. They could have designed the game to operate like an online multiplayer shooter and built it as a client/server application that allows people to host regions, and invite others to play. They could have provided a matchmaking service instead of hosting the entire system. That design wouldn't have prevented people from playing alone without an internet connection, or playing over a LAN with friends, or the internet with strangers. They keep saying that they designed it to be an online game from the beginning, the problem with that statement is that it's very misleading. Had they taken any queues from other online games that have a strong single player component, they should have followed the model listed above. It accomplishes the goal of having an online game, and at the same time allows the freedom of modding, offline saves and single player. The always online design decision is different and I believe it is intended to be a form of control over the product. I don't believe it was simply a DRM decision. I believe that the always online requirement is a business model decision. It is a way to keep the core product locked down and protected so that they can charge us money for things the community could (and would) do for free. I don't blame them for trying to create themselves another revenue stream, I don't blame them for wanting to put out DLC and make money with updates, new regions, buildings, scenarios, or what have you, but I don't appreciate the method they've chosen to implement it. The fact that Lucy didn't address any of the reasons behind the decision, other than the canned response that it was planned to be an online game from the start, just annoys me more. Of course if she had, Maxis and EA would come off looking like the greedy children who run everything starting with a little i directly followed by a capital letter.

Thanks MamaLuigi. I was using the vibrant filter on the latest set if images.

Still in the same city as my previous post.

Dear Electronic Arts, My mother always told me that it's petty to say "I told you so" when proven right. That's why I really hope she isn't reading this, because I have a message for you: I told you so. But it's not just me; a big chunk of the gaming community feels the same way. I don't want this to seem petty, but I genuinely want you to learn from your mistakes, so you don't repeat what's shaping up to be one of the most embarassing game launches in years. So far, Amazon has 1,091 one-star user reviews for SimCity out of 1,213 reviews total (and I'm pretty sure several of the five-star reviews are being sarcastic). A Change.org petition has raised over 35,000 signatures in two days demanding that you offer a single-player, offline mode in SimCity and eschew always-on online for games. Polygon has revised its score of SimCity increasingly downward from 9.5 to 4. At PCMag, we even came up with seven SimCity alternatives for players who don't want to deal with server problems. I don't want to gloat. I want you to understand why this happened, and how you can prevent it from happening in the future. When concerns are raised over "online features," listen to them. When people warn you months in advance that there will be server issues, listen to them. When gamers worry that they won't be able to play SimCity years from now (when every SimCity game from the Super Nintendo version to Simcity 4 remains playable and enjoyable), listen to them. Turn away from your paranoia regarding piracy and realize that there are tons of customers who want to give you money in exchange for being able to play a game. Appreciate the value of customer loyalty and developing a community instead of squeezing every last drop out of people and discarding them.

Ongoing problems with the latest version of SimCity led Amazon to briefly stop selling the game. The web retailer stopped sales late on 7 March as players reported continued problems with the city building title. Amazon's sales suspension of the downloadable PC version of the game only lasted a few hours, but it has put a warning note on the product page about the "issues" with the game. These have contributed to the one-star score purchasers have given SimCity on Amazon. As of this writing there are 2,400+ one-star negative reviews for the title.

Burning garbage should be an early priority. I've never had any garbage space issues. After the placing the initial one, I always add an incinerator to handle burning the garbage. If the dump begins to fill up, I add another incinerator. Also, using the recycling center reduces the garbage, not sure by how much, and can make you a lot of money. As you reclaim alloy, metals and plastic you can sell it on the global market through a trade depot for pretty good profits.

This is exactly how I solved the water problems in my cities. They need to patch the water system soon but I suppose I'll let them fix the servers first...

Definitely sounds like a bug. It's good to know that you can run a plant specific to a single recyclable.

It might be that you're out of space for new recyclables. You might need to process the plastic and metal so that you can get new recyclables containing Alloy into your recycling center.

I've been pretty upset about this design decision from the beginning. I want to be able to play on my laptop while riding the train or in a crappy campground in the middle of nowhere. I don't really need to play with other players to make my gaming experience complete. I don't care about the "global" economy, and above all, I hate being treated like a criminal with ridiculous DRM (which is what this is really about, if anyone still thinks that this isn't a DRM decision you're deluding yourself) that won't let me save my game locally. I said all of those things and was prepared to stick to my principles and vote with my wallet... ...until I played the beta... ...it was really fun... ...and now I'm going to buy it... This smiley expresses my shame...

I am coming at this topic from another angle entirely. I think that one of the reasons certain features weren't added to the core game is so that they can sell us "stuff" packs and expansions like they do with The Sims 3. They could easily put together a network add-on expansion. Or come up with new city specializations to sell us, or new building sets. The list goes on and on, but one way to ensure they have more stuff to sell us is to make sure that not all the stuff we want is in the initial release. I'm not saying they will definitely do this, but I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Hey everyone, haven't seen you all in a long time... The beta is very fun and I really am enjoying it. I've played through the 1 hour time probably 6 times now and each time I learn something new or do something different. I'm always disappointed when my time is up and I get booted to the start screen. I share several criticisms with many of you, the city size is too small, the online requirement is asinine (what will keep me from buying it), some of the gameplay has been dumbed down a bit, etc. I really did enjoy the modular buildings, city specialties seem fun, the removal of some of the micro management is nice, I didn't really enjoy adjusting sliders for coverage sizes in SC4.

I won't be buying it simply because it requires Origin to play. I have Steam already and will not purchase another EA title until they start releasing them on Steam again. I refuse to use two different digital distribution services, maintaining two different purchasing accounts, adding another program to my system tray, simply to buy games from EA. Since they are forcing me to decide between using their distribution system and not buying their games, I choose to not buy their games. The only way we can make a point with a large company like EA is for us to enforce it with our wallets. It's really unfortunate, as I'd like to play this and several other EA games, but it gives me more expendable cash for games I can buy on Steam.

</lurking> Breaking my non-posting streak to say, "Congratulations winners!" <lurking>