joerg

I have 3 issues with the city size, the first is that the physical appearance of the cities and region view will not at all resemble a city. Obviously many people have discussed this, and it seems a common concern. However, it will prevent me from buying the game, and cost Maxis some money, maybe not much but who knows how many people are thinking the same way I am. Next the simulation will be dramatically impacted. For example the glass box engines transportation system sounds awesome, but it will end up being completely worthless on a 2km x 2km tile. In SC4 I often longed for the ability for my sims to make 45 minute commutes across multiple large tiles allowing true suburbs. This will be completely ruined in SC2013 because of the region layout, lack of highways, and tiny city size. SImultation will be affected in many other ways and in my opinion that makes the game fairly pointless even if I didnt mind the appearance of the small tiles. Finally my biggest concern is that they are rushing it to release without doing everything possible to increase the tile size. Honesty, I think the game would be better off it it got delayed another 6 months for them to overall the region and city size issues. If the game launches and even a generous 200k people buy it and Maxis makes their money there is still a huge risk of users falling out of love with the game very quickly due to the limited amount of gameplay time users are going to have working on small tiles with broken regions and not having more than 16 save slots. I could see myself getting a couple weeks of solid fun out of the game, but that is nothing compared to the multiple years SC4 gave me. SC4 had enough gameplay right out of the box that by the time rush hour and modding community really got into the swing of things there were tons of addicted users. SC2013 has the potential to sell a lot of copies, but not engage those users for long enough for any real support to emerge. Delay the game for 6 months, and things could be totally different.

I think I may have been miss understood a bit here. My point has little to do with the realism of the graphics (afterall graphics are the easiest things in a game to mod), and more to do with realistic limitations to the game. Things like scale can never be truly corrected for once EA decides to ignore it, or the incredibly small map size and limited region abilities. These things would take years for modders to even begn to correct, but were fundamental decisions that clearly Maxis had to make in the early days of SC 2013's development that are now going to be incredibly tough to change. The point is we needed a solid foundation where even if it didn't look realistic the simulation could still be realistic and the ideas of what actually happens in a city could remain intact. These issues are over arching and cascade through the game changing everything. Lets take the map size and scale issue and look at them a bit more in depth. The game will have a 2x2km map, as stated before this is significantly smaller than even the smallest of real world "cities". If I lived in the middle of a 2x2km city I would never need a car, my longest round trip would be less than 2 miles even to the corners, consequently from a realism standpoint I no longer need large roads or parking structures. Obviously the get around this issue of cars becoming insignificant developers had to change scale to make the issues of a smaller map size less significant, there by opening a whole new can of worms. One of the greatest joys for many players is laying out and maintaining the transportation networks of their cities. How important could a transportation network possibly be when a Sim could walk any where in their city in 10 minutes???? Oh wait Maxis opened up another can full of worms to fix that issue, lets make certain income brackets less likely to walk to work. This idea while good in theory has been put in place as a solution to a problem caused 10 layers back and not as an added bit of realism. And the issue of map size and scale cascades even further. Maxis knows its players want huge populations despite what a 4km^2 area should hold in real life, so they make buildings and houses hold more people than they should, allowing populations to soar while still keeping the map size small. Then they have the issue of radius for fire, education, healthcare and safety. A single police department should easily be able to handle a 4km^2 area in reality, but that would make the game to easy so instead you need 10. All of these issues stem back to a fundamentally poor decision to give us extremely tiny maps, a decision that will impact every piece of the simulation and force maxis to try and correct for these issues by creating all new issues. My point goes back to the idea that to create a realistic simulation we needed realistic scale and map sizes. I suggest realistic monetary values not because I want to be an accountant and wade through mountains of million dollar values, but simply because Maxis seems to be doing a poor job of scaling real values to a more manageable number, using something closer to the real values would have insured they couldn't have messed it up. I don't expect breathtakingly realistic graphics, and am quite content with the graphics i have seen so far despite being way over saturated (thankyou optional filters). What I did expect was at least a suitable ground work for a realistic simulation. One that would allow me to at least realistically need a highway system and train system to get my sims from place to place. The idea of tracking every sim individually is awesome, but when they can never move more than a couple kms it seems a bit pointless. I just don't see the fun in being forced to build cities so inherently unrealistic. BTW way off topic, but I have been out of the game for years now and would love to play some SC4 again, but cant imagine doing so without some mods. Are there any mod packs or mod loaders out there that make installing 500+ bats, mods, and dependencies any easier or is it still like a 2 day long process of tracking down files and installing everything one by one like it used to be? Wish I could just download someones dat file and be done. Sorry for the off topic question that probably has an answer somewhere in the forums

I grew up with SimCity, and have been playing the games since the early 90s. Every single one of them got better and better until Simcity Societies when either I got to old for a Sim City game, or EA and Maxis decided they needed a new target audience. I played SimCity in order to create my dream cities, the problem is my dream has always been one a bit more grounded in reality. If I play Minecraft for example I build structures that might be able to realistically stand on their own rather than floating lava towers made of diamond. Every bit of who I am as a gamer today was shaped by those initial years of playing SC2K, 3K and 4. I remember calling in sick from school the day SC4 came out and from that point forward I devoted hours of my life to playing it, modding it, making BATs, and playing it some more. All of that love for the series came from the concept of achieving a realistic dream, a dream which could actually exist in the real world, one in which I could base my ideas on reality. Why is it that Maxis is so very afraid of realism? Everything from the costs of buildings and taxes, to the scale and populations are so far gone from reality. I know there is an entire thread dedicated to map size limitations, but seriously maxis don't you freaking understand anything about the idea of a city? My home town of 48,383 people would barely fit onto a 10x10km map..... ok so lets say scale isn't perfect and players tend to add less buffer area between zones and stuff than in reality so maybe we could squeeze that same city into a 5x5km map if we really tried.... NO, Maxis expects me to put 200k people on a freaking 2x2km area! just no. I understand that maybe processing power became a limiting factor because you are forced to calculate the dietary habits of a million sims in a freaking city building game.... I can understand that, but make it a population limit then not a city size limit. Heck I would be fine with a 10x10km area with a max pop of 500k people. Theoretically it shouldn't take anymore processing power to calculate the eating habits of 500k sims on a 100km2 map than a 4km2 map. If its an issue of graphical power then I am going to just laugh and say Maxis needed to rethink its graphics engine of choice then. There are tons of games out there rendering much larger areas with significantly more detail than what SC2013 seems to posses. Heck I wanted bigger cities in SC4, but I was never going to win that argument, at least not with the sloppy coding that made the game such a resource hog (ran nearly the same on my old old althon 1.4ghz with 1Gb of ram as it does on my six core I7 with 16Gbs of ram). Alteast there are regions though right? so that you can choose your own connections between cities and zoom out to region view and see your awesome creation from a single fixed perpective? Nope, seriously why in the world did you guys make connections preset and then add a 10 mile wide buffer between your city and its neighbor city? The question of scale bothers me even further. In SC4 they were moving in the right direction with the addition of suspension bridges that actually looked like they didn't belong in a cartoon caricature of a city. They still had some work to do though, airports for example were so small that even a real life aircraft carrier would have dwarfed them. Now in SC2013 they decided that the bridges needed to go back to looking like cartoon caricatures of the real things, and that airports needed to consume an entire city tile.... Seriously guys? Why can't you get them both right at the same time? its not like this is a guessing game, we have these things called measurements. On the subject of population, I have seen many screenshots showing cities with populations of around 200k, but some even showing 700k. Lets say that most well developed cities in the game would achieve a population of around 240k. That puts the density at 60,000 sims per kilometer. The densest city in the world is Manila, at 40k people per Km... New York city, still a fairly dense city even by european standards has a density of around 14,000 people per square km making it about 1/4 as dense as an average well developed SC 2013 city. Seems like easy math to me. Was the design decision basically that people like big numbers so we should lie a bit and say that 25 sims live in a house? Speaking of numbers, why can't things cost a realistic amount? Sure Ill take 30 schools at $5,000 each Bob! I just don't get it... a school costs a couple million to build. Cities rake in millions in revenue quarterly. We also calculate that revenue quarterly and even yearly in many cases, so why does maxis insist on hourly revenue? Are our attention spans that short that the thought of waiting for more than an hour of game time to balance our budget just makes us loose it? I know this is negative, and I am of a minority that wants extreme realism. However, I would love to see some middle ground here, maybe cities slightly larger with a population cap and the ability to only simulate traffic patterns, job needs, and income levels with 1 in 10 sims simulating everything and then extrapolating that data to the other 9 sims similar to them? That would dramatically simplify the processor load and give us bigger maps. If it is graphics limited then for crying out loud just give us simple lods again at longer view distances, and use that awesome tiltshift shader tech for something useful and just don't render those out of focus elements. Making data values like population and costs realistic is as simple as changing a couple numbers around, and you could even have a realism mode in the game! As for scale, there is just no excuse, if maps were the size they needed to be then you wouldn't be forced to make a suspension bridge 1/10th its normal size and still leave buildings their proper size. If you read this far then sorry for this massive rant, I just miss the game I grew up with, and the idea of being able to do things even somewhat realistically. That is what a SIMulation game is supposed to do right, realistically simulate things?

Lets just say from a software standpoint SC4 is sluggish title, not designed to take advantage of much scaling beyone what was available at its release. No multi core support, no advanded gpu support, limited support for more than 2gigs of memory, and a rather slow loading sequence. The game would probably run at its absolute fastest on an xp pro system, 3.46ghz P4 Extreme system (the fastest single core cpu based on netburst if i remember correctly), 2 gigs of memory, 4600 series graphics card, and a massive page file stored on if possible a raptor drive. My guess is this combination would yield very impressive sc4 performance. Which is sad becuase i acctuall hadnt played sc4 in 3 years and in that time my computer went from a single core althon 64 3000+ oc'd to 2.6ghz and a gig of memory and a ti4200, I went to a dual core athlon x2 4200+ @ 2.53ghz, 4gigs of memory, and a 6600gt, needless to say the game honestly feels slower to me. Ideally SC4 would have a mem cap of 16gigs, support for up to 4 threads of processing, and support for offloading physics and highly parrallel tasks to the gpu. Unfortunetly it has none of those nice little performace boosters and we are stuck with it as is.

Alright not a whole ton of time these days guys, so here is the best update I can provide for now. Explanations, and comments to follow this evening. Thanks to all that have stuck with this journal. Here is a region map, we had to dig this out of the old county archives, our best guess on the date was something around the year 1931, seems to be a hand made map drawn up for the an organization that predates the USGS. CLICK THE THUMBNAIL FOR FULL SIZE! Sorry again about the lack of time put into these pictures, work has begun on downtown tangaire as you can see, but the game seems to have its own plans (aka crashing to desktop repeatedly, and yes i have dat packer). The harbor needs work, but I have ran into a huge roadblock, seems i have forgotten my stupid Simcity.com account info, and i no longer can reregister with maxis because my serial number is in use by my self. So i find myself lacking night lights on bats and a multitude of props, and my goodness dependency files are nerve racking. Fox i will check that out and who knows perhaps i might have to bat up an embassy

Yeah the max.ini file is in a hidden folder in the user profile, its burried pretty deep. I did change it though, but changing it still left me with errors. Basically I am getting a scripting error with max starts up. Then in my tools list there is no place to make lods, however everything else is there and some things are even there twice.

I can get bat for max to work just fine with version 8 of max but version 9 wont let me even create lods, much less render. I wish i could just use version 8, but my autocad files can only be transfered to version 9. I think ive changed all the paths i need to but still no luck. I just need for someone who uses 9 to point me in the right direction. Thanks for the advice jason, i just wish it were that simple. I dont want to sound like a complete idiot that cant set up the bat, as said it i can render and everything through 8 but that isnt helping me much, and ive tried just exporting to 3ds and then importing it into 8 but its been a pain thus far.

Actually this building was designed prior to me even being aware of the final design for the Burj Dubai. They do seem similar though.

Thanks guys, and thats exactly what i had in mind for the roof, this is an older building designed without sc4 in mind it was never meant to be rendered from a top down perspective, hence the utter lack of anything on the roof. Unfortunately at the moment i have given up on getting bat for max to work and ive tried contacting a few people about it but no luck at all thus far so i guess modeling new stuff is about all i can do.

Regional pop sits at about 48,000 divided into 9 populated large tiles. I hope to lower that though with the residential halfing mod i just picked up (a HUGE thanks to Livin in Sim whom by the way is looking for the mod that extends the length of freight trains so if anyone runs accross it a PM or post here would be great). The good news guys is that zoning, planning, and layout are nearly done on the central city (about one full large tile right now, one day to be more than 10 tiles). The bad news is I work a 12 hour shift tomorrow (6 hours from now YUCK!) and another 9 hours sunday and monday so im going to be pretty beat, that and I just found a new psu for my modded xbox so there are about 10 games in need of serious love. Lol oh and my job is having me do some graphic work for them! Oh and well girls eat up time too, so again the city might start to move at a snails pace, but i promise pictures tomorrow after work atleast of the lake, and McCook pass.

Thanks Livin in Sim, first off the lake is plopped, i made my own ploppable water some time ago even prior to jeronijs mod. The Main roads you are seeing need to be labeled so far the railroad leaving town is pretty much finished and the coastal highway is about 1/2 done. As for the scale, well lets just say SC4 scale is off in so many regards its almost impossible to tell, but yeah the technical size of the map is 12 x 10 large squares long which means about 48km x 40km or 62km across the diagonal or roughly 40miles. I personally prefer to think of each large city as 3x3 miles because SC4's scale is so crazy, so that makes the region 47 miles across diagonally. As for towns getting covered up that will definitely occur, the metropolitan area is going to grow very naturally with towns I am showing you now eventually being immersed in the overall metropolis while farm land expands even further outward. A little update and teaser is that I am currently developing and laying out the starting point of the city of Tangaire which will eventually become the metropolitan area being talked about. I working on the port now, but I think I need new custom content, Im using Pegs CDK pack and it seems a bit bare. Also population is climbing way way to much, like i am at 48,000 regionally amongst 8 large cities, and I know thats not a whole ton, but I kind of wanted to make this more realistic. As far as growth is concerned think of think of the regions current state as like 1900 although I know there shouldnt be cars and roads and such but just keep that date in mind as in the sequence of events and current stage of development. Oh and where can I find the pedrinas farm mod and the residential pop mod that lowers your population? Ive looked for both with no luck. Thanks again guys and more to come soon, I am currently at work on 4 large tiles that have yet to be shown, and I finished lake Clementine which I know means nothing to you but it looks pretty realistic.

Great work jacky, I love the castle its simply beautiful.