GMT

I'm not familiar with solidworks, but you can try what the solidworks forum suggests, there seems to be viable ways to convert between SW and 3DSmax. Not easy, but it doesn't read too complicated either from my outsider's point of view

[quote name='Mithrik' timestamp='1348696676'] WOW! Incredible! [/quote] gotsta second that statement here... WOW! Incredible!

you should definitely try optifine, this really helps both to tune it up and down. also, may I ask what your system specs are? because even with increased rendering settings, especially distance, the worst fps I get is at about 10, give or take a few. And I can put my finger down on the CPU being the bottleneck here (non oc q8300 isn't exactly great) as I sport more than enough ram (8gb) and a very decent graphics card (2gb 560ti)

apart from me not agreeing with the opening statement that suburbs are sprawling and unattractive - well, sprawling maybe but in fact i'd prefer living in the suburbs many many times before even thinking of moving downtown - I guess my favorite suburb is in fact that clichee sprawling suburbia with a bazillion of same-looking single family homes in a scratchboard designed neighborhood... just like Malvina Reynolds pictures it in Little Boxes: sry, I just had to post the whole lyrics to deliver the complete feeling of the song anyways, since you're up for some names: the Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Albuquerque metro area is full of what I'm thinking of hearing that song. I'd prefer a nice house, most preferably in the hills with a nice view over the nightlighted metro area, so you can condense it to some hoods, but it's really hard for me to pin down exactly one... leaving money and employment situations completely aside, I'd pick a house offering the mentioned view in the Phoenix area, Scottdale and Mesa cover a rather large area with a lot of subdivisions matching these criteria.

no need to feel offended, we tend to comment on stuff we're shown here, compliment well done work and suggest improvements if necessary... good ol osborne... you know, back in the days when regularly spent my easter holidays in Playa de Aro, that one Osborne bull near el Bruc was some sort a special landmark to me on our way down south... too bad them idiots destroyed it over and over...

why not use these instead : http://www.bripizza..../appt/appt.html , the approach lights are only 2x7 and also includes a localizer and glideslope. never seen them before... little clumsy in their appearance, but still a very nice addition

yep, like nonny moose already said, add -cpucount:1 to the adressline of your shortcut and voila, your game won't run into any of the multicore issues anymore. what further helps with stability of the game on newer pcs is working with a costum profile for sim city 4 in your graphics card control panel. I don't know about ati cards, but here's a list of things that extremely help with stability on nvidia cards, and I guess you can apply similar things on current ati cards. note that not all options are available anymore with never nvidia drivers, but those still available do the trick aswell. for upgrading your pc, like areus said, it's a matter of budget. from a few 100 bucks to 5 digits everything is possible. but since you have a pc about as "bad" as my pc was when I replaced it 09 after 8 years of dutiful service, I suggest you to completely discard the update idea and really go down and by a whole new pc, because upgrading will not work anymore for changed standards (almost all connection types have changed since then), so you gotta replace everything anyways, which should not be done unless you have at least basic knowledge considering hardware. I know what I'm talking about, my first try at assembling a custom pc ended up with the techshop guy laughing his behind off for I pretty much tried to built the most incompatible system ever created by mankind... lucky me he was in for customer service and refused to accept the order, otherwise I would've spent loads of money for nothing.

not quite right. you do the common mistake here, but the other way around. the common mistake is that many ppl think a quad core @ 2.7ghz has the power of 2.7ghz x4 = 10.8ghz which is utterly wrong. you take it the other way around and say a quad core @ 2.7ghz has the power of 675mhz x4 = 2.7ghz which is also wrong. multicore cpu never run "in line" like the above calcs suggest, but "parallel", so each core has the stated ghz (2.7ghz in your case) and with the correct system and software architecture can either designate certain applications to certain processors or even certain tasks within a single application to certain processors. 3D movie tools, for example, are mostly designed to appreciate several cores to divide the calcultation tasks thus speeding up the process of rendering frames. same for several games that are optimized for dual/quad core systems. it is, after all, a difference if the whole calculation process is done by one core or divided into parts and done by several cores. if you want, think of cloud computing like folding@home and seti@home, they cut one workload into several parts and let them run on several pcs to dramatically speed up the evaluation work done; analog to what multicore optimized programs do. that said, sim city 4 which is a single core game - if at all - will only benefit from multicore processors in a way that background processing of other applications aswell as the operating system does not affect the sim city 4 cuz it's done on different cores.

exactly that house next, paaaaleeeeese difficult with the onslope thing but I guess you can figure out how to do it or circumnavigate the problem freestyling it into a non-onslope version...

I was sharing it quite a while with a buddy's acc, erryone had his own worlds and stuff, but I got my own copy to mess with multiplayer when 1.3 was released

So you must be a real academic than?! Seriously though, I wasn't after a silly argument (in a foreign language for me at least) and yes, I read between the lines so to try to be of help. . shame on me I guess? no! you wanted a silly argument, you'll get a silly argument then!!!!!1111oneoneeleven and yes, shame on you! don't tell what you know, just answer exactly and only what question asks!!!!!11111oneonepointoneleven cmon dear, just say I was right and everythings fine again :rofl:

you can try and use the SSALS. it's lot is 2x14 and the overall size is 2x23. but I think this would require a bit remodeling of the approach area. Or abandon the approach lights completely, Hiroshimanishi doesn't have it anyway.

sometimes people need to be reminded that it's a videoGAME, not videoREALITY... just saying... I mean, seriously, how realistic is it that you fly at an arbitrary height above an empty lot of land with pockets full of money and resources and start bulding a city out of nothing with traffic networks created in minutes rather than months/years and houses popping up out of nowhere and people moving to this city without any connecting ways to it? my problem with the tilt shift is that it annoys after a while because you can't see everything. It's a nice catch for a screenshot (like in Anno2070) but nothing to be permanently bothered with

The OP didn't ask for solutions but about improvements with the new hardware. Oh I love university. makes you all numb and hairsplitting over the exact meaning of questions... I like it that way tbh. the static shadows don't appeal to me. also you can run into weird shadow issues with custom content. the day I got rid of shadows, I had a nice lot made but the main installation didn't cast shadows at all, on a bright surface and with everything around it casting shadows... eeeww. yep. forgot to mention that.

actually the answer, to the question whether this improved hardware does improve performance when scrolling/zooming by itself, remains no. without tweaking here and there, you can't improve the ingame performance beyond what the coding is capable of, and this is considerably limited. I elaborated this matter at hand just a few days ago in a different thread on hardware vs performance, but I'm reluctant to go through it again in detail as these questions seem to pop up more frequent lately. in short, I play since the day it was released and went through many hardware but the most noticeable improvement that came only by improved hardware was the loading times. consider this: the game won't use anything more than one single core, not a byte more ram than a 32bit architecture can handle and also a GTX690 in 3-way SLI won't change a thing compared to 2003's middle class GPUs. period. of course, compared to release date hardware, today's hardware does also slightly improve on the game's performance itself, but don't expect no wonders due to afore mentioned reason. anyways. here's some tweaking stuff I strongly suggest to do: since you use a gtx460, go to the nvidia control panel and create a custom profile for sim city 4 with all the settings you can apply listed in this post: I use a GTX560ti and yes, I know you can't apply all the settings anymore, but also those that are possible help a lot. in fact, they not just help on performance, but even waaaaay more important, these settings dramatically improve stability on today's graphic cards. ever since I applied this profile, my CTDs reduced by way over 90%... imho, such a dramatic improvement renders the suggested profile settings an absolute must-do. further, familiarize yourself with the command line parameters you can add to your sim city 4 shortcut, this also helps a bit with the game's performance. there's a bunch of threads handling and experimenting these settings. I, for one, use: [code] "exe location" -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -intro:off -eh:off -d:directx -cpucount=1 [/code] exe location is of course where you installed the game, the next gives me a windowed game in custom resolution set to my screen's native resolution (one of the best things about SC4 is that it supports a hell of a lot of custom resolutions very handy for todays screens), I disabled the intro, force directx rendering and a single cpu processing of the game. I don't know exactly what eh:off does (i know it as exeption handling, not sure if that's what it does), but someone suggested this in the steam forums to SC4 and it seems like the game runs better with it for me. next thing you can do is working within the graphics rules.sgr file (where SC4 is installed). what really helps with scrolling is adding the line [code] property usevertexbuffers false [/code] to the standard hardware rules section. (if you want, also add a comment behind so you know what you did there and why, really helps if you happen to go back to the file after years and wonder whats going on) you can also try changing other settings in here, but don't go nuts and also keep a backup if you experiment around and of course like vortext said, at best disable the shadows when playing (and if you'd ask me, there's no need to turn them on when taking photos either; there's no such thing as direct lighting ingame anyway, it's all done with color tone and prerendered images). this also does improve scrolling. some threads also suggest to do nothing but to set rendering to software mode. I myself didn't achieve as much by doing this as I did with afore mentioned tweaks, but still worth noting that this settings change does something good to your gaming experience.

long story short: no.

you know what just crossed my mind considering map size? empire state building is a little over 1400ft tall, bottom to top. library tower is about 400ft smaller. so ESB is about 40% taller than LT. Now, knowing this and the fact that R* tries to keep the buildings scale accurate, take a look at the panoramic shots of Los Santos (trailer or screenshots) and imagine the empire state building next to or instead of the library tower... dunno bout you, but this sort of heavily underlines my previous statement that the Los Santos we're shown so far is rather small...

Au contraire! The modding community is SO strong, they still find new possibilities today. Needless to say that almost everything found yet still works and is still practiced regularily. I suggest you take a deep breath and plunge into the 9 years of modding and experimenting practiced...

do you have but the slightest idea how much building an airport from scratch costs in real life? several billions. the piece of disgrace they're working on in Berlin at the moment is already well established in the billion euro regime, yet rising. and this ridiculousness of a misplanned piece of self-monumentation of Berlin's major was already built on top of an existing airport. But I must say, for an eye-candy-only use of the lots, especially since it takes oh so many of them, you can at least ask the reason for it. The only advise I can give - apart from cheating the money - is practicing and tweaking the layout of your airport on a completely unrelated city tile, with cheated money, thus streamlining the creational process and lowering costs once you go "life" and build the airport in the city you actually want it to have. That said, I never mind about the money, I cheat my way to it anyways, I'm beyond actually playing sim city 4 since day two and accepted playing it more like a virtual model rail road, creating "worlds" to my likes rather than facing the economic and social challenges of running a city.

off topic: Not necessarily. In the given context, total forgiveness equals not fighting back thus accepting to be exterminated. non-violent solutions always require an opponent willing to accept them and this is not given in the context at hand. the opponent wants the extinction of mankind, no if or buts. Dunno bout you, but if it's fighting to live on or die trying, I'd give a damn bout non-violent solutions. EDIT: to round this off, german phylosopher Ludwig Marcuse once said: Ein Friedlicher ist einer, der sich totschießen lässt, um zu beweisen, dass der andere der Aggressor gewesen ist. I can't find a proper translation, but it goes like: the peaceful one accepts being killed to prove that the other one was the attacker.

negative. You can improve gameplay with a better pc, but don't expect wonders, the game's coding is the main problem. a lil out of the pocket story: I started playing it on P4 with 2.4ghz, gforce 5x00 and 1gb ram. upgrading to 2gb ram barely impacted on anything ingame, but loading times slightly reduced. then I played on laptop with a core 2 duo t5750 2,0ghz, 1gb ram and an intel 965 express. this gave some improvement to the games performance. no giant leaps but overall a little smoother. now I'm playing on a core 2 quad q8300 2,5ghz. originally with a gtx260 and 4gb ram, now with a gtx560ti and 8gb ram. switching to this machine from the laptop, due to the overall better specs, had a huge impact on loading times and also improved performance, although not as much as one might guess. changing the graphic cards aswell as doubleing the ram didn't do anything to the game's playing performance and also loading times didn't improve further. so, on the bottom line, sim city 4 is one of those games that barely profits from boosting system specs. as with almost every simulation game, the graphics aren't that much of a problem as graphics are simple. actually simple enough to completely rely on software rendering instead of hardware. ram does have a huge impact on loading times, but due to the 32bit architecture of the game - as 64bit was a matter of dreams back in the days - this effect is also limited. cpu - of all the relevant hardware - does have the largest impact on the gameplay as it, being a simulation, extremely relies on calculation steps, but the game will always utilize one core. Of course you can get a measurable and feelable improvement BUT don't be fooled, even on state of the art highend systems you won't get a perfectly running sim city 4. at a certain point in city development, the game's performance breaks in, no matter if it's a P4, core 2 quad or i7 (or amd equivalents), and these points aren't too far away from each other

you should also check out this channel here, kinda awesome minecraft animations... and funny every now and then http://www.youtube.com/user/animationcraftpg5

I just stumbled over Terraria recently and got hooked. It's basically the same concept as Minecraft, building with blocks, but 2D only (think of platform like Super Mario) AND much more on the gameplay side of life, mixing the building/crafting scheme of Minecraft with some RPG elements. character creation, day/night circle with respective monsters, big bosses, a great set of different tools/armors/weapons, some magic, dungeons, events and so on and so forth... And effin huge maps. 3 differnt sizes of randomly generated maps, the biggest at 8400x2400px, while 1px equals one block ingame. And it's of course single and multiplayer while you can also host multiplayer games on your singleplayer map. it's current version is 1.0.4 and it's available for low budget on steam (it's 9,99 €/$) and if you'd ask me, you get a decent game for that prize, definitely for those who tried minecraft and missed something

now as development of Terraria has been canceled quite a while ago to start working on Starbound, there's still news about Terraria: 505 games will release Terraria on PSN and XBL in early 2013

you can easily see this in the s3d files in reader. what in bat creation happens is, there's a picture taken from the respective perspective and this picture is projected on - in most cases - a simple box or a fairly simple shape somewhat along that of the original model, so the overall result is that the building appears to be a real 3d building, while in fact it is only a simple, textured box which, correctly aligned with the viewpoint, looks like a house. together with some alpha-mapping, the game can simulate buldings with high complex structures and still keep the poly-count very low. unfortunately this only works with fixed viewpoints. here's btw a picture I already showed a while back in a different thread to show what all the viewpoint chitchat actually means: the right side is the final ingame model correct viewpoint, the left side a random rotation of the same model. note that this building is a "complex" structure in the ingame model roughly following the shape of the house. and also note that the non-visible sides aren't textured. If I'd turn this particular model around, you'd look at the very same texture from the back. so you can say that every viewpoint has it's own model in the actual file, same for every zoom level. here comes the next big problem with a 3d print of a sim city 4 city. while it is possible but hard to get the original models of custom content, you can't get the original, complex models of the non-custom content. they're gone. forever. on a sidenote: that's why I don't particularily like the 2.5D definition of sim city. In fact the whole game is fully 3d, the terrain is, the buildings and props are, same for cars et al. but due to the fixed viewpoints maxis took a really really smart move and reduced the complexity of the buildings and props so the game does at least keep cool on the gpu.