SimSome

Request: CS$/CS$$ Suburban Vertical Malls To illustrate my request, I will use a "case study" of the little island nation of Singapore. Above is an image of 112 Katong which is a small suburban mall in the east of Singapore. I will provide more similar examples from the east of Singapore. Such malls are called Vertical Malls in contrast to the sprawling strip malls and big box store format of malls. These are most commonly found in higher density areas where land is more expensive and thus there is a necessity to build upwards. I'm sure many examples spring to mind when considering Vertical Malls in city centres or other very dense areas. However, these tend to cater to higher wealth Commercial Services and will often have CO office towers as well. An example of this is Parkway Parade which is around the corner from 112 Katong (above). Such malls are not what I am requesting. Description: My request is for smaller, suburban malls catering to low and medium wealth Commercial Services. Below, I share the examples of Siglap Centre and Bedok Point. These are both smalls that serve their respective neighborhoods and are essentially a small strip mall compacted into a much smaller area. These illustrate the relative small size yet high density of services/jobs met by them as well as their regional and suburban nature. LINK Why would it be beneficial to the game or community? SimCity 4 as a game is a very american game. As such almost all CS$ lots are very low density in terms of jobs/tile. THey also mostly only grow in low density zones. When players attempt to build medium density settlements, it becomes ridiculous to zone low density lots just to create 3 CS$ jobs per tile. It is not economically viable, not good planning and not good cosmetically to create low commercial zones so as to meet CS$ demand in such cases. A personal gripe of mine is that CS$ lots (more than others) seem to grow into lots that are mostly parking lots. In medium density settlements and in public-transport heavy settlements, this is even more frustrating. But to the community in general, such malls will provide a way to provide commercial services to the sims (and thus CS$ and CS$$ jobs) even when creating higher density settlements. For my personal game, these will allow me to build the medium density suburbs as in Singapore (or UK) as opposed to the typical sprawling american suburbs. A BATer may begin by creating 2 types of malls - one with more CS$ than CS$$ and the second with more CS$$ than CS$. Stretch goals could be to add CO$$ towers to these malls and to create a mall with more CS$$$ than CS$$. Further stretch goals could be to add multi modal transportation options to the malls. A BATer fascinated by the larger vertical mods may even like to create the larger CS malls. I would suggest looking to CO malls for inspiration.

Amazing! Can't wait to use this!

Multi Purpose Stadium I don't think that something like this exists IRL. But I have created an inforgraphic. Description Most of the information is in the info-graphic. I provide a very large vision for this project for Multi-purpose stadiums for various capacities and wealth groups. So feel free to downsize it to fit your time constraints. The main idea is that using movable 4-tile wide stadiums, stands could be moved to facilitate various sports. Why is this beneficial to the game/community? I think that this useful for a wide variety of communities which would like to have stadiums for their favorite sports. Such a stadium could be used satisfy multiple communities. The urban area where land is precious or a lower density community(rich or poor) which cannot justify the construction costs for multiple stadiums could use the same mid-size stadium. If multiple capacities/wealth stadiums are available they too will be able to be used in multiple communities.

Maxis:[Dan] The size of our new cities are roughly equivalent to the SC4 medium sized city (2 kilometers square). That said, you can connect cities together inside a region and build out a network of connected cities - each city providing different resources and abilities to its neighbors and the region. For example, one city could be a residential suburb which provides workers every day to a nearby industrial city. The industrial city could be providing power to the suburb. You can play both of these cities yourself, or even run the entire region by yourself, or invite a friend to help out. I think every post should start with this comment.Or at least keep this in mind. I would like to believe that the developers are watching these forums and I'd like to think that some of the ideas/comments on these forums might be added to the game or at least guide the direction they take. That said the final product will be compromise between making the best simulation game and the best selling game. This means that whatever sizes are finally in the shipped version will be aimed at somebody between the millions of people who populate this world and the few thousand of us who populate these forums .They'll work backwards from this person. What will their rig be, what kind of things does this person want to do, what would be scary large to this person, what would be irritatingly small to this person. [ In fact this person in the middle will probably be not be in the center but in the CG if you imagine the spectrum as a non-uniform rod where people are mass and and x-axis of serious gamer-ness] The final game will make this person the happiest person in the world. It'll make people on the edges of the spectrum have some issues with it but play it anyways cos the pros outweigh the cons. Thats gonna be us right there. Or at least me. And im ok with it because that is the reality of a for-profit project. What im thinking is that they might be ditching multiple tile sizes so they dont have to created a complicated region creator. You simply input a length and breath and viola! A region.This means that they'll work backwards from this Happiest person and figure out what their perfect size is. If they do have mulitple tile sizes I KNOW that they'll make a good in-game region creator. Right? And that the sizes will represent multiple reference people on the serious gamer-ness axis with the Happiest person represented somewhere in there. So this is what us people on the fringes should be hoping for. If I was to have a dream situation I'd I imagine a massive swath of area being visible in an equivalent of region view. And you'd have a selector tool which lets you highlight any (say) 2km x 2km square and lets you play that. Maybe the grid for this selector tool could be 0.5km x 0.5km. The reason this is my ideal situation is that it overcomes my biggest problem. I just dont know what to do with the edges.What i described above will get rid of edges because there will be no edges. The ede of one playable area is inside the next playble area. Except edges to your region of course.[which was a maximum of 32 x 32 large city tiles(4km x 4km) I believe ] Also it will also automatically incorporate the suggestions im gonna mention below into the concept. A lot of suggestions have been made to tackle that edges for the upcoming game including instead of seeing the abyss being able to view but not interact with the next playable area (lets call em playable areas instead of cities).Also most of you seem to be optimistic that the interaction between playable areas will be more than agents(cars,pedestrians,freiht,water,power, garbage,positions open agents) moving between cities but also maps(polution,trees,oil water). What I understand the expectation is that say there is an oil or water table that expands across multiple playable areas then both aread can draw upon those resources because they will be draining the entire table and not just the section of the table in that area. Same way pollution adding and removing features will add and remove pollution to the whole region-wide table of pollution. What would be interesting is if plop's effects cross boundaries. Like a hospital on the edge. This is a wonderful development. Equally enticing at first is the idea of region wide taxes or mayoral management. But I dont think I'd like that especially if I want to create special tax breaks for certain areas in the spirit of business parks or industrial parks. And im also pretty sure that the casual gamer would hate that feature. What would be nice is a common pool of money but tax levels and other policy should not be region wide. It would kill any hopes of having multiple centers of population which are not the same in their populace. ( 2 types of cities or a city and and rural area in one region) Whatever your feelings I think my Ideal situation of not having fixed playable areas but a range to select from would overcome most problems and incorporate many improvements. But heres why it'll never happen. Not even in 2030 or 2050. Because any such game would only run under any of 2 conditions. A super duper rig at present day(when ever the present day is) graphics or a normal rig with ancient graphics(with respect to the present day). Neither of those will be a particularly large market. That of course stems from my belief that the processing capabilities of whatever device is in use will never be way ahead of the latest graphics. Im prety sure its always gonna be the opposite. Developers will use high end rigs hoping that by the release date the average processor would have caught up to the game's specs. Sorry if its does not flow well.Wrote it in bits and pieces. TL;DR which isn't really a summary but just some questions for the lazy reader. 1) Does the number of tiles in a playable region matter? (besides defining the scale within the area?) 2)Do you think that SimCity 2013 is gonna be the first in what becomes a series of games released yearly? And does that mean that the series will focus down to the serious gamers every year? Or will the yearly releases be expansions/DLCs aimed at various demographics on the x-axis of gamer seriousness. I just think there would be no point to releasing a new game aimed at the same massive spectrum of gamers unless there are massive changes. The 2nd question is purely speculative of course. Be Scared of my Wall Of Text, SimSome

Ive been looking for a functional station GLR/Tram and Rail. Ive combed the STEX and LEX and all Ive found is Cogeo's Set and I was wondering if there were any other options. Im not exactly in love with it for something in my city plus I was actually looking for an interchange for 2 GLR lines and a rail line. If anybody knows any other interchanges or knows where I should look next it would be greatly appreciate. Cogeo's set on STEX ---https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/files/file/16625-glr-stations-and-hubs/