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Yes, I'm talking about the jazz track shipped with Windows XP. Now, I've 'met' lots of people (myself included) who think this sounds very SimCity-ish. But can anyone here settle the debate: does this just sound like a SimCity track or has it actually been one? If so, which version, and what did EA/Maxis call it?

I thought as much - but I think the confusion has been caused because it is not just a "nice jazzy tune" - but perhaps it is in a similar style to some of the SC3K/SC4 tracks - and of course the name "Highway Blues" only adds to the confusion.

Talking of the various Sim games - SC4D is a hybrid... An updated SimCity, with bits of three other games thrown in for good measure: The Sims (the MySims feature, and ability to import Sims from The Sims) Streets of SimCity (U Drive It - road-based vehicles) SimCopter (U Drive It - helicopters) Perhaps one idea for a future city builder is to have two separate modes: the conventional mode, and then a 'stop the clock' mode which enables such things as roaming around at street level both as a pedestrian and a driver / pilot etc. Given EA's huge game franchise, if they had had the foresight they could have potentially integrated several different game franchises that could make use of city files (or even bolt-ons to the same program) - road racing game, train/boat/plane simulator (latter could make use of entire regions), wargame (e.g. C&C), and probably many others...

Interesting: UK Charts: Week ending 5th Jan 2008 PC CD Games (Full Price) - SCS is at number 10. UK Charts: Week ending 5th Jan 2008 PC CD Games (Budget Price) - SC4D is at number 26, but look at the jump...the previous week it was at number 40! Other figures, at yougamers.com, present a slightly different tale: Nov 24th: 6 Dec 1st: 10 Dec 7th: 10 Dec 15th: 11 Dec 22nd: 11 Dec 29th: 10 The US weekly figures show SCS entering the top 10 as a new entry on Dec 22nd. However, The Sims 2 and its Bon Voyage expansion pack in the Top 10 each week, I doubt EA will care too much about whether SCS sinks or swims... Although one 18MB patch released on Nov 14th (a day after shipping) and a 50MB patch released on Dec 21st does tend to suggest the game was released before it was ready... Besides which, EA have other things to think about - the development of Tiberium (a first person shooter set in the C&C universe) and the acquisition of BioWare and Pandemic Studios...

Righteo, I think it's time for me to join the crowd requesting texture IID ranges Looking at the recent allocations, and following the pattern, would I be right in thinking F3C8* is the next in line? And how do I configure SC4tool to use 'my' range when allocated? EDIT: Courtesy of SC4D, that info is apparently obtained by PM'ing geoffhaw (to prevent any Tom, Dick or Harry creating textures with IIDs that have already been allocated, thus causing other people's lots to look mangled).

The file will not work on a Mac - so Mac users, unfortunately you're limited to the standard set of cheats. See page 3 of this thread for more details: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=83080&STARTPAGE=3

Here's my 2p worth of ideas: feel free to comment on whether any of them would be worthwhile, or indeed the extent to which they are code-able. A simple method of implementing curves would be to follow the same approach as some painting packages: you select your transit network tool, and click along the path you intend the network to follow. As you click, a point-to-point network is built up - initially a 'preview' of straight lines, but once you double-click to end the path, the game automatically adds appropriate curves to the path. A similar approach could be taken with zoning - especially as in real life, not all zones extend right up to the road, but sometimes have a patch of 'amenity' land in between. You'd click your way around defining the edges of a zone 'parcel'. In easier game modes, when you have two 'back-to-back' lots on the zone (e.g. when zoning between two roads), the game would draw the backs at the half-way point between the two edges. In harder modes, you'd have to define the backs yourself (so you could have one road having deeper lots than the other). Zones would primarily refer to the predominant use of the ground floor - so your typical surburban row of shops with flats above would appear in a commercial zone and would provide the necessary jobs - but also recognise the residency of sims. Alternatively, zones could be defined more loosely, so "mainly residential", "mainly commercial", "mainly industrial" would allow a limited amount of permitted development of other occupant groups within a zone - so when placing a residential area, the houses nearest the school might convert their ground floor into a shop. Building exemplars could contain fields for all occupant types - so you could have a building providing 12x R$ and 24x CO$$ at the same time. Buildings could also contain props which are activated under certain conditions - so e.g. over time, houses acquire conservatories and the asphalt drives get replaced with block paving. Garden props should change seasonally - prop families could be used in a similar way to seasonal trees, so bulbs appear in spring, bedding in summer, shrubs bloom in autumn as the bedding is chucked, and the gardens look a bit miserable in winter (unless the sims have shrubs with nice bright foilage). Also, as the resident sims get older, they may replace their lawn with gravel (easier maintenance). Initially zoning all land as agricultural would be fairly realistic - but there should be an option at the God/Mayor mode boundary to define 'exempt' areas e.g. for nature reserves as well as land unsuitable for zoning (e.g. marsh, steep mountains etc.) Building types are much more sensitive to the local environment - i.e. regardless of the wealth of your citizens, you do not get a 300 storey tower block in the middle of a satellite village - even though it is on the same map as megopolis. For commercial buildings, perhaps a nearness indicator could be included in the exemplar - minimum distance between repeats of the same building (so companies don't set up two branches in the same area of town). And how about the option to zone seaports, airports and parks as well as plop them? At easier game levels, you could delegate most funding decisions to your advisors, therefore allowing novices to concentrate on city building without having to worry too much about finances. However, your advisors will choose funding levels that are in their best interests, so on the next level up you should be able to override your advisors. On the tougher levels you'd have to do all the micromanagement yourself, but the advisors could still nag you that they're unhappy with your decision. Of course, there'd have to be an 'auto-ignore' option - so that they would only interrupt you if the city was descending into bankruptcy or anarchy. Also on easier game levels, the option to auto-upgrade transit networks when they become over-capacity - advisors list the approximate cost (in terms of compulsory purchase orders and building) of widening the transit network, and you choose whether to let them proceed. Of course, the advisors won't tell you that if you were canny and examined your transit data view, you'd realise that plopping a few extra bus stops and subsidising a few services could alleviate the problem for less money, and wouldn't anger the environmental advisor (since in the UK at least, the "Green" lobby vehemently oppose any new infrastructure developments - especially roads [their logic being that new roads "create" more traffic rather than shifting existing traffic elsewhere]...) As most roads/streets in real life are named, but manually naming every street would be as tedious as plopping every building, how about the ability to select an estate, and select a naming scheme. A few would be provided automatically (e.g. birds, poets etc) , but as ever with Simcity, you could plug in your own themes (of course, we could let it do the US model of "First Avenue, Second Street" etc., but that's far too easy and plain boring!). If we were really clever, the game could take cues from the environment when suggesting naming schemes - particularly with small R$$$ developments. I like regions, but I also like the idea of tiles. Perhaps a hybrid could be made, where you can create a custom region, but in the unlikely event of you filling it to capacity, you can extend it as needed. Since the whole point of region play is the ability to shift between cities, we need to develop a way of saving/loading cities much faster than in SC4. Perhaps if you save and exit to region, the game initially does a 'dirty' save - saving all the variables in a large uncompressed file, then works on compressing / optimising it in the background. The uncompressed file would only be deleted once a 'safe' copy had been made, so that if the game crashed, you'd still have a working copy. Perhaps even the game could cache somewhere on disk all game variables that are not currently 'active' for what the user is currently doing, so that a quick save would only entail saving the currently active variables - the game could then work on merging and optimising the necessary data into a single file in the background.

One workaround is to develop an MML for your lots. An MML is a Menu Management Lot. This is a custom lot that is relatively easy to create, and has a unique property: until this lot is plopped, all your other lots remain hidden. When it is plopped, your custom lots become visible in the menus after a few game days. Removing the construction lot greys out your lots, and when you save and reload the city, your custom lots will have disappeared again. See here for more details: http://simpeg.com/forum/index.php?board=84.0

I'm running a Vista box and haven't noticed any problems with the Lot Editor. I initially had "issues" with other tools crashing, but nothing a shutdown and reboot couldn't cure (remember, Vista doesn't perform 'proper' shutdowns by default - it will try to "sleep" instead (i.e. standby/suspend)).

A few more ideas: Individually naming every street/road/highway is possible, but completely unfeasible for most players. How about the option to name an estate, and let the game name the roads, based on lists of 'themes' (e.g. birds, authors, musicians, or numbers). Or even name prominent geographical features, and let the game name estates based on them. One way of reducing menu clutter with several different types of roads would be to have all streets/roads that occupy the same tilewidth available under the same button. Placing the street/road would initially place the lowest capacity option, but through relaying the road (perhaps with a modifier key) the road would be upgraded to the next in sequence. If you were lazy, you could ask your advisors to do it for you (after asking permission to go ahead with the likely cost). Speaking of which, that's one way the game could be made simpler for novices: have the option of allowing your advisors to make some budgetary decisions for you (e.g. automatically adjusting the maintenance cost of public buildings based upon the number of users, automatically replacing old power stations). Although it's nice to dabble in microeconomics, financial management has always been the toughest aspect of SimCity. Submenus / context menus could also help, so if you wanted a large play area, you could drill down via public services --> parks --> playgrounds --> large (or parks --> large --> playground). That would help end the confusion of one menu item containing dozens of different structures. It would be nice to have the option of gradual change when rezoning an area - so, instead of demolishing the existing building immediately, it would wait until the building fell into disrepair or became abandoned - similar to what happens when you rezone low density residential with medium/high density. And finally, since it's likely SC5 will be targeted at Vista, it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask for 1GB RAM requirement (which would only negatively affect those running Home Basic - who are unlikely to want to play computer games anyway), which would allow for much smoother drawing of cities as you roam around (SC4 on 256MB RAM is pathetic - zoom out, and wait 30 seconds for your city to redraw).

A simple water flow model would be nice - also, the water table could be set as x metres below ground at time of incorporation - so, if you dig underwater tunnels, you'll need to install a pump lot to pump all the water out. Woe betide you if you allow the pumps power to fail! You could also learn the hard way why it's not a good idea to develop in a river's flood plain... Pathfinding: as well as the commuters / workers paths, it would be nice to have a visitors / tourists set of paths, generated on-the-fly when you query a CS building. Show paths for seafreight as well. Public transport: Allow road-top mass transit stops. Tweak the design rules so that you can build next door to one of these, but you can't place a driveway (for fairly obvious reasons). It would be nice to be able to upgrade mass transit stops if they go over capacity, rather than ignoring it, adding additional mass transit networks, or demolishing half your high-rises in order to squeeze in another monorail line. UDI / disasters etc.: How about having a special 'real-time' mode. In this mode, you wouldn't be able to develop your city or tweak your finances, but as the simulator wouldn't be worrying about these, it could devote time to generating more realistic automata paths - you could even select a car / truck, and observe its route, or hover outside a school and watch the chaos twice a day as parents drive up, park everywhere, and drop off their children. Zones of Effectiveness: at the moment, the 'effective zones' for schools, hospitals, emergency services etc. are a fixed radius from the building. Particularly for schools and hospitals, it would be more realistic to vary the radius according to the density of the surrounding buildings - evidently a school in a high density residential area will have a much smaller catchment area than one in the middle of a farm. Multi-level transit networks - including the ability to drag transit lines under bridges. It would be handy to be able to designate the remaining under-bridge space as parkland, or allow small low-density development underneath.

Thinking of startup farms / mines etc., how about an option to start with some form of through route. Cities are rarely planned in the middle of nowhere - there's usually some form of transport traversing the area to begin with. In the UK, many towns started off with a ford (track crossing a river) - merchants saw they made ideal places to trade goods, so eventually settled, built houses / shops etc., and the towns took off.

I'm not sure I like that suggestion that SC5 will abandon zones - instead you'll plop appropriate buildings instead. I like the zone idea - after all, it's pretty much what happens IRL. Here are a few of my ideas: Auto-fill streets - it would be nice to have an option to make them randomly weaving culs-de-sac, rather than the present grids. If it's too much effort for EA, if they could code the possibility of doing it, I'm sure there are plenty of Simtropolis residents who'd release DIY versions... Diagonal zones - it could potentially be difficult to implement, but since we can have diagonal mass transit, maybe it is possible. You wouldn't want them all the time, so maybe use a modifier key when zoning? And you'd need to think carefully about the lot backs - you'd need to have orthogonal and diagonal backs to allow a diagonal MT (mass transit network) and orthogonal MT to meet. Maybe the grid could be changed to triangular (90/45/45)... 'Catchment areas' - it would be cool if the zone of effect could change depending on the density of the surrounding zones - e.g. a school/hospital sitting in the middle of a low density area will serve a much greater radius than one sitting in a high density area. Two transit layers - one on-ground, one above-ground. This would enable 'proper' viaducts with MT / parks / flora underneath. It should be fairly evident that SC4 plugins / modds / lots etc. won't be compatable with SC5, but I'm sure the hundreds of custom content developers here on Simtropolis would be eternally grateful if EA could release (at the very least) detailed guides to using the SC5 versions of lot editor / BAT, or even some form of conversion tool, to make transferring / editing / updating any SC4 content that's still relevant to SC5 easier.

Ouch! Since in SC4 Deluxe Disc 2 is the disc that contains the exe encryption key, you evidently can't play the game at the moment. If the dog hasn't decided the manual is tasty yet and you've still got the remains of the CD, it might be worth calling EA and seeing if you can get a replacement. I've never phoned them, so I don't know what their customer service is like, but if you can produce the original CD (the receipt might also come in handy), you've got nothing to lose. If they won't help, you'll just have to part with another

Hmmm.... Submenus (yeah, I know it's already in the top 10, but just in case it slips out...) How about seasonal variations in network capacity? Then a modder could arrange for rail capacity to be halved during Autumn (in conjunction with one of the seasonal trees mods) - "Leaves on the Line", and capacities in snow-hit areas during Winter to be dramatically reduced (unless someone produces a road gritter mod)... And comments on a couple of other suggestions: Double-decker bridges do appear to be currently possible (at least where each deck has a different network) - someone's currently experimenting on it. UDI into neighbouring cities - why?! It might be nice in theory, but in practice, could you bear to wait 5 minutes whilst city 1 is saved and city 2 loaded before you can continue your journey? Roads under bridges - Buggi has already said this is virtually impossible to truly achieve, but search the STEX and you can find a couple of workarounds in progress that use cunningly disguised tunnels. Water flow model - I doubt it would be possible to add even a simple water flow model into SC4 without major code changes. It's probably best to think of this in terms of a SC5 wishlist item. However, as it is possible to change the water level, it *might* be possible to introduce a 'flood' disaster that affects low-lying ground.

I have NAM - I might experiment with one of the Perfect Pathfinding options and see if that improves their commutes without significantly affecting system performance. As for the bus stop issue, I'll ignore them (hey, I ignore the advisors often enough, shouldn't be too difficult to ignore the residents!)