Shooshie

While you're at it, ask them to fix the nightlighting so that 3rd party BATs will work with Macs. I'm sure it's hopeless, but I'd do it anyway if you ever actually get through to anyone.

I use it, too. I figured a billion at a time would be safe, and it affords me the luxury of trying any configuration of lots and streets, roads, parks, etc. that I want to try, bulldozing at will, and never having to ask if there's enough money to do so. Bear in mind that I'm an old hand at Sim City, and had mastered the ability to build cities from scratch with no cheats long, long ago. In fact, that was what originally attracted me to the game. I used to love the strategy of it. But after the umpteenth city, you know exactly what to do, and there isn't any challenge in that anymore. It just becomes a matter of waiting for your cities to grow enough money to get creative with the layout. SC4/RH offers a whole new game-play concept: realism. Making cities that are more interesting to the eyes is a new challenge for me, and one I first played with in SC 3000, which visually was an amazing improvement over SC2000. But even with the greater detail of SC3000, it wasn't really "real" looking. It took SC4 to start approaching anything like realism. Now, with all the great BATs, mods, and lots you can download, your cities can take on very customized looks. But doing it on a treasury budget becomes an academic pain in the anatomy. "Cheats" make it possible. Personally, I feel that this should be a gameplay option and don't consider it cheating at all. This is just a new evolution in the many ways to enjoy one of the oldest and greatest games for the Mac. ...er... computers. Use it with impunity, but if you're new to the game, be sure to learn the traditional way, too. SC is pretty amazing for its complexity, and learning to navigate the tools given you to produce a functioning, happy city that's rolling in simoleons is not something to avoid. It's very (i hate to use the word) educational! Shooshie

Or, on a Mac: Option6 =

Power outages kind of shake things up and make you think about the fabric of our cities. Nothing works without power, except old-fashioned things like pianos and oil lamps. We have oil lamps mounted on our walls, because our power outages are frequent, and once or twice a year we'll have an outage that lasts close to a day. The worst for my house has been 5 days. It usually happens in the summer when air conditioners are overloading the grid. Then along comes a lightning storm, and the city's electrical system gets trashed. It sometimes takes crews from all over the region to put it back together, thus the week-long outages for some neighborhoods. What's maddening is that the people who live across the street are on a different circuit. Sometimes ours goes out for a day or two, while theirs may not go out at all! Well, glad to know that yours wasn't too serious. It'd be terrible if you couldn't play Sim City for a whole day! Shooshie

The Numero Uno All Time Gripe for me is the lack of good support for the Mac! Aspyr no longer even has SC4 on their site, at least not that I can find, and we Mac users are not allowed to register on Maxis' site. It really doesn't have to be that way, but people in charge just don't give a darn. You PCers don't know how great you have it unless you've tried to build a nice city on a Mac. We can't make BATs (at least, not without a PC or PC emulator), and the BATs that everyone else makes lack nightlight support on Macs. It's kind of an involved process to get them to work within the Aspyre port, which is not really that bad of a port job, but things that are easy for you guys are somewhat more difficult for us. And the lack of nightlights on the custom buildings means we either have to stick to daytime or work with a limited set of mods. I work with limited mods, as I love the night lights too much to let them go. The other sore points are: 1. The Grid -- though at least we are all on the same footing there. 2. The Networks when they just decide not to cooperate. You KNOW that road will bend and join, but it refuses until you bulldoze everything and start over. 3. The LOUSY trains. Fortunately, there are some good mods, but what were they thinking at Maxis when they made those toy trains and destroyed the illusion of a decent transit system? 4.The lack of an UNDO. Have you ever accidentally slipped with a levelling tool or bulldozer after spending the better part of a day getting a certain layout just as you want it? And have you ever accidentally lost something you can't get back, due to lack of money or lost opportunity? I guess it would require too much of a RAM hit, but sometimes I'd take a hit for an UNDO. 5.Why aren't Maxis's originals as great looking as some of the mods? I think Maxis overlooked a great source of funding: sell "placement" to real companies by offering models of their stores in the game. Why not have all the big chains represented? They could all pay a thousand bucks or so for the advertising, and Maxis would have the budget to finish the darn thing before releasing it! 6.The U-Drive has horrible sounds and controls. I wish it had a ground-level view. 7. More trees, please! Why do we have to download mods just to get pines? I guess one could criticize for days, depending on how "real" your expectations are. But I don't want to make these criticisms without telling the other side. This is one incredible game! Look at how far the networks have come since the original Sim City! Remember when things didn't even try to fit together? The art of making these things fit together as seamlessly as they do now is just incredible. Maxis has come a long, long way. Gameplay is different in each release of SC. It just keeps getting better, IMO. Regions takes SC4 lightyears farther than any previous version, and gives us a sense of continuity in our cities. And it's amazing that you can click on something and see the paths. It really knows what or who is going where, and creates a credible relationship between residences, jobs, and transit. With each new version of SC, I learn something else about the way actual cities grow. It is said that Will Wright studied everything he could find about city planning and related philosophy, and it shows. Sure, it's got lots of flaws, but who cares? I can turn the music off. I can suspend my disbelief and get so immersed in a city that it HURTS when a fire burns down a building. I get GUILT feelings!!! It's just great. I've been playing SC for nearly 20 years, having started in the late 1980s, and I've never found a game that compares in its breadth of interest, educational value, and just plain enjoyment. Yeah, some people probably think we're crazy, because there's not a gun-barrel in our user interface, but SC is just for a different breed of gamer. Between this and the Myst series, I could just about go without any other games. Shooshie

This has got to be the longest weather-related thread I've ever seen. Here in Dallas, Texas, the weather turns cool at this time of year. Such a relief! We've endured more 100+ degree (Fahrenheit) days this summer than we have in quite some time. I think we were starting to feel a little like Phoenix! (but it's usually hotter there than here, at least by a few degrees) October is a peaceful month for us, weatherwise. It's cool outside, probably in the 80s today. We've had a few weeks of temps in the 60s at night, 80s by day. Fair skies, gentle breezes, it feels so good to open the windows and let the world in. I'm confined to bed and chair for the time being, having broken my hip skating around White Rock Lake on September 2. I still have a couple of weeks to go before I can walk, so I'm enjoying the time off playing you-know-what. If you'd like to see pictures of the trail where I skate, follow the link in my sig. Somewhere on the index page where you arrive, you'll find an item about skating at daybreak at White Rock Lake. I had hoped to do another page of autumn photos, but the accident postponed that. I'm an expert skater, btw, but just had a freak accident, which goes to show that it can happen to anyone. Dallas is at the junction of several different geographical regions. There's prairie to the north, coastal plains to the south, semi-arid "western" scenes to the west, and forests to the east. Dallas sits astride the Trinity River, whose annual flooding has shaped the city, the economy, the architecture, and the society itself. It's never been a beautiful city, but it's getting better, and it's not ugly, either. For us "city builders," it's got an interesting layout. Imagine a watering hole on the river. Now, imagine roads radiating out from that watering hole like the spokes of a wagon wheel. That's the way Dallas started out. Neighborhoods were built in parallel to the roads they were on, so when neighborhoods intersect around here, it's always at an odd angle. The resulting clash of streets yields interesting ways of dealing with the situation, including public parks, wedge-shaped buildings, oddly-shaped retail areas that appear forced in between the residential sections jutting out at each other, golf courses (I live between two golf courses; one at each end of my street!) and other things. Highways split neighborhoods in half, often leaving one half orphaned without good access, causing one side to become a slum while the other side may be rich. In October--right now--the State Fair of Texas goes on for a month at Fair Park. You are more familiar with Fair Park than you think. Sim City 4 has a state fair that is modeled after Fair Park in Dallas! If you visit my site, you will also see in the index an item regarding the Art Deco at Fair Park. At least a few of those pictures, including the thumbnail in the index, show the main building in SC4's state fair! The real one, that is. You cannot miss it; the resemblance is pretty much exact. SC4's building is smaller, that's all. From now till December it will get cooler, but not by much. Then in January, winter finally hits, and we will have sub-zero temps. We're lucky to get a few snows, nothing that stays more than a week, before March, when the flowers come back and the trees turn green. I hope I've given you some idea of the weather in this part of the country! Shooshie

Just updated to OS X 10.4.8 a few days ago, and I can say for certain that the game is slower now. Hardware: Dual 1GHz G4 Quicksilver 2002 Also, I notice slowdowns when I use my tablet for drawing or editing in the game. I don't know why that would be; maybe it's just typical of the tablet in general, and I just haven't noticed it before now. Response is a little more crisp with the Kensington Trackball. Shooshie

One possibility: rezone light residential with dense residential. Another possibility: add more parks, marinas, opera houses, etc. to make it desirable. Some of those options aren't available at low populations, though. Also: . connect roads to neighbor territories, so that the commerce is flowing. . make sure basic services are always covered: garbage, water, power, roads . city ordinances can make a big difference. If you can afford it, give them perks--things like free clinics or CPR training, pollution controls, junior sports, reading programs, etc. . add trees . if there is water, add beaches, ferries, marinas It's a learning/building process. Shooshie

Originally posted by: Sainty Hello Sim-players, I found this community just a week ago and have been reading here since. I find this forum confusing, many times i have trouble to find back to a topic that i was reading a day ago, so answer to my question might be already answered somewhere under all the subforums but since I'm a hopless searcher, I just had to make my own topic about it. I dont know, but most of my towns dont grow over 200 000 people, and i feel its terrible. I've read somewhere that some of you have cities over 1 miljon so I'm guessing that i'm doing something wrong. Most of the tips that come from you say that its all about clever zoning and transport. I thought that i found a clever zoning strategy by doing a chess board zoning kind of thing and adding one subtrain-station and one bus stop to each building. The thing is that my cities all look the same! I was thinking that today I'm gonna get one of the biggest titels in the Los Angeles to grow big time. My region is 1,3 miljon so I think that i'm ready for it. BUT I would like you to give me some visual advice in how to zoom thise residential and commercial areas, and of course, the transportation system. Here are some screen shots of how I have been doing untill now. What I dont understand is why my sims are using cars even tho they got subtrain and bus just by their house and work office. The commute time is still long even thos they are just working 2-4 blocks away. The subtrain stations arent full nor are they bus stations. I'm using the network plugin already but it doesnt seem to help. I've added 2 screen shots to show you how i zone my city. quote> Hi Sainty, I recently rediscovered the Simtropolis site and forums myself, due to an injury that's had me limited in mobility for a while. I've been enjoying the downtime by playing SimCity4/RushHour. Naturally, I've been enjoying the community aspects of it, too, so here we are. I think one reason your sims find their commute time to be so long is that your industrial zoning is so far away. Even if I have a lot of commerical demand, the foundation of my Sims' employment seems to hover around the vicinity of industrial zoning. In theory, mining and industry are the foundations of economy, whereas office and services just bounce around wealth that's already been created. So, keep industry, office, services, and retail all within reasonable commutes. Parks just add to the desirability. Mass transit sometimes doesn't work easily, but I've got cities where rail stations regularly report actual traffic of 500 to 1000 riders, though it changes frequently. I just try to make sure there are options for commuters to get off where they work. Building cities of over a million population in any Sim City version has been a matter of patience and planning. Not planning the exact, cookie-cutter zoning before there is any demand for it, but planning education strategies and real-world growth algorithms. The object is to start light and grow dense. That takes a long, long time. When you get to the point where your land values have maxxed out, and you start rezoning for density, your population begins to multiply by leaps and bounds. Some things that help make this happen: Education, education, education, recreation, and education. It takes time to get budgets up to levels where you can afford the education. You can't rush it. Once your Sims have reached the maximum education, your industry is mostly going to be hi-tech. Education and contentment (back to the convenient zoning) will lead to higher land values. Higher land values are ripe for rezoning into more density--but be sure to add density to your employment zones, too--both commercial and industrial. The amazing thing about Sim City is that it can sustain this kind of strategic game play for months. You can constantly improve a city. There are always routes that need cleaning up, zones that need redesigning, funding to increase, services to provide, infrastructure to replace. And the numbers tell the tale: as you get beyond populations of 600,000 or 800,000 and start approaching a million, you will know how you got there. One comment: lots of real-life cities have taken the formulaic approach to zoning, and they appear with cookie-cutter sameness all over the country, if not the world. Some of the grid formulas I've seen in the playing of SC at various forums remind me of those cities. In the Dallas area, Frisco comes to mind. in Phoenix, Scottsdale or Fountain Hills comes to mind. Orange County, California, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Nevada... in each of these places you will find neighborhoods that appear to be tiled right out of Sim City, as if the planners think they have people exactly figured out. I always wonder if those places will be self-sustaining in 30 years, or massive slums. The places that seem to be the strongest are the ones that grow organically based on need and planning just far enough ahead to take care of that need, but always willing to tear things up and address those needs even on a large scale. I see it in my own neighborhood, where old houses are being bulldozed and MacMansions are going up in their place. Some change is painful, but it's leading to revitalization and continued self-sustenance. Which reinforces the idea of taking it slowly, growing organically, and being very patient. That's what seems to work best for me. Shooshie

I use SC4+Rush Hour with Tiger on two different machines: Dual 1GHz G4 Quicksilver (2002) 800MHz G4 Powerbook (Titanium) The performance on each of them is acceptable to fast. For small cities or cities that are just starting out, the performance is super. For the very largest region, fully developed with all transportation options, all buildings and rewards, etc., the performance is not quick, but it's definitely acceptable. A month at Cheetah speed goes by in about a minute, though sometimes in as little as 20 seconds. But I'm talking about a fully developed region. The small regions are very, very fast. Terraforming is not instant, like it is on a PC, but it's not far from it, either. Maybe a 1 second delay after releasing the mouse to finish it. The one thing I've found that SC4 can't handle in Tiger and a full region is planting trees. It has to create a budget item for each tree, and it can take minutes to finish a large "planting" over a wide area. But there is a cheat that works quickly: CONTROL/SHIFT/OPTION-CLICK on the "God" mode, and use the original terraforming tree tool. It works instantly--and free--which solves that problem. I'm sure that the faster Macs of the past couple of years handle all this much faster than my 4-year old pair of Macs. Tiger has not slowed it down drastically. I recommend, however, that you restart your machine and do not open Dashboard before you play SC4. Anything you can do to save CPU cycles will help. Also, max out your memory. If you're trying to do this with less than a gigabyte of memory, it's going to be very slow. So, the answer is that Yes, SimCity4 with Rush Hour works great with Tiger. Not a problem. Be sure to use Rush Hour, and not just the plain SC4. The original SC4 Mac port was terrible. It hardly ran at all. There is also a patch for Rush Hour, and for SC4. They may already be included in the Deluxe version. If there is a performance difference in Deluxe, I do not know about that, but I can assure you from my own experience that Tiger is not a SC4 killer. It works fine. Shooshie

So, does that mean that none of the properties in the BSC Mac Archive will light up at night? Only the MacPacks by GoaSkin? I've found a few that do light--maybe they weren't here. I don't remember where I got them now. A burger place, a lounge, a restaurant... I don't remember now which do and which don't. So I downloaded the BSC Mac archives thinking that perhaps someone has figured it all out, someone has done the converting... but not so? Are my hopes of a brilliantly lit, customized SC4 about to be dashed on the reality of half-baked Mac ports by Aspyr? I'm going to keep tinkering with these. There's got to be a way to make this work. Maybe that little Mac app, "The Cheat," could be utilized to change out some variables. Suppose that could be done? Shooshie

Am I the only one seeing what appear to be links, but which are inoperable? I'm getting frustrated trying to find the packages listed in these threads, as the links almost never work. Is it my browser? Or have some of these links been deactivated? In either case, can anyone direct me to working versions? I'm really getting into downloading BATs that actually light up at night on my Mac. Shooshie

I tried getting the file from the addresses you provided. They download, but they will not unstuff. Stuffit Expander gives an error message for each one of them. Other alternatives? Or maybe they don't need unstuffing? Shooshie