catman232

I looked into SimCity's JavaScript and it appears that this isn't possible at all. Instead of having the speeds declared in the JS, they're declared in the core game. All references to speed in the game's JS are simply constants that point to resource ids, which can't be changed. Basically, all the scripts can do is point the core game to the id of whatever speed you want, not create your own. I could be completely wrong, but I see no way of doing this.

Simple interchange 1 Simple Interchange 2 Entire city

This project kind of got forgotten about but I am going to be coming back to it soon. Been busy with other stuff

For the past few days I've been reverse engineering the SimCity Javascript files, and I'm starting to figure out what is possible and what isn't. SimCity uses Javascript only for the UI, however there does seem to be ways to change the simulation. So far I've figured how to retrieve data from the core game, referred to in the code as querying, but not how to modify anything. Instead of trying to teach everyone the way that SimCity's scripting works (because I don't know it very well yet, either) I've decided to start working on a mod called SimCity Script Extender, or SCSE. SCSE will provide simple APIs to mod developers that make working with SimCity's code much easier, and make mods that modify the game's scripts not interfere with each other. A simple use case of SCSE is displaying messages to the cheat console. Normally, this would require editing the SCRUI_min (or similar) JS file in SimCity_App.package. This method would only allow one mod to use the console, the one that loaded first. To prevent this, SCSE hooks its self into the console and exposes an API that can be used by any number of mods at the same time. Printing text to the console without SCSE requires replacing core game files. Printing text to the console with SCSE: SCSE.print("message"); This is obviously a very basic use case for SCSE, but the functionality it can provide will be growing as I better understand how SimCity's scripting works.

Lol, I'd keep them unless they become annoying

bump

Looking through the code, it seems that SimCity DOES have a terrain editor somewhere. However I don't know if the retail .exe has it, because only the UI code is in the .package files. Why can't Maxis just release official modding tools?

I don't know if this was directed at me or not, but I'm going to reply to it as if it was. I had never implied that VRAM had anything to do with video performance, and if you read the specs of my PC you'll see that I DO have 8GB of ram. In my post I detailed about why SimCity can't use more than 4GB (compiled in x86), which is why I used a 4GB RAM limit. You're also partially right that it is mostly the CPU, in that the CPU directly affects how much ram a system can have. Because it's safe to assume that maps twice as large will use over 4GB of ram, and x86 CPUs cannot use more than 4GB of ram, no x86 CPUs will be able to run the larger maps at all. If Maxis were to fix this by distributing a separate x86 and x64 versions of the game, then one would have a massive advantage over the other and the game would become fragmented. (x86 and x64 players would have be separated from one another)

This reason exactly is why I didn't include any information about FPS in my post, because Maxis has said that people's graphics cards aren't the issue.

Lol, I just got finished doing the exact opposite and implementing regular desktop cursors into SimCity. SimCity's cursor kind of bugs me for some reason.

Yeah, I can't believe I am doing this, but I am going to play devil's advocate and attempt to verify why Maxis isn't going to increase city sizes. People are complaining all the time about how Maxis is lying about how it can't be implemented, and I want to show that there is some truth behind their claims. My Specs Windows 7 Pro Intel Core i5-2520M @ 2.5GHz (dual core w/ hyper threading) 8GB of RAM AMD Radeon HD 6770M w/4GB of memory As you can tell I don't have the most amazing gaming PC in the world. (it is a laptop, if you couldn't tell by the CPU and GPU) I think it is representative of "good enough" enthusiast gaming hardware, which I would assume is the main target for most AAA games. SimCity has a much more diverse install base than something such as Crysis 3, for example, so I can see the average specs of a SimCity player being considerably lower than these. SimCity's Resource Usage I used Windows Task Manager to measure the resource usage of SimCity while playing on a reasonably demanding city. Let's start with the RAM usage of SimCity alone. This is just showing that SimCity is using ~1.18GB of RAM. Normally that'd be pretty low, considering I have 8GB of ram to use. However, SimCity is running in 32 bit which means it can only use up to 4GB of memory at a time. This dramatically limits the size of simulation SimCity can handle. Consider the fact that the layout I was using for this city was by no means the optimum layout to fit in population and that there is easily potential to fit in several times more sims than I did. (My population was around 130,000, but I think it can get as high as 600,000 with some layouts) Taking this into consideration, my resource usage was far from the highest it could be. Even with the small city plot sizes, I feel that reaching that 4GB limit is closer than some might imagine. If I were to continue the same non-optimal layout and make it four times the size, I am sure I'd be well over the limit. The easiest solution I see for this is for Maxis to distribute separate 32 and 64 bit versions of SimCity, but I am not sure how difficult that would be to do. Above you can see my total CPU and RAM usage from all of the programs running on my computer. In the previous image you can see that SimCity's CPU usage was at 36%, meaning only 1% of the other CPU usage was from programs other than SimCity. This is another place where we will hit a limit. Theoretically quadrupling the size of the simulation would also quadruple the CPU usage, (not scientific) which would put my CPU at 144% of its limit. Conclusion I think I have showed why implementing larger city sizes is a challenge, however this is a piss poor reason for Maxis to not include larger cities. They should see this as a reason to implement smaller cities to fall back on, but they shouldn't have let the fact that most people couldn't run it prevent EVERYONE from running it. PLEASE try to prove me wrong, as I seriously hope I am. SimCity is a game I enjoy very much and would enjoy so much more with larger map sizes. I just don't want to get to optimistic about that happening in the near future...

I just discovered this while trying to change some of the UI elements of the game. I had put all of my modifications into a file named Test.package, and continued to wonder why nothing would work. I figured out something REALLY important when it comes to SimCity modding: SimCity loads files alphabetically and the priority of the files is ranked based on the alphabet. For example, my file named Test.package couldn't over-write any of the existing assets because it comes after SimCity_Game.package in the alphabet. This caused me tons of frustration and I am writing this hoping that I can save others from the same!

Forgive me if this is old news, but I found that SimCity has been in development for quite a while now. Looking at some of the first YouTube videos from the SimCityEA channel showing off the engine and how primitive it looks I assumed the game had only been in development since 2011. In the HTML file with the InstanceID of 0xdd6233d6-0x00000000-0x7e3b49ad, you can see that the copyright goes all the way back to 2010! If you're too lazy to look up the file, I'll just put the interesting part here. <!--///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // editor.html // // This HTML sets up the UI system and provides all the main boilerplate // // Brad Smith // // Copyright 2010 Electronic Arts Inc. All Rights Reserved. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// --> Not really anything important, just figured I would post it