BobertMcBob

EA temporarily shut down OpenSC2K because the repo included allegedly copyrighted assets converted from the game files. A remake without those assets would be fine. Would assets that are based off of EA's allegedly copyrighted assets, such as 3D versions of 2.5D sprites, be allowed? I'm not sure, but I'd suspect under current US copyright law, they likely would not be.

Okay, this is really cool. The second picture kinda reminds me of Simcopter, though with much better looking buildings.

My bad, I didn't read my notes closely enough. Mayor name is stored in the city file, it's the first entry in the XLAB segment of the save game file. Neighbour names aren't stored in the city file itself, still, they're stored in the game. You can edit them in memory if you'd like, but they won't persist that way. I've attached an image with a neighbour edited in memory this way.

To add to this from a technical perspective, I've been working on reverse engineering SimCity 2000 in my spare time for the last 3.5 years. I've probably put ~600-800 hours into it, and while I've figured out the file format for the game as well as most of the other data files, reverse engineering the game itself has been a slow, arduous process. SimCity 2000 is a much simpler game than SimCity 4, so the time commitment to make a true, open-source re-implementation of it would likely require significantly more time.

Hi all, My first SimCity game was SC2k for DOS, which we got on a CD that came with a CDROM drive and souncard that my parents bought to go in the family computer. Needless to say, I was hooked and spent many hours gaming. I played SC3k and SC4, but I never found they scratched the same itch as SC2k did for me. I've been working on reverse engineering SC2k, and at this point have nearly completely reverse engineered the .sc2 city file format, as well as the sprite format and at least the raw data from the newspapers. I have no way of verifying this, but at this point I suspect I know more about the game than anyone who didn't work at Maxis. My initial goal when I started the project was to re-implement SC2k so that it'd run properly on modern computers, but also allow much larger map sizes, etc. Unfortunately, while I've got a lot of experience programming and reverse engineering, I've never found it easy to get into game programming.

I've almost completely reverse engineered the file formats for SC2k at this point, including reading and creating scenarios and even whole cities without involving the game. I'm in the process of making the code more useful and documented so that someone other than myself can use it. Right now it's very much an exploratory architecture I created to help me reverse engineer the file formats and not something that's easy to use. As for the utilities you're looking for, changing the actual names of the neighbours past the ones already in the game would require modifying the game. As has been stated, mayor name isn't stored in the city. Money, date, etc is easy enough to change. I've attached images of a couple example of what you can do with this. Mixed bridges. Highways to bridges to avenues. Avenues inside a city. A map based on the earth (does not have the correct coastline tiles drawn).

This is caused by how SC2k internally represents anything with a microsim, which is one of 150 small simulations the game runs for specific buildings. The save file has fields called XTXT that stores a pointer to either a sign (with actual sign text stored in the XLAB segment of the save file) or points towards a microsim stored in the XMIC section of the save file. The reason you can't put a sign on something with a microsim, is that for any tile, the XTXT record can only be pointing to one thing, and the game is programmed such that the microsim always takes priority. Edit: If you'd like the read more, here's a relatively complete (unofficial) file format specification: https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/sc2 file spec.md#xtxt Incidentally, this is also where the game stores things like disaster tiles, so you can create some pretty interesting things by directly editing the game saves, like in the attached image (with city available at: http://patcoston.com/sc2k/cities.asp).