asasnat

I have another, a bit smaller idea as a subset of my "arcologies in SimCity 3000 (or Arcology3000)" idea. It's basically this: When a launch arcology launches, the people that live in it, instead of disappearing, will actually still count up toward the population count, but won't push up demand for Industrial or any other zone type. This is because they live on a colony now (so to speak), and as such they're going to be using the services available in that colony instead of your main city. They still pay you taxes, though. In other words: When you launch the launch arcologies (which I'm going to call "the Exodus" from now on), you actually set up an imaginary colony on the planets in the targeted star system. Now, of course the "colony" is just imaginary. There won't actually be a way to view it (or will it?). You just kinda know that it is there, even though the game won't let you see it. But still, neat concept I think. EDIT: And I just realized that my programming skills are rusty as heck. Better prep up before the big moment comes.

If the source code for SimCity 3000 (preferably Unlimited) be released, I'd like to re-add arcologies into the game. I think it would be neat to see detailed animations of the launch arcologies launching into the unknown. Perhaps it could even have every advisor in the game congratulate you when you do it? However, I did come up with a bit of a pre-requisite for launching the arcologies. Before you can actually launch them, you first have to launch a normal rocket (from a space center building) to find a target star system for the launch arcologies to arrive at. Only then can you actually launch them and watch the show. Here is my idea for this so far: When you reach 500k population, you unlock arcologies. For now they are just extra-densely populated residential zones. However, at 1m population you unlock a Space Center. You place it down, and then construction of a rocket starts. It takes 3 years to construct, after which you can launch it via a petitioner issue. It will take 20 years to find the target star system, after which a new petitioner issue will come up letting you know that a target was found and giving you an option to begin the exodus (in other words launch the launch arcologies). All of the launch arcologies display an animation of them launching one-by-one (arcologies that have already finished the launching animation will disappear), and at the end of the animation you get paid back a hefty sum of money. Furthermore, another petitioner issue will appear, asking if you want to begin the construction of a new rocket. Answering "Yes" will cost you a lot (but a lot less than the amount of money you get rewarded for launching arcologies), and another rocket will begin construction, and once built will start searching for a different, unexplored star system. Because the penalty for building a rocket is lower than the reward for launching arcologies, this means that you can keep doing this till the end of the world and gather as much money as you wish. Also, maybe the launch of a rocket could slightly increase the chance of a Space Junk disaster happening? Maybe? Wow, that was a lot of text. By the way, yes. I do think we should create a new thread for this conversation.

Uhh, I made some assumptions about what some of these things (might) mean. Plane Crash - it might be possible that the plane crash disaster was originally in the game, but then got removed following the... "things" that happened in 2001. Or maybe they just never even added it in for one reason or another. Smite - maybe this is just referring to the earthquake disaster. Maybe. "Visitations" and "Abductions" - I think that in the early game, the UFOs will just visit your city and fly around for a while, without destroying anything. Then, as you progress later into the game, they become more and more aggressive, with the first visitation being possible from 1900 onward, the first abduction being possible from 1950 onward, the first crop circle being possible from 1975 onward, and the first attack being possible from 2000 onward. There are some other interesting things about the UFOs as well. For example, they can (apparently) at max: (per attack) Man, I really wish SimCity 3000 Unlimited was open-sourced so that we can look and see for ourselves what some of those less-understood parts mean.

I feel like one day EA should make the decision of "Okay, so we actually have a lot of really old games. They aren't making us money anymore, so how about we open-source them? Not that it's gonna be much of a loss to our company. Plus, we might get a lot of people making mods for them!" Hopefully they stop being the notoriously low-quality-game-making and money-wanting company they are known as today.

SimCity 2000 and SimCity 1989 are too simple for me. Meanwhile SimCity 4 and beyond is too complex for me. SimCity 3000 is right at the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity. That's why I'm more intrigued by the idea of complex modding in SC3U than in any other SimCity game.

Hmm, I'm starting to gain some programming knowledge. Slowly but surely. Maybe I could be the one to reverse-engineer the inner workings of this game and develop modding? Who knows, time will tell. That's because both are always unlocked from year 0 onward. I don't know why they had to do it this way, they could've just made them available in 1900 and everything would work fine I think.

I'm currently working on a new city - perhaps the successor to Parksville. It's named Vladislavus, and it currently has a population of 24k. My hope is that this city's population will eventually reach 1 million. I've realized that I don't have to overwhelm my Sims with services at the very start of the game. The very start of the game is when I worry about zones and roads, not schools and police. Right now the city's economy isn't able to support an army of all of these, so I will have to move in some more tax-payers. IIRC outside road/rail connections raise the demand for Commercial and Industrial. I feel like this will help me a decent bit while building up my city. ok why did i type out all of THIS this is basic knowledge that every SimCity player should already know by now

Are they really tracker music though? The Wikipedia page says it's a live music score. Indeed, when I try to import one of the soundtrack files into Audacity, well... it's quite a bit muffled, but I can still hear the basic arrangement and structure of the track. Also, the same format used for the music (.XA) is used for most of the sound effects as well. In my opinion the format is definitely live. oh btw you mispelled XA as XM

AFAIK SimCity 3000 modding never got past adding in buildings and retexturing existing buildings. Could be wrong though.

So I was looking around in the Lua code and found an effect called "stream". It said it was a stream of water, but for some reason I thought it would just be the generic and boring static water spray that you get when a volcano's lava touches water. Nevertheless, I added it into the function that randomly spawned effects, and I got... this. Needless to say, I was quite fascinated by the fact that this even exists. If you could make it so that a specific buildable building generates this effect when it is placed, I feel like this could be quite a nice decoration feature to make little streams and "waterfalls" in your city. by waterfalls I just mean water pouring out of a mountain into a river. if you could build a bridge over one of those, you could probably make some real nice looking cities. that is just a pipedream though, and it may or may not happen with a future mod. P.S. The spoiler contains the gif of the effect in action. I put it in a spoiler because the file is pretty big, and I hope this will ease the load on one's internet by not loading it immediately. If it still heavily impacts network speeds though (even when the spoiler is not open), let me know.

There are a couple of ways to mod SimCity. For SimCity 4, you have mods that add new buildings. For SimCity 2013, you also have mods that add new buildings. And for SimCity 3000, you have new buildings that you can replace existing buildings with. However, none of these games have any way to add in new disasters (to the best of my knowledge). This is kind of sad, as there were a few disasters I felt were missing in SimCity 3000 (floods, plane crashes, maybe even train derailments). So, would it be possible to make mods that add new disasters to SimCity 3000? P.S. one of the many hidden .ini files in SYS.PAK (specifically SC3DisasterLayer.ini) makes a mention to a few weird disasters (which I doubt even appear in the game). First is a "smite" disaster, not even gonna talk about that one as I literally don't know what it's supposed to be. The rest is refrences in the UFO section to "visitations", "abductions", "crop circles" and "attacks". The only one I know anything about is the crop circles, as there's a crop circle tile that can be accessed with the "build any building" trick. However, I have no idea if it actually appears during normal gameplay.

Yeah but... what about adding disasters? Would it be possible for a nerd to implement a patcher program that adds new disasters to SimCity 3000 from maybe DLL files? Or some other, possibly custom format?

I know it's not quite one day after posting (yet), but... here goes the bump.

I noticed a few interesting things in SC3DisasterLayer.ini. The file has whole sections devoted to the "plane crash" and "smite" disasters, whatever those are. The plane crash one is pretty obvious (its obviously supposed to be a plane crash disaster), but I've never seen it in SimCity 3000 (maybe because all the versions I've messed with were produced after that, uhh... thing, you know). But "smite"? What the hell is that? Also, the file mentions "visitations" and "abductions", and also "crop circles"! WERE THOSE EVER IN SimCity 3000!? CAN ANYONE EXPLAIN????? God. SYS.PAK truly hides some treasures we never got (and likely never will get) to witness. sorry for necro btw

I've always thought the terrain generation tool (the one that appears when you create a new city) was pretty primitive. The mountains often look more like the pyramids of Giza more than anything else. Sure, you can fix it up a bit using the terrain modification tools (that are also available once you start a new city, at least in Unlimited), but they're not any better to use. The raise and lower terrain tools also create terrains that look more like pyramids than a realistic landscape. So I've been thinking of a tool with a more complex terrain generator, that could then export the generated maps to a city terrain, that you can then use via the Real City Terrain window (kind of like how Landscape Designer, except for SimCity 3000). Is there anything like that? (Sorry for my bad English. It has never been any good.)

Nevermind, I figured it out.

The highest population city I've ever made in SimCity 4 was Sunville, a kind of nice city (except for the fact that it has terrible pollution), with a population of 70k: An earlier screenshot: However, the most populous city I've ever made in any SimCity game of any sort was Parksville, also quite a nice city, with a population of 225,222: Unfourtunately the growth of the city seems to have stopped to a halt. There wasn't any significant spike in the Residental/Commercial demand for literally hundreeds of in-game years. I don't know how I managed to mess up that badly, but I had to somewhere. This is also why you can see a lot of abandoned buildings - I simply zoned too much of everything.

Oh nice. I never knew there was something like this. It even lists some buildings that you can't place! Interesting.

That does generate a heightmap, and it does let me export it to a BMP, but... where do I go from here? I don't think SimCity 3000 can load in a bitmap... am I missing something? Does SimCity 3000 have a really strangely hidden "render terrain" feature, just like in SimCity 4?

Just asking, how did you get the Berlin Wall tiles into your city? Did you hex edit it?