astronic

Is the content on the STEX CD tested regarding bugfreeness and game balance and does it provide a nice installer? If the answer is indeed yes, I'll order my copy as soon as I can. Otherwise it seems that there is not much interest in streamlining the installation of custom objects in Sim City here. Of course since all of you provide your wonderful custom objects free of charge I have no right to demand anything, but that doesn't change the fact that the installation process is pretty much a mess and the absence of QA can really hurt if you spend countless hours of playing and then have to trash your city because something is broken. I think the task at hand is very similar to what Linux distributors have to accomplish and the solution is quite obviously the same: A package manager which keeps track of installed packages and their dependencies and a package repository with QA'd packages for easy installation via the package manager. I think that could broaden the audience of Simtropolis similiar to how Linux distributions broaden the Linux audiences compared to LFS only. I concede that implementing such an infrastructure may not be worthwhile for Sim City 4 because this game is too old to be of much interest to the masses anyway, but remember, Sim City 5 is on its way. Regards, Stefan

Hello, at the moment enhancing your SimCity installation by content from STEX is rather tiresome and not without pitfalls: 1) You'll sooner or later end up in dependency hell, which makes you download countless files and makes you keeping track of what files you already installed. 2) Some buildings seriously hurt the game balance by providing services much too cheap and some buildings are useless because they provide services much too expensive. If you know the in-game values and if the download page tells you about a building's stats in advance you can of course avoid some of these cases, but it will still frequently happen that you have to download a building and all its dependencies, install it, find out it's unsuitable and deinstall the building and all its dependencies. 3) Some buildings are seriously bugged in some way and sometimes these bugs show up after it is too late. For example, in one of my cities I found out after countless hours of playing that using some school from STEX prevented my city from getting an university, even though all criteria were met. Unfortunately even replacing the custom schools with original ones from Maxis didn't help. After all I think that enhancing your Sim City installation by custom content from STEX can be a really frustrating experience, especially for the casual user. I think these problems could (at least partially) be addressed by providing a package of highly rated, well tested and balanced content including its dependencies. This way everybody could profit from the greatest STEX content by just downloading one big ZIP file without having to spend countless hours of manually fetching single BATs/lots/etc. and its dependencies and installing/testing/uninstalling the content. It might also help, if users could vote on content more differentiated than just giving stars (which primarily tend to be given for nice looks). Furthermore maybe service buildings such as schools, hospitals etc. can be marked with a "preserves game balance" tag to avoid problem 2) for those of us who like their game to be balanced. The grand solution would of course consist of the introduction of a package manager (as it can be found in Linux distributions for example), but I guess that would require more effort than can be reasonably expected. Regards, Stefan