Jasoncw

The medium sized train station should be on the STEX within a few days. edit: I just uploaded it! It should be available in a little while.

I thought you meant DD as in Dungeons and Dragons, I got excited Neat though

looks good so far from what I can tell.

yea, this is for the BAT Make some buildings!

The small train station I uploaded a week or two ago (https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?mode=files&filetype=BAT&Str=small%20train%20station go download it! ) was the result of looking at the BAT request thread. a small train terminal (i think it was in boston or something) was posted a few times, and I liked the design, but it was too detailed and I wanted a simple project. I think a seperate forum would be better than a single thread. I'm kinda sick of all of the 'what should I do next!' type threads And if BAT - Request is just clutter, then why does NDEX have it's own forum? It's just a special BAT open discussion forum for a few members. Only 4 or 5 of the threads are even active. The BAT request thread has more/about the same amount of posts as: The Sims 2, The Sims 2 Modifications, The sims 2: Sims Diaries, Sim Mars the Game, and the Lot Editor and Plugin Manager. Plus if it was it's own forum it would be harder for the newbies to miss. But if it was still a single thread, Sparky has a good idea. I think having one member running the locked thread and the requesters need to send a pm request is good. And if they need to be by pm, people would be more likely to only send requests that they really want, not a huge list of every building they think is pretty. The list could be updated once a week, since doing it everyday would be a lot. I like Domo too, he's my avatar on aim. Unfortunalty most people don't know who he even is, they just think he's some goofy japanese thing.

I think it's a good idea to start a sequel instead of continuing this one. But as for the subway, I think that would be too expensive. I would expect a mix between above ground and subway. The waterfall is pretty outragous imo, I bet it cost more than the stadium itself, but that's ok.

That's not a bad idea. and if people don't like it, they can always hide it.

Realism is good, but I'm surprised that in real life that building doesn't have any flowers, or potted shrubs or anything around it.

If they're going to make it tall just for the sake of being tall, it should at least be the tallest on earth, not just the tallest in the US.

Date: 10/27/2005 6:57:48 PM Author: Woko This is a picture of the edifice price. For the people who don't know it. quote> I saw a picture with that building in it in one of my French class text books. That building would work well imo becuase: 1. It's small (2x2? 2x3?) which makes let's you spend more time on each area of the building, and it will render faster. 2. It's details and features repeat throughout the building (making it easier to spend more time on each detail since you can free up time by cloning it). 3. It's size and style is uncommon in the game and on the STEX. This is a gap that needs to be filled. I'm always up for helping someone with textures. If anyone wants help texturing (not just zmveliger) just pm me.

Prepo is making a diagonal park and a diagonal skyscraper. I think I might make a diagonal building out of one of my finished buildings some day.

It looks alot better now. If you have room for polys maybe you could add a tree or some shrubs or something too. How big is the lot going to be? I just noticed you only have 14 posts!

I really like the idea of green buildings. I think that the design itself isn't that great, but it isn't too bad, and it could be alot worse. But it could also be alot better. I like that kind of glass they used for the renderings though.

Date: 10/28/2005 1:36:14 AM Author: ninjasquirrel On that note, why doesn't someone just model Tokyo Sky City? It is a modern Arcology, or will be when it's finished. Looks really cool as well. Not to mention they show you a 3d model of it from all sides.quote> I don't remember the exact dimensions of that project (it's not actually being made, and it never will be made) but it would be huge. Those super sky scrapers people are making are already hard to make, and this one would probably be the size of a large city I didn't realize how huge the archologies really where. 16x16!!! They would be really cool to have in that scale though, so huge!

I think that highways are good in that they connect places that are far apart with a convienient fast and free (you can control when and where you stop) path. But the negative concequences outweight the positive ones, unfortunatly. In Sim City, once my main avenues leave the developed area they turn into highways (they do not bypass development, they bypass forests). For my cities purposes, they are basicly avenues with a faster speed limit, and without any stops becuase there is nowhere to get off to. Occasionaly there will be some on/off ramp, but nowhere near as much as in real life. I think it's interesting that alot of the people here could make better decisions for cities then the governments themselves could make.

I used the forest arco the most. I filled most of a map with arcologies and it was cool, except they repeated so much, and because there isn't anything stylisticly between the black ones and the white ones. Someone is making the plymouth one, and I thought it was basicly done, but you know how projects can take longer than they should sometimes (especialy with me! )

eh, why not look at the BAT request thread? The entire point of it is so that if BATers don't know what to make they can look there and find what peopple want.

I liked the growable airport and seaport zones ALOT better. I like them so much, that I think it should be applied to other things as well. Growable Civic Buildings: There would be zones for: Health, Education, and Safety. You would zone it, and then a hospital or whatever you zoned for would grow. Once the capacity would overflow, it would build an expansion on itself somewhere else on the lot. These zones also have the options available that I mentioned in my previous post, so you could control what style and how big and all that the hospital got.

New Players: I think it might be hard for someone who thinks of games as what they see, not the engine behind the game. I didn't really get great cities untill I understood how the game worked, and then I could manipulate everything to get what I wanted, but I think this is the way that these sorts of games are, and there isn't much to do about it becuase it's impossible to program every logical action into a city. A new player who has no experiences in how past sim cities worked would have trouble, but appearantly there is a new code or something and SC5 will be new to everyone. Growable Civic Buildings: There would be zones for: Health, Education, and Safety. You would zone it, and then a hospital or whatever you zoned for would grow. Once the capacity would overflow, it would build an expansion on itself somewhere else on the lot. These zones also have the options available that I mentioned in my previous post, so you could control what style and how big and all that the hospital got. Preferences and settings: The game would be overwhelming if you had to micromanage things, so there would be alot of preferences and settings so that you don't need to. These would work like a mayor telling a city person what to do in case of something, instead of the mayor doing it directly. A whole bunch of checkboxes are radio buttons for alot of the gameplay. It might seem like too much, but if you wanted to, you could play the entire game without clicking click for more options and it would work fine. This would please everyone who wanted more options as well as everyone who wants it simpler becuase the default settings help to run things automaticly. Putting that in SC4 terms, the hospital would automaticly adjust it's funding to exactly what it needs so that there are never strikes, but if you got sick of that and wanted to control that aspect, you could change it to manual, or whatever other options there could be. Just a visual. This would be arranged in tabs. One tab for Information (like the query we have now), one tab for the zoning (zone type through medical) and another tab for physical stuff (dimensions through position). At first most of the options are hidden, but if you select a zone type (educational for example) then the options for the educational buildings would be displayed. Once you decide something there, maybe there are more options. If you want to make a boarding school, then you could check educational and residential (and then the residental settings would come up). However, some uses cannot be combined, like seaport and a school, so if you picked one, you could not pick the other (if custom content was made that fit both categories then the game would allow it becuase there would be somethere to grow there). The list that I made is very rough and more options would be added and some would be dropped or changed. I was just making a quick visual so it makes a little more sense. Economy: I think there should be alot of stuff with the economy (so far sim city hasn't had any economic related gameplay) and other stuff. I think the game should include something about where the money goes with some kind of simple economic structure. Money is generated by industry using natural resources selling products. If the raw materials are imported the industry generates less money for the city becuase some of the money went to shipping the materials. Commercial (either from the city, or another city) buys the products. If a buisiness from outside the city buys the products, then your city as a whole accumulated wealth. If a buisiness inside your city buy it then it prevents them from needing to buy it from another city. Citizens make money from working at both commercial and industry, but they spend it at commerical. If they spend their money inside the city then the city has retained some of it's wealth, if not, the city as a whole has lost wealth. If someone from another city works in your factories, then they are taking money out of the city. This would be done automaticly and you wouldn't be able to control it. You could influence it with the city planning, ordinances and taxes, but you couldn't control it (unless there were different types of government you could play as). I'm not too knowledgable about economics, but from my understanding this is part of how it works. Zoning: There would also be the sim city playing we're used to (RCI balancing), except that zones wouldn't be so limited. Instead of being 3 types with 3 densities, there would be 3 default preset types, with three default densities, and a bunch of default settings. By altering the settings you could decide the range of how tall the building is, how close it is to the street, what architectural styles it is, what wealth it is, what density it is, what it's floor space is, what functions the building has (several types and mixes of the 3 zones and maybe more). I don't think this would be too tough to program since you'd just have each building have a set of tags that define what the buildings characteristics are. Construction Approval There could also be settings for approval of projects done by private companies (basicly, the growables). Each construction would need to get approved by you, except you have alot of options on what is automaticly approved and what you need to approve. Maybe you want to approve if an entire city block is demolished, and then a skycraper is built in it's place, but maybe you don't want to be bothered if if a house get's built. Vector Based Zoning and Transit System: A vector (uses points and mathmatical equations to draw lines, like in adobe illustrator, flash, or the splines in gmax) based transit creation would be cool. Zones could be made using that too, exept using complete shapes instead of lines. For zoneing there would be premade shapes, like rectangles for simplicity. Also, you can bulldoze any part of the lot and only that part will be demolished. So if a 70x102 meter lot was almost all parking lot, but had a building in the corner, you could demolish the everything in the lot except the building, and then you could rezone around it for new buildings. The buildings would be rotated to fit along side the road. Some buildings would have particular shapes (maybe pie shaped, or triangle shaped) to fit in certain areas. Automaticly Generated Lots: Growable lots would be automaticly generated at the time of construction since you couldn't make a premade lot for every single shape possible. In the construction approval system I mentioned earlier, you could have it generate a new lot if you didn't like their old one, and there would be options and preferences that would help make the computer generate a lot you like more. Planning Mode: Also, all city zoning and transit making could be done in a special mode. There would be a planning/drawing mode where you build what you want (it shows you how much money it would cost, but you don't pay it untill later). Then there is a simulation phase right after where it runs the city as if the newly planned stuff had been built (not completely accurate, it would be like having an expert analyise your plans), and then a build phase where you say ok and you pay the money and it gets built. You could also just build it while the game is normaly running like you do now. Because things are planed and approved before you buy or grow them, things can be more realisticly priced. in previous sim citys, things had to be cheaper to take into acount that you would bulldoze it if you didn't like it that way. Custom Content Developer Mode Maxis could make a free downloadable extension to the game that adds a custom content developer mode (CCDM). In this mode, you could click on a building while playing the game and edit it's stats. This would allow for real time testing. There would not be a 3-d editor in the game becuase that would be too much, but you could click a refresh type button that would reload all the buildings models. Since this game would have to be in 3-d for the vector zoning and transit, there wouldn't be any pre-game rendering. With the new 3-d editor open, you could change something, save the file, and then go back into sim city and click refresh in the CCDM to see the changes. Problems: The only problem that I can see is that the buildings must be in 3-d if they are to align to a vector based road or zone, and 3-d plus an economic system, the sims pathfinding on vector transit, the current RCI math, city services, taxes, and everything else that already makes SC4 slow, the game might not be possible. So that's what I would personaly want in SC5 (or any game).

I was going to wait to reply to everyone for when I had something new to report about, but I don't have anything new to say right now and I won't have time to do anything to report about for about a week, so I'll reply now instead. Thanks I'm glad you're enjoying the station (even with the small bug). I was going to say something about the bug in the description on the STEX, but I figured that some people wouldn't download becuase of that, and if they did download and use it, they would find they didn't mind the glitch too much. I should have put something in the readme though, I'll do that next time. I made a simmars building really quick, but it wasn't very good becuase I spent so little time on it. Also, it was mostly an experiment with some of the features in Gmax that I haven't used before. well, I guess there was a little bit to report about afterall