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Showing results for tags 'city building'.
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After 5 years in early access on steam, Foundation is finally being released on the 31st January 2025 https://store.steampowered.com/app/690830/Foundation/ Been playing around with the demo while waiting for it to be released, and one of the things that stands out is the way a map is now viewed, up until now its always looked like SimCity where the map drops off into nothingness, now its looks like this .... on the left hand side is my map and on the right hand side of the white line is the end of the world
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Looking for Guidance on Improving My City Builds' Realism
Kelly Gloria posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Hello Everyone , Even though I'm new to SimCity, I've been having a great time creating and running my towns. But I've found that a lot of the amazing constructions published in this forum have a realistic touch that a lot of my cities lack. I would be grateful for any guidance and recommendations from more seasoned gamers on how to improve the authenticity of my city constructions. These are the particular places I'm having trouble with: Zoning & Layout: How should zoning be applied to provide a realistic and natural city layout? Do you employ any particular patterns or strategies for residential, commercial, or industrial zones? Road Networks: I've found it difficult to design effective and practical road networks. Which techniques work best for creating road layouts that resemble actual cities in both appearance and functionality? Public transit: Another area I could use some help with is efficiently integrating public transit. Which public transit systems function best in which kinds of cities, and in what ways might they be seamlessly integrated? Detailing and Aesthetics: Which important aspects do you emphasise to give your city a more realistic feel? Do you employ any particular mods, materials, or methods to up the realism factor? Growth & Development: How could you control your city's growth and development to make sure it changes in a way that makes sense over time? How can one strike a balance between growth and preserving a unified urban environment? https://steamcommunity.com/app/255710/discussions/0/3200366575422119924/ I would be very grateful for any guidance, materials, or case studies you could provide to assist me get better at creating cities. I'm also willing to consider suggestions for any essential plugins or mods that will improve the realistic feel of my creations. Thank you in advance. -
A Build It Ourselves City Building Game Needs To Be Created
Badfish301 posted a topic in City-Building Games
Hi everybody, and sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, I just don't see a better forum to do so: I have been watching the Cities Skylines 2 stuff unfold, and I really feel like they have left the door wide open for the truly next-gen city building game- only I think it could be approached much differently. It would be mostly content created by the player base: Cities Skylines 2 is very good with road and rail networks, but pretty much everything else leaves a lot to be desired. There is no map editor right now, and no building editor, which are two of the main reasons the release hasn't gone well besides the performance problems. What I am hoping to see is a game where the content is mostly created by the player base. This would be almost an open-source city building game, which has the very nice road and rail fundamentals that we saw in Cities Skylines 2, but would have a map editor and building editor that would be the main focus of the game. This way, the creation of the building models and maps is farmed out to the player base who does it for free. The game is less expensive, but would grow explosively. The map creation tool should allow for the creation of the usual "flat" and squarish type maps we are used to, but also creation on a globe- where you can scale up and down the globe size. A globe type map where specific areas could be zoomed in on on a much, much larger scale world map would have many advantages: Trade distances could be much larger scale and more accurate and have more of a purpose. Travel infrastructure between disparate cities on the map would feel more important. Building a very long rail line to a far-away city for example would add a lot. Potentially multi-player maps where other players are involved on a much larger scale could be implemented. Different world biomes relating to the given settings and latitudes could become a thing. Basically, the game ships with the road and rail tools, map and building editor, but there is nothing else- Not one building from the beginning until someone uploads it. There would be a base-game city building simulation model, where services such as fire stations and police stations, schools and hospitals are needed for population growth, but the actual building models and statistics for those buildings (number of workers, building coverage, building influence etc.) everything else is created by the players in models they upload. The building editor: The building editor would be an in-house maybe block based building tool - or buildings could be imported using other 3d design software and that is the content that populates the game. It would be like the steam workshop, but you get to subscribe only to the building models you find interesting- low Poly, or just well thought out and compelling. This way, you populate the game only with user-created content (maybe some of your own) that you actually like, and don't have any of the bloat that you don't want and bad building models you don't want. People would have just as much fun designing buildings in the game editor to fit their particular city as they would playing the game. Imagine the diversity of building design that people would come up with. There is a person on this forum who has made some amazing models (well, there are a lot of people actually), but the models are just more architecturally interesting than what CO developed. Even the musical score could be created by the players, and it would be triggered by certain city-growth benchmarks, such as population growth, cultural growth, education, or industrial triggers. Think the music in the SNES version of SimCity- only more potential triggers for different musical styles. The City Growth Models- the underlying city simulation could also be altered and tailored by players to create more realistic city growth patterns and city growth simulations- There would be a base city-simulation, but it could be replaced with other models created by the playerbase to help simulate different countries and cities growth patterns. - European cities grow differently than American Cities- Asian Cities grow differently as well. There really isn't a city-building game like this that exists right now. Perhaps a decent comparison would be something like Minecraft almost (but not really), where the players create the content and you are just kind of provided with the UI and also the road, rail, sea, and air framework to populate your game the way you want. You can of course download mods as well to alter the game. Almost everything is user created though. The building and map upload areas would also have the option to tip the person who made the model or map, which would encourage people to try and do a really good job, and would incentivize people further to create content. Everything would be free to download as a rule, but with a tip optional. A percentage of the tip might go to whoever develops the underlying game infrastructure, with the content creator keeping most of it, or maybe the entire thing is open sourced. You could even download different water type brushes, water behavior models, trees, props.. basically anything and everything, and the sizes would be decided by the content creator. This probably should be built in Unreal Engine 5. The game just ships with the 3 basic things though - 1. The building editor, 2. the map editor, and 3. the basic city simulation model, road, rail and the UI. What are your thoughts on this?- 15 Replies
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Hey there everybody. I am a long time city-building fan who has kind of lost interest over the last few years. Skylines was fun for me to a certain extent, but didn't quite scratch the city-builder key points I was looking for- mainly a density related downtown growth algorithm, a more realistic scale, and more toned down color scheme (less donut trucks if you will). NewCity is more of a Macro city builder, and doesn't focus as much on traffic, sewage, electricity, death care and that type of thing. If you like that stuff, this probably isn't the game for you. If you found emptying cemeteries cumbersome, it might be. It has come a long way in the last year, and I am hoping as more people learn about it, it will really take off and become a cult classic of city building. With more people modding and adding buildings it could really take off. It has a very interesting simulation that a lot of other city-builders haven't figured out with a city-center effect. It is also strange to me that it has received such little attention in the city builder genre, as it is a lot of fun, and does some things right that others haven't. The game is only $15 on Steam right now.. definitely worth trying out. For me a lot more fun than Skylines, but everyone has their own taste.
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Is there any city building game better than SC4?
ironjaw posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
First, and foremost, I want to thank each and everyone here at Simtropolis, admins, mods, contributors, etc. that have made this game the most amazing and enjoyable, ever! I can't believe that 2003 is so many years ago, with the 20th anniversary, 2023 upcoming, I do feel ancient but this game cheers me up, nostalgic style. I played SC4 in 2003 when as 20 year old I stood in front of a queue to buy it at a local game store. I still have the original game discs somewhere in storage. I spent many hours in front of PC laptop with a resolution of 800 x 600, such a tiny screen, while also reading the Prima game guide and searching the net for articles. And then when RH came out, I was overjoyed with the new release and again stood in a longer queue, this time to buy it. RH made such a big change. That is also somewhere in storage, after I had bought the game digitally both on the Mac App Store (disappointed), when I moved to the Mac, and Steam. Although, I've been playing on a Mac since, and am therefore not gaining the full experience of the mods, night mode, etc, as well the issues incumbent on Mac users, such as .exe files, I still love the game. NAM just breathes new life into this game. So my question is to all of you still hanging around here, and keeping this game going from strength to strength, is there any other city building game better than SC4? Will this last another 20 years, I know I will still be playing this. Or am I just nostalgic? -
SimCity, like many city simulators, are serious game. But it turns out there's a hidden ideology behind it. The story starts when the creator of SimCity, Will Wright, came up the idea of city simulator when reading Urban Dynamics by Jay Wright Forrester. The problem with that book is it's authored based on the famous Nixon idea of minimizing the government intervention. The book also lacked representation of both city demographic and geographic. While Urban Dynamics were indeed serious simulation, SimCity weren't. But it turns out, it didn't. There are real life examples of mayor being tested with the game. Along with carrying problematic model, SimCity was also black box. This is problematic since you can't replicate exactly how the game works, an important aspect of the scientific method. But, there's a plot twist to it. Magnasanti is a famous city that revealed the black box of SimCity. It turns out that the quality of life of the citizens aren't important. DoNotEat1 made a city based on history and its biases although using the competitor Cities: Skylines. He have to use mods to convey his city story. SimCity has been associated with Republican idea, at least in the past, like regressive taxes and free market policies. SimCity isn't only the controversial city-related algorithm. There are 3 of them and the researchers refused the request. In conclusion, we should aware of the black box.
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In my experience, I can agree SimCity the series are capitalistic. You have to earn money more and more to fund more and more expensive and wealth, of course. The end goal of SC4 is simply to have lots of everything, not necessarily the quality of the citizen. Heck, I made a city of 700,000 inhabitants with no civic services. That's horrible. At least, it gives me lots and lots of money, something matters in SimCity. Oh yeah, SimCity the series isn't necessarily a democratic city. It's dictatorial and not even monarchy since it lacks hereditary dynasty, for instance, though you can add it by simply planning the future leaders in the dynasty and use HelloMyNameIs cheat to change the mayor name once the time comes. Don't forget the monopoly of dirty industry for some reason. To make things even worse, SimCity is a bit American-styled. SimCity 4 assumes you make in the perfect grid fashion, which Europe and some parts of Asia doesn't. And stock SimCity games are lacking pedestrian infrastructure, though SC13 have some traversable parks, and trams only added in SC13. And bike lanes were never added to the series at all. It doesn't mean you can't have socialist policies in SimCity. Using more efficient in budget wise civic services, such as the excellent BSC Schools & Hospitals, can provide such services to those in need without breaking the bank. Also, there are ordinances and tax policy that helps to counteract the big dirty, the wealthy or whatever you call, though honestly, 8% of (yearly, maybe) property tax is a bit too high since my country, Indonesia is only about 0.5% and that's without considering that my country only taxes 20% of land value. And, I did make a city with all of its citizen having high wealth, high education, and high life expectancy resulting to the highest income, work in comfortable offices, and high mayor rating (which is unfortunately have some artificial part due to I was using Census Repository Facility to gain income and more importantly, lift the cap since I don't make the cap lifter at the time). But for some reason, SC4 acts a bit buggy especially in the average income. And, the game is basically stagnated once you max out the quality of the citizen, and no traffic jam since I have few traffic. Also, it's not the efficient way space-wise since I have to build 1 million CO$$$ to serve 100K citizen. The obvious way to make higher goals to simply expand the city. And, that's could be a huge problem because cities are complex and you should have more room to improve the quality of the citizen, not just expand that only enrich the city and maybe the officials. But, I do have some disagreements. Despite not having homelessness as the problem, the series do have some social challenges such as abandonment due to lack of jobs, commute time, and pollution consequence to the sims despite no climate simulation. All of those are important in socialist government too. Another is they said the algorithm is black box. Well, it's open as long as the simulation is effecting the player. You can read the manual which is quite comprehensive and try to push the simulation to your goals. You should able to figure the algorithm and in fact, there are some real evidences. From commute time research by Z of NAM Team, to even small things like not being able to build all of tilesets at once even with ironically named "Build all tilesets once" selected. I think the biggest mystery (or black box) is the other logic of the game itself. For instance, we can't crack the weather system completely since the system never affect us in a clear way in the first place. Or, we can't figure out how to add another real networks. Yeah, there's a legal challenge we need to solve, but for older games like the 2000 and 3000, we can figure out the algorithm and analyze it. At least, it isn't like the YouTube algorithm since we can't completely figure out in short amount of time, always updated, and there's no old (legally enough) version (or old version at all, functional ones, not including old version of YouTube archived by Wayback Machine) to be figured out by us. Another is they imply that SimCity has some sort of end goal. Well, it doesn't, except for keeping mayor rating from extremely low level and keeping the budget in green. There's a something called UDI, though. But, you're not forced to do the goal, except to unlock buildings, which except for one building (Grand Central Station?), can be obtained by other ways. There's no one force you to expand the population, except if the budget is red. If your budget is green, then feel free to be stuck in certain number of population. If the budget is increasing but you don't wish to increase the population, well just improve the quality of life of your sims. Sims also needs better and better quality of life. One tip to increase the quality of life of your sims and reduce the stressed look of the city is to add parks, which is functional (except for some parks). Did the advisor advise you to expand the city to give better wages to them? Nope. C:S doesn't help either since they're not a great representation of city's scale (1 high-rise apartment only consists of 5 families, for instance) and they lacked wealth system, which is unrealistic. If we can combine both great aspects of both games, we could have better game overall with plus point being constantly updated and extremely moddable. But in the meantime, choose the game that you love (and suitable for your computer) and work with the workarounds. Let me know your opinion in the replies. Correct me if I wrong. Thanks. Addendum: this could be an April Fool but I don't exactly sure. Let me know.
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Hi everyone. My game was released on itch.io .It's a game like SimCity classic, as the first SimCity game. Below is the link for the game. It's free!! https://djmjm.itch.io/djms-city-builder
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I inserted an image below. What Sims game is this, exactly? This is amazing. Is there a game that looks like this where you can build exactly what buildings you want without having to use a budget or have rules? I'd like to just try creating my town from real life. Thanks!
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Varied collection of real-life sources for city-building
pschulka posted a topic in Architecture & Urban Planning
hey folks, attached you'll find a small collection of sources to give you ideas for building more realistic cities. i have myself struggled with realism in my ...."creations", so i started looking for some inspiration. what i listed here is an overview consisting of some articles, educational material of varying depth and some youtube-videos for ease of consumption. i hope it will give other players some ideas how to fill those big empty maps, too! and lest we forget google earth! (oh how i wish we'll someday have a game that will look like the 3d-view there.) https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-sociology/chapter/urbanization-and-the-development-of-cities/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_city http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/SimCity/manual/history.html https://www.boredpanda.com/how-famous-city-changed-timelapse-evolution-before-after/?utm_source=duckduckgo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning http://metrocosm.com/morphing-metro-maps/ https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/about/city-planning-history.page cheers.-
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Hi there, im playing SC since the Amiga Version. SimCity never dies But i cant understand, why they wont be able to set up SC5? It would be a Hit. Happy Holidays, Dirk
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In this post I would like to lay out my thoughts and wishes on the ultimate SimCity game. I am not a game designer, nor anything close to an expert on SimCity. But while I still love SimCity 4 and loved SimCity 2000 in the past, I always recognize shortcomings and am always thinking about what might make these great types of games even better. I know the ultimate SimCity may never be made. I know we may not even get a proper sequel to SimCity 4. But a man can dream so here - just for fun and hopefully a nice discussion as well - I'd like to share these dreams with you. I have many thoughts and ideas, too many to write down in one post. So this OP will be mostly an index to topics that I will share in replies to this post. I hope this forum allows me to do it this way and to make future edits to this OP. Core concept My core idea for the ultimate SimCity lies within the name of the franchise itself: "Sim" and "City" My ultimate SimCity is purely about simulating a city. The word "simulating" implies realism, which must be also be part of the fundament for each game design decision. So to summarize: my ultimate SimCity is a game about simulating a realistic city. Pretty much all my ideas stem from this fundamental concept, which I will describe in more detail below. Detailed ideas RCI zones and AI-decisions on what buildings develop where .... t.b.c.
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Hello guys, I´m new here and I´m not sure if i´m understanding how it works in general, and less where I should post this topic. I´m gonna introduce myself and my question, so I think is the right forum to do it. If I'm wrong, just let me know and I'll put this topic in the correct forum/ My name is Oscar and I'm a World History teacher in Kyrgyzstan. I'm quite noob in city builders, so I arrived here to learn about this amazing community, I saw some of the modelings and they are incredible. So, I arrived here because I'm trying to settle a cool project for my students but I don't know how to do it. My problem with the kyrgyz students is that their culture sometime is quite far from the World History and they feel disconnected to that kind of matters. My idea is create a project where the student will build a new city/state somewhere in the world and this city will survive through the history interacting with all the events. The main goal of the students is create the wealthiest city of the world (or at least of the class). They will win money to spend in new buildings and grow, if they participate during the lessons, if they do the homework, doing good exams, etc. They will interact with the empires and kingdoms, deciding if they want to fight, be friends, or pay tribute. Well, the main problem of this project is that I don't know how I can create a city for them and they can see their progres and feel accomplished. I tried to use Blender and 3D animation, but I'm really bad on it and I don't have enough time to learn it. So I was thinking in some city builder with a big community where I can get mods of different buildings from different ages and culures. Because that's the point, if the city is in Egypt, India, China or Europe, the Architectonic style should be different too. I don't have thousands of dollars to spend trying different games, so maybe you know a good solution for that. For this yeat I'll need only the Classical Era: Summeria, Greeks, Egypt, China, Rome, etc. but if you need any game or easy tool to do that I'd really appreciate. I think with this ways the students will learn a lot and enjoying the process. Thanks if you read till here, I hope I express myself properly, and thanks for any kind of advice, Oscar
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There is a new game named Townscaper which is probably the most simple and relaxing city-building game ever made. It's a procedural generation city-building digital toy in which you build medieval aesthetic towns in the middle of the sea simply by click-and-build. No menus and construction options, just choose the color and click anywhere you want. The game will try to figure out what you want to build, with the result of endless building possibilities, such as bridges, gardens, towers etc. Just click and have fun
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Hi there, I’m JimmySnails, creator of Cytopia. https://github.com/JimmySnails/Cytopia I'd like to introduce myself and my project here. I've always loved SimCity 2000 most and some day i thought about what SC2K would be like, when it was made today (with pixel art, of course). In my opinion, it'd beall about moddability. I always disliked the very closed environment of SC2K and there were too many missing features. What does that mean? You can pretty much change everything in cytopia easily. From removing / replacing buildings you don't like to adding a bunch of new buildings. Even the UI system is completely moddable via a json file. So eventually i've started working on this project several months ago and meanwhile we've built quite the community. We have 4 awesome graphics artists now, one fantastic sound designer who does an original soundtrack for the project and lots of people helping out in other ways. I'm still the only developer, so if you want to join us (or know someone with C++ skills who'd be interested) that'd be much appreciated. I'm really proud of what Cytopia has become in such a short time and we'll continue to work on the project with dedication. I hope you guys like our vision of Cytopia and i can post more about my Project here on this forum! Here you can see the last release video of Cytopia:
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I cannot wait for the day when a city building strategy game implements Google Maps/Earth into their platform, that would be very very exciting. Imagine being able to modify any Google Map in a Sim game? Wow.
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So i've been playing Cities Skylines for a while and and thought I would try something a little different from a let's play, so I started a new City with unlimited money and several mods this first episode was kept fairly simple with a small American suburbs to kickstart the series. This is going to be a large project where I will build a realistic looking city that hopefully pleases the eye. I would love to hear some feedback on your thoughts and suggestions for the series.
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http://www.citystategame.com/ I tried to search this here but no one seems to have brought it up so far so yeah. I hope its a good game, the game will be out by Feb 22 this year https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.shadowtree.software.trafficbuilder Not exactly a ciybuilding game, its a traffic light management game of sort. but the fun part here is you get to layout your own roads and simple objects as if you're creating a small city. the best part of it is that it has a server where you can share and view other uploaded maps. This game's vehicle AI makes me wish that CSL would adopt it, no more cars driving on a single lane in a highway (well at least most of em )
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How do you build a perpendicular onramp on a sunken highway?
olegario39 posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
when i try to build a perpendicular onramp on my sunken highway, it ruins the "sunkenness" of the highway... -
Hey everyone! I'm just curious what type of cities you like to build or the look you go for in your cities. For example, I love building classic American towns or American cities inspired by east coast/rust belt. I tend to build many older building in cities and rowhomes, combined with real chains and newer skyscrapers. There is just something about brick, ornate buildings and historic houses that makes the city come alive!
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Are there any good medieval city building games? or does such an type of game not exist?
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Are there any city building game where i can build an dystopian/totalitarian looking City? I want to build an City that could be an capital of an totalitarian fascist oder communist dictatorship. Does such an city building game exist? Most cities in city building games look very colorfull and not really dystopian, can you build in simcity 4 such an city?
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Are there any futuristic city building games, where you can build an extremely futuristic looking City (like coruscant)? Or do sci fi city building game not exist because it would be too difficult to program such an game?
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How do i build in Simcity 4 a big sucessfull metropolis? How Long does it take to build such an big City with over 1 million inhabitants?
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Today I'm showing the construction of two new developments: Norfax and Tyson's Corner, as well as the towns of Durham and Lafayette. Norfax is a 1970s condo development located west of Alexandria between I-85 and the Halifax River. It has 13,651 units in the entire complex, plus shops, restaurants, gyms, pools, and other community facilities. Here's some pictures of the construction. Building Tyson's Corner was both fun and difficult, since I built it on a diagonal grid. Durham is a town of 20,000 people. It was founded in 1693 by farmers, was established as a city in 1808, and has rapidly suburbanized since World War II. Historic Downtown Durham: When the railroad was brought into Durham, rather than going around the hill, the builders chose just to cut a trench. And finally, Lafayette. This far-flung suburb was built up around the old Boston Central Railway. Its streets are anything but grid-like, and its small-town feel appeals to those who want a country feel. Lafayette Station, built in 1907. That's it for this post. Next I'll be showing the suburbs of Seneca, Halifax, and Charlestown.
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