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Showing results for tags 'experiment'.
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Hello everyone, In the wake of all the DLL stuff going on and the package manager for SimCity 4 called sc4pac, I've gained new interest in modding SimCity 4. One of the things that always bugged me is that it is not possible to draw a road under a bridge. This is hardcoded in the .exe, so it can't be changed with "normal" mods. Perhaps that a DLL mod could fix this somewhere in the future, but since I discovered that savegames can be edited, I've always wondered whether it would be possible to draw a road under a bridge by modifying the savegame. Hence I decided to go on a new SimCity 4 savegame endeavour that I decided to call the Under the Bridge Project where I will try to figure out if roads (and other network types) under bridges are possible. Now, in contrast to marking buildings as historical via savegame editing, or growifying plopped residentials, this one is a bit different because it is not known if it is even possible at all. For historical buildings and growifying, it was clear that it was possible to achieve it via savegame editing as it's just a matter of modifying the savegame to the correct state. With roads under bridges, we don't know if the game can handle this, so the outcome is at least uncertain. In my opinion, there are three possible outcomes for this project: It turns out that having functional roads under bridges is possible, after which I add a new command to my savegame editing tool to make the functionality available to everyone. This is the ideal scenario. It turns out that the game is unable to handle roads under bridges (things like CTD's etc.), but some minor tweaks with DLL modding might make it possible after all. It turns out that the tweaks needed for the game to handle roads under bridges are way too complex so that even a DLL mod is next to impossible without a complete rewrite of the game. Let's hope for the best, being scenario 1 of course. I will use this topic to document my findings as much as possible so that anyone interested in this topic can use it as a reference. I've used the same approach with my experiment of programmatically generating cities, and it has worked really well there. Allright, let's kick off! Instead of drawing roads out of nowhere, I decided to first try to move an existing road under a bridge. For this, I've created a small test city called "Under the bridge": The Network Subfiles of the savegame are all nicely decoded and I have implemented parsers for them, so I'm able to modify them easily. Let's see what happens if I move the road 8 tiles up north. For this, we have to properly update the coordinates in the Network Subfile, but also update the tile numbers in the Network index Subfile: Phew, no CTD here, that's a good start! The road has been nicely moved under the bridge, though there is clearly something wrong with the textures. Let's try to save the game and see if we experience a CTD. Cool, no CTD either after saving, and as a plus the game has redrawn the textures and now they are properly present. This is in line with what I already knew about textures from my experiments: if you save, the game redraws the textures. I guess that the reason why they weren't showing up right after moving is that there's some z-fighting going on between the road textures and the terrain textures. My guess is that this is somewhere stored in an unknown SimGrid, I'll have to investigate this later on. Let's see what the paths look like if we use the drawpaths cheat. That doesn't look too bad actually! Now let's try to connect a new road to the ends: This is where things start to go wrong. The roads don't connect, but they just seem to overlap. I'm not sure what's happening here, but my guess is that there is some other information present somewhere in the savegame that tells the game what tiles are to be considered as a road. This information was probably not moved correctly along with the road, and so the game just assumes there's no road there yet. Interesting. I assume this is stored somewhere in a SimGrid, but unfortunately not all SimGrids have been decoded yet, so it's something I will have to figure out. Anyway, I think we're off to a good start. The game did not crash, neither when opening the city, neither when saving the city, so that's huge already. Up next I will have to figure out how to make the game recognize that there's a road somewhere. It seems like moving the network tiles only moves the textures and the paths, but does not make the game recognize it as an actual road. Perhaps someone from the NAM team has more information on that. As far as the main question of whether it is even possible: the signs are good, but we're definitely not out of the woods yet. There is still the possibility that if we figure out what makes the game recognize a tile as a road, it turns out that it can't have both a road and a bridge on the same tile. But we'll see what the future brings in the next posts!
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My little things along the way. My little tests, creations, according to my desires of an evening, weekend ... which may not yet deserve an edition in "Plugins" ... that you will want to criticize or just pick here ... or not My little showcase ! And to start, today it was partly "ripple" modding but I'll come back to it later ; and a soil cutting (cutaway ? .. not sure of term) : scoty_cutaway_04.dat @CorinaMarie may not have enough to open a cutaway shop yet, but it's still one more ... pffuu the sixth .. seventh one ?
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ReShade and SimCity 4: A horrible experiment
Toby Ferrian posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
After seeing the recent discussions about using DirectX wrappers to run SimCity 4 at higher resolutions, I thought, can I use this to run ReShade with SimCity 4? The answer, to quote myself from Discord, is: In this thread I will share the results of my experimentation. Prepare yourselves, we are about to tread on unholy ground. To make this work, I used the dgVoodoo2 wrapper, along with the latest version of ReShade at the time of this writing, ReShade 4.8.2. I also ran the game at 1440p. If you wish to try this yourself, download dgVoodoo2 and extract the files within the MS\x86 folder within the zip file into the game's Apps folder, same as the game's exe file. ReShade comes with its own installer, so I will not provide instructions for that here. (Note: The performance impact of all this is minimal on my system, but your mileage may vary.) Once both are installed, simply run the game, and you should see the following: The ReShade overlay at the top of the screen, and the dgVoodoo2 watermark in the bottom right. If you see both of these, you are now able to see the horrors I have witnessed with your own two eyes. Now let's move on to my experiments. Antialiasing Easily the best use of ReShade within SimCity 4, at least in my opinion. It simply smooths out jagged edges in an image. It does not make a huge difference, but it results in a softer image. In my opinion, it looks much nicer than it did before, and is the only effect I can recommend using for normal gameplay. HDR HDR will make the image look more vibrant and colorful. With the right settings, it can look great. However, I don't recommend enabling it for normal gameplay, only for screenshots. The reason: Like all other effects, it also affects the user interface. Bloom don't just don't but if you do anyway, it will allow for some fantastic night shots: It can also be combined with other effects for an even better result: It might even look good during the day, but in my experimentation I found that it mostly ends up too bright: However, do make sure you hide the UI and unpause the game first, otherwise the bloom from the UI will bleed into whatever you're taking a screenshot of: And do be careful when adjusting the settings, otherwise you might find your eyes dripping down your face from the blindingly bright images: This is everything I have tested so far, but feel free to experiment with ReShade on your own and share your results here. -
Military base and federal prison experiment
brianc1327 posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
In some recent posts of mine, I described a region that I am building, and did some speculation on what I call the "desperation awards." For example, the military base, federal prison, toxic waste dump, and the other rewards one gets when one is down to just a few thousand dollars and is loosing money quite rapidly (or uses the "you dont deserve it" cheat code). I speculated further that once the income from these "desperation awards" gets one "over the monetary hump" and a city is making money without one (even if that is not one's goal, a city has to make a small profit or at least break even), which ones should be kept and which ones should be bulldozed. I concluded that, at least in some circumstances, the military base and the federal prison should be kept, while the others should be bulldozed. I further speculated on whether the "you dont deserve it" cheat should be used to put these in the city before you start developing it (I suppose one could even see what happens when all the reward buildings, both positive (churches, etc) and negative (toxic waste dump, etc) are put in a city before development). I decided to do just that. In "Central Producer 3," which is one of the 4kx4k cities that I am zoning as only industrial, I am using the "you dont deserve it" cheat code to put a military base along with the power plant, bus stops, etc., in the city before I started zoning. It seemed to increase the amount of industry that the city attracted before I had to start building the "Housing and Business" cities around it. In my "Housing and Business" cities, which are the cities surrounding my "Central Producer X" cities, I run out of jail cell space rather quickly, so I put a prison in the city in the initial setup of it, as far away from reidential areas as I could. I also put some parks around it to serve as a buffer. In the "Housing and Business" cities surrounding "Central Producer 3," the "subregion" I am currently developing, I am putting a federal prison instead of a "regular" prison. After putting it in, I exit to region then reopen the city to reset the rewards buildings because that is the way I prefer playing, putting in the reward buildings when I earn them, though as an experiment i put in all the reward buildings (positive and negative) in the initial set-up of my city just to see what would happen. I think that is one of the good things about SimCity 4 (and perhaps other city building games such as skylines, etc., but I don't k know as I have never played skylines). You can play a region by whatever self imposed rules you might have, such as not using external mods, not using money cheats, not using cheats at all (in this case specifically the "you dont deserve it cheat" to get the military base or the federal prison), then open a city (or entirely new region), see what happens when you use the cheat code or whatever, then go back to the original city or region and continue playing it with your self imposed rules. For instance, several years ago, I noticed that there was a cheat code called "howdryiam" that removes the necessity of having to have water producing facilities such as towers or pumps, so I opened up a region to see what happens when I use this code. I really don't remember, but I think the code had to be reentered each time the city was opened. One thing I do remember is that I was pretty constantly putting out fire, I think so often as to almost make the game unplayable. I don't know if this was an artifact of the way the cheat code was implemented or if it was a deliberate punishment for using the cheat code. Another time, I opened a new region to perform an "education experiment" where I put in various levels of educational facilities (no schools, just an elementary school, an elementary and a high school, etc). In my final city, I not only put in all the regular educational facilities but also used the "you dont deserve it" code to get the educational reward buildings (university, central library, etc.) in addition to the regular education buildings. After I was done with the "education experiment," I went back to the region I was building, in fact, I think that this region that I developed these cities in is still sitting in my regions folder with 5-10 cities with varying levels of education and all the rest of the cities undeveloped. Brian Christiansen -
Programmatically generating a city: A savegame experiment
smf_16 posted a topic in SC4 Modding - Open Discussion
Hello everyone, In the wake of the discovery that savegames can be edited - see this thread for more general info - I decided to set myself a goal. I want to write a program that is able to plop an entire city - or at least the lots in that city. I have actually been playing with this idea for a few years, the main reason being that I always struggle with creating nice transitions between the CBD and the suburbs. The game only gives us the possibility of zoning either Low, Medium or High, but this just doesn't do the trick. You'll always be able to see very clearly what the Low, Medium & High zones are. One of the first achievements after the savegame discovery was the ability to turn plopped residentials into functional residentials. While this certainly helps because we are now able to build whatever we want instead of waiting for it to be grown, humans are actually pretty bad in "creating randomness". I've experimented a bit with the plopped residentials and it is really hard to create something that doesn't look too repetetive - unless that's exactly what you're aiming for of course, repetition has its beauty as well. I figured that if I was able to programatically plop any available lot, I could also write a program that generates an entire neighbourhood in a semi-random way based on a arbitrary function. For example, we could set the "maximum height" per tile and then have the program build something by selecting an eligible lot (from a predefined set of lots) that does satisfy the height restriction. As such we could create "skyline functions" and generate a city accordingly. Another reason that I'm starting this project is that it will a good exercise to learn what is and what isn't possible when editing savegames. I will post my findings, struggles, remarks, discoveries, ... here so that this thread can serve as a reference for other people experimenting with the savegames. Moreover I obiously don't understand completely how the game works and how all file types are related, so I will definitely need some help on the road. With this thread I also hope to find the required and much appreciated help as such. So... Let's kick off! As I've already mentioned above, the process to programatically generate cities is actually two-fold: First we have to be able to plop any lot we want, wherever we want. Once that is done, we have to write an algorithm that decides what lot should be plopped where. The second part is pretty much agnostic of the game's inner workings, so I guess the hardest part will be part 1. If I understand correctly, if a lot is plopped in the game, the game does something like this: Look at the lot exemplar and figure out what building, props & flora are on the lot. I found that these things are stored in the LotConfigPropertyLotObject property of a lot exemplar. Modify the terrain underneath the lot according to what is stored about slope conformity in the lot exemplar. Put the building, the props and the flora in their respective subfiles in the savegame. This also means that - if I understand correctly - when a lot is plopped (or grown) it's "exploded", meaning that the building, props & flora are no longer tied to the lot itself. Hence if you edit the building, props or flora of the lot in the LE, the existing lot in game will not change. As far as I know this is not the case though for textures, they seem to be "Hot Reloaded" (but correct me if I'm wrong). So if we want to programmatically plop a lot, we'll have to do something similar. Of course we will need to edit the Building Subfile, the Prop Subfile and the Flora Subfile here, but these are all nicely decoded according to the wiki, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. As a first step I think we could ignore the props & flora and just try to plop a lot with only the building and its textures. According to this list 0x0: Building: Defines position, and IID reference of building exemplar. 0x1: Prop: Defines position, and IID reference of a prop exemplar. 0x2: Texture: Defines position and IID reference of a base or overlay texture. 0x3: Fence: Not implemented currently. 0x4: Flora: Defines position, and IID reference of a flora/growable tree exemplar. 0x5: Water Constraint Tile 0x6: Land Constraint Tile 0x7: Network Node: Defines transit connections and automata paths the building is stored in the LotConfigPropertyLotObject where the first entry is 0x0. The structure furthermore looks like this: Rep # | Value | Description ----------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 0x0-0x7 | Type descriptor. See above. 2 | 0xAB | Level of detail modifier (See Table 3 below) 3 | 0x0-0x3 | Orientation. 0=South, 1=West, 2=North, 3=East 4 | * | X Location Position. 0x00000000-0xFFFFFFFF 5 | * | Z Location Position. 0x00000000-0xFFFFFFFF 6 | * | Y Location Position. 0x00000000-0xFFFFFFFF 7 | ''' | X1 Size Position. bounding box 8 | ''' | Y1 Size Position. bounding box 9 | ''' | X2 Size Position. bounding box 10 | ''' | Y2 Size Position. bounding box 11 | 0x00000000 | Usage (optional/mandatory) Flag. Unused. 12 | 0xABBBBCCC | ObjectID (See Table 2 below) * These values define position. VERY large numbers. ''' These values define bounding box size. VERY large numbers. and for buildings Rep #13 is added which looks like ---0x0 (Building) Type--- 13 | IID/ID | For Ploppable buildings, this is the IID of an exemplar/S3D pair. | For Special Buildings (tollbooth, etc.) IID of exemplar for data. | For Growables, the ID of the lots compatible building family. That seems fine so far. If we have the Lot Exemplar that contains the LotConfigPropertyLotObject entries, we should be able to find the building easily based on its IID stored in Rep #13. However, this is where I hit my head against the wall for the first time. I opened an example lot in the reader (I chose Simmer2's Easy Money here) and looked at the LotConfigPropertyLotObject entries. It looks like this: So I though I should be looking for a building with IID 0x79536AF6 here. Just to confirm, I've checked this in SC4 by using BuildingPlop and I noticed that the building I needed indeed had this id: What I noticed as well though is that the corresponding lot also had the same IID. I guess that was on purpose by Simmer2 because the building only appears on one lot. However, I looked for this number 0x79536af6 in the .SC4Desc file, but I was unable to find it anywhere: The Exemplar in the .SC4Desc file has TGI 0x6534284a 0x7cc07882 0x28cd5dcb, while I thought that its instance ID here would be 0x79536af6. Probably that's not how the TGI system works I guess, but I don't know where this building id 0x79536af6 can be found then. I tried to do some research on TGI's, but it's all very overwhelming and I have some trouble understanding it. Is there anyone here that can help me out and give a brief explanation - or point me to some resource - of how the TGI system exactly works and where I'm supposed to find the building id 0x79536af6? If I understand correctly, the Type ID is used to designate file types but the Group ID & Instance ID aren't very clear for me. However, I think that a group ID is used to link files of different types together (which you can see in the image above: the exemplar and the xml file have the same Group ID, but the same Instance ID as well). Additionally, I think a lot of the information I need is already well known - for example the PIM X includes a lot editor, so it sure knows where it should look for buildings & props on a lot. In this regard it would be extremely useful if the source code of both PIM X & Savegame explorer are available somewhere, but I didn't manage to find them anywhere yet. Anyone who knows if these are available somewhere? Many thanks and I hope I can bring this project to completion with the help of the community! - Seba -
Welcome to Kuzcek
drocca posted a City Journal entry in What Happens when you Withdraw All Government Services?
Welcome to Kuzcek! Named for the town in the movie Borat where the titular character is from, Kuzcek is a great place to raise your kids, retire, start a new life, or just live in! Complete government services include a hospital, a museum, schools (coming soon), full police coverage, 26 community gardens and roads paved with only the finest asphalt. I've developed the city much like I do my other cities, with an avenue grid and roads within, with residential "districts". It's nothing like the city in Borat... yet. Little do Kuzcek's future Sims know, they're part of an experiment. Once the city meets a certain set of criteria and holds it for five years, the government's going to pull the plug, everything except power and water will have its funding set to zero overnight. Before that happens, the city must: -Have an EQ of 180, a life expectancy of 90 years, a university, and an advanced research center. The reason schools are coming soon is that I know that this city will hit the required 4,000 and 6,000 population within in game months for the bigger schools so I just wait.-
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experiment Teleworking and automation in SimCity 4
Terring posted a topic in SimCity 4 General Discussion
Imagine a city where most Sims (or even all of them) can work from the comfort of their home, without having to commute twice a day. A city, where industries and farms can produce their products without workers, and where commercial buildings run as access warehouses from where you can get whatever you wish delivered by a drone. Sounds like a science fiction concept, but actually it's a reality which is approaching us day by day. This is what happens if you combine teleworking and automation. Teleworking is the ability to work from wherever you want, even from your house. You don't have to spend time traveling by bus or car to get to your job. Just turn on your laptop, your smartphone or your PC and get to work. The benefits are enormous. Teleworking reduces traffic jams and air pollution, and make easier for the teleworkers to balance their family responsibilities and personal lifestyle, while protecting them from detrimental situations. In other words, teleworking allows you to work, listen to your favorite music and spend some time with your children, while you're protected from the rain and the seasonal influenza, all at the same time. Automation is the form of technology that can perform actions without human assistance. Automation today is at the center of a very hot debate. Some people claim that the technological unemployment it produces will eventually destroy our economic system and even our civilization, while others claim that automation can change our economic system to the better and liberate man from any kind of labor, allowing her/him to be free and pursue higher things. So, can we play with teleworking and automation on Simcity? And if yes, what results we'll get? Let's find it out. There is a mod named RCImulti made by @niloluiz. It's actually a pack with mini mods for various aspects of the game, like jobs and demand. The one I'm most interested about is the "homejobs", that deals with residential caps and adds jobs at the residential buildings, allowing Sims to actually work at home. OK, not exactly at their home. Technically, Sims can work at somebody else' home. This can simulate jobs like baby sitters and gardeners, but it's also the closest thing we can have for teleworking as well. All homes and apartment buildings will keep housing their Sims, providing this time some jobs for other Sims as well. How many jobs depends on the file you'll choose to use. The "10pct_homejobs_uncapped.dat" will provide 10% of the building capacity in jobs, so an apartment building that houses 100 Sims will provide 10 residential jobs. The "25pct_homejobs_uncapped.dat" will provide, you guess it, 25%. But the most radical file is, hands down, the "100pct_homejobs_uncapped.dat". It gives all the capacity of the building in jobs. In other words, the apartment building of our example will house 100 Sims and give jobs to 100 Sims at the same time! So, what will happen if all Sims can work at their home? What if all Sims can telework? I've made a little experiment to find it out, and the results are very interesting to say the least. For this experiment the only files I had in my plugins folder are the 100pct_homejobs_uncapped.dat and the Simoleon RH to get more money from taxes. No NAM, no CAM (although I'm not sure if the homejobs files are CAMpatible at all), no nothing. Only those two files. First, we need a city. A big one, with plenty of Sims, traffic, and unemployment. And no mass transit. I'm too lazy to build one from scratch, so I used the Big City Tutorial city from the Timbuktu region. No teleworking, for now. I've changed many things at this city, like adding parks and police stations and bringing more heavy industries. And as you can see, the city remained a mess, with a lot of abandoned and dilapidated homes. We all know that Sims are too lazy to pick the fastest route instead the shortest one, but I thing the main reason why there are so many abandoned homes is the serious lack of jobs. As about the traffic, it's bad in some spots. This city has only streets and roads. Not even a single avenue. So yeah, this city is miserable, even with all those parks and hospitals I've build. But what if we use the teleworking trick? What if all Sims had the alternative of working at their home? Will this technology solve both the traffic and the unemployment problems at the same time? The answer, is yes! After adding the 100pct_homejobs_uncapped.dat file at the plugins folder, I demolished all the abandoned and dilapidated homes to make room for new Sims to come. When that happened, the new Sims found a job. Instead of looking for a job at the offices and industries, finding nothing and leaving the city, they got residential jobs. In our case, they start teleworking. All Sims can now work, from factories or from their homes. Or from wherever they wish. Since Sims doesn't even have to get out of their homes, traffic has been having improved a lot. Safer streets, cleaner air... ...and a serious drop of car use! While experimenting and playing around, I discovered that the mod will affect immediately only the new Sims and not the older ones, unless they lose their previous job. If a Sim has already a job at a factory, it will not abandon it to start teleworking. Unless you remove her/his factory. Which I did. I removed and reconstructed the heavy industries of the city, to see if Sims will keep working to those factories. The result was that Sims dropped their previous jobs and start teleworking. We can imagine that those Sims are still working for those factories, from their homes this time. If you're an industrial robots administrator, why not supervising those robots from your house? But even with no workers, those factories are still running and producing goods. The only way this can be happened is by replacing the workers with machines and AIs. Maybe automation is indeed possible on Simcity. And yet, some Sims will still keep working on those factories. Maybe it's a hint that even teleworking has it's limits. We have tested the concept of teleworking on an already established city. But what will happen in a new city? The results are the above, plus one. We can now build cities with not a single factory or shop in them! Cities where all Sims can telework for corporations that might be in a distant city or even on another country. Or not. Maybe they're working for themselves, using their house as the HQ for their corporation. Or maybe they don't work at all. Maybe they let the machines doing all the hard job, so they can live however they want in a money-free society. So many potential, so many stories. And all the above, without having NAM yet. What will happen if we mix teleworking with NAM? Will both mods contradict each other, or they can coexist and even collaborate? Who knows? Maybe I'll experiment with it soon. Now I think we need a conclusion. For some of you, the above experiment is nothing more than a fun but unrealistic project with no practical use. For me, it's a small taste, an idea of the shape of things to come. The above idea might be a nice concept for making a futuristic city on Simcity, but it might also be how we'll be living in a not so distant future. Everything we take today as granted will be challenged and changed tomorrow. The story of our culture, our civilization and ourselves is also a story of change. And by the way, I'm a teleworker too. -
Considering the Upper East Side. Good Idea?
omnivoreceo posted a City Journal entry in Everybody is Moving to Ellinn (C:S)
I'm assuming you're referring to the recently less industrial area of the UES, that's probably going to end up with a new name because it's not really like the rest of the Upper East Side which is a lot grimier and old. Probably my new favorite part of town. This area is west of the M6 Highway, which separates it from the rest of the Upper East Side. This area will probably be another one of those hot areas soon that's going to be a haven for people who are new to the city. It's not going to be a place for families, though. It's all recent graduate housing/buildings for startup types/coworking space type dorms and bars galore. So yeah, if you're part of that demographic, it'll be perfect for you. Do you like beer? If not, you should start because there are SO. MANY. BREWERIES. over here. Borealis Craft Ales Avalanche Brewery Barrage Brewers Sanctuary Brewers Bottom's Up Brewing Company Labyrinth Brewing Dominion Fermentary Hop Dog Not sure exactly how that happened, maybe so many of these beer brewer types moved over there and before you knew it, this became the mecca for beer in the city. Prices for apartments are going up pretty substantially, but you can probably find a 1 BR flat in this section of town for around $850, which will seem like a bargain a year from now. It's not quite as popular for the tech folks as you'd expect for some reason, which is keeping prices mostly down because it's recent grads moving here and some newer people to the city. But it's still a bit of a hidden secret besides all. of. the. breweries. I don't expect that'll last into next year and beyond. Mark my words. Here's how it looked before they started redeveloping the area. -
Here's my first city in Cities: Skylines, River Town. It's more of an experimental city to get a grasp of what the game can do, so I don't have a definite plan. My first video is just me working on a highway interchange and setting up the basics of the city. The next video will certainly have a lot more going on. River Town: Episode 1
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Because I've been doing the city simulator thing for a long time like most of you, my latest challenges have been looking for cities that are built and essentially becoming "mayor" and then reconstructing them how I want. The challenge with this -- much like real cities -- is you can't be as painstaking without detracting from a functioning city. I like these constraints because it forces me to prioritize, it doesn't allow me to be perfect and it enables me over time to get more immersed into the city as neighborhoods take shape and I start rezoning areas say away from industrial to residential or whatever. I'm a big mixed use proponent, so I've been working on that. I added height restrictions throughout the city except downtown, so the skyline looks like "Dubai-like" despite the population of over 400k (3.5m fudged) because I too, like a realistic looking city. So to begin, I started working my way around town and dealing with the subway lines and bus lines, as I felt they could be better. The verdict on this project is that my bus lines need work. The subway is pretty successful, though. Not sure what state or country Helensburgh is in, but perhaps by looking at the map over time, you all can help me figure that out. I'm going to try to show progressive evolution since I started the map in late November through now, as I can dredge up screenshots. I've only JUST learned about HD screenshots, so I didn't start tinkering with those until the past few days, therefore most of my screenshots won't look amazing. But the best is forthcoming. Some of the original neighborhoods have evolved into smaller ones with more people, in some cases. So I'm posting one of the original neighborhood maps so that as we evolve you can see how I've managed to change things over time, too. Originally we had just 24 neighborhoods in town. It's grown a lot since then, but this will get you started.
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Hello guys, some time left and finally I made my port of my city. Not every aspect is the best solved, but i think it is not bad looking port/harbor. This port took one week of time to build it. What do you think about this guys? What ports did you make,
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Las Palma Experiment - an island with no highway connection
boformer posted a topic in Cities: Skylines Showcase
I did a little experiment: An island with no highway or train connections. Instead, I placed a cargo and passenger harbour in map editor (with the Advanced Building mod). The results are pretty cool: When I started the simulation, residential and commercial buildings were spawning, but there were no residents or cars on the road. A bit later the first passenger ship arrived and brought the first 30 residents: The interesting thing was that most of the residents were working in the cargo harbour, the passenger harbour or the power plant. These 3 buildings provided about 350 jobs alone. That was also the reason why no industry spawned. Cargo ships only brought goods for the commercial stores and the power plant. Industry started to spawn when the population was twice as high as the job count: The good thing is that the harbours didn't cause any expenses. It looks like buildings placed in the map editor are handled as "untouchable". That also means you can't open the info window, but that's only a minor problem. At least you can bulldoze the harbours. It would also be possible to use an airport instead of a passenger harbour. And it doesn't have to be in the initial tile! -
Ferries!? Took 10 seconds with mod tools...
boformer posted a topic in Cities: Skylines Modding - Open Discussion
Here is the result of a little experiment I did: Harbors and Airports use the same AI as train stations. All that is missing is a menu button to create transit lines. Here is what would a mod must do: Add ship line menu button (simple) Add missing strings to localization (simple) Enable transport line panel for ship lines (probably simple) Make ship lines visible in transport view (probably harder) -
Here is the random tree rotation mod!
boformer posted a topic in Cities: Skylines Modding - Open Discussion
You may remember this thread I started ago. I showed off a prototype for a mod that randomly rotates the trees in Cities: Skylines. It was not possible to rotate the LODs of the trees, so I did not release it: I changed my mind! I think this might be useful for some people who want to take nice close-up shots, and the transition between LOD and detailed model is not so bad. It applies the rotation to any tree just before the rendering, and can safely be enabled or disabled at any time. It also affects trees which were placed before the mod was installed. Workshop Link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=556784825 Media: -
Hello, guys. Yes, I have abandoned my City Journal for almost 2 years from now. I should not had done that, but at least Im back to get this done – even if it won’t be done as I initially planned. I had plans to introduce and show, in detail, 5 cities, however, in the end we are going to have 2-3 cities on detail. I had problems with my notebook (it did broke last year and I had to buy a bad one just to use internet and ms office), and, also, the Portuguese version of this Cj was completely lost by www.simcitybrasil.net (please don’t click). I´ve tried to restore it, but, by now, the Brazilian sim city website is completely gone. Well, Im going to start with the only thing the Brazilian version had and the English don’t have: The Article 1. First, I had to completely re-write it because I had no backup of it. Second, I pretend to release 3 articles about some interesting non-tutorial stuff. By now, I already have the article 2 done. Article 1 – Commute experiment As we known, Maxis use the metric system or international system to measure units of distance, time, and speed. It was posted more than a decade ago, somewhere on ST, that a Sim City square unit is 16x16 meters, the small map is 1x1 km, the medium map is 2x2 km and the big map is 4x4 km. I had done myself – two years ago – some “experiments” about commute and speed. First, with completely empty plugins folder, I´ve started with one house and one small shop. The first thing came into my mind was: “If a place is right near the other, is the commute is zero?”. Here´s the answer: No. As shown in the picture below: For calculating commute, the game counts 1 or 2 squares? I’ve decided to increase the distance between the house and the shop by 8 squares. If the game counts only 1 square in this case, the increase of commute would be 9x. If the game counts 2 squares, then it would be 5x times. An 9x increase means that the new commute would be 9x6=53. If 5 then it would be 6x5=30 minutes. So: This dramatic increase indicates that not only the game counts just 1 square or less in this case, but it also counts some time for the sim to leave his house or the count is less than a square. However, in order to not create unnecessary overcomplicating, lets count as 1 square. Before proceeding, I found something odd about the house and the shop. The game states that the whole city has 5 inhabitants, but the shop employs 7 people! Switching back, what about sims walking speed? Well, if you pay attention, they took about an hour to travel a distance that doesn’t look to be big. Think about it – How long you take to travel 1 km by foot (0.62 mile)? 15 minutes? 20? Well, for sure is not an hour. The average speed of a walking human is 5 km/hour (about 3 miles/hour). The average of a Sim City sim is: (9 squares x 16 meters/square)/(1 hour) (144 meters)/(1 hour) (0.144 km)/(hour) 0.144 km/hour! That’s less than 0.1 mile/hour. Wow, how slow, huh? Are sims turtles and Maxis never told us that? Well, maybe turtles in cars can get really fast. So, I made an increase on the distance to 20 squares, put a decent avenue (that made the distance increase to 22 squares), and here it is what I got: Much faster, huh? About 13 minutes, with 2x the distance… So lets get back to our simple speed calculation: (22 squares x 16 meters/square )/(13 minutes) (352 meters)/(0.217 hour) (1622 meters)/(hour) That’s about 1.6 km/hour, or almost 1 mile/hour. It looks like that sims cars travel about 3 times slower than a regular human being walking! How slow are they? Im really starting to think that a turtle would easily beat a sim on any race. Even using a car the sim would still lose for the turtle. Lol. What about a sim, in a car and on a highway, or in one of many Simtropolis sunken Highways, how much speed? It looks like that our poor, or better, slow sim, decided to buy a Porsche (the red car), so he would go faster. However, how can a poor ($, not $$$) sim can buy a supercar? This is just interesting evidence that SC4 generates the cars on the highway, without considering the wealth of the houses around. Getting back to the speed, here it is the new commute due to the highway: About 7 minutes. Then, the speed of a sim on a highway is: (1622 meters)/(7/13 hour) (1622 meters)/(0.54 hour) (3 km)/ (hour) 3 km/hour, or almost 2 miles/hour, is enough to win the turtle, but still too slow to win a human being walking. I made a similar experiment with subway, and the sim did took 8 minutes to take 20 squares. Something like 2 km/hour. What can we say about this? Well, sims are slow. Very slow. Very very slow. Now comes “my opinion” part. I really don’t think this is a mistake from Maxis. I believe they are very aware of this. They know. The real problem isn´t the fact that sims are slow. It is because the maps are too small. Here are some examples of city sizes: Tokyo = 2,188 km^2 London = 1,572 km^2 Ciudad de Mexico = 1,485 km^2 Johannesburg = 1,644 km^2 Toronto = 630 km^2 SC4 “large” map = 16 km^2 In terms of speed, in the biggest map SC4 can ever generate, it would take about an hour to go from an up-left house to a down-right store walking. It looks to be big, but, actually, it isn´t. At street speed, about 20 km/h (about 12 miles/hour), it would take about 15 minutes. At 100 km/h (about 62 miles/hour), it takes only 3 minutes. If Maxis decided to put sims at realistic speed, then what sense would the Rush Hour expansion do? With such small map there is no need for any fast ways of traveling. The commute on a city with only streets would be 15 minutes at peak (with no heavy traffic). There is no reason for subways or highways. The avenues and buses would solve any heavy traffic problems. No worries about commute times. I believe that, in order to try to mask the problem of a small map, they decided to make sims go slow. So, they would make the gameplay better (sacrificing simulation), and hide the real problem. I really think that very few people ever noticed that sims are really slow, and maybe not even half of Sim City players are aware about how small the “large” map is. This is because, at least in 2003, there was no computer that could take a real size map. I really hopes that in the future, that changes, and really hope for some new City Sim with a 20x20 km map or larger.
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Who Uses Online Mode to Make Cities?
TheCraftKid posted a topic in SimCity (2013) General Discussion
I really only use online mode to experiment with the Global Market at best, and fix people's abandoned cities on random servers. I do have friends I collaborate with on North America East 3, but I only use multiplayer 20% of the time because of the major benefits of Offline Mode. I would like to know about the state of EA's SimCity servers, so I would like to know how often the community actually uses them. Thank you! -
This weekend I decided to experiment. With Turtle Speed. I created a 3-city region to keep it simple with a main objective of ONLY playing in Turtle Speed. Secondary objective, minimal pollution. The creators give you a pretty good region to start with; one city has all the resources while the other two just have good water and wind supply. I start with one of these and call it TurtleSpeed (to remind me f my goal). I build away in Clearwater, trying to micromanage everything I can. Progress started slow, EXTREMELY slow. And I found myself taking out loan after loan. Once I got my first town hall upgrade, my first module was a Dept. of Finance to open up the larger loan amounts. My first plop was a library and RCI JUST enough to meet the demands. That means I had a mere 10 industrial buildings to start with. From here on out it is just Commercial and Residential to see if I can flourish with minimal pollution from industry. So far so good, right? Well.....right. I have only minimal traffic issues and as of August of Year 1, I have almost 20K population, Wind Power, 1x Clinic, 2x Fire Small, 1x Police, Dept of Tourism and Finance, Grade School, Community College, Expo Center. But I couldn't neglect my other cities. My plot of land of Norwich Heights with the resources has become JUST an OIL town for now with a Dept of Utilities (Sewage Central), Trash Collection for region, 1x Clinic and a trade depot for a booming industrial section with some residential and commercial. It is having some issues with making a profit, having to turn off parks and other sources but it is finally catching up to par with my main city of Clearwater. My third town only has a few houses. Because of Turtle Speed, you really end up spending a lot of time with individual cities and it is hard to even manage 3 at this speed right now. Discoveries of Turtle Speed: -There is some sort of correlation of actual time spent playing the game and the amount of time it takes structures to be built in your city. I only have a few small (low/mid class ) high rises but they were built in my city in due time, all in turtle speed, sometime I feel within a "hour" of sim-play. -It takes TIME, I was nervous about my first Expo event as I had No Dept. of Tourism or transportation system or other drives for tourists, but I managed to make 15K off the Motocross event. -It is a lot of fun. I managed to power my 2 cities off of a mere 3 wind turbines for a long time. Once I added population and the Expo Center, power and sewage production/consumption went up drastically and I had to plop more. -I am just drawing roads, no grid format here for the most part and traffic has been alright. I have been keeping how I want avenues to look in the city when i design the layout and so far so good. I hope to get some images up soon. Any other people have some experiences with turtle speed?
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The new Simcity gives you the ability to build truly circular cities, something "impossible" in the grid-based Simcity 4. Too bad that the new buildings are not designed for those kind of constructions. So let's have a look at Simcity 4. In original version, the closest shape to circle was an octagon. Thanks to N.A.M. team and the F.A.R.-3 technology however, it's now possible to build 16gon cities! But N.A.M. team didn't stop there. Not only the original F.A.R.-3 is now dragable, but F.A.R.-2 is now possible. Check the video to have a look. With F.A.R.-3 and the new F.A.R.-2, grid will be a thing of the past. Thanks to N.A.M., it's possible to build gridless cities without having ugly empty spaces between the buildings. But this is not enough. With the new F.A.R.-2, it's possible to build 24gon cities. Even closer to an almost circular city! Thanks to N.A.M. team, I can now build this! Now I need to find a... formula? blue print? basic design? You name it. Anyway, a way to make always perfect 24gon in any shape. Because however I'm not mathematician, any help will be more than welcomed
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