FourWinds

I spotted this thread and it reminded me of a BBC news story I read. Apparently you're all being farmed by the south Korean government: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28861625

I haven't seen any update posts from Maxis on the SC forums, no sign of life for months ! Plus their new AAA project and their new recruiting makes me belive that Maxis gave up on SimCity 5.................... :( Don't be sad. I have faith in Paradox and Cities: Skylines. I'm sure we'll all love it, and that there will be a forum dedicated to it here.

I'm a fan of Paradox too. I'll be buying this, as will most of us no doubt. The only trouble with Paradox game is the fonts they always use in their UI: the fonts will be tiny and the UI won't have scaling. In every game I recall, Paradox have been asked to consider peeps eyes, and didn't bother. But it's always one of the first mods available, as people have come to expect it from Paradox. Ok. rant mode disengaged. This looks great. I have added myself to the mailing list so I don't miss any news of it.

I've read the thread and I agree with all of you...in parts of what you say. teehee Firstly, I still enjoy playing the game, and I don't wish anyone dead because it's not Google Earth, with the drawing of roads and RCI zoning thrown in. Did they want to sell large plots as DLC? I seriously doubt it. Was the small plot size due to the inadequacies of PCs? Again, I seriously doubt it. My opinion is that Glassbox just couldn't handle more than it does reliably; and so what we got/have is as a result of simply that. But, when I first played the game I didn't mind the small plots as much as most; why, it was because of the region, and my understanding that I would set up specialised cities to supply cash and resources around my region. It would be a beautiful symbiotic structure, and I would see that it was good. Oh dear. After a few hours I was hitting the internet to see how this was done. A little while later I was sad. I still enjoy it, even limited to a single plot. Note that 'offline mode' is just that, and is not a 'single player game.' Maybe Maxis will expose enough of the game to allow the moders to, one day, give me a regional game, and therefore the single player game I dream of; maybe.

I think the rest of what you wrote was clear. I did note that xoxide made a point of saying "Name Convention and Standards to help Users and Modders alike including mod managers" in his original post. He mentioned again that the format he suggested was to help all: users, moders, and automatic tools for mods god help us all ) I'm sure he took note of what you suggested; you'll know more about that than me if you have joined some group of moders. I also appreciate elemental1100's point about some of the names we've been used to not being so intuitive to read. But I guess that as you modding types are considering the best way forward at this point, things (both file names and file installation instructions) are only going to get better as time passes. Now I'm going back to lurking and watching developments; I'll still be using some of the stand alone mods that came along before these behemoths that require all this discussion for a while yet.

Hi, OP stands for 'Original Post.' In that post - well, it was the original post before two threads were combined - you said: "The date - confusing when date change but not the build number. as far as I know, add code to the file = increased build number?" I took this to mean that you had noticed mod files where the date had changed, code had been changed, but the build number had not changed. That was what I considered to be alarming. As elemental1100 pointed out however, I went on to say that as SimCity is only a game it probably wasn't a big deal. As an end user of mods, as long as the load order works, I don't care much what the moders put in them to make life easier when they track and combine the things in their increasingly large packages. I do like to be able to see who made what however; some of the little ones may get swallowed by larger projects, and I'd like to keep track of what's going on if I get to see the files. It's nice to know who to be a fan of.

I like to see the moder's name in the file name. It's a little alarming to read the OP's post where he seems to say that dates are changing and not version numbers. But as nothing is safety critical - it's a game right and not a nuclear reactor or fly by wire code - I guess it's no big deal.

I've been following Orion, and the other mods that make it fly, with great interest. Without installing myself, I've gleaned a lot of information from this thread over the weeks, and I think I could run with it myself. I have to say however that I agree with some of the other posts about the offset/offsets being perhaps off-putting. I've watched Skye's video 2 and he clears up a lot of points, but even he seemed to think that the original plot resources were where they were indicated; reading this thread suggests that there is some issue here, but maybe that's been resolved. Like I said: I didn't install yet, so I didn't check on water and the like. The reason I write this post is because I happened to notice that one of Twitch's most popular streamers (Lirik) was streaming SimCity last night (20k+ viewers for a number of hours). At the start he asked the chat about Orion, and the response was that it was not good and didn't work well at all; this is not the case I think personally. I also think that this perception would fall away pretty quickly if the new build area indication was not offset, and anything else that was offset was corrected if at all possible; to my mind, player uptake would benefit if it were prioritised. Also I understand due to reading, and watching Skye, about ctrl zoning - sod that btw - and RCI plopping; perhaps greater effort needs to be made in spoon-feeding this information to the majority who just don't want to spend long in reading and comprehension. None of what I have said is intended to be a criticism in the slightest way; it's just my thoughts on the friendliness of Orion and 'supporting' mods currently. I understand that you generous and talented mod creators might cry out 'sod the masses, we are making this for the community who do like to make an effort by reading and understanding.' I'm looking forward to using all this new stuff soon; I'm still going to hold off and watch how Skye gets on first however, as I've come to respect his musings on things.

I hope not. I'm a bit optimistic that now we have 'offline mode' they will be thinking about making it a working single player regional game. But you are correct that over on the EA forum it doesn't say much about what they're working on; I think it only mentions bug fixes for offline mode. Perhaps they can stealth release the single player game with a offline great-works expansion pack, or similar, to save any u-turn embarrassment. They must realise that if they fix up the regional play for offline mode they can keep selling it for years however. Fingers crossed.

I came back to the game after a long absence, and to my delight it seems that most of the nightmare city plot bugs have been dealt with. I don't get to watch fire trucks drive in a circle round my burning buildings in an infinite loop for example. So I thought I'd give online multiplay a go for the first time. So my question is about cities that are just left alone. If a user leaves a region and then maybe forgets to ever start the game again or doesn't ever bother to abandon the region, will that city become abandoned after a certain amount of time? I don't like the idea of putting in the time to make something nice if peeps don't even bother to leave properly you see.

I would like to request a mod that removes the white-outline highlighting of anything and everything you mouse over. The pointer changes from an arrow to a strange horizontal oval with three dots - I have no idea what this might be btw - and that should be enough for most of the time. The best solution, if it could be done, would be to have the white-outline highlighting switch on and offable from within the bulldozing tab, as it can be very handy when trying to delete redundant school bus stops. I hope some clever moder hates the white outline as much as I do.

I was just thinking that a Simcity (2013) Rush Hour would make a great expansion idea for Maxis. I'd like to see it done first person however. It would be fun to drive and walk around your city in FP mode. Perhaps you could even invite others over, when online, for a race!