151–160 of 252 posts
This is a stretch. 4 was alright, but it also marked the death of the series. 3 was great, 2 was legendary. There's a great reason Cities: Skylines became the spiritual successor.
If SimCity 4 marked the death of the series what was SimCity 2013?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have OpenTTD and OpenRCT. Maybe someone somewhere is creating an C++ remake of our favourite isometric city simulator, with multiplayer support!
How the multiplayer mode would look like? Do you think about competing against the other real player? Or maybe collaborating with some friend? I am asking, because I think I haven't seen the multiplayer support in any railroad/transport-tycoon game. I remember in Railroad Tycoon 2 and then in Sid Meier's Railroads [0] we could play against NPC. Same as us, NPC is establishing a company and we may buy all his stocks t…
In OpenRTC, each player gets full control over managing the same park from a shared pool of funds. Mayhem may ensure if you set your game to public and don't configure permissions carefully.
In my mind, such an OpenSC2K's multiplayer would work like the latter. Each player managing the same city. Though if they removed game engine restrictions, it would be nifty if each player could manage his own city on one big shared map, similar to OpenRTC.
My favorite SimCity 4 bug: There were several minigames where you would drive vehicles around in your city. If you drove a train, you would have to get from one point to another in a certain amount of time. Drive fire trucks to a fire to put it out. Stuff like that. Emergency vehicles had sirens that you could turn on that caused other cars to drive towards the shoulder and stop so you could pass them, which worked g…
Sounds like real driver behavior to me.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/SimCity_4_Deluxe_Ed...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy. For example, if trying to demolish an apartment, you need to solicit 400 approvals and gain local support before doing so. Or to build to a railway you need to buy out all of the land and organize environmental studies for every square foot of it before laying track.
While this would be more realistic the majority of players would stop playing the game. I would argue this is just like you not having to build each street in a 3d game by yourself you also don't need to fill out every form, etc. by yourself. I just image you have a lot of employees doing that for you.
For example, you could add "federal/state requirements" where a new freeway/rail line/whatever would appear on the edge of the map and you have to get it to the other side, making connections as appropriate.
I prefer SimCity 2000. I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely realistic). Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare. Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it adde…
I prefer SimCity 2000. I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely realistic). Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare. Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it adde…
SimCity 2000, much like Hunter S. Thompson's description of mid-sixties San Francisco, represented a harmonic convergence of factors that established a high-water mark of game design.
It was a time when the energy of a whole generation of computer hardware and game developers came to a head in a round shiny disc, for reasons that were hard to fully grasp at the time and even harder to explain in retrospect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc
Just as Thompson describes the sense of being alive in that corner of time and the world, there was a similar sense of knowing that you were part of something special when playing SimCity 2000, a testament to constructive expression and augmented imagination, instead of pre-scripted storytelling and showboating special effects.
It marked a technological zenith, fruitfully applying the latest technology in a way that later versions fell short. It was an inflection point in simulation game design and immersive production values, having reached a point where any further elaboration would only lead to diminishing returns. It struck the ideal balance of complexity by remaining true to the original SimCity Classic, while learning from the oversimplification of SimAnt and the overcomplication of SimEarth.
And just like the high-water mark described by Thompson, the peak of SimCity 2000's game design was a place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Subsequent versions, despite their technological advancements, could not recapture the magic of that moment. They were like the Las Vegas of today, where with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark of game design that was SimCity 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
In a 1996 talk, Will Wright dove into how the designs of SimAnt and SimEarth both influenced SimCity 2000. During a Q&A session, a student asked what he was making next, so he also gave a sneak peek into his current project, Dollhouse, which was later renamed The Sims.
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy. For example, if trying to demolish an apartment, you need to solicit 400 approvals and gain local support before doing so. Or to build to a railway you need to buy out all of the land and organize environmental studies for every square foot of it before laying track.
While this would be more realistic the majority of players would stop playing the game. I would argue this is just like you not having to build each street in a 3d game by yourself you also don't need to fill out every form, etc. by yourself. I just image you have a lot of employees doing that for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't.
The minimum requirements for Civ 6 are far below the capability of the M1 series macbooks so I don't know why you'd think so.
Also Civ 6s target GPU is much faster than any of the M1s (which, despite the marketing, are still mobile CPU/GPU SoCs, not high clocked 100W+ TDP desktop CPUs with a separate 100W+ TDP GPU) so you won't see it use less than maximum what GPU (and CPU) can handle.
Don't mix performance profiles of games with performance profiles of bursty desktop browser software running Electron.
I have fond memories of simcity 1 and 2000. I currently play cities skylines but it has its cons. I hope cities skylines 2 will have less central traffic and we can zone without road. It's our best hope to a modern simcity. But this article motivated me to play sc4 again.
There are mods for CS that let you zone against the park paths, IIRC. You can make road-free portions of the city, but you need other mods to handle garbage, etc (basically dumpsters) because without roads you can't get the trucks in. The latest DLC seems to have some more on that area (roads that ONLY emergency/bus/service vehicles can use).
I have not tested the latest DLC I think. I thought it was about airports only.