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I decided to try exactly replicating a real town in SimCity, mainly to see how well SimCity would actually work with a real place. I've seen a few people do real cities, but always at reduced scale. A while ago I started trying to do the city I lived in, but it was just going to take forever and I'm not that persistent. I needed a small town and I chose Morrinsville, population 7,500:  Surprisingly enough I found a free download on the council's site for the actual zoning map:  Green = residential, pink = Commercial, yellow = industrial. Then I grabbed the street map from Google Maps, rotated it to be straight, and put a grid over it in Photoshop at the right scale. I didn't put in the exact real terrain with the proper rivers etc, but I did to everything to exactly match the real-life positions. All schools, parks etc are in the right places. So here's the finished town (best viewed at full size):  Traffic:  Pollution:  I works surprisingly well. I actually make a couple of grand a month from it and everyone's pretty happy. I did have to use a couple of mods: - I'm using NAM on Low settings. Anything higher seems like cheating to me. But the main thing is that I needed to increase the commute times because the default max commute time in SimCity 4 is six minutes. With that setting, people in this small town think it's too far to commute half-way across town. - I got another mod, cant remember what it's called exactly, but it just doubles the radius of effect for service buildings. Doesn't increase capacity so it's not really a cheat. But again, the default effect radius in SimCity is tiny. Even now, the hospital on the outskirts of town doesn't cover the whole town, and this is a place that takes under 5 minutes to drive right through in real life. Some observations: - Traffic is distributed roughly how it is in real life (the might be due to my choice of avenues and roads for the main roads though, and streets for the rest. People might be prioritising the high-capacity roads. - The western side of the city is generally higher wealth than the west, again much like in real life, mostly because of its proximity to industry. In SimCity the industry is way denser and more polluting than it is in real life though. - There's no power station in Morrinsville so I hid one at the edge of the map. - Population is 20,000 whereas in real life it's 7,500. Not sure how that happened as the housing isn't much denser than real life - There are actually some gaps where houses should be because the one thing SimCity couldn't handle at all is the amount of housing where it's a house behind another house, with a long driveway to the second one. Luckily I could mostly work around that. I know some of the low-wealth housing in SimCity is two houses behind each other, but those have a tiny plot of land each. I need to be able to place like four or five block deep residential. - Demand is pretty good. R, C and I are all in positive demand with normal tax rates - SimCity is convinced that this town is big enough to have a university So basically, it worked well, but it also highlighted how small SimCity's city areas really are - I needed to use the biggest map size to fit it all in. Although, there's still a lot of free space on the map here. Probably about 2/3 of it would fit on a medium-size map. Nition fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Mar 9, 2013 |
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Mar 9, 2013 10:37
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benzine posted:* Finally, the auto-roads always split the zones into strips/blocks. Do I ever miss out on any buildings, like large skyscrapers, because of this? Holding Shift also removes auto-streets. It's a bit different to Ctrl. Best way to see what they do is probably just to try them.
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Mar 20, 2013 06:56
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piratepilates posted:I never noticed how well trees can fill out a space and make it look nice. Is there a nicer way to fill large areas with trees than just using the landscape tool and dragging though? I wanna carpet bomb my suburbs with trees so it doesn't look so empty. Ctrl-alt-shift clicking the God Mode button will give you back the pre-city tools, where you have the much more powerful tree placing tool. It's sort of cheaty, if you care about that, because the trees are free. But you can always pretend that you never cut down the trees in the first place.
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May 19, 2014 20:44
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Taeke posted:Anyone have a link to a mod that extends the area of influence of my services? I'd like to be able to have one elementary school suffice when I have a spread out village/city. Radius Doubler: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/13696-radius-doubler-mod
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May 25, 2014 07:57
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You mean mega.co.nz. Mega.co isn't a file host.
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Oct 7, 2014 05:25
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Tai posted:Yeah steam mods go into a different location Tai on the CD/DVD version posted:Ok plugins go in C:\Users\XXXXXX\Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins\ Just for the record, the Steam version will detect plugins in that Documents folder as well. Just need to run the game once to make it appear after installing. I think all versions actually have two places you can put plugins: In the game's install folder or in that Documents folder. Nition fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jan 8, 2015 |
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Jan 8, 2015 19:37
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Very nice cities. Also, those screenshots where you've bumped up the colour saturation look quite nice. I wouldn't go quite that far personally - maybe about half-way between those and the default - but I wonder if it'd be possible to make like a post-processing colour saturation mod for use in-game.
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Jan 8, 2015 21:41
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I hate all the extra menu clutter enough that I even uncheck about half the stuff in the NAM. I don't need third-level road overpasses. Also, I was just reading some old posts in this thread and someone lamented that they'd been playing SimCity 4 for a decade and just wished they could turn off those annoying adviser popups. For anyone else that's sick of them and hasn't found it: In the play options there's an Urgent Advice Dialogs checkbox.
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Jan 14, 2015 20:25
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Nah, those are really good questions. Re zone sizes: From my experience it seems like if you have e.g. two 2x1 lots next to each other, the game can build either two 2x1 lots or one 2x2 lot on it, whereas if you have one 2x2 lot it will only build a 2x2 lot (if it can - sometimes it means the lot doesn't get filled right away). But someone else should confirm whether that's actually correct. You can hold various combinations of Ctrl, Alt and Shift to get all sorts of different angles and configurations.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:30
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Glorgnole posted:I'm pretty sure this is how it works. The game won't chunk out big residential and commercial zones to put in smaller buildings, so if you only want to develop those huge 6x6 hi-rises you can make a single 6x6 zone and nothing else will go there, for better or for worse. Cool. Although the tallest buildings are actually 4x4.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:52
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Man, that sounds like pretty much exactly what I want in terms of mods as well. Thanks!
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Jan 15, 2015 19:47
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Iunnrais posted:I'm getting frustrating trying to find a region I'd like to use. I'm not interested in wall-to-wall large maps as appear exclusively on the various fan sites, I'd like to be able to pull open a small or medium map too, especially for the sake of my poor CPU. Maybe help crash less. Anyone have any good regions? Preferably with a nice mix of water/flat land/mountains. I have one that fits that description. It's based on a Wellington, NZ region map that I downloaded, but I cropped it smaller because it was enormous, and changed it from being all large maps to being a mix, trying to put the divisions in good places. It is still mostly large maps in the better building locations though.  Download here. Unfortunately I didn't save the original version of the region without any cities on it. I've removed my cities in the download above, but there are some slight differences in the land left over from city stuff. Having said that, the original region data has the reclaimed land that the real city has already in it as well, and it's quite good because it provides a bit of flat land to build on. Nition fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 20:26
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Unfortunately SimCity 4 is still missing the mod it seems to need most: One that automatically adjusts the budget sliders to just exceed current demand.
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Jan 23, 2015 02:57
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Bel Monte posted:They've tried to make their own game since societies that is usually just 3D SC4, but then they sperg out and want to add tons of extra things. So it's less "here's SC4 in 3D and a better set up" and more "you don't understand, we NEED mixed use industrial/residential zoning, because MY city has 10 buildings set up this way and it adds so much to the game!" Then they devolve into bickering and/or intense discussion. There's been tons of no-start "I have an idea!" threads. I can't find their major project, but here's one thread as an example: I love how the second reply is like, "Wow, what an interesting and daring project.  " Anyone can propose the perfect game!I also like how the OP details all the work that everyone will be doing, but has no experience themselves at any of it.
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Jan 24, 2015 21:10
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Does anyone here actually use Rush Hour's silly U-Drive-It feature?
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Jan 25, 2015 02:53
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People could upload their regions as actual region files instead of greyscale maps etc. That way they could also provide all the trees etc with the file. But it would make the file size like 50x larger and we've heard what the SC4 community thinks about large files.
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Jan 29, 2015 01:50
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Curvature of Earth posted:For the record, while I like the look of it, Shibuya Station is bizarre: In real life it's super multi-level:  The "weird perpendicular one" is the top one.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:27
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Curvature of Earth posted:Pick "Ultra" settings for the traffic simulator, which are generous enough that you shouldn't have to worry about saturating your roads or rail. Pick "Ultra" if you're a dirty cheater. Pick Medium or Low if you want a realistic traffic simulation. 
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Feb 3, 2015 02:45
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Fair point. I guess when I said "realistic" I meant "doesn't feel like cheating", considering the super-duper-low "Classic" defaults.
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Feb 3, 2015 05:29
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ExtraNoise posted:We would have had kind of a lovely 3D SimCity 3000 in the year 1998 that may or may not have killed Maxis through lack of sales. I remember the screenshots in PC Gamer.  
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Feb 4, 2015 04:07
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Oh man, the Steam reviews are so overwhelmingly negative! http://store.steampowered.com/app/313010
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Feb 5, 2015 21:53
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More filled in:
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Feb 5, 2015 23:10
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It seems like there are lots of nice mods for European or Japanese housing. This isn't super important to me or anything but has anyone seen something with the sort of typically wooden housing we have around here? 
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Feb 15, 2015 23:18
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VostokProgram posted:https://web.archive.org/web/20021201104847/http://simcity.ea.com/dev/3d.html That's really interesting. And if I'm reading it right, it also implies that modded buildings with tons of polygons should still affect performance when they're first rendered, before the render gets cached.
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Feb 21, 2015 08:36
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Lol, the grid extends farther than the city!
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Feb 25, 2015 22:32
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I'm not used to that at all because there's very little flat land like that here. As a result our road layouts are basically an abomination.  That particularly insane bit in the middle left even has a tunnel.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:51
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