6 ms·

I want to see a remaster, or some sort of faithful remake of SimCity 4. Something about its crisp graphics and trimetric camera projection feels irreplaceable.

I want to see a remaster, or some sort of faithful remake of SimCity 4. Something about its crisp graphics and trimetric camera projection feels irreplaceable. I still frequently listen to the soundtrack while I work too. God I love that game. If EA released the sources to it or created a “Definitive Edition” I could die happy.

ascagnel_ 6y ago
I'd want a lot more than a faithful remake of SC4 (although SC4 would be a great starting point) -- the SimCity games have always, to a degree, been games that follow suburban California's zoning laws, and they're really great at making sprawling California suburbs. Just a few things I'd want to add to city games: - Model water runoff as pollution from agricultural zones. - Transport-in-road designs -- surface level transport takes up far, far too much land space because the game doesn't support urban infrastructure properly. In SC4, things like subway entrances and bus stops always take up a full tile, when they're typically no more than a portion of the sidewalk or a road sign (and maybe a shelter), respectively. - Mixed-use zoning. It's probably been the single biggest wish I've had for the SimCity games. It's impossible to build a vertical downtown if you're stuck trying to mix together commercial and residential plots, when many residential buildings along avenues feature ground-level commercial (making them effectively "light" density commercial contained within "dense" residential).
- jagger27 6y ago
  SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the two systems. The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not. Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it.
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    > I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not. Road Top Mass Transit
  - ascagnel_ 6y ago
    > SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the two systems. That's there, but it was pretty dumb -- it didn't take terrain topology into account, so you wouldn't have to worry about making sure agricultural zones didn't wash into rivers/lakes/oceans that might otherwise be used for water supply. > The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not. While I love modding in general, I think something so fundamental as being able to put up a "bus stop here" road sign should be included in the default game. As it exists, a bus stop or subway entrance take up as much space as a small home. The NAM is a great mod if you're looking to get into SC4 today, but it really should be included in any new release for the knock-on compatibility benefits (you don't have to worry about another mod somehow breaking NAM). > Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it. Skylines is definitely worse at it. The base game is a little too bare-bones for me (generally, I like games where the simulation is a state machine where you can tweak inputs vs directly messing with it), and the transportation options are lacking even when compared to SC4. I've tried to get into it a few times, but I keep bouncing off.
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  SimCity is very much a product of its time. They went with the dominate development paradigm of the late 80s and I guess they've stuck with it because the game has sold very well. Why mess with the cash cow? If there ever is another version released, maybe the features of the competition will spur the project managers of SimCity to expand into the modern era.
  - jagger27 6y ago
    SimCity as I knew and loved it is completely dead. The last entry to the franchise was a mobile game released in 2014. I can't see the series being much of a cash cow for EA anymore.
- publicola1990 6y ago
  May be add slums too, if it does not have them. I found Cities Skylines for example, has not concept of urban squalor.
- zokier 6y ago
  If we are assembling a city builder wishlist, then the biggest item for me would be richer concept of time. In SimCity and its ilk, time handling is really simplistic. Even huge infrastructure projects finish pretty much instantly so making dramatic changes is not that disruptive, and there is nothing to simulate the changing of eras so your cities end up having fairly monotonous texture. What if as your city evolves it would change from old-town narrow cobbled streets and weirdly shaped buildings to early modern brickwork, then brutalist concrete monsters, and finally modern sky scrapers and suburbs, or whatever, so different neighborhoods end up feeling different based on the era they were built. And if/when you need to remodel/improve the area, you'd have to take the existing stuff more into account and plan for the potentially multi-year construction project with the construction traffic and potential street blockage etc.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  NewCity is quite fun (if rough, due to its alpha state.) The whole game revolves around desirability and density; one can choose to make a low-services sprawly city or one can choose to make a high-value dense village. Though the mixed-use scenario there is a bit iffy (mixed-use is a separate zone that only develops in areas with sufficient density/traffic to warrant it)
meddlepal 6y ago
You might enjoy NewCity on Steam
jcranmer 6y ago
> I still frequently listen to the soundtrack while I work too. The SC4 soundtrack definitely works really well for non-distracting background music while doing work. I recall that one of the Youtube videos having the music had the comment along the lines of "I was looking for a different game [Soul Calibur 4, I think?] and found this instead... HOW IS THE MUSIC THIS GOOD?"
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Random Simcity soundtrack trivia: apparently "Concrete Jungle" from SC3k is in a pretty unusual time signature. And the soundtrack is also pretty good.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    Link: https://youtu.be/AtJbm-pKuAs https://youtu.be/AtJbm-pKuAs It's definitely all over the place, but it works very well.
speeder 6y ago
I tried to convince EA to let me do that. Didn't work. EA really, REALLY doesn't want to update SC4, they don't want to fix its easily fixable bugs, and don't want to share the source either, despite the most important parts of it being Open Sourced recently (EASTL is notable) SC4 to start of, was never finished, while modding the game and then trying to fix its bugs, I found out a ton of features people want, DO exist, but are partially implemented, for example the game even calculate the wind effects on the ground, but does nothing with the result of the calculation. It also has a advanced modding system using dlls, theoretically you can make dlls using the game APIs and greatly modify its behaviour but the API documentation is heavily secret, asking individual EA (ex)employees about it resulted in them telling me it is secret, and asking EA itself got my questions outright ignored (different from other requests, where they reply declining...) And it has bugs because the devs went so cutting edge at the time, that they used everything they could of the hardware, that immediately moved from under them: 1. It uses RDTSC for its original documented purpose: count clock cycles. Meanwhile right after launch Intel decided that RDTSC was supposed to count time instead, and changing what it does, breaking some features of the game, and causing crashes, the game still crashes often because of this. 2. The game uses DirectX 7, mixing DirectDraw and Direct3D, it used all the features it could at the time, it was running really poorly in a laptop of mine, so I went to check and found out that nVidia some 2 years after the game launch decided that DX7 is so outdated that they wouldn't bother supporting it at all, and whenever a game asked questions to the videocard using DX7 APIs, it would lie, so SC4 on my nVidia based laptop would get a lot of lies as answers to queries to the video card capabilities, and attempt to do poorly supported things, resulting in severe graphical artifacts and performance issues. To me the treatment of SC4 by EA just serves to show that EA is a company that doesn't care for quality that much.
- humaniania 6y ago
  Thank you for your efforts!
- jagger27 6y ago
  Are you aware of any OpenTTD-like projects for SC4? If EA won't play ball that seems like pretty much the last option left.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
SimCity 2000 was my thing back when I was 10. I got SimCity 4 shortly after release, but I didn't like it because it was too complicated. I'd rather have something like 2000 instead of 4.
chem83 6y ago
ThinMatrix, creator of Equilinox, is working on a city building game. Too early to tell how different it will be from SC, Skylines and the like, but it's at least interesting to see his progress: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUkRj4qoT1bsWpE_C8lZYoQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUkRj4qoT1bsWpE_C8lZYoQ

ascagnel_ 6y ago

I'd want a lot more than a faithful remake of SC4 (although SC4 would be a great starting point) -- the SimCity games have always, to a degree, been games that follow suburban California's zoning laws, and they're really great at making sprawling California suburbs. Just a few things I'd want to add to city games: - Model water runoff as pollution from agricultural zones. - Transport-in-road designs -- surface level transport takes up far, far too much land space because the game doesn't support urban infrastructure properly. In SC4, things like subway entrances and bus stops always take up a full tile, when they're typically no more than a portion of the sidewalk or a road sign (and maybe a shelter), respectively. - Mixed-use zoning. It's probably been the single biggest wish I've had for the SimCity games. It's impossible to build a vertical downtown if you're stuck trying to mix together commercial and residential plots, when many residential buildings along avenues feature ground-level commercial (making them effectively "light" density commercial contained within "dense" residential).

jagger27 6y ago
SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the two systems. The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not. Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it.
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  > I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not. Road Top Mass Transit
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  > SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the two systems. That's there, but it was pretty dumb -- it didn't take terrain topology into account, so you wouldn't have to worry about making sure agricultural zones didn't wash into rivers/lakes/oceans that might otherwise be used for water supply. > The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not. While I love modding in general, I think something so fundamental as being able to put up a "bus stop here" road sign should be included in the default game. As it exists, a bus stop or subway entrance take up as much space as a small home. The NAM is a great mod if you're looking to get into SC4 today, but it really should be included in any new release for the knock-on compatibility benefits (you don't have to worry about another mod somehow breaking NAM). > Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it. Skylines is definitely worse at it. The base game is a little too bare-bones for me (generally, I like games where the simulation is a state machine where you can tweak inputs vs directly messing with it), and the transportation options are lacking even when compared to SC4. I've tried to get into it a few times, but I keep bouncing off.
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
SimCity is very much a product of its time. They went with the dominate development paradigm of the late 80s and I guess they've stuck with it because the game has sold very well. Why mess with the cash cow? If there ever is another version released, maybe the features of the competition will spur the project managers of SimCity to expand into the modern era.
- jagger27 6y ago
  SimCity as I knew and loved it is completely dead. The last entry to the franchise was a mobile game released in 2014. I can't see the series being much of a cash cow for EA anymore.
publicola1990 6y ago
May be add slums too, if it does not have them. I found Cities Skylines for example, has not concept of urban squalor.
zokier 6y ago
If we are assembling a city builder wishlist, then the biggest item for me would be richer concept of time. In SimCity and its ilk, time handling is really simplistic. Even huge infrastructure projects finish pretty much instantly so making dramatic changes is not that disruptive, and there is nothing to simulate the changing of eras so your cities end up having fairly monotonous texture. What if as your city evolves it would change from old-town narrow cobbled streets and weirdly shaped buildings to early modern brickwork, then brutalist concrete monsters, and finally modern sky scrapers and suburbs, or whatever, so different neighborhoods end up feeling different based on the era they were built. And if/when you need to remodel/improve the area, you'd have to take the existing stuff more into account and plan for the potentially multi-year construction project with the construction traffic and potential street blockage etc.
bobthepanda 6y ago
NewCity is quite fun (if rough, due to its alpha state.) The whole game revolves around desirability and density; one can choose to make a low-services sprawly city or one can choose to make a high-value dense village. Though the mixed-use scenario there is a bit iffy (mixed-use is a separate zone that only develops in areas with sufficient density/traffic to warrant it)

meddlepal 6y ago