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Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

658 points by notpushkin 4y ago

dreen 4y ago
Hopefully Minecraft has a mod to let you fly around in a helicopter and pick people up from the ground only to drop them confused on top of a skyscraper.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  While Ride of the Valkyries blares in the background, obviously.
  - remoquete 4y ago
    Showering them with water from a bucket.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      And the mobs kissing.
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        "himbos" https://www.avclub.com/simcopter-programmer-once-deployed-armies-of-digital-hi-1844132990 https://www.avclub.com/simcopter-programmer-once-deployed-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himbo https://tcrf.net/SimCopter https://tcrf.net/SimCopter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8
- reilly3000 4y ago
  If anyone here wants to try to recreate your Sim Copter glory days, I would recommend FlansMod. It’s an incredible mod family that is pinned to the ancient Minecraft 1.7.10 I believe. It has tons of vehicles and weapons from WW1 biplanes to mechs. There are definitely helicopters and I think they have passenger seats. The whole thing was pushing the bounds of the Minecraft engine beyond reason when it was being actively developed, and has largely been abandoned. Still, I was hosting a Flan’s server to play w/ my kids as recently as last winter. If you can live with the bugs it’s an incredibly fun mod, and a masterclass in Java hackery.
- cykros 4y ago
  In my experience there aren't many things minecraft doesn't have a mod for -- though sometimes it is a matter of what version of minecraft you want it for. mods at the very least tend to trail the main release version by a few cycles.
theandrewbailey 4y ago
Wow. I played SimCity 2000 all the time when I was a kid. Still got the CD and some save files, and built a retro PC that can run it.[0] (I even have the same sound card that the family PC had, so the MIDI is exactly the same.) Walking around my cities in Minecraft would be so surreal. [0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/122/SimCity-2000 https://theandrewbailey.com/article/122/SimCity-2000
Systemic33 4y ago
Very cool idea and execution. Slightly off-topic; if there ever was a excellent example of what it means when a C# program is being written by a java developer, this would certainly qualify. Was this ported from a java project?
- n4r9 4y ago
  Could you give examples of what you mean? I've had a look through and there are certainly stylistic things I'd do differently, such as using "var" and LINQ more, and capitalising method names. But it's easy enough to understand despite that.
  - Systemic33 4y ago
    Don't get me wrong, it's not "bad" code (from a brief glance) but it's just clearly written as if it was Java code, and probably not in a usual IDE like Visual Studio, Rider or VSCode /w C# plugin (as that would typically scaffold a more C#-esque style). Here's what I've noticed so far: - Uses camelCase instead of PascalCase - Uses setter and getter methods instead of C# properties. - Uses reverse DNS namespace com.mc2k.SimCityReader instead of e.g. JGosar.MineCity2000.SimCityReader. - Lack of LINQ (It is such a big part of C#, that not using it at all is strange).* - Lac of using generics e.g. List<string> instead of string[].* - Excessive use of arrays (you'd typically use a simple IEnumerable<T> or List<T>). - Lack of `var`.* - Casting integer literals to short, byte, etc -- these all have equivalent literal notation.* - Lack of extension methods.* - Lack of maps (pattern matching).* There could be more, but those are what I noticed. EDIT: * Given that the original code was done with VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4, its fair to say that a few of the points above do not apply, but the code is nevertheless very java-esque (just from the first two points).
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Excessive use of arrays can be a sign of many things, but not of being a java developer. Perhaps a sign of having been a java developer at some point in time before 2004 but not having touched the language ever since.
tedeh 4y ago
This reminds me a lot of SimCopter (1996) where you could also import your SC2k city and fly around and do missions. Mostly about helping people in various forms of distress by picking them up and flying to various destinations. Great flashback from 90's gaming, I remember tossing people out at random when flying which was always hilarious when you're a young kid. You could then pick them up and fly them to the hospital to get fixed up. But I must say I think the original SimCopter looks slightly better graphically than this Minecraft version. You can play SimCity 2000 online here, by the way: https://playclassic.games/games/city-building-dos-games-online/play-simcity-2000-online/play/ https://playclassic.games/games/city-building-dos-games-onli...
- justusthane 4y ago
  SimCopter was awesome! I had forgotten all about it. I didn't realize you could import SimCity cities!
  - Arrath 4y ago
    God I love SimCopter. played it so much as a kid but I never got to the fanciest helicopters because every run hit a bug where I couldn't enter the hanger anymore, I was too young to know that patching a game was even a thing, if it ever got a patch to fix that.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  SimCopter wasn't the only game that allowed you to import from SC2k -- the city import is the only notable feature of the otherwise-unremarkable Streets of SimCity[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - somat 4y ago
    The music, the music was the other remarkable feature of streets of sim city.
poisonarena 4y ago
neat idea but the project is like 10 years old, and last commit was 3+ years ago and only works on java edition. would like to see something like this, but for other city builders like Caesar
- kuschku 4y ago
  > only works on java edition Yes, as the project says, Minecraft. Not the cut-down mobile game with microtransactions that claims to be Minecraft.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    I'm not playing Minecraft, but this has fascinated me from afar. AIUI, Microsoft has two teams on two different continents essentially developing two very similar but subtly incompatible versions of the same game. Funky. Do they share any code or formats? Are the client/server interoperable? Does the C++ one even have a server implementation?
    - Pako 4y ago
      Servers are not interoperable by default. There is 3rd party software that acts as a proxy letting Bedrock players connect to Java servers but it'll just remove anything that the more limited client doesn't support. They both use completely different network stacks, Bedrock using RakNet over UDP, Java using Netty (?) over TCP, so they have to be translated accordingly.
      - sho_hn 4y ago
        Thanks! So I gather Microsoft has renamed Bedrock Edition to just "Minecraft" and then there's "Minecraft: Java Edition". What's the player base split between these? Do PC players still generally prefer the Java Edition?
        RedNifre 4y ago
        The invisible majority of players uses Bedrock. The majority of players that stream/post videos or use/write mods use Java. If you want to play with friends (Macos, Linux etc.) you need Java, because Bedrock is Windows and consoles only.
roody15 4y ago
Well done. Cool project.
raydiatian 4y ago
Is this what “reticulating splines” means, then? Almost 30 years later and I still don’t understand but the phrase is eternally trapped in my mind.
- mccolin 4y ago
  I looked this up once to determine if it was real or just hilarity. And the answer is great. From [Sims Fandom](https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines) site: > The words 'reticulate' and 'spline' both have dictionary definitions, which has led several people to determine a meaning for the phrase, such as "to make a network of curved elements." However, Will Wright stated in an interview that the term itself is meaningless, as SimCity 2000 does not reticulate splines when generating terrain; the phrase was included in the game because it "sounded cool."
  - jgosar 4y ago
    It sounds cool indeed. That's why this project includes a reticulateSplines method :) https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/MineCity2000/SCMapper.cs#L524 https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/MineCit...
  - PhasmaFelis 4y ago
    It's compelling because SimCity 2000's terrain is very much a network of curved lines, so it sounds like a plausible part of the process.
hardlianotion 4y ago
A noble quest
jl6 4y ago
How did they convert the 2D sprites to 3D blocks? Automatically or laboriously?
- tclancy 4y ago
  You have to mine them one by one.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Probably manual, given they have a specific list of supported buildings. But they're pretty simple so I can imagine it'd take an hour at most to build one them (in creative mode).
- jgosar 4y ago
  Hi, I did it manually, first some 2D drawings of where to put the blocks to correspond to the original game's pixels as close as possible, and then I built them using MCEdit, and finished the details in the game itself
pipeline_peak 4y ago
I thought it was interesting that not only does this guy choose C# over Java but he chooses to write getter methods instead of properties https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/SimCityReader/CityData.cs https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/SimCity... Completely trivial, but as a long time C# developer, this was a big pet peeve. For City name just do public string CityName{ get; private set; } Based on the fact that I see capital letters in String etc, this is either old code or this guy dove head first from Java.
- chris37879 4y ago
  Or Unity, their flavor of C# discouraged properties for a long time, it does support them now, though.
jawadch93 4y ago
[dead]
MayeulC 4y ago
That looks great! It's C# though, so I have no idea how to build this under Linux. I also wish there was a Minetest backend. Similar: OSM to Minecraft[0][1] (there should be another code drop soon-ish, I heard [2] they plan to move the dev effort to GitHub by the end of the year). [0]: https://minecraft.ign.fr/ https://minecraft.ign.fr/ [1]: https://github.com/ignfab-minalac/minalac https://github.com/ignfab-minalac/minalac [2]: video, in French: https://peertube.openstreetmap.fr/w/cLpfr5jWd9SipjJTDKDPmj?start=20m5s https://peertube.openstreetmap.fr/w/cLpfr5jWd9SipjJTDKDPmj?s...
- chris37879 4y ago
  Looks like the GUI uses WinForms, which means you won't be able to build it on linux, I would wager. You may, however, be able to run an already built version of it through Wine.
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    Well, I wasn't too interested in the GUI anyway :)
  - nycdotnet 4y ago
    The GUI code looks very simple at first glance - just four buttons and file picker and background worker. Chances are this would be straight-forward to port to a .NET command-line tool that would be cross-platform assuming there's nothing Windows-specific in the domain logic.
    - MayeulC 4y ago
      Thinking about it, wouldn't mono support this fairly well? I don't have much experience with mono nor C#, but going from a sibling comment and my package manager, I would be tempted to install mono-msbuild-sdkresolver and run `mono build`. Of course, I believe a command-line tool is a better fit, especially if one wants to automate this. The real value of this project probably lies in the buildings the author made :)
JuanPosadas 4y ago
I wish the demo videos included walking inside the skyscrapers.
PhasmaFelis 4y ago
One of my favorite games on the Commodore 64 was Raid on Bungeling Bay, in which you fly a helicopter around a 360-scrolling island map, knocking out enemy war factories. The map was surprisingly detailed and interactive for an early action game, with supply ships moving around helping to build defenses; you could destroy the six factories in any order, but each time you zapped one, the rest would tech up and get tougher. Very open for the time. Anyway, the dev found that he enjoyed designing the map and its interactions more than he did actually playing the game, so he decided that his next game would be all about building a map. He called it SimCity.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Correct, but Will originally called it "Micropolis", however there was a disk drive manufacturer using that name, so he subsequently renamed it "SimCity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_Corporation "Dollhouse" also went through a lot of names before settling on its more marketable and obvious-in-retrospect name "The Sims". After convincing EA to relicense the free original source code of SimCity under GPL3, I renamed the open source version "Micropolis" so as to avoid using the trademark "SimCity" (which would have contractually require getting EA's QA department to test and approve every change, which was not an easy task the first time (they'd never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to handhold them through running it under VMWare), a difficult task which I didn't want to repeat). OLPC/EA SimCity Contract: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf >General Software Requirements: OLPC agrees that the OLPC SimCity will not be approved by EA for distribution under Section 2.2 of this Agreement, until the OLPC SimCity meets the following general software requirements: >1. EA’s QA team is unable to crash the game in sixteen (16) man-hours of play-time. >2. EA’s QA team is unable to find images/language that is deemed inappropriate to achieve an “E” rating by the ESRB standard. >3. No use of any EA Trademarks that would reflect negatively upon the established reputation of EA. >4. Add copyright/license information to each source file to reflect the proper licensing. It was based on the original Mac version of SimCity that I first ported to NeWS/HyperLook then to X11/TCL/Tk and made to support multiplayer (which I had to disable for the OLPC version, due to X11's broken security model): http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/SimCity.README http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/SimCity.README http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold: https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27... >[71] The Unix and then open sourced versions have undergone multiple iterations. The OLPC version is based on the original open sourced version, which is written in C for X11 with TCL/Tk. Hopkins introduced some optimizations and, I believe, some bugs in this version (the tile animation system). Hopkins would go on to rewrite Micropolis in C++, cleaning up and organizing the code. Java and JavaScript translations now exist, too. >There were a couple of notable stipulations. First, that EA’s quality assurance (QA) test and approve any release titled “SimCity.” For this reason, Hopkins renamed the project “Micropolis,” an earlier working title for SimCity. Second, as a post-9/11 consideration, EA requested that the airplane crash disaster be removed from the game. Regard for publicity, both negative and positive, must have driven these stipulations as well as the decision to move forward with the project. >SimCity began life as Wright’s private toy, and went on to be continually recast as commercial software (Maxis), serious simulation (Sun), and educational plaything (OLPC). It’s polymorphic quality allowed it to be perceived and used by diverse agents, who turned it towards satisfying their own particular agendas and contexts. This interpretive versatility, which can productively be understood through Sutton-Smith’s notion of play’s ambiguity, is crucial to SimCity’s evocativeness, and ultimately led to its availability as free open source software. Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305 https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
beprogrammed 4y ago
Things you didn't know you needed
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
justin-mccarthy 4y ago
Would love to see something like Magnasanti in Minecraft https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/sim-city-magnasanti-vincent-ocasla/ https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designand...
nomercy400 4y ago
How much time does it cost to create one building? Would be cool to connect minecraft to a real running sc2k, adding/removing buildings on-the-fly.
- jgosar 4y ago
  The simplest ones can be done in a few hours. The latest one I did was the Statue which only took about 3 hours. The most complex one so far is the big corporate tower with the KSIM sign on top. That one took a few days.
YesBox 4y ago
Pretty cool! If people are still interested in playing city builder games, I am in the middle of developing one right now. I cleared the CPU hurdle of path finding via developing my own algorithm ( old demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI ). Here I am pathing around 300,000 units to their own unique destinations. Unfortunately I dont have a video update yet, but my game's graphics are now isometric (like SimCity). I also take a little inspiration from The Sims in that the player will see the interior of the buildings so they can watch their citizens live their lives. Most frequent updates: https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/
- anthropodie 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing!
- ahansen 4y ago
  Amazing. I had a few questions about pathfinding inspiration since I had just watched NoClips video on Rollarcoaster Tycoon, but your linked video is already so in depth!
- felipemnoa 4y ago
  This is quite cool! Best of luck!
- Sakos 4y ago
  My biggest issue with modern Simcity-likes is this blind focus on traffic simulation. I want a realistic simulation of a city, the traffic is a secondary effect of everything else, and that's where games are dropping the ball. It's crazy we haven't seen anything surpass Simcity 2000 even now. Wil Wright did research into city dynamics and turned that into a series of games. And even if the sources he used weren't perfect (even questionably neoliberal), what he did was unique and nobody seems to be trying to replicate what he did with better information, better research and a better understanding of people/psychology/sociology.
  - YesBox 4y ago
Apocryphon 4y ago
This is the real metaverse we care about.
aarpmcgee 4y ago
Not sure why exactly, but this gives me strong nostalgic feelings for Lego Island.
forbiddenvoid 4y ago
Time to spin up the ole SC2k again. I haven't played Minecraft in VR yet, and this seems like a really good reason to try it out now. I would definitely love to see more things like this that spin old games/software into new experiences.
pocketsand 4y ago
porntipsguzzardo
- fragmede 4y ago
  In case anyone was really wondering, it's a cheat code for Sim City 2000. It unlocked all buildings and gave you a bunch of money.
jrm4 4y ago
I hope we can all begin to learn some lessons from stuff like this; I think this kind of thing is the only path to a remotely interesting "metaverse" to the extent that such an idea is valuable. And it's so weird. It's obvious that private companies buying game properties is very often death and annoyance -- but it's (sadly to me) equally obvious that straight-up "nothing but free open source" is unlikely to get the engagement and interest. (e.g. otherwise Minetest would have taken over Minecraft a while ago) I have no good answers here, but I hope people think about the question?
joe__f 4y ago
"Your antivirus program might think that MineCity 2000 is a virus. It's not." Exactly what a virus would say...
- maxpro 4y ago
  Antivirus: This is a virus! MineCity: Exactly what a virus would say...
rheide 4y ago
I had this exact idea but for OpenTTD worlds. Well done.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
This is the best use of a computer that I’ve ever encountered.
wcarss 4y ago
some kind of mechanism must be devised to stream an evolving simcity world into minecraft live
jaza 4y ago
By God I loved SimCity 2000 as a kid. Did anyone else build a "hydro mountain" in every city (basically a pyramid covered in water, to which you could keep adding hydro power plants as the city grew, was all the electricity you ever needed), or was it just me? To this day, whenever I'm stuck in traffic, I say out loud: "Sim Copter 1 reporting heavy traffic". My addiction still hasn't cooled, as the main game I play these days, when I play anything, is Cities: Skylines.
- smcl 4y ago
  Clicking on the helicopter to crash it :)
- kwijybo 4y ago
  I also did the hydro mountain. From memory the hydro stations was one the few stations that lasted forever.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Hydro mountain back then, poop power now!
muralmural 4y ago
I cannot image when these tools are handed over to Gen-Zs, who are native to the Minecraft environment. I had tens of friends who used to spend their entire day playing Minecraft in school, and one of the greatest motives to play hours on the game is to recreate or improve an existing monument or a viewpoint of another game.
jrm4 4y ago
So, uh, do I have to compile this myself? Anybody got an exe?

658 points by notpushkin 4y ago

Hopefully Minecraft has a mod to let you fly around in a helicopter and pick people up from the ground only to drop them confused on top of a skyscraper.

mikepurvis 4y ago
While Ride of the Valkyries blares in the background, obviously.
- remoquete 4y ago
  Showering them with water from a bucket.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    And the mobs kissing.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      "himbos" https://www.avclub.com/simcopter-programmer-once-deployed-armies-of-digital-hi-1844132990 https://www.avclub.com/simcopter-programmer-once-deployed-ar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himbo https://tcrf.net/SimCopter https://tcrf.net/SimCopter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8
reilly3000 4y ago
If anyone here wants to try to recreate your Sim Copter glory days, I would recommend FlansMod. It’s an incredible mod family that is pinned to the ancient Minecraft 1.7.10 I believe. It has tons of vehicles and weapons from WW1 biplanes to mechs. There are definitely helicopters and I think they have passenger seats. The whole thing was pushing the bounds of the Minecraft engine beyond reason when it was being actively developed, and has largely been abandoned. Still, I was hosting a Flan’s server to play w/ my kids as recently as last winter. If you can live with the bugs it’s an incredibly fun mod, and a masterclass in Java hackery.
cykros 4y ago
In my experience there aren't many things minecraft doesn't have a mod for -- though sometimes it is a matter of what version of minecraft you want it for. mods at the very least tend to trail the main release version by a few cycles.

theandrewbailey 4y ago

Wow. I played SimCity 2000 all the time when I was a kid. Still got the CD and some save files, and built a retro PC that can run it.[0] (I even have the same sound card that the family PC had, so the MIDI is exactly the same.) Walking around my cities in Minecraft would be so surreal. [0] https://theandrewbailey.com/article/122/SimCity-2000 https://theandrewbailey.com/article/122/SimCity-2000

Systemic33 4y ago

Very cool idea and execution. Slightly off-topic; if there ever was a excellent example of what it means when a C# program is being written by a java developer, this would certainly qualify. Was this ported from a java project?

n4r9 4y ago
Could you give examples of what you mean? I've had a look through and there are certainly stylistic things I'd do differently, such as using "var" and LINQ more, and capitalising method names. But it's easy enough to understand despite that.
- Systemic33 4y ago
  Don't get me wrong, it's not "bad" code (from a brief glance) but it's just clearly written as if it was Java code, and probably not in a usual IDE like Visual Studio, Rider or VSCode /w C# plugin (as that would typically scaffold a more C#-esque style). Here's what I've noticed so far: - Uses camelCase instead of PascalCase - Uses setter and getter methods instead of C# properties. - Uses reverse DNS namespace com.mc2k.SimCityReader instead of e.g. JGosar.MineCity2000.SimCityReader. - Lack of LINQ (It is such a big part of C#, that not using it at all is strange).* - Lac of using generics e.g. List<string> instead of string[].* - Excessive use of arrays (you'd typically use a simple IEnumerable<T> or List<T>). - Lack of `var`.* - Casting integer literals to short, byte, etc -- these all have equivalent literal notation.* - Lack of extension methods.* - Lack of maps (pattern matching).* There could be more, but those are what I noticed. EDIT: * Given that the original code was done with VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4, its fair to say that a few of the points above do not apply, but the code is nevertheless very java-esque (just from the first two points).
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Excessive use of arrays can be a sign of many things, but not of being a java developer. Perhaps a sign of having been a java developer at some point in time before 2004 but not having touched the language ever since.

tedeh 4y ago

This reminds me a lot of SimCopter (1996) where you could also import your SC2k city and fly around and do missions. Mostly about helping people in various forms of distress by picking them up and flying to various destinations. Great flashback from 90's gaming, I remember tossing people out at random when flying which was always hilarious when you're a young kid. You could then pick them up and fly them to the hospital to get fixed up. But I must say I think the original SimCopter looks slightly better graphically than this Minecraft version. You can play SimCity 2000 online here, by the way: https://playclassic.games/games/city-building-dos-games-online/play-simcity-2000-online/play/ https://playclassic.games/games/city-building-dos-games-onli...

justusthane 4y ago
SimCopter was awesome! I had forgotten all about it. I didn't realize you could import SimCity cities!
- Arrath 4y ago
  God I love SimCopter. played it so much as a kid but I never got to the fanciest helicopters because every run hit a bug where I couldn't enter the hanger anymore, I was too young to know that patching a game was even a thing, if it ever got a patch to fix that.
ascagnel_ 4y ago
SimCopter wasn't the only game that allowed you to import from SC2k -- the city import is the only notable feature of the otherwise-unremarkable Streets of SimCity[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- somat 4y ago
  The music, the music was the other remarkable feature of streets of sim city.

poisonarena 4y ago

neat idea but the project is like 10 years old, and last commit was 3+ years ago and only works on java edition. would like to see something like this, but for other city builders like Caesar

kuschku 4y ago
> only works on java edition Yes, as the project says, Minecraft. Not the cut-down mobile game with microtransactions that claims to be Minecraft.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I'm not playing Minecraft, but this has fascinated me from afar. AIUI, Microsoft has two teams on two different continents essentially developing two very similar but subtly incompatible versions of the same game. Funky. Do they share any code or formats? Are the client/server interoperable? Does the C++ one even have a server implementation?
  - Pako 4y ago
    Servers are not interoperable by default. There is 3rd party software that acts as a proxy letting Bedrock players connect to Java servers but it'll just remove anything that the more limited client doesn't support. They both use completely different network stacks, Bedrock using RakNet over UDP, Java using Netty (?) over TCP, so they have to be translated accordingly.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      Thanks! So I gather Microsoft has renamed Bedrock Edition to just "Minecraft" and then there's "Minecraft: Java Edition". What's the player base split between these? Do PC players still generally prefer the Java Edition?
      - RedNifre 4y ago
        The invisible majority of players uses Bedrock. The majority of players that stream/post videos or use/write mods use Java. If you want to play with friends (Macos, Linux etc.) you need Java, because Bedrock is Windows and consoles only.

roody15 4y ago

Well done. Cool project.

raydiatian 4y ago

Is this what “reticulating splines” means, then? Almost 30 years later and I still don’t understand but the phrase is eternally trapped in my mind.

mccolin 4y ago
I looked this up once to determine if it was real or just hilarity. And the answer is great. From [Sims Fandom](https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines) site: > The words 'reticulate' and 'spline' both have dictionary definitions, which has led several people to determine a meaning for the phrase, such as "to make a network of curved elements." However, Will Wright stated in an interview that the term itself is meaningless, as SimCity 2000 does not reticulate splines when generating terrain; the phrase was included in the game because it "sounded cool."
- jgosar 4y ago
  It sounds cool indeed. That's why this project includes a reticulateSplines method :) https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/MineCity2000/SCMapper.cs#L524 https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/MineCit...
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago
  It's compelling because SimCity 2000's terrain is very much a network of curved lines, so it sounds like a plausible part of the process.

hardlianotion 4y ago

A noble quest

jl6 4y ago

How did they convert the 2D sprites to 3D blocks? Automatically or laboriously?

tclancy 4y ago
You have to mine them one by one.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Probably manual, given they have a specific list of supported buildings. But they're pretty simple so I can imagine it'd take an hour at most to build one them (in creative mode).
jgosar 4y ago
Hi, I did it manually, first some 2D drawings of where to put the blocks to correspond to the original game's pixels as close as possible, and then I built them using MCEdit, and finished the details in the game itself

pipeline_peak 4y ago

I thought it was interesting that not only does this guy choose C# over Java but he chooses to write getter methods instead of properties https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/SimCityReader/CityData.cs https://github.com/jgosar/mine-city-2000/blob/master/SimCity... Completely trivial, but as a long time C# developer, this was a big pet peeve. For City name just do public string CityName{ get; private set; } Based on the fact that I see capital letters in String etc, this is either old code or this guy dove head first from Java.

chris37879 4y ago
Or Unity, their flavor of C# discouraged properties for a long time, it does support them now, though.

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

MayeulC 4y ago

That looks great! It's C# though, so I have no idea how to build this under Linux. I also wish there was a Minetest backend. Similar: OSM to Minecraft[0][1] (there should be another code drop soon-ish, I heard [2] they plan to move the dev effort to GitHub by the end of the year). [0]: https://minecraft.ign.fr/ https://minecraft.ign.fr/ [1]: https://github.com/ignfab-minalac/minalac https://github.com/ignfab-minalac/minalac [2]: video, in French: https://peertube.openstreetmap.fr/w/cLpfr5jWd9SipjJTDKDPmj?start=20m5s https://peertube.openstreetmap.fr/w/cLpfr5jWd9SipjJTDKDPmj?s...

chris37879 4y ago
Looks like the GUI uses WinForms, which means you won't be able to build it on linux, I would wager. You may, however, be able to run an already built version of it through Wine.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  Well, I wasn't too interested in the GUI anyway :)
- nycdotnet 4y ago
  The GUI code looks very simple at first glance - just four buttons and file picker and background worker. Chances are this would be straight-forward to port to a .NET command-line tool that would be cross-platform assuming there's nothing Windows-specific in the domain logic.
  - MayeulC 4y ago
    Thinking about it, wouldn't mono support this fairly well? I don't have much experience with mono nor C#, but going from a sibling comment and my package manager, I would be tempted to install mono-msbuild-sdkresolver and run `mono build`. Of course, I believe a command-line tool is a better fit, especially if one wants to automate this. The real value of this project probably lies in the buildings the author made :)

JuanPosadas 4y ago

I wish the demo videos included walking inside the skyscrapers.

PhasmaFelis 4y ago

One of my favorite games on the Commodore 64 was Raid on Bungeling Bay, in which you fly a helicopter around a 360-scrolling island map, knocking out enemy war factories. The map was surprisingly detailed and interactive for an early action game, with supply ships moving around helping to build defenses; you could destroy the six factories in any order, but each time you zapped one, the rest would tech up and get tougher. Very open for the time. Anyway, the dev found that he enjoyed designing the map and its interactions more than he did actually playing the game, so he decided that his next game would be all about building a map. He called it SimCity.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Correct, but Will originally called it "Micropolis", however there was a disk drive manufacturer using that name, so he subsequently renamed it "SimCity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_Corporation "Dollhouse" also went through a lot of names before settling on its more marketable and obvious-in-retrospect name "The Sims". After convincing EA to relicense the free original source code of SimCity under GPL3, I renamed the open source version "Micropolis" so as to avoid using the trademark "SimCity" (which would have contractually require getting EA's QA department to test and approve every change, which was not an easy task the first time (they'd never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to handhold them through running it under VMWare), a difficult task which I didn't want to repeat). OLPC/EA SimCity Contract: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf >General Software Requirements: OLPC agrees that the OLPC SimCity will not be approved by EA for distribution under Section 2.2 of this Agreement, until the OLPC SimCity meets the following general software requirements: >1. EA’s QA team is unable to crash the game in sixteen (16) man-hours of play-time. >2. EA’s QA team is unable to find images/language that is deemed inappropriate to achieve an “E” rating by the ESRB standard. >3. No use of any EA Trademarks that would reflect negatively upon the established reputation of EA. >4. Add copyright/license information to each source file to reflect the proper licensing. It was based on the original Mac version of SimCity that I first ported to NeWS/HyperLook then to X11/TCL/Tk and made to support multiplayer (which I had to disable for the OLPC version, due to X11's broken security model): http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/SimCity.README http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/SimCity.README http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold: https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27... >[71] The Unix and then open sourced versions have undergone multiple iterations. The OLPC version is based on the original open sourced version, which is written in C for X11 with TCL/Tk. Hopkins introduced some optimizations and, I believe, some bugs in this version (the tile animation system). Hopkins would go on to rewrite Micropolis in C++, cleaning up and organizing the code. Java and JavaScript translations now exist, too. >There were a couple of notable stipulations. First, that EA’s quality assurance (QA) test and approve any release titled “SimCity.” For this reason, Hopkins renamed the project “Micropolis,” an earlier working title for SimCity. Second, as a post-9/11 consideration, EA requested that the airplane crash disaster be removed from the game. Regard for publicity, both negative and positive, must have driven these stipulations as well as the decision to move forward with the project. >SimCity began life as Wright’s private toy, and went on to be continually recast as commercial software (Maxis), serious simulation (Sun), and educational plaything (OLPC). It’s polymorphic quality allowed it to be perceived and used by diverse agents, who turned it towards satisfying their own particular agendas and contexts. This interpretive versatility, which can productively be understood through Sutton-Smith’s notion of play’s ambiguity, is crucial to SimCity’s evocativeness, and ultimately led to its availability as free open source software. Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305 https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

beprogrammed 4y ago

Things you didn't know you needed

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

justin-mccarthy 4y ago

Would love to see something like Magnasanti in Minecraft https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/sim-city-magnasanti-vincent-ocasla/ https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designand...

nomercy400 4y ago

How much time does it cost to create one building? Would be cool to connect minecraft to a real running sc2k, adding/removing buildings on-the-fly.

jgosar 4y ago
The simplest ones can be done in a few hours. The latest one I did was the Statue which only took about 3 hours. The most complex one so far is the big corporate tower with the KSIM sign on top. That one took a few days.

YesBox 4y ago

Pretty cool! If people are still interested in playing city builder games, I am in the middle of developing one right now. I cleared the CPU hurdle of path finding via developing my own algorithm ( old demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI ). Here I am pathing around 300,000 units to their own unique destinations. Unfortunately I dont have a video update yet, but my game's graphics are now isometric (like SimCity). I also take a little inspiration from The Sims in that the player will see the interior of the buildings so they can watch their citizens live their lives. Most frequent updates: https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/

anthropodie 4y ago
Thank you for sharing!
ahansen 4y ago
Amazing. I had a few questions about pathfinding inspiration since I had just watched NoClips video on Rollarcoaster Tycoon, but your linked video is already so in depth!
felipemnoa 4y ago
This is quite cool! Best of luck!
Sakos 4y ago
My biggest issue with modern Simcity-likes is this blind focus on traffic simulation. I want a realistic simulation of a city, the traffic is a secondary effect of everything else, and that's where games are dropping the ball. It's crazy we haven't seen anything surpass Simcity 2000 even now. Wil Wright did research into city dynamics and turned that into a series of games. And even if the sources he used weren't perfect (even questionably neoliberal), what he did was unique and nobody seems to be trying to replicate what he did with better information, better research and a better understanding of people/psychology/sociology.
- YesBox 4y ago

Apocryphon 4y ago

This is the real metaverse we care about.

aarpmcgee 4y ago

Not sure why exactly, but this gives me strong nostalgic feelings for Lego Island.

forbiddenvoid 4y ago

Time to spin up the ole SC2k again. I haven't played Minecraft in VR yet, and this seems like a really good reason to try it out now. I would definitely love to see more things like this that spin old games/software into new experiences.

pocketsand 4y ago

porntipsguzzardo

fragmede 4y ago
In case anyone was really wondering, it's a cheat code for Sim City 2000. It unlocked all buildings and gave you a bunch of money.

jrm4 4y ago

I hope we can all begin to learn some lessons from stuff like this; I think this kind of thing is the only path to a remotely interesting "metaverse" to the extent that such an idea is valuable. And it's so weird. It's obvious that private companies buying game properties is very often death and annoyance -- but it's (sadly to me) equally obvious that straight-up "nothing but free open source" is unlikely to get the engagement and interest. (e.g. otherwise Minetest would have taken over Minecraft a while ago) I have no good answers here, but I hope people think about the question?

joe__f 4y ago

"Your antivirus program might think that MineCity 2000 is a virus. It's not." Exactly what a virus would say...

maxpro 4y ago
Antivirus: This is a virus! MineCity: Exactly what a virus would say...

rheide 4y ago

I had this exact idea but for OpenTTD worlds. Well done.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

This is the best use of a computer that I’ve ever encountered.

wcarss 4y ago

some kind of mechanism must be devised to stream an evolving simcity world into minecraft live

jaza 4y ago

By God I loved SimCity 2000 as a kid. Did anyone else build a "hydro mountain" in every city (basically a pyramid covered in water, to which you could keep adding hydro power plants as the city grew, was all the electricity you ever needed), or was it just me? To this day, whenever I'm stuck in traffic, I say out loud: "Sim Copter 1 reporting heavy traffic". My addiction still hasn't cooled, as the main game I play these days, when I play anything, is Cities: Skylines.

smcl 4y ago
Clicking on the helicopter to crash it :)
kwijybo 4y ago
I also did the hydro mountain. From memory the hydro stations was one the few stations that lasted forever.
zamadatix 4y ago
Hydro mountain back then, poop power now!

muralmural 4y ago

I cannot image when these tools are handed over to Gen-Zs, who are native to the Minecraft environment. I had tens of friends who used to spend their entire day playing Minecraft in school, and one of the greatest motives to play hours on the game is to recreate or improve an existing monument or a viewpoint of another game.

jrm4 4y ago

So, uh, do I have to compile this myself? Anybody got an exe?