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Discussion (159 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that).
Sure, there's something great about Cities Skylines that (at least with very powerful hardware) can look and feel like reality. But at the same time the game engine, in order to make this photorealism of terrain elevations with infinite possible shapes of infrastructure, is so complex that the actual simulation is sloppy, and feels to me like a big downgrade from SC3000.
Traffic, economics, zoning, crime, pollution. are so much practical to simulate (both in the computer, and in our mind models) in this classic isometric style.
* https://microlandia.city
edit: spelling
One thing I particularly loved was printing out very large maps of my city to go on the wall :)
Edit: I like the music a lot, and the little tutorial guy is endearing. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I tried scroll click drag, mouse button drag, arrow keys.
Maybe we manage to make something that doesn't need blender (though it probably won't look as cool) or we just stop dev-gatekeeping the function that exports the 3d file. Consider it done for the next point release :)
Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.
"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.
Other than that, I'm really enjoying it.
How big can cities get, though? One of the things I love about Cities Skylines is how massive the land plots are, and the tiny plots of SimCity 2013 was a bigger turnoff than anything else in its disastrous launch.
I also prefer to use GOG whenever I can, but I really don’t know enough about itch.io to judge it. I’m hoping you can help bridge that knowledge gap.
That would be a real challenge to achieve simply because most of us are constantly surrounded by cities, but it is something that we should strive for.
For instance, game designer Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian) said that I never wants to visit any old castles or ruins for fear that it would ruin his imagination on how game worlds should be built. It is a fair point, none of his games have had any focus on reality in terms of scale and that is what makes them so special.
Also looking at your game... can I get a copy of Microslop Excellence? ;)
thanks for sharing that. i'm a big city builder fan, but this one slipped by me. looks cool, and i'll be picking it up!
Got an opinion on Timberborn? I think it's a great city builder, plus a fluid dynamics simulator where if you guess wrong everyone dies.
its a lot more like dwarf fortress than sim city
They were less-realistic, yes, but is so pleasant how everything ties together and you can neatly fill out the whole map.
Meanwhile, while I like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, it is always incredibly awkward to build roads and paths to the point where I find it frustrating.
https://www.pcgamer.com/a-tech-analysis-of-cities-skylines-2...
But yes, at launch Cities Skylines 2 was very heavily GPU bound, due to very unoptimized meshes and a poor culling implementation. I haven't profiled it afterwards, but from what I've read they've optimized it enough that on most systems the limiting factor is now the CPU.
Realistic traffic is always the bane of these simulators.
I think Cities Skylines scratched that itch for a lot of people.
All in different stages of development. Can't say for sure when it's gonna be live but it's locked in.
RT2 (which I played on Linux through Loki) was very different.
As an aside since it's in the article, what are other cultures' irreverent targets? e.g. Anglo-cultures seem to casually joke about disasters like he does here about 9/11. Somewhat diminished by the fact that he's British, not American, but Americans do it too, and the American-British interaction involves this and Irish Car Bombs taken rather lightly. I find that curious. Do the Quebecois joke about Opération Satanique and the French have likewise a thing they make fun of the Quebecois for? Or is this an Anglo-culture thing? Obviously, I principally read in English so this might be specific to my language.
even after 9/11 and London's Greenfeel Tower fire? The vertical living seems very strained to me after events like that. Sure, they are not common issues, but there's always that thought in the back of my mind of what if.
In 2023, the annual fire fatality rates for single-family homes and older multifamily homes were roughly equivalent at 7.6 and 7.7 deaths per million, respectively. In contrast, according to Pew researchers, the annual fire fatality rate for newer multifamily residences was 1.2 deaths per million.
https://www.multifamilyexecutive.com/apartment-trends/modern...
It’s very on-brand for places like Russia and China but clearly western countries are not immune to this kind of thing either.
After the fire there were investigations into towers constructed here in Australia. Many used the cheaper flammable cladding material also. Just like with Grenfell, nothing much was done and nobody went to prison.
Unfortunately for SC4, they proceeded to make all the advisors 3D-rendered Sims. For SC2K, well:
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/simcity-advisors/4/
(that was the least offensive page to link; for the canonical experience start at page 1)
And while I cannot confirm what Maxis was doing internally, I am quite sure no-one was using 3DS Max for rendering game assets in the 90s considering it had just been released and well into the 2000s it was still humongously slow.
I disagree! SimCity 2K FTW. :)
Best balance of complexity IMO and ran pretty well on my old Mac. I'd love a retro-futuristic reboot.
I worry that its scope might be a bit wide.
From planning region-wide infrastructure (the thing I love about city builders/OpenTTD) right down to deciding how many wardrobes someone needs. How well can it do those things and everything inbetween?
But, I'll definitely be giving it a go. Thanks for posting the link.
However he lost me at
> I was cruising in the fast lane, minding my own business
There is no fast lane in the U.K (including NI). There are overtaking lanes. If you are in this lane it’s because you are overtaking slower moving traffic in inside lanes.
If you aren’t, then you need to be losing your license
Ahh of course, every streamer streams every second and is egotistical. What a moron
That said, probably don't want to discuss other weird posts for each HN submission!
If he wants me to disregard them, he shouldn't be writing blog posts about them.
The blogging person is definitely making stuff worse, but they're just amplifying. The source of the problem is to be found elsewhere.
A surprising amount of comments in here seem to completely disregard that for some reason.
And even if it's a slow speed accident, who cares about being right if you get a disability in the process? It is safer to let them through so they don't plow into you when you have to suddenly stop.
The only reason to LARP as a highway cop is just ego.
Don't let the people win, but also do not suddenly assume powers you do not actually have.
Essentially, plausible deniability but on the road. You might really just be a slow passing slow lane changing driver.
___
The goal is to reintroduce friction into everyday life to nudge people into being less antisocial and/or make them slightly suffer for being that.
The goal is not to become a vigilante.
One brings a stable society, the other just a different flavor of the same chaos that came before.
in the wise words of reddit: ESH (everyone sucks here)
The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting, but it's at least proof that this isn't AI generated content...
9/11 seems to be an important milestone in his life. In the about section of his web page it says this:
Q:/> How old are you?
A:/> I can't remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can remember 9/11.
I was so happy to score the physical “Music From SimCity 3000” soundtrack CD at the Alemany Flea Market fifteen or so years ago: https://www.discogs.com/release/794952-Jerry-Martin-Music-Fr...
> Some of the music from the original release is missing from an .ini file, even though it is present in Unlimited.
Article neglects to mention that the tracks which are included in Unlimited are lower-bitrate and monophonic compared to the same songs in stereo from the 1.0 release. Copy the same-name files from the original CD instead :)
Unlimited is sad because data-mining shows that it was almost multiplayer à la SC2k Network Edition: https://tcrf.net/SimCity_3000_Unlimited/Unused_Multiplayer_T...
I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...
But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.
The soundtrack is great though.
I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.
Not quite what you're looking for I think but it was a Wine-style reimplementation of MacOS.
(Looks like this screenshot confirms it, those two blue arrows rotated the view: https://pressakey.com/gamepix/101/simcity3.jpg)
You recall wrong.
The only 3D SimCity game was the one released in 2013 that was simply titled "SimCity" but is frequently called "SimCity 2013" to differentiate it from the original classic.
2K, 3K, and SimCity 4 were all 2D games.
When SimCity 3000 came out, I couldn't help but wonder if I inspired them. "Remember that kid was really stoked about 3000."
Too soon, too soon..
Would it be possible to automate porting the windows version into a mac or web version? Like giving a long-running agent the task and some tools to check/play the game on both platforms?
Pretty impressive for a game released in 2003.
Oh my goodness SC4 is 23 years old. I'll go be old in the corner.
This and Rollercoaster Tycoon and Doom II was my jam.
I firmly disagree with that point. If the game is well-made and enjoyable, the developer probably deserves some extra cash thrown their way. Games remain one of the best bang-for-your-buck when it comes to entertainment anyways. ($50 can get you DAYS of enjoyment, compared to going to a movie theater, theme park, or other paid attractions)
So yes, go ahead and purchase an enjoyable game multiple times if it's a good game. I certainly have!
We played SimCity in my shop class at school on olds macs and i like picking it back up every now and then. It still holds up better than most new games.
A SimCity 3000 tile edge was equivalent to 64m, whereas in SimCity 4 it was 16m. The scale of the city in SimCity 3000 was bigger as a result.
Hoping to test this principle of largest possible map sizes out soon.