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.
Too soon, too soon..
This and Rollercoaster Tycoon and Doom II was my jam.
But they ignored him, and went off on a tangent trying to design their own ultimate totally general purpose virtual reality (and we know how well Second Life has done ;), without much thought to what was actually possible, playable, or fun on current computers.
They gave some demos of the 3D prototype to reporters, then Maxis ran out of money because it was nowhere near shipping, then EA bought us, then fired the people who were out of control, and Luc Barthelet announced to the reporters that SimCity 3000 wouldn't be 3D, but it would be 2D and beautiful.
Here is a little nugget I saved from that time: Guru's infamous SimCity 3000 design document, from when the 3D design was really going off the rails:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rnvzKdJp9tyEJwEGxsIjoHnT...
Ocean Quigley says that Guru was really sincere and believed what he said (and was not just on mushrooms).
I have to admit, that if that's true, then that Guru dude was 15 years ahead of his time, and not just a crackpot! But he should have mentioned something about the fact that it would take 15 years to develop those ideas into a shipping product!
- Peak hubris / scope explosion:
“It is possible to bridge the chasm of expectations and technology in the forthcoming year in a realistic and economical manner.”
“The Real Time Render mode shall define a visual paradigm hitherto unseen in any game or product.”
“Hence attempting to assault the cliff of expectations of the visual paradigm by means of the linear ladder fails.”
“There is a whole think tank of concepts and ideas which shall be explored and implemented…”
- Hardware reality fighting back:
“Needless to even state this is impossible performance for a delivery Pentium 75 within one year.”
“Terrifying thought. Cut the flexibility we say ! Let’s govern the flexibility I say.”
“That’s a tall order, admittedly, but then, this is an ambitious project !”
- Glorious jargon poetry:
“The semi-digested spatial data is nothing more than just that.”
“This data simultaneously suffers further transformation…”
“The motion window is always stabilized and will ‘fly’.”
“The Snapshot Port — a.k.a. The Portrait of Reality”
“causation of an event singularity for the common reference of the simulator and the visual computing system”
- The “there / that / do this” interface:
“Once ‘that’ has been identified to be able to ‘do’ ‘this’ to ‘that’…”
“The user can merely point ‘there’: and place a building. The user can point to ‘that’ building and delete it.”
“A single pencil beam shot back into the scene from the point of the mouse…”
- Biology metaphor goes full Spore:
“The species of the virtual world… shall be encoded for spatial representation as chromosomes…”
“The species itself shall be represented in its completeness as a self descriptive cell.”
“Needless to add… if transfer RNA were metaphorically the lifts of the building…”
“The other facet… is the ability to create more species by crossbreeding and mutation of species.”
- Buildings become existential -- this is the crown jewel:
“The behavioral transformation over time has a standard pattern
Now I’m a cylinder and Now I’m an egg
Now I’m smooth & shiny and Now I’m not
Now I am mottled and Now I’m not
Now I feel mottled and Now I do not
Now I’m here and Now I’m over there
something or the other blah blah”
- Las Vegas shark tent cinematic universe:“Once the Simulator and the VC shell agree that there is a building called Big Joe’s Shark Tent…”
“yes I have neon lights, I have thirty bulbs all having high level scripts…”
“aaah OK ! you got it ! the script is queued, bye”
- Voxel fever dreams:
“This throws up the possibilities of bulldozers actually bulldozing soil. And Mining community towns actually mining inside a silver mine !!!!”
“Voxel space animation methods can actually cause earthquakes.”
“The display of a building or a city block being engulfed by splitting seams of the earth is not an impossible target…”
- Favorite one-liner:
“Modelessness is messy.”
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.
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.
edit: spelling
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.
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)
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.
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...
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 ...
When SimCity 3000 came out, I couldn't help but wonder if I inspired them. "Remember that kid was really stoked about 3000."
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?
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZHI2bCCpl0
It has a demo on Steam now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/ It's quite playable already, and it's a very small 100Mb download.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Realistic traffic is always the bane of these simulators.
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.
That said, probably don't want to discuss other weird posts for each HN submission!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Martin_(composer)
https://www.last.fm/music/Marc+Russo
https://soundcloud.com/kirk-casey
Here are his web sites with more:
“The Streets” 70’s Car Chase Music (reminds me of the Austin Powers theme Soul Bosa Nova by Quincy Jones):
https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-70s-car-chase-1/
“Batucada” Bossa Nova:
https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-bossa-nova-3/
“New Beginnings” This one is definitely in the 4 million plus club for plays on youtube:
https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-sims-1-build-1/
“Let’s Go Shopping” Happy 50’s Shopping Music:
https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-shopping-1/
Jerry Martin – Music From SimCity 3000:
https://www.discogs.com/release/794952-Jerry-Martin-Music-Fr...
Simcity 4 Soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSv37HwwojU
SimCasino (Early Access) - Soundtrack Sessions Complete:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOm9SSXyQ_g
How The Sims Made New-Age Jazz Piano the Soundtrack of Our Lives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LpVUi9TQ8U
>The Sims soundtrack is an iconic piece of video game music, and the build mode's minimalist new age jazz piano songs are undoubtedly among it's most famous tracks. We spoke to Jerry Martin, the composer of the soundtrack, to find out how and why new age jazz piano became the sound of The Sims.
The Sims Soundtrack CHEATED. Here's how:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMds3jT7c8
The Untold Story of 'The Sims,' Your First Favorite Jazz Record:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-untold-story-of-the-sims...
Music in The Sims:
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Music_in_The_Sims
Interview with SimCasino Composer Jerry Martin! A Master of Simulation Game Music:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158420/view/4689895...
SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve:
its a lot more like dwarf fortress than sim city
(Looks like this screenshot confirms it, those two blue arrows rotated the view: https://pressakey.com/gamepix/101/simcity3.jpg)
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.
Pretty impressive for a game released in 2003.
Oh my goodness SC4 is 23 years old. I'll go be old in the corner.
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 :)
https://www.pcgamer.com/a-tech-analysis-of-cities-skylines-2...
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.
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.
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
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 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.
So if you're in the outer lane and the person behind you wants to go faster than you and get past, get out of their way.
It's safer anyway, and also you don't know who they are or where they're going.
If he wants me to disregard them, he shouldn't be writing blog posts about them.
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)
Not quite what you're looking for I think but it was a Wine-style reimplementation of MacOS.
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.
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.
That way firefighters can take people down the elevators safely etc.
We need more than blog posts, we need the government to do something. I'm thinking of starting a campaign for Saner Roads if you'd join me.
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 the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!
It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!
(the keys can be changed in control settings)
If you're looking for a free-angle view we don't have it, the game is designed to be looked like a isometric game. Having said that, I'm working on a "photo mode" that frees the camera and lets you choose a lens (with depth of field) and a film but so far it's only for shooting pictures and not for actually playing the game.
This is a childish mindset. It would be worth taking a defensive driving course if you haven't done so, it may be helpful.
> join people like him and me and take a stand against bad behavior
Ironically, impeding faster traffic by camping the passing lane is also illegal in several states (yes, even if you're going the speed limit).
There is zero chance they'll recognise your dominance, let alone moral superiority, and walk away changed from a teaching moment. They're not even seeing you as a person. They only see your car as one more obstacle among so many other "idiots", and it's quite probable you're provoking only more reckless behaviour.
In other news, I was on track to win re-election and lost. I lost while having the selector for building a structure enabled, and that was stuck on the placing-a-tile, even though I'd lost and the game ended. Very fun game nonetheless!
SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity. It's built upon a souped-up version of the Sc2K engine. It features isometric art, crafted pixel by pixel. It strikes the right balance of features and complexity; it feels like it could be mastered but without coddling you. It also has a high resolution Jazzy/new age OST.
Running it on modern systems takes a few tweaks but is certainly doable. By "modern" I mean Windows 10 LTSC 2021, Ryzen 5 3600, Radeon Rx 7600, 48 GB of RAM, 4K monitor.
I first installed SC3k from its CD ROM. I've had this Scholastic Edition CD all my life, I actually purchased it at a school book fair in a primary school building that no longer exists. But the disk still does, and I will not pay for the same game twice. The installation completed without trouble on 64-bit Windows 10. The game launched but it wasn't very playable:
Not to worry. There are remedies for each of these. By the end of this article, you will have a SimCity 3000 game that looks just like this:
Behold, SimCity 3000 in 4K! Risky biscuits: building 1WTC and 2WTC but no hospitals or fire stations. I like to tease fate.
The patched EXE will enable widescreen support. It also acts as a No-CD patch. GOG.com contributed this patch and have shared it for a public download:
Download: From GOG. Mirror. MD5: 638eb5b3e7de9ada9b61a1ea40d276a4.
Download this and replace the original EXE with it. Now you can start the game and choose a larger resolution. However, the mouse acceleration will now be too much. Also, the game will appear horribly askew if you've chosen a resolution that has a factor of 8, which is very likely because that's most of them. Not to worry. We can fix that too.
Edit the SC3U.ini file. Modify or set this variable:
[Navigation] ScrollMarginFactor = 0.005787
Source: CorinaMarie @ Simtropolis
This will fix the resolution weirdness, meaning you can play the game at full 4k. My monitor is 3840x2160 native, and this will make the game support it. It will also fix any other graphical acceleration problems on modern cards and DirectX 11+.
Download PCGW. Mirror MD5: e97d0989cab120608800f2e3395581a7
Extract these files to your SC3K Apps directory. That's it. Almost...
By default the D3d Wrapper will run in borderless, not fullscreen. That means your Taskbar will push the game off the screen! This is allegedly for better compatibility for streaming, but since I'm not an egotist who needs every second of his life broadcast to an audience, we will switch it to true fullscreen.
Inside the SC3K Apps directory there is a file dxwrapper.ini. Make the following changes:
[d3d9] EnableWindowMode = 0 ... [FullScreen] FullScreen = 1
I also did this:
EnableVsync = 1
When scrolling the map, you'll see tiles appear as a small pale cube before their contents are loaded into view. Installing the 4GB patch will give the game more RAM to play with, and should help, but I haven't confirmed this scientifically. There's no harm installing it anyway.
Download: NTCore
Run this on the SC3K.exe file. It will allow the game to use more RAM on 64-bit systems.
The slowdown when first opening the game is caused by the auto-updater trying to contact a long-dead update server. You can disable it with this patched .ini file:
Download: catty-cb @ SimTropolis. Mirror. MD5: e01ec9e7568560f493ff4cbbebb0e3d4
"Save this file (making sure to unzip it and rename it to UpdateSettings.ini) to "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000 Unlimited\Apps\Updater", overwriting the existing UpdateSettings.ini file."
Basically rename it to UpdateSettings.ini and stick it in the Apps/Updater directory.
Some of the music from the original release is missing from an .ini file, even though it is present in Unlimited. Fix that with the following patch:
Download Patrxgt @ PGGW. Mirror. Md5: 5877e363565850306131e564e364481c
Extract that into your base SC3k directory.
Finally, if you installed SC3K from CD like me, the music is not copied to your computer. Fix that by navigating to the CD directory: APPS/RES/SOUND/MUSIC then copy the .xa files to the same directory on your HDD. Done!
That's it. Now you can get back to dismissing petitioners, building golden statues of yourself, and zoning quiet farmland only to have it immediately bought over and turned into a brood of Smoke-O-Matics. All on your shiny Windows 10 box, in glorious 4K resolution!
These steps have been confirmed working on Windows 10. I don't know about Windows 11, I presume it will work there also, but I refuse to let that abomination anywhere near my home. If you are unlucky enough to be stuck with W11 but have success with these steps, let us know in the comments.