The importance of roads in SCS

[MarkDuffy]

It looks like roads are very important in SCS. A first guess could be that roads do triple duty. Transportation is the obvious first duty.

Roads are also water pipes & power lines (underground)? Power stations & Water pumps & their cousins/upgrades have to be connected to roads.

Connect your homes, workplaces & venues to roads to get transportation, power & water. No "zones", right? The buildings themselves are our zones. We make our own zones by the mix of buildings we place there. I really like this new idea!

I really don't see much difference from what I have noticed with my beginning play of SC3U.

When I heard about the early posts about power lines & especially pipes, I thought it was a big deal. It is not, having played a bit of SC3U now. I was surprized how pipes & powerlines were just a simple gimmick. Now budgets, that is another thing all together & very complex. ;)

Another possibility might be area effects for water &/or power. Anyone see the overlay zone appear in the IGN video when the antique shop was placed?

This brings me to transportation. Won't more transportation types make the game easier? One of the challenges in SCS is to build appropriately so that our people have enough time in the day to work, shop, party & sleep.

I could see transportation buildings added to raise some type of Societal Energy, but not really necessary for transportation.

[Romaq]

I think we've not seen a great deal on transit because I believe they are still hammering out game balance issues with transit. In SC4, the greatest 'cheat' you can have is a bottomless supply of money. It appears that in SC5, transit is more vital to game balance than even money. SC5 wants you to think about where you place buildings, because relationships between the function of the building and travel of sims between them has a huge impact. If transit can be done in such a way as to make those relationships irrelevant, it's the same effect in SC4 as shipping the game with endless money and no tax or budget issues.

TM isn't going to ship the game with transit done in such a way as to make the relationships between buildings and neighborhoods 'irrelevant' any more than Maxis would have shipped SC4 with all tax set to 0 and a 'bottomless supply of money' cheat mod already installed. Now, granted... *I* happen to be playing SC4 at the moment with such cheat mods simply because I'm not interested in learning budget managment within a city. I'm attempting to recreate an existing city that already has lots and lots of 'stuff,' and to duplicate that 'stuff' within the game, it costs money. LOTS of money. Now *after* I recreate the city I live in within SC4, *THEN* I might apply taxes to throw on the breaks to growth and see if I can balance budget issues and learn more of what the City Council has to work with. Or I might have a tornado rip the city hall into teeny-tiny little pieces, build a Wal-Mart Supercenter on top of the remains and have a good laugh. But I digress...

I saw the overlay zone pop up in the video also, but I think that is simply a way to describe the 'reach' of that building's effect as a venue. We didn't see her dropping transit. I'm guessing that 'water' and 'power' are simply not considered within the model at all. For the *most* part, at least within what I see real-life, if there's a road, there's almost certainly power lines nearby, and a water main is likely running alongside it. The capacity of the lines and the water main may be an issue, but that's getting in the direction of SC4. If you simply say those things are not going to count in SC5, you can take things in a new direction.

In Real Life, I live roughly 2.5 hours drive from the local dormant volcano. I really *really* like seeing that volcano, since I'm from Flat-Land IndiaNoPlace, Indiana. If I *could* simply hop on the monorail from Bellis Fair to Heather Meadows and be at the mountain in a half hour, I would, and likely once a month, maybe more depending upon the fare. But there isn't a monorail, and there will not likely be one ever.

If it's trivial to build a 'high speed monorail' between where your sims live, where they work, and where they play, you can have residential areas far enough away from industry, that industrial polution simply doesn't matter. If that monorail goes right to the local Sim Version of the Vegas Strip, and from that 'Strip' right back to their place of residence, you have effectivly made all of their careful balance of societal energy gameplay irrelevant. TM is *not* going to ship the game like that.

So... some poor soul is responsible for making sure 'transit options' do not effectivly suck out the challenge of playing the game as intended. I really would not want to have that person's job. But I'm sure if someone has ideas and suggestions on how to resolve the 'home --monorail--> work --monorail--> venue --monorail--> home' problem, I'm sure they would be interested.

Then again, I might be looking at things the wrong way entirely. That's the trouble with having so little data to work with. My goodness I'll have to make sure to grab the GDev issue with SC5:'s post mortem!

--Romaq

[MarkDuffy]

Now, granted... *I* happen to be playing SC4 at the moment with such cheat mods simply because I'm not interested in learning budget managment within a city. I'm attempting to recreate an existing city that already has lots and lots of 'stuff,' and to duplicate that 'stuff' within the game, it costs money. LOTS of money. Now *after* I recreate the city I live in within SC4, *THEN* I might apply taxes to throw on the breaks to growth and see if I can balance budget issues and learn more of what the City Council has to work with.

You do WHAT, Romaq? :eek:

[King Faticus]

Power was-is required to get any buildings to grow from zones in sim city, without it they would just sit there as empty zones. Water was-is required for buildings to become higher quality and to support larger populations.
other than that what did it add to gameplay besides another thing to add to the budget? I know it wasn't very difficult to place powerlines or water pipes so it didn't add difficulty, maybe a sense of realism...
Speaking of realism in simcity the water pipes are also used as sewers appearently:eek: I HOPE this isn't realistic...I personally would want water pipes to be seperate from sewer lines but that might just be me:rolleyes:
also in some poor countries they do not have residential power or water at all, adding to this some even lack zones entirly, "regular" Simcity cannot simulate those types of real cities but SCs can and makes you do it too. o_0

Edit: Im not sure if there were sewers in 3k but I didn't see any in 4k today or remember any in 2k

Edit2: my post has absolutly nothing to do with roads because Im special o_0 but I like ^ post above mark's :o

[MarkDuffy]

It's funny, King. When I started playing SC3K, I just did my usual CB thang & placed Power Plant & Water Pump on a road. I learned about power lines later (When David, Azeem & Reed laughed at me about my future pollution from my posted Noob City) & they only connect a disconnected Nuclear Power Plant to a road & this powers the entire city (until it gets too big). Everything else gets its power from roads. There are no real power lines. They are under the roads already to zones connected by roads. SCS changes nothing here.

Water works through area effects (I placed waaaay too many pipes :rolleyes: ). :o Area Effect for SC3U pipes is SEVEN tiles! Yikes! HUGE! I'm still wondering how that disconnected Nuke Plant got workers. :eek:

<then I started to read a bit the manual>

Now I have searched the web for SC4 tips & it looks like not much had changed here.

I just don't see any difference in "realism".

In C4, we got stuff via roads. In SCS, we just get a few more things through roads, possibly.

EDIT: I love to post below King! :)

[Azeem]

Personally, I'd really really really like it if there were at least bus systems and rail systems. All the fancy stuff (high speed rail, elevated rail, etc.) are not necessary to make the game enjoyable for me. But at least have more than just roads. ;) [Are you reading this, TM? I really don't want to give you guys "Time Out" for not including rails! :D ] At the very least, SimCity original had standard roads and standard rails.

@KF: Piping was introduced in SC2k. Sanitation was introduced in SC3k. The original SimCity did not have water piping networks. Odd thing about the power lines thing is that I recall that back then, players actually complained about the need to use them. ;) If you've noticed the trend from SimCity original to SimCity 4, the need to set up power line networks gradually diminished. In SC4, zones only need to be within the vicinity of a building. Also, there was a trend in simplifying piping networks from SC2k to SC4.

@MD: SimCity also has its own set of "magic" effects. :o

[Romaq]

Uhm... was it it that I cheat? That I'm duplicating the city I live in with SC4? Or that I mangled how I said it to imply I'm actually living within a SimCity?

Oh dear... does that mean if I don't play SC:5, I'll cease to exist? Now THAT is one heck of an incentive to play a computer game!

"Buy this video game, or the place where you live will cease to exist when nobody else plays the prior version."

At the moment I'm fetching a ~64km^2 square area with Las Vegas in the center so I can port the whole works into SimCity. I've finally got down how to get the 10m DEM data and USGS topographic maps that exactly match. Pull the whole thing into SC4 using a 16 bit image, large city sizes only, start marking down water, major roads... come July 9th I'll actually *be* in Las Vegas for the first time to see what it's like. Maybe I'll move there.

Will Las Vegas cease to exist too if I don't buy SC5?

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

@ mark: place commercial districts between industrial and residential ones to shield them from pollution, also try to keep the industrial parts and the poweplants twards the side of the map so that half of the pollution they produce is outside your city and not inside:)

PS there were no powerlines in 4k either except the huge ones, power automatically went to zones through the street

PPS Romaq: Mark is a huge anti cheat type:eek: he doesn't even use texture mods;)

Edit: @ Azeem, kinda sounds fun for the developers to deal with opposing input, IE Person#1 doesn't want powerlines because random reason A
and Person#2 wants power lines because random reason B

[Marius]

Uhm... was it it that I cheat? That I'm duplicating the city I live in with SC4? Or that I mangled how I said it to imply I'm actually living within a SimCity?

Oh dear... does that mean if I don't play SC:5, I'll cease to exist? Now THAT is one heck of an incentive to play a computer game!

"Buy this video game, or the place where you live will cease to exist when nobody else plays the prior version."

At the moment I'm fetching a ~64km^2 square area with Las Vegas in the center so I can port the whole works into SimCity. I've finally got down how to get the 10m DEM data and USGS topographic maps that exactly match. Pull the whole thing into SC4 using a 16 bit image, large city sizes only, start marking down water, major roads... come July 9th I'll actually *be* in Las Vegas for the first time to see what it's like. Maybe I'll move there.

Will Las Vegas cease to exist too if I don't buy SC5?

--Romaq

I suspect you should skip SimCity Societies...

*Cough* ... wait it out for SimCity 5 (Obsessive Compulsive Edition)
:rolleyes:

[MarkDuffy]

@MD: SimCity also has its own set of "magic" effects. :o

I sat here, calmly for over a week, Azeem, while SC4 fans slammed the hell outta TM & our forum. So many bogus claims. "They killed SC". "They dumbed it down". "This will be a game for children!"

So, I did what I usually do.

I went to the LAB

TM is gonna make SimCity better! :D

[King Faticus]

also their bs claims about realism;)
btw they were scratching for something else to complain about when they mentioned power and water
This will be a game for children!
pfft most of them acted like complete asinine children the other week, you would think they would appriciate a game conviniently and appropriately designed explicetly for them:rolleyes:

[Romaq]

(blushes) Oh! Er.. well, I must beg forgiveness on using the money cheats, but I really would like to have the fun of duplicating Bellingham. And I'll put the cheats away after I've flattened the City Hall and plopped a Wal-Mart Super Center in the middle of downtown Bellingham, just to spite them. Honest I'll put them away! Maybe.

Actually, I can come clean on a few things...

1) I have two legal copies of SC4, of which *one* of the 'disk 2s' can no longer be used to do an install for scratches, since I wore it out using it as a 'dongle'. At that point, I made a copy of the CD and I'm using the copy to circumvent the 'copy protection'. On a laptop, it simply isn't feasible to carry around a stack of CDs *just* because the company doesn't want me to use pirate copies. So, of course, I use the tools the pirates use to ensure ensure *I* don't have to suffer loosing the use of a CD drive or damage to the original disk. But the people who make these decisions don't appear to have to suffer the consequences of their choices. Only those who are honest and not willing or able to break copy protection for software they legally purchased.

2) I do cheat on the game budget, but I'm playing for a different set of expectations out of the simulation. I'm looking to place things and have the game simulation grow without having to devote time and energy to 'budget management' issues. It also gives me time to play 'what if' and 'how come' without the pain and disaster of not managing to do things 'just right', and having to recover from mistakes with heaping gobs of time. I'm not that patient.

3) I cheated on X-Com to have fun going through it, and seeing the game play out end-to-end. Then I played it 'right' without cheating, and it took heaping huge gobs of time, but I know I can play it out 'right' if I wish. If I want boring tedium, I can get paid for that at work. I want entertainment, so I persue the most entertaining route. It's the same with SC4. If I wanted to manage budget tedium, I'll get a job and be paid for it.

4) Half of the 'entertainment' value I get out of a game isn't so much the game itself, but what's 'under the hood'. I'm entertained, having just pulled USGIS data and Topo maps for a place I've never been, and getting that detail into a game. I have entertainment value in learning to understand the mechanics of the game, and why certain 'cheats' work the way they do, and what the limitations are. If I'm not 'entertained' by SC5, I'll likely take up BATing and MODing, and figuring out how to make the NAM do more of what it does.

5) A big portion of the entertainment is positive interaction with others. I *like* that I've had conversations with CycleDogg on SimTrop to get a terrain texture that works for the Cascades. I like having talked with Woulanagain through issues with SC4TF. I will be pleased if my Whatcom County region is found useful and interesting to someone else, especially if it already has major transit work done, even if I have to use a 'cheat' mod in order to have the budget to lay down those transit networks.

So, apologies to those who can't stand the thought of any form of 'cheat'. I consider myself an honorable individual, and I loath dishonesty. If it were not for those who played the game 'right', there wouldn't be much of a framework for the 'metagame' area I play in.

So, thank you, Mark, and the people like you who provide the context and framework for the 'metagame' I play in.

Cheers!

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

I don't think making a copy of the disk for your own use in private is illegal

PS I have no problem with cheating myself

[Romaq]

I suspect you should skip SimCity Societies...

*Cough* ... wait it out for SimCity 5 (Obsessive Compulsive Edition)
:rolleyes:

Alas, I suspect you are correct.:rolleyes:

But I've proven that an accurate rendering of one's own hometown (at least in the US) can be done with as much accuracy as is possible within the context of the SC4 game engine. Not that... uhm... anyone else would care about that sort of thing.:(

Oh well, I consider myself entertained, and I'll be well set for a job in surveying or taxi-cab driving if I move to Vegas.

--Romaq

[MarkDuffy]

TM will give you your money cheats & all the usual suspects, Romaq. GFW sez that you will also get your custom content.

Everyone will be happy. :)

<you might not get your million population, though>

[Romaq]

I don't think making a copy of the disk for your own use in private is illegal

PS I have no problem with cheating myself

There is debate on it, and I'm not a lawyer. If EAGames wants to sue me over it, they could. I would also raise hell and publicity over the right of someone to make backups of their own legally purchased work, and make a huge embarassing stink about it. I would also have the call out for anyone and everyone who has the least scratch on their game CD to demand EAGames exchange their damaged media for brand new media, free, even if their game is from the late 80s.

Who knows, maybe EAGames would actually win the lawsuit. But they would most assuredly loose the war. And they really don't want light shed on the farce of copy protection. But it's all topic for another thread that's not SC:S. I was just coming clean on the issue of 'cheating'. I don't steal from EAGames. I sure as heck wish EAGames would quit punishing me (with copy protection) for *not* stealing from them. But, you know... Wizard's First Rule.

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

people play video games for different reasons, I play to try to relax (I have alot of stress in RL) and feel physically ill when I feel the game is pressurring me too much, Mark plays to see what trouble he can cause and to try to understand the game completely, and you play to analyse the game and see wht it's limits are.

All are equally valid no one more ethan the other, so you are welcome to enjoy any game as you like :p

PS I agree with mark about the population, it is difficult to have a higher population when the computer is running 10,000 people in the streets instead of mindless animations :o

@ Romaq:
to be honest you already purchased the game and you are not distributing the copies so they shouldn't have a real reason to go after you o_0
and besides Why would they care about sueing you, it is not like you have a ton of money or are any real threat to them, it would probably be a waste of their time... (no offence meant)

[MarkDuffy]

also their bs claims about realism;)

If I find out that they have modded a COTN-like villager's hovel into a skyscraper, someone is gonna be in BIG trouble, King. ;)

[King Faticus]

what about venetian baroque? :o

[MarkDuffy]

what about venetian baroque? :o

As long as it is Pretty™, then it is fine! :D

[King Faticus]

you know me better than that:p
I am doing a whole city makeover starting with the wireframes themselves but hit a snag :(
I am going to have to pester TM to hell about stuff and other annoying questions before you see anything lmao
It will be a while before I can seriously work on my "Mother of Grace™ Mod"

I don't know how to scale the buildings to a footprint in the game, also I don't know how to make sprites walk up into different doors yet and I don't know the format the models use or how to convert either :/ so basically I have the idea and ability to make the buildings but am unable to put them into the game and make them functional:(

but on the bright side TM always leaves the games guts exposed for us "modders" to poke around in easily

[Romaq]

TM will give you your money cheats & all the usual suspects, Romaq. GFW sez that you will also get your custom content.

Everyone will be happy. :)

<you might not get your million population, though>

I've not attempted to push for population on anything yet. What fascinates me at the moment about the *possibility* of building anything within SC4 is the area within which I live. It has islands, it has flat farms and plains. The area has lakes, hills, rivers, mountains, and even a dormant volcano.

I love saying that. I live within a few hours of a *DORMANT VOLCANO*! How freakin’ cool is *that*? Just the cone of the thing occupies *FOUR* ‘big city’ tiles (Roughly 64 sq. km). It’s freakin’ huge and dominates the horizon in this area. I mean, come on! It’s a FREAKIN VOLCANO! Ok, maybe I’m too excited about that, but I’m from IndiaNoplace, and I’ve yet to see a volcano among the endless cornfields. So when I thought to tackle a city, I’d want to build a city that’s pretty much like the area I live in. So… why not *build* the area I live in? And things kinda went downhill from there, but I digress.

It wasn’t so much the money cheats, but the vision of what I wanted to create, and my desire to kick loose anything that got in the way of achieving that vision: This is where I live, with islands, farms, lakes, and a volcano holding the horizon up. Talking about Mt. Baker gets me giddy like a kid. ‘Population’ is a side effect of recreating the local.

I’m not sure if everyone will be happy with SC5. I am not quite sure if I will be one of them that is happy with SC5. I’m quite sure I want the ‘big names’ of SC4 custom content to port their models and fit their work into the SC5 ‘context’ before I’m going to be all that secure with SC5. That includes the NAM (in keeping with the theme of this thread). There will be some, perhaps even most that won’t. But having it possible and putting the choice on the authors is different from having it *not* possible.

And I’d really *REALLY* like porting DEM content from content such as here (http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/US/61067/1785/group4-3.html) to occupy far less pain than what it does currently. I’m documenting the pain for those curious here: http://www.mik-maq.com/sc4tf/LasVegas.

And transit. I still want a private monorail ride up to Mt. Baker, even if only in a game.

--Romaq

[Romaq]

...Why would they care about sueing you, it is not like you have a ton of money or are any real threat to them, it would probably be a waste of their time... (no offence meant)

No offense taken. A friend told me of an article showing research that if they can hold off pirating for six months with copy protection, they pretty much eliminate the impact of piracy upon their products. The companies know they won't *stop* piracy, but they seek to mitigate it 'long enough' so that sales have peaked, and it doesn't matter. And the trouble isn't so much friends passing pirate copies amongst themselves as 'black hat' companies making and selling pirate copies made to look as much as possible like the legitimate ones and selling *those* to people that think they are buying the real thing.

There's no 'copy protection' for Colgate Toothpaste, but *that* particular game has taken quite the deadly turn (http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/colgate06_07.html). And so it is that honest people have to suffer copy protection. But having to dink with SC4's 'disk 2' in my CD tray has me appreciate paying a monthly subscription fee to UO.

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

I guess that makes sense, most people who would steal the game beyond a certain point would likely not have bought it in the first place I guess... but I have never heard of those "black hat" companies selling realistic fakes:eek: I assume they mostly operate in countries where those kind of laws aren't as stricktly enforced.

[Romaq]

From http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/colgate06_07.html
The counterfeit toothpaste can be easily recognized because it is labelled as "Manufactured in South Africa." Colgate does not import toothpaste into the United States from South Africa. In addition, the counterfeit packages examined so far have several misspellings including: "isclinically" "SOUTH AFRLCA" "South African Dental Assoxiation".
It's a problem with clothing and many manufactured goods. In one overseas plant, it was either Intel or IBM that noticed certain 'oddities' coming up at the factory, as if were running full blast but not producing the expected number of processors. It turned out they were manufacturing, we'll say 'Genuine Intel' chips, but those chips were *not* going through 'Genuine Intel' *books*. The management was simply making selling for a fraction of the price the 'real thing' through the back door. The problem went on for some time because everyone involved simply assumed that was 'how it works'.

As far as sales, within that six months you pretty much have whatever sales you are going to get that matter. And at *that* point, 'black hat' manufacturing isn't interested, because *they* are not going to make any money on it either.

I think at some point online connectivity is going to be at a place where you simply pay a fee, say $50 a month, maybe more, maybe less, depending on the content of games and how much time you spend playing them. The game becomes fully interactive with other 'subscribers', and 'copy protection' isn't an issue because the only real copy of the game is under server control of the publisher, such as the case with Ultima Online.

Maybe not. Having that 'Disk 2 dongle' is still a major pain, and I hope to quickly thwart that sort of nonsense. And they ought to be pushing DVD disks for content by now instead of CDs.

But that's another thread. I digress again.

--Romaq

[Forkboy]

I think we've not seen a great deal on transit because I believe they are still hammering out game balance issues with transit. --Romaq

I'd be shocked if TM was out marketing the game before they were able to show off all of the transportation options. By the time developers start releasing official screenshots and showing their game off in public, things are usually pretty close to being complete.

Matt

[callagrafx]

There is debate on it, and I'm not a lawyer. If EAGames wants to sue me over it, they could.
--Romaq

Making a backup copy of a legitimately purchased game is 100% legal. What you may not do is break the copyright protection, the executable files and/or distribute the game through any means. You can not sell the copies, but are free to sell the originals.

[Romaq]

I can make a backup, but I'm not permitted to break the copy protection which otherwise renders 'backups' useless.

That's a nice feature of the law.

The whole situation on Intellectual Property protection is a mess.

Hopefully we'll get some word on transit Monday when the Devs come back in to post.

--Romaq

[callagrafx]

Yeah...technology moves faster than Law. Probably something to do with liquid lunches :D

[Romaq]

Law is about generating revenue through maintaining the status quo.
Technology is about generating revenue by being a cheaper alternative to the status quo.

One of those 'societal energy conflict' issues at work.

--Romaq