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If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 19 years, SimCity is a game where you start from nothing but money and a huge chunk of land, and produce bustling metropolises with millions upon millions of Sim residents. SimCity 4, and its expansion Rush Hour, are the latest instalments in the series, (Societies doesn’t count, don’t even get me started…) and were released a relatively long time ago now, in 2003. However, the game has aged extremely well, and maintains a large community to this day, who have done amazing things with mods, from replacing the traffic pathfinding engine to letting you add McDonalds or Burger King to your city. If the thought of playing god appeals to you, and you grew tired of making your Sims piss their pants or drown in the swimming pool, step it up a notch and kill millions with a meteor shower. Or, you know, build pretty cities. Reviews: Simcity 4, Rush Hour. Screenshots:           Beta Gigapack Finally got the chance to organize and datpack these. Thanks to Metrication, there are now dozens more parks, canals, and functional seaports/airports. I've also added Road Top Mass Transit in light of recent developments (that is, how it doesn't actually gently caress your city) and a whole load of goon-suggested civic buildings and plugins. Important things to know - All of the plugins have been consolidated into several large .dats. This means that NAM and the like aren't yet configurable. This will change in the final release. - You can install this straight over the top of the old beta gigapack. - You can upgrade from KillHour's pack or my original pack by emptying your plugins directory and installing this. - For best results, empty your plugins directory before installing this. - Please report any unusual crashes, brown boxes, or missing textures! - As an addendum to the above, remove any additional plugins before reporting bugs, just to be sure that it's gigapack related. Yeah yeah, give me the download already! GhostDog posted:Here's a torrent of the mod pack: And here is a list of all the files included in the .DATs. FAQ & Tips: How do I make SC4 run in widescreen? Change your SimCity 4 shortcut, add this to the "target" box in shortcut properties: The bolded part is what you should be adding. "X:\your simcity 4 directory\SimCity 4.exe" -CustomResolution:enabled -r1680x1050x32 -f -intro:off You can change 1680x1050 to whatever resolution or colour depth you want, obviously. MAC USERS: edit: The following may not be necessary, supposedly you can hold down command while starting the game to pick a resolution. To run in a custom resolution (eg. 1680x1050 or whatever), you'll need either Apple Developer Tools installed, or you will need to have some other way to edit binary plists. A cusory google search shows this: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/plisteditpro/ may be a good candidate (but I have no idea since I use the Developer Tools). - Go to your "Home" directory - Go to "Library/Preferences" - Find the plist entitled "com.aspyr.simcity4.plist" - Back up the plist in case you mess it up I guess. - Open the plist (with either Property List Editor, or whatever tool you downloaded) - Twirl down the "Root" node and find "custom-height", "custom-width", and "custom-resolution". - Change custom-height and custom-width to whatever values you want to run at, and change custom-resolution to 1 - Save your plist, open up SC4, enjoy your new native resolution CPU-sucking game. Help! My city is at X population and my demand has hit zero! You might have hit a “demand cap.” There are some good articles on these caps, and their “busters” here and here. Oh god I’m losing money! Play the tutorials that come with Rush Hour. Seriously, they cover all sorts of tips for managing your budget – the main one is to MICROMANAGE FUNDING! If you’re only using 1000w a month, build a Coal Plant and decrease its funding – or even better, build a Coal Plant in a neighbouring industrial city and sell off the excess power. This game is 5 years old, why is it bringing my computer to its knees? There are a few common causes for bad performance, but know this - SimCity 4 is just as much of a system hog now as it was back then. Abnormally bad performance can be caused by: 1) ATi cards, specifically the Catalyst drivers. I'm pretty sure there are some versions that work alright, but I do not own an ATi card so somebody else will have to clarify. Try running the game in Software Rendering mode. 2) Multithreaded CPUs. These can make SC4 act really weird (on XP at least, Vista seems to work fine.) If you have issues, try starting SC4, alt tabbing out, hitting CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, right clicking the Simcity 4 process and choosing "Set Affinity." Untick all boxes except CPU 0. I believe you have to do this every time you play the game, which is a pain in the arse. 3) Road Top Mass Transit mod. The methods that this mod uses to place bus stops and the like on top of your roads are somewhat of a hack - it's really just a regular building that lets traffic pass through it. This means that every time a sim passes through the building, their route is recalculated. This can bring a city to its knees, and can even lead to abandonment as the pathfinder gives up on finding routes. 4) Shadows kill performance. Turn them to low and enjoy tolerable framerates again! http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/me...866&STARTPAGE=3 for more information, about halfway down the page. Guide to not sucking: 1) Buy Rush Hour. Seriously, it adds so much to the game that should have been there from the start, and it lets you use the Network Addon Mod, probably the most essential mod for the game. 2) Don't build a fire station until you've had your first fire. Don't build police stations, schools, or anything right off the bat. Ignore agricultural demand unless you want to make a farming village, and don't hook water up to any farming zones - they don't need it. 3) Use bus stops everywhere, they reduce congestion significantly. This isn’t as necessary as it once was with the new pathfinding AI that’s coming out in the new version of the Network Addon Mod soon (the stable beta of which I stuck in the two download packs,) but it’s still helpful. You should also only build streets until they get congested, then upgrade the congested ones to roads. Commerce likes to be on a busy road, residential likes to be away from busy roads. Dirty/Manufacturing Industry doesn't give a poo poo about pollution, but high-tech industrial, commercial and residential hate it. Do not use subways, highways and such in a small city. They're for regions with hundreds of thousands of sims or more. Play as a region. Put your power plants and dirty industry in one city, and your water pumps and residential/commercial in another. Connect your cities with roads, power lines and water pipes and you'll be able to set up neighbor deals that buy and sell water and power. Sims will automatically look for jobs in neighboring cities if a road connection is present. To get rid of garbage, build an incinerator and set the funding to 0. It'll still burn the trash, it just won't generate power. Some might consider this cheating, but whatever – you still have to pay for the garbage pickup, and they still generate pollution! There's a guide on making a successful city here, that you might find helpful, and a guide to region play here. Zoning Tips Shift prevents roads from being automatically built. Alt changes the road that your zone is aligned to — useful if you want something to be on a side street (or if you don't.) Ctrl allows you to make zone "subdivisions" of custom sizes. I use this for making slums, as it lets you specifically zone for 4x4 high density residential and nothing smaller. Click and hold the zoning tool in between some roads to automatically fill in a city block. Links and Resources: Old SC4 Thread. Simtropolis. The exchange is horrible to navigate but the Omnibus is a fantastic source of information. Check it out sometime if you’re having trouble with the game. SC4Devotion Their exchange is pretty nice, especially compared to the one on Simtropolis. Their forums are atrocious, (not due to AOL speak or anything but because they are egotistical neckbeards) but there is a lot of good information in them. The City Journal/Mayor Diary forums on Simtropolis and SC4Devotion respectively, are a really good showcase of some amazing work, but a warning in advance: They’ll either completely de-motivate you, or you will become addicted. Zygar fucked around with this message at Apr 17, 2011 around 02:10 |
| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:11 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 09:27 |
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might want a mod to move this to the proper forum for you...
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:13 |
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Full Circle posted:might want a mod to move this to the proper forum for you... Shush.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:14 |
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angerbotSD posted:Shush.  I'm a loving retard with tabbed browsing and skimmed the forum title - thanks for this.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:15 |
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Barring that, this actually looks pretty well done. I bought this a few weeks after it came out and got frustrated because I was so miserable at it. Perhaps this will help.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:16 |
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Every single time I see a Sim City 4 thread here I have the urge to re-install, and just as I build up the energy to do it I remember how lovely I am at it and how I have to resort to cheats every time. I really am awful at managing money and end up getting bored so just start messing about with disasters 
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:22 |
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For some reason my day/night rotation doesn't seem to happen anymore and I don't remember seeing an option that tied directly to that. Does anyone happen to know how to fix that? Also, for that industrial waterside screen shot, are those placeables or does industrial on the water edge naturally grow into that?
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:23 |
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Wayback posted:For some reason my day/night rotation doesn't seem to happen anymore and I don't remember seeing an option that tied directly to that. Does anyone happen to know how to fix that? I'm pretty sure the guy who made that city used placeable seawalls for that, they are probably on the Simtropolis exchange. They won't grow naturally like that. As for the day/night rotation, go into God-mode, I can't remember where exactly the button is but it's there. VV Done, thanks. Zygar fucked around with this message at Feb 26, 2008 around 20:34 |
| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:30 |
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Should throw something in the OP about widescreen support. Add whats in bold to your command line to enable widescreen. "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -CustomResolution:enabled -r1680x1050
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:33 |
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I guess the secret to my cities sucking is that they aren't tied in with any sort of regional plan at all.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:40 |
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Zygar posted:I'm pretty sure the guy who made that city used placeable seawalls for that, they are probably on the Simtropolis exchange. They won't grow naturally like that. I can't find my disks, so I guess I'll have to buy this again when I get my next paycheck. Such a great game. Of course, I could never turn it up past normal difficulty due to constant water main incidents, but there is nothing better than having a dense, hideously polluted industrial city surrounded by pristine suburbs.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 20:58 |
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Joink posted:Should throw something in the OP about widescreen support. OH WOW! Thanks for that. So can you enter most any resolution there that your card and monitor support? Any tips on optimizing for Vista and an SLi configuration of nVidia graphics cards? I have 2 gigs of RAM and swap(.avi) space is at like 4095.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 21:29 |
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Kleptomik posted:drat. That would make my day. Amazon has the deluxe for around 17-18 bucks. EA for 20.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 21:30 |
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Great OP, the last thread was fun, but maybe this'll get some more people into/back into the game. It's worth mentioning that you should stay away from the road top mass transit mod at all costs, I know lots of people use it, but it confuses the simulator and brings larger cities to their knees. Good thread title by the way 
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 21:34 |
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Zygar posted:(not due to AOL speak or anything but because they are pretentious neckbeards)  but then at the end he threatens criminal action against anyone who dares to reregister after being banned. Pure gold.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 21:38 |
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Sindai posted:Oh my god the first few paragraphs are I didn't read that far into it until you mentioned it, but he actually wants to prosecute someone for re-regestering under a new username?  Even the crazies at NMA never go that far.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 21:45 |
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OP updated with some common performance issues (in the FAQ.) If anybody knows of any other common bugs, let me know and I'll add them as well.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 21:53 |
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What is with people who absolutely hate having their mods distributed elsewhere? Seorin ran into the same poo poo with the morrowind mod pack. Do they not realize that their mod being included in such a pack makes it reach a far larger audience than it would ever otherwise see? Or do they just not care?
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 22:10 |
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:What is with people who absolutely hate having their mods distributed elsewhere? Seorin ran into the same poo poo with the morrowind mod pack. Do they not realize that their mod being included in such a pack makes it reach a far larger audience than it would ever otherwise see? Or do they just not care? I think they want the traffic to their websites. If they only restrict the mods to be downloadable from their site, you have no choice but to go to their site to download it.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 22:14 |
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Zygar, has the CAM been updated to work with these new traffic simulators? Or does using your pack with both of them just cause the new simulators to be overriden by the old ones that CAM uses (modified for higher capacity)?
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 22:46 |
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Lakitu7 posted:Zygar, has the CAM been updated to work with these new traffic simulators? Or does using your pack with both of them just cause the new simulators to be overriden by the old ones that CAM uses (modified for higher capacity)? I opted not to install the CAM simulator, and just installed the updated NAM simulator. They both have a similar capacity so it doesn't break anything.
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 22:50 |
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Oh my god! I used to play obsessively (had a NY region going with over 6 million sims), but I've gotten out of touch with it since I started playing other things.. Where oh where did you get those port tiles like in the pictures..the ones with the containers and the LNG ships being loaded. YOU MUST TELL ME!
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 22:54 |
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TyroneGoldstein posted:Oh my god! I used to play obsessively (had a NY region going with over 6 million sims), but I've gotten out of touch with it since I started playing other things.. I pulled those port screenshots from a city journal on Simtropolis by the name of "Stratton", I believe. They're a great example of how far from default you can take SC4. Hopefully you'll be able to find the specific name of the tiles from Simtropolis. 
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| # ? Feb 26, 2008 23:02 |
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I've been reinstalling with each repost of the SimCity4 threads, and I simply think I don't have the patience to put a good city together. Here's some questions I have: Are your big cities completely zoned? That is, is every square tile covered with some sort of zoning? As a second part to that question, do you even use power lines? And finally, the thing that irks me the most, I have a real hard time bulldozing over some lots to build a bus, an avenue, or to clear some traffic. Are you rezoning stuff throughout your city's existance or does everything need to be organized from the start? Can I have a big city on a smaller region square? Help! EDIT: Some more questions Should I be building my new, hoprefully someday successful cities adjacent to all my failed, yet still existant cities? Or should I start a new region entirely and hope to put things together? Do I need to think about my entire region development or just build a city, start a new one adjacent, etc, then go back through and connect them later? Madcosby fucked around with this message at Feb 26, 2008 around 23:16 |
| # ? Feb 26, 2008 23:11 |
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Madcosby posted:I've been reinstalling with each repost of the SimCity4 threads, and I simply think I don't have the patience to put a good city together. Here's some questions I have: Power lines are needed to bring power across empty spaces, either permanently or just to connect a city while you build from the outsides-in. Just remember that this isn't SC2: Sims will drive across the whole map and even into neighboring cities for their commutes. You don't have to checkerboard your tiles so that every R square has an I or C square within 5 blocks anymore. quote:And finally, the thing that irks me the most, I have a real hard time bulldozing over some lots to build a bus, an avenue, or to clear some traffic. Are you rezoning stuff throughout your city's existance or does everything need to be organized from the start? quote:Can I have a big city on a smaller region square? quote:EDIT: Some more questions Lakitu7 fucked around with this message at Feb 27, 2008 around 00:34 |
| # ? Feb 27, 2008 00:30 |
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I've tried twice to get the megapack and it's timed out both times at about 100 megs, I assume we killed the server?
Retrograde fucked around with this message at Feb 27, 2008 around 01:23 |
| # ? Feb 27, 2008 01:19 |
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Works for me. Anyone have that problem where it crashes to desktop after playing for a while? After the game starts taking up 500+ megs of ram, it starts randomly crashing. I have 2 gigs of ram and I think this is an issue, was just wondering if anyone has heard of a fix.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 01:43 |
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Retrograde posted:I've tried twice to get the megapack and it's timed out both times at about 100 megs, I assume we killed the server? I have the same problem, but I only get to 50MB
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 01:54 |
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Retrograde posted:I've tried twice to get the megapack and it's timed out both times at about 100 megs, I assume we killed the server? It's timing out every 5 minutes-ish for me. I'm just using the Firefox download manager to pause and unpause it when it times out, which works perfectly.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 01:55 |
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I've been trying to download the Giga Pack myself, but having no luck - first it stops downloading after a while, then doing pause/resume in Firefox doesn't work, and now I can't even get the link to open...it's possible someone will need to host a mirror version of it. Either that, or I just suck at the Internet.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:06 |
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The_Censorship_Nazi posted:I've been trying to download the Giga Pack myself, but having no luck - first it stops downloading after a while, then doing pause/resume in Firefox doesn't work, and now I can't even get the link to open...it's possible someone will need to host a mirror version of it. same. it downloaded 25mb at a good speed, then it stopped. pause/resume got another 0.3mb and now I can't get it to resume at all. Zygar can you post it as a torrent on alluvion?
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:10 |
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I can't even get the essentials pack downloaded Seconding a torrent on alluvion.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:14 |
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Pretty unusual that the pause/resume method isn't working for you folks. Once/if the torrent goes up I'll help seed; my upload caps at around 25kb/s so it'd be a horrible idea to try and start the torrent myself.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:17 |
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Xenofell posted:Pretty unusual that the pause/resume method isn't working for you folks. Once/if the torrent goes up I'll help seed; my upload caps at around 25kb/s so it'd be a horrible idea to try and start the torrent myself. I've got only about 65 to play with so I doubt I could start the big one... and I'd want to ask before starting the small one. Unless someone intends to host them together, which in my experience isn't the best idea. Of course, once one starts I'd be happy to help seed too.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:32 |
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I'm downloading the big pack. I'll put it up on alluvion if it finishes. Its downloading pretty quickly for me. I have a pretty nice upload so it should go fast.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:40 |
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Xenofell posted:Pretty unusual that the pause/resume method isn't working for you folks. if I do it a bunch of times it'll work and get another half meg or so before it quits again, but it'd take forever to download the entire huge file like this.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:45 |
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This looks awesome, thanks Zygar! I'm re-re-re-re-installing SC4 now.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:55 |
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Griz posted:if I do it a bunch of times it'll work and get another half meg or so before it quits again, but it'd take forever to download the entire huge file like this. Damnit the same thing's happening to me as well now. I'm at 711/867mb and it's stopping roughly two seconds after each unpause. Ah well I'll just stick with it since I'm so close.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 02:56 |
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Am I the only one who has some strange form of OCD when it comes to Sim City? Where everything has to be grids, blocks, asymmetrical, etc.? I am completely unable to create a natural flowing city, though I've tried, often. For example, here's my latest city's zone layout:  And the city itself: 
DEO3 fucked around with this message at Feb 27, 2008 around 03:16 |
| # ? Feb 27, 2008 03:09 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 09:27 |
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Goddamnit this thread title. WHY.
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| # ? Feb 27, 2008 03:22 |
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