Avocados posted:

Now if only theme park sims could start up again.

Grand Fromage posted:

There is merit, yes. Say you made a good phone booth people wanted to use, so you have 50 buildings that all include that phone booth, so that's 50 copies where in theory you only need a single one in a dependency pack.

This was a legitimate problem in 2003 when hard drives were small and dialup was still common, and is why the dependency thing originally happened. It was quite sensible at the time. But now that terabyte hard drives cost fifty bucks and everyone has broadband it's not a big deal.

The only part of it that's still relevant is that SC4 does load slower the more files you have, so it does help to not be repeating things. That would probably be true with Skylines too. I don't think it's worth it but it's not bullshit. Dependency packs are not 100% spergy ego, maybe 95%.

Ofaloaf posted:

I don't understand why Mod A would need Mods X, Y and Z, though. Dependencies were a way to reference a common pool (for at least a single author) of resources to minimize filesize and prevent repeats-- which isn't really needed now. If there's assets in one building that could be useful for another building, what's to stop just taking a copy of them from the one and pasting them in the other?

ToastyPotato posted:

If it were modded, it will probably just be fake numbers representative of nothing. The issue is that the engine can only track 1 million people or something, so high density buildings with realistic values would result in tiny cities. The compromise is bigger cities with lower population and empty buildings.

HardDisk posted:

That wording is on Skyrim EULA and it didn't stop that community from spawning Arthmoor and Co.

The problem isn't that they are making money of it, most games have EULAs that prevents specifically that. The problem is just good old entitlement.

ToastyPotato posted:

Ofaloaf posted:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?837080-Paid-and-Lock-custom-3D-Assets

"I'm not good enough to make my own games, or be hired by a company as a professional, but I should still be paid for the things I choose to do in my free time!"

Poizen Jam posted:

I'm sure someone's gonna jump on me for this, claiming I'm angry or sperging that it isn't realistic, but the city where I live (Hamilton) has a population of 500k and a total area of 1100km^2. Toronto core has an area of 400km^2. So while I'm quite happy with 100km^2 as a max size for a single persistent city unit, I am still a little disappointed that I don't have the option to go bigger as it's still quite small.

Inverness posted:

Yes, that is my point.

Poizen Jam posted:

So I just came across The Architect, which looks like a really, really ambitious project. Has this been posted or discussed on the forums before? It looks like it may scratch the itch for the more spergy city builders among us, if they even come close to delivering. There's a few demo reels and examples, although it appears they chose cry engine 3 for their render so just thinking about the requirements has me all

14 October posted:

well well well... We definitively want to apologize for the LOOOOONNNGGGG days/nights/weeks/months without any news from us. Actually we have been hibernating to work on the prototype while people were having fun on beaches. We are carrying on with the project and we will be pleased to show you something as soon as something will work (great challenge!)
We hope that everybody's ok and wanna say we appreciate your support. The A. team.

21 January posted:

Hello !!! First of all: HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015. Guys, I don't know how to say that your posts and comments are chilling us and help us to keep this project alive even when we're thinking about leaving it...
We had to take care about others issues by the end of the 2014 year but we can say (we hope) 2015 would be different.
Cheers to all of you.

Baronjutter posted:

It seems like traffic is artificially jammy. Like there's no way these tiny villages should have any sort of traffic problems or need anything other than a 2 lane road. I guess that was just a design choice to have "fun" big-city traffic problems right from the start but it looks so weird to have these massive multi-lane streets and traffic jams in these villages, plus it means your city is just covered by roads. Like the ratio of buildings to roads seems way off. It seems like it's impossible to have a little european village with narrow streets and little car traffic, the moment you get a few hundred people it's multi-lane traffic jams.

The cities all look like something out of some 1950's "CITY OF THE FUTURE" video where it assumed no one would ever walk ever again and there would be huge highway connecting every little house.

I wonder if there's any sort of car slider option like in CiM1 and 2. I'd love more realistic levels of traffic so villages don't need urban highways.

ExtraNoise posted:

For some reason this reminded me of something about SimCity 4: I went and visited the Maxis offices in September 2002, a few months before the game came out, to sit down and play SimCity 4. It was a really cool opportunity to get to meet the team and play the game for a few hours. They were super cool with their fans back in the day.

Anyway, one of the things I seem to remember were the cars zipping around at incredible speeds, even on the slowest settings. They were basically so fast that you couldn't even really see them unless you paused the game. On the faster speeds they moved even quicker. They were, of course, modeled to whatever time of day it was in the day/night cycle that SC4 had. Apparently somewhere along the way they must have slowed them down so you could see them better.

And thinking about that now and applying it to what we're seeing in C:S, I'm venturing a guess the traffic models would look a lot more "normal" if cars moved at the speed the day cycle was occurring at. Instead they are getting all bunched up because, relatively, they are all on the road at the same time even if they're not supposed to be.

Subyng posted:

By "nice place to live" you mean your personal perfect pedestrian wall-to-wall utopia?

Baronjutter posted:

How much was the Simcity Pre-order? Didn't they have some outrageously expensive version that came with a few really lovely european landmarks?

Baronjutter posted:

Man I really hope modding the minimum curves and maximum grades for the various roads is easy because like the first thing I'll do if I have the chance is implement something a touch more realistic with the crazy loving ramps everywhere. In reality 2% on a railway is considered extreme and anything over 10% is very high for a street and pretty much right out for a highway. Also trains need much broader curves, at least to travel at any useful speed. Don't need to go full realism sperg, maybe 3-4% max grade for trains, 10-15% on highways. In the game I'm seeing trains and highways doing crazy impossible 20%+ grades. Some of them would be hard to even walk up let alone drive a train.

To me anyways I actually enjoy the challenge of dealing with those sort of things, and it makes your city not look like poo poo.

Baronjutter posted:

I went up and down the highway a bit as usually at the start of an extreme grade there will be a warning sign to warn that there's a steep grade and then list the grade in %. I saw a sign for trucks to use their low gears, but not a specific grade %. I'm not sure what the highway code is like in gorgeous NZ, but here I think you need a grade warning that lists the grade on anything beyond 6%. My best guess for that stretch of highway would only be about 5-8%. Like I said in a previous post, from the viewing angle we're playing our city-builders at, grades look really modest, but from a driver's perspective they'd be practically cliffs. Cars would be bottoming out at the crests or scraping their fronts at the bottom of a lot of these mega-ramps. The bridges/overpasses them selves seem way too high as well, like about twice as high as they'd need to be. You only need about 4m clearance for most road bridges, while in-game many look to be closer to 8-12m, which only forces the grades to be that much more extreme.

Here's a famously "dangerous" highway where I live, it kills a lot of people because the curves are much tighter and the grades much steeper than a usual highways, but the max grade on the whole stretch is only 7%.
http://goo.gl/maps/mkjI2

Here is a 15% grade street in Seattle, very extreme.
http://goo.gl/maps/pRlKy

Now imagine double that. Now imagine a train going up.

OwlFancier posted:

Oh no I was thinking ridiculously tall tower-cities all arranged in circles with massive green belts between them. If you can't signal aliens from space with your weird circular road patterns I don't want to know about it.

OwlFancier posted: