Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)(rumorsontheinternets.org) |
Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)(rumorsontheinternets.org) |
Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water from the sewage run off of the rest of the city, I created roads and bridges everywhere, there's several 'nice' areas along the non polluted areas of water with large mansions, there's a big bustling urban center full of office buildings and highrises not far away from squat, squalid apartments underneath highway overpasses, schools next to landfills, a lack of hospitals and fire departments, many police departments, i've intentionally clearcut as much of the forest surrounding the city as possible, the next step was to create a small gated community out away from the city, for those with money who can't handle the horrid amounts of traffic and infrastructure...
I may have also accidently poisoned the whole city briefly when trying to build the prison island and killed 30% of the people there, but things have been looking up, population growth is finally starting to rise again, though the health of the population is questionable.
I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt deep and the isometric view didn't make me sad about not doing angled zones.
If Skylines could make roads free of the square course why not the buildings that seem to have to be orthogonal to the tangent of the road.
SimCity 4 felt an incomplete and shallow game at start, but I've come to enjoy it greatly with the rush hour expansion of the deluxe edition, which made the city dynamic enough to feel compelling to work with.
back then it was hard to find in depth technical commentary of the game internals, so I don't know how much my feeling match reality
Well, with the Steam version anyway. It's the only version that has mods and access to the Steam Workshop with all the community created assets.
For example Sunset Harbor added above ground metro's but the modding community provided a solution years before.
I sure hope they come out with a follow on version that can scale more than the current version but even as it is I love Cities:Skylines!
That's NYC, isn't it?
An example that comes to mind is Factorio, where solar panels are more tricky to operate than generators, but minimize conflict with the ingame fauna. Earlier versions of Rimworld were programmed to have men be either gay or straight, but women to be bisexual. I think both of those gameplay mechanics illustrate (or at least point to) the author(s) idea about the world.
Or maybe Micro Adventures: https://alastairhumphreys.com/microadventures-landing/
The Alphaville Herald was dedicated to it; the blog continued on for years, after the sim was shut down. This Salon article references the mag https://web.archive.org/web/20040217030353/http://www.salon....
Alphaville is one of my favorite pieces of internet history but it wasn't ever really documented. It's hard to find anything about it now.
IIRC it ended with the Celts, Vikings, and Sioux facing off in thermonuclear war in the year 3991.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_play...
https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_i...
There's a bug that lets you delete a building tile but keep the building there in memory, meaning you can build over it but have all the same pops/crime/etc.
Lots of megopolis SC maps use this exploit.
It's essentially a grid-based parallel computer.
Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.
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Maybe OP posted this after working from home in quarantine for one week too many.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqZWxCv-_5I&list=PLIsqJzeZeG...
Interesting game to max out, not sure if anyone has tried though...
For good games, I don't think so. The #1 concern of any video game is "is it fun??".
Case in point: Factorio oil is infinite and a renewable resource (pumpjacks never run out). This isn't there because of some preconceived notion of infinite oil. This mechanic exists because planting new pumpjacks is far more annoying than planting iron mines / coal mines. In fact, pumpjacks are basically the only endgame mine that cannot be automated with blueprints.
As such, its best to have pumpjacks pump infinite oil for the rest of time. Because it'd be too an annoying of a game if oil ran out.
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In the case of Factorio solar vs nuclear vs coal: the game developer made them different enough to make the difference fun to think about and fun to play with. But I don't believe it necessarily reflects upon the political opinion of the creator.
First game I played, I just made far-off copper mines that would only mine during the day.
(Then I learned it's just as easy to run power lines along RR tracks)
And you can say, "You don't need to play the game that way," and you'd be right, but it is still part of the obsession with the game.
There is some scientific truth to it: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34744903
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=37.79184,-122.33...
Humans are social animals. We need to have contact with people outside our families.
Living in the country / distant suburbia doesn’t give enough social contact to be healthy, I think, at least in the U.K. In the past I imagine small villages were much more sociable, because people weren’t commuting out, and families lived in the same place for a long time.
So overall, I think living in a city is psychologically better for you. Not necessarily in the centre, but close enough that you can easily get there, can access lots of social venues and find people you get in with.
Of course that was pre COVID. Now is the time to go spend that year in the country, you’re not going to miss out on anything.
Sounds like China as well
Speed beacons + Speed Modules + Infinite Productivity gets you pretty far.
> Pumpjacks give less oil over time.
Back in 0.13, they dropped to 0.1 oil/second. Today, this minimum has been grossly buffed, greatly reducing the number of depleted pumpjacks you need in endgame. The output is also improved by infinite-productivity research, increasing their output the longer your megabase runs.
There's also Coal Liquefaction, which came a few years after 0.13. That also reduces the need to find new pumpjacks (and again: because coal mines use electric mines, its possible to automate mines with blueprints).
So Coal runs out, but is far easier + automatic to expand compared to oil. So you just turn your coal into oil products.
Well, I can agree with that viewpoint regardless. Even if the author didn't intend for something to be taken a certain way... if the audience took it one way, then that's what matters (unfortunately)
As for mods, really the move it and traffic manager president edition is basically a minimum to not be frustrated.
I was tempted once to grab them all during a sale, it would have been $40 down from like $160 or something, but I also don't want to get sucked into a game like that. Games like civ and simcity eat too much time i've been down those rabbit holes before. Even as it is I spent literally two days straight doing nothing but playing this game when I started that map.
no the false narrative was that they will remain unoccupied and is just built as a form of economic stimulus.
With the early game it wasn't so bad, like one or two districts, but as the city grew, it became too much, hence the residential surrounding industrial stuff.
Most of the dystopian stuff came from my frustration with limitations in the game. The massive amounts of roads and bridges came from the traffic congestion problems and my lack of patience in rebuilding roads or designing transit lines, though i do have 3 massive metro lines that crisscross the city.
The interesting thing to me was the disparity in my city and the dystopianness came from my negligence and lack of patience or caring. The ghettos and ramshackle neighbourhoods built themselves around the zones i built out of just the hell of it much of the time. A lot of it came from stuff the game just generated. Zooming into the close up view in some areas was kinda heart breaking.
It mostly showed me how intentional negligence leads to some of the most nightmarish outcomes and that the games modelling of neighbourhoods based on zoning and surroundings is scarily accurate.
I'm not sure it indicates actual multiplayer capabilities, or just the intention. It just looks like someone dropped an IRC client library into the repo at some point.
Totally speculation of course, but maybe even just a dev tool in the repo that got sent around to different devs/studios so that they could communicate. Slack being IRC for work wasn't a new concept after all.
"The server does not automatically pause when all players are logged out."
So you were supposed to like log in for 30 min per day and play a little and then wait for tomorrow with the game server running? Seems like a Minecrafty way of playing. It would probably be fun for some IT-department to have an instance but it feels very niche.
I remember reading articles on Happy Puppy around 1998 or 1999 that talked about the “promised land” with screenshots of 3D cities. These are still around if you look around
I am hopeful that someone on here that could share some lore about the development of that 3D version.
Sadly I don't know of an equivalent for SimCity 3000.
And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocally yes). The typical "it's the best time to be alive in human history so far" sounds almost defeatist, like a license to become lax.
Also, nobody claims "this is the worst time to be alive".
Want what you like; but (1) pretty much everyone else wants that so it goes without saying, (2) it is common for people with plans to make things better achieve the opposite because they are lousy planners. The existence of things we don't like doesn't mean we know how to deal with them. People come up with ideas that sound good and don't work.
Such as?
If you live in a country whose population gives a fuck about other people, YMMV.
I don't disagree, necessarily, but I would be fascinated to know if there are any books or articles that game out this scenario in detail. What would industrialization without massive reserves of hydrocarbons look like?
Can you expand on what you mean by this? I’m not finding much through search.
"We might get lucky" - humans have overcome every adverse condition in our 2 million years alive, why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.
"stop the coming disaster" - again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.
"could snap back to...centuries ago" - this has happened once in the past 2000 years, you really think you're going to be alive when we enter a 2nd Dark Age.
I think it's the same sort of thinking with the "Jesus is coming back in the next 5 years" religious crowd. You want to feel important and part of something bigger than yourself, something planet-wide, so you're almost looking forward to being a part of it so you can feel like you're part of history.
Mental disorders are at an all-time high. Extinction levels are well beyond their natural baseline rate, due to human activity. Environmental destruction is at an all-time high. Now, with the Internet, we've managed to build a system that can amplify nearly every negative aspect of human society but at the same time offers a shield of sorts from those effects.
Yes, humans are likely to survive in the same way that a virus survives. We find a way but it isn't always a virtuous path. We humans have yet to understand that nature is a balance and that we choose to operate outside of that balance. Everytime we progress we invent new ways for people and other animals to suffer.
> why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.
They didn't say we can only survive if we get lucky. The dichotomy they painted was between 'getting lucky' and civilizational regression, not extinction.
> again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.
This is clearly not what they said: they said 'some technological or social innovation' might 'negate or stop the coming disaster'.
You can make an argument that we should lean more heavily on base rates rather than an inside-view attempt to predict the future. But here you've just psychoanalysed a strawman.
You can absolutely do it, but you're crawling by your fingernails. And then you have to multiply that by thousands of different factors and different problems. I've thought about this a bunch through the lens of building a game in a world like this and done quite a bit of research, and I tend to think that most of what you might consider "ready resources" in such a world require a pretty significant amount of re-bootstrapping that become really, really hard without easy hydrocarbons.
Maybe doable! Probably really really hard.
I’m really tempted to post spoilers by way of example, but part of the fun of the book is putting the pieces together and realizing what’s going unsaid because the narrator either takes it for granted or doesn’t understand it himself. Very strong recommend if you have any interest in sci fi/fantasy.
Those are the basic examples of the few animals which are docile herbivores, breeding in captivity, growing to a large, breeding adult in a couple years, and which live in social groups that accept humans at the top of the hierarchy. Building a society with protein and labor from cows is much easier than, say, harnessing turkeys. There are a billion cows on the planet, but if human society grinds to a halt and we stop artificially inseminating them and running the feed plots those species might not survive.
Please provide some references that show mental illness is higher now than during the Dark Ages. Or in Egypt among the slaves under the Ptolemy's.