SimCity 4

SimCity 4 is the fourth computer game in the SimCity series of games. It was published by Electronic Arts (EA) and developed by series creator Maxis, a wholly-owned subsidiary of EA.

Overview

There are many differences between this game and previous versions, the largest difference being that cities are now located in regions that are divided into segments, each of which can be developed.

Neighbor cities played a large role in the previous version of the game, SimCity 3000. For example, neighbor deals could be established, where a city could exchange resources such as water, electricity, or garbage disposal for money. In this version, the player may develop several dependent cities at the same time, eventually populating the entire region. Additionally, the simulated city can now be seen at night time as well as during daytime.

SC4 can be used in conjunction with Maxis' popular game The Sims. Sims can be imported into the city where they will report what they think of the area they are living in. SC4 comes with some default sims for those without a copy of the game. Moreover, SC4 does have a control interface very similar to The Sims.

More recently, Maxis has released an expansion pack for SimCity 4 dubbed "Rush Hour," which includes extensive transportation improvements such as avenues (roads with two lanes going in each direction), ground level highways, and elevated rail. One of the main features of Rush Hour is U-Drive-It, a mode where players can take control of cars, planes, and many other vehicles and drive them around the city. A set of missions have been included with the game that involve things such as rescuing cats with a fire truck and drawing images in the sky with a skywriting plane. This feature has some similarities to SimCopter and Streets of SimCity.

The biggest improvement in SimCity Rush Hour (RH) is the route query; with it, it is possible to check the routes the sims use to get to their jobs, and it makes the traffic simulator of the game feel a lot more "alive" since one can directly see where the sims need to go and how they do it.

Problems

Of note are the exceptionally high system requirements of this game, with users having 2GHz CPUs and 1.5GB of RAM reporting that their systems are too slow to effectively run the program. Many of the first to purchase the game found an abundance of bugs; this was mainly due to the fact that the game had not been properly beta-tested.

Many assumed that the high system requirements are due to the intense graphics requirements of the game. SimCity's graphics engine for this installment is quite refined, however, and its requirements are modest despite the heavy graphical nature of the game. The high requirements are actually due to the complex AI which the game is constantly processing.

Another common problem is the poor quality of the sims' pathfinding skills, often taking a slow but direct route over a faster route that requires moving away from the workplace to use. User communities, however, have studied the transportation issues in great detail, and have created "pathfinding mods" that greatly improve the sims' ability to find the fastest route. These can be found at the fansites listed below.

Maxis and Electronic Arts have released several patches that deal with many issues discovered in the original versions of SC4 and Rush Hour, including a reduction of the exceptionally high requirements when designing major metropolises, and the so-called "stage 8" problem, which made it nearly impossible to get higher-density buildings such as skyscrapers.

Add-ons

Development tools

Several tools have been released by Maxis that allow players to customize the game to their liking, in addition to several third-party tools.

The Lot Editor allows a user to modify the lots that SC4 buildings are built on. It cannot edit the actual buildings, although it is possible to create new buildings by adding props (including other buildings) onto an existing one.

The Building Architect Tool, or BAT, is used to create actual customized buildings. When the buildings are finished, they can be imported into the Lot Editor and made available for use. It is based on gMax and was released in February 2004. Several modified versions have been released that have, in effect, served as bugfixes for various problems that had not been discovered before the initial release.

Such a tool was also available for SimCity 3000, and SimCity 2000's Urban Renewal Kit was very similar in function; however, both were created from scratch by Maxis and used completely different interfaces.

Third-party modifications have also been created to solve problems that were not yet fixed in an official patch, add functionality to the game, or make the high learning curve slightly lower by modifying environment variables. A large amount of work has been done by a group of people at Simtropolis called the Modd Squad. They have unlocked many of the game's internals to modification, and have created an impressive array of changes to the game. Their work has also permitted the development of more realistic user created plugins made with the BAT and Lot Editor.

User Created Objects

Since the BAT and Lot Editor were released for SimCity 4, many new buildings have been created. Models of real world stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Outback and Piggly-Wiggly have been created. Other buildings like the Sears Tower, and the Seattle Space Needle have also been released by fans. Others include Checkered Cabs driving through your city, the Amtrak running along your railroad tracks, yearly crop reports, and others.