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Lots, buildings, zones.

Started by croxis, October 28, 2009, 12:50:46 AM

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croxis

One thing that annoyed a lot of people with the previous sim cities is how fast the buildings change. It is rare to see whole skyscrapers demolished and rebuilt when the land value changes :D.  SC4 improved this a little to use props to reflect conditions instead of the structure. But the occupants (the buisness) of the building is still tied directly to the actuall building.

This doesn't always reflect what happens. Industries and buildings change owners and companies all the time without the building being demolished. There can even be more extream changes. An old industrial district in my hometown was thrown urban renewal money and converted into residential/mixed use. The developers decided to keep many of the industrial buildings and just renovate them for new use. So there are very expensive condos in wearhouse - looking buildings :)

My idea is to separate lots, the buildings, props, and zones a bit more.  In the building definition file it can define what types of occupancy the building can have using a whitelist/blacklist (default is allow all types). The building is then built with an appropriate zone type. Instead of the building changeing the contents will change, even with rezoning.

This is a late night post, and there are obvious flaws, but I thought i might introduce this. City skylines don't change that much!

Atomius

hmm yes. what you say is true and in my mind is near the priority level of multi-zoning (residential towers with shops on the first floor, etc)

many older buildings are renovated and reused for a different purpose to the original one... certainly it seems a good idea...

Yes certainly a less fluid cityscape would be far more realistic

j-dub

What I noticed is when you zoned only first stage, it could change to third stage, even though that is clearly what you did not zone in the first place. I saw 16 single style shacks turn into one giant mansion. Now, if it is still possible to zone on a diagonal in this game, that would be something else.

You were allowed to have building controls and restriction in SC4, but doing absolutely everything in only one hour of your real time alone, was difficult, so the bigger the city, the harder it was to keep track of making specific neighborhoods restricted, as the only option on growable buildings was to make the one place historical, versus a bunch of buildings in a certain area making a neighborhood. It would have been nice if there was a limitation control for a whole neighborhood, if you could set up a neighborhood boundss, instead of the city all behaving the same. So one area where change is allowed, versus another area where buildings are not suppose to have a certain style was not possible.

SC4 would even allow diagonal buildings to grow on diagonal networks, despite the lot being square, it somehow could tell the difference between a diagonal house on a diagonal street, compared to a building that just had corner driveway requirements.

Anyone you ask that had the Mattb325 diagonal houses could tell you diagonal residential was able for sc4, now in City Mania, if we can have growable diagonal houses, that would be a step up from the Japanese Metropolis Mania on the Playstation.

Atomius

Ok. So i'm not experienced. So i have those infernal pet projects and ideas. But i may as well put down some ideas. Its not like its going to ruin the project to have just a few more ideas into the swampland of suggestions.

What i liked in SC4 was the objects. The way a building would change to reflect differing times (even of the day and night) and that was nicely realistic. I liked the animations, the various differences between two of the same type of building etc.

With the possibility to build at any angle in this game, this opens up a whole new set of possibilities. Now i understamnd you have a system in place for shadow creation using this billboarding technique (much as i wish it was in full 3d as that was one of the main reasons behind my wanting simcity 5) but the objects in SC4 didn't have shadows. I mean stuff like sims and so forth.

Another point is that i think there needs to be, as a previous poster stated, more of a neighbourhood effect. For instance it'd be nice to see more effect from local influences. Say an ugly decaying mansion is in the middle of some high wealth mansions in good repair. This has effect in SC4. But i think the effect needs to be more... realistic and... broad. Difficult to explain but i guess neighbourhoods should have a culture... a social connectivity which should be reflected in the sims you see. The animations in 4 were the same no matter whether it was a low income or high income area, etc etc... with a few crimes and disabled people thrown in for a touch of realism.

I reckon for these largely cosmetic features as it isn't an integral and difficult part of the game surely more effort could be done to make the sims you see reflect better their surroundings