I remember back in '98 or so when Sim City 3 (or was it “3000?”) was coming out, one of the big features that they were hyping was the ability to go down to “sim level” and just walk around on foot in your city, which would be 3D-rendered in a manner that presaged the Grand Theft Auto 3 Engine-based series of games. It seemed to be one of THE features that they were banking it on, and there was much talk about it leading up to the game.
Once the game came out, there was no sign of it - even worse, they acted as though they had never even discussed (much less hyped to death) the option. Strangely, the mode did appear in a japanese-only Sim City game for the Nintendo 64, but it was a very simplistic incorporation into a simplistic rendition of the series.
I figured that it would surely appear in Sim City 4, considering the game’s basic approach (a 3/4 city view that doesn’t allow the user to zoom in that much) hasn’t really changed in about 15 years, but once again, no sign of it.
So what’s going on? Maybe it’s just me, but it’s the one feature that would inspire me to actually start playing the game - the ability to actually “explore” my city on foot or via car, GTA-style or even in first-person. It’s the one way to really “get into” the city that you’ve created and see it from that perspective.
I know that they actually attempted this back in '94 or so with “Sim Copter” and “Streets of Sim City,” two standalone games that were compatible with cities created with Sim City 2000, allowing you to either race around your city or fly around it in a helicopter. The scope of the effort was admirable, but the primitive graphics technology was only one step above playing with a CAD drawing.
So what’s the state of this feature? What do you think? Has anyone heard anything about any plans to finally incorporate this in the next game?
Both of these games flopped BIG TIME, so maybe that’s your answer right there. Of course, the lack of success was in no small part due to the fact that those particular games sucked as well! “Streets of Sim City”, at least, was horrible – I’ve heard rumors that any Maxis employee who mentions that game gets fired on the spot.
In the addon for Sim City 4 you can drive/fly around the city. It’s still from 3/4 view as it’s still a 2D game but you can zoom in until you can see people walking around. You can zoom in on a backyard and see someone having a bbq, for example.
I don’t think it’s a lack of will, but a lack of computational resources. The basic “sim” part of Sim City 4, i.e., simulating the population/economic/traffic dynamics, was intensive enough to grind to a halt even the fastest computers of the day when playing the largest cities. Add in a three-dimensional rendering engine and you can forget about anything approaching smooth gameplay.
The Sims is an outgrowth of the street-level simulation. I fully expect Wil Wright to one day come back to this and attempt a full merger between The Sims and Sim City. His next project Spore is a step in that direction.
What I’d like to see in the next SimCity is something like the interface for Evil Genius. Aside from being totally 3D, the Sims would wander around each with their own stats and automatically interact with objects or buildings as their stats dictate - go to the store when they are hungry, find a place to park the car, go to work when they need cash or school when they feel stupid. SC4 simulates this by modeling “trips” between work and home and visually representing traffic density by the number of cars/pedestrians. But I would like to see it go a few steps further.
How about a MMORPG where each player has a city, and they can expand and do trade with other cities? If you start to run out of room, just have a new continent pop out of the ocean for some new real estate.
Certainly the excuse has been computational power, or lack thereof, to render your city in 3D for such a walk-through. I would think that this is no longer an issue. Plus, if you’re talking about the pedestrian’s-eye-view, you don’t have to render the entire city, just the immediately visible area.
The only real question, then, is EA willing to put the money into developing this? So far, there’s no sign of it.
Computational power is a big part of it, but it’s not the renderer that’s the problem; it’s the simulator. The whole purpose of the game is to simulate a city, obviously, which means that it’s got to allow for cities with populations well over a million. You’ve got to simulate buildings growing and declining, traffic patterns that respond relatively quickly to changes in the road layout, businesses growing, education levels, happiness levels, power and water supplies, garbage, and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.
The game abstracts that as much as is possible, but it still gets to the point where you’ve got to run a simulation on each building, each person or family going to work, and so on. If you cut corners any more than that to save processing power, then the simulation starts to break down and stops being responsive – I just demolished this road segment, how come the traffic patterns haven’t changed yet?
What a lot of people don’t realize about SimCity 4 is that it uses a full 3D rendering engine. The vehicles like cars and planes are full 3D models (albeit low-poly), and it would’ve been possible to put a fully 3D building into the world and have it rendered along with everything else – to work within the poly budget, the buildings were reduced to 3D boxes. This article describes what the rendering segment of the engine could do and why it didn’t.
And don’t forget that even if computers and videocards now have enough power to run a decent simulation and render a full 3D world in real-time, that fans of SimCity and Maxis games in general aren’t the same audience as fans of DOOM and Half-Life. They don’t always have the latest-and-greatest hardware. Even when SC4 came out, there were tons of complaints that it took “a supercomputer to run,” which just meant it ran fine on a contemporary machine and videocard, but not as well on the 2-year-old machines that most of the audience had at the time. Maybe the new higher-powered consoles can fix that, but then you have to figure out how to make a fairly compulated simulator run from a gamepad.
And still, computational power is only part of the issue. To me, it’s kind of like asking why when you’re playing DOOM3 or Half-Life 2, you can’t go up to a computer screen and play the original SimCity. It’s not a question of processing power – the original SimCity plays on PDA’s and cell phones now. It’s just that that’s not what the game is all about.
People would look at games like Grand Theft Auto and MMORPG’s and say, “well they render a whole city and let you run around in it, so SimCity should be able to as well.” But first, look at their populations – you’re only ever seeing a couple dozen people around with you at the same time. And you don’t care what’s happening in other parts of the city, so the other parts don’t have to be simulated at all. Also, look at their buildings – since SimCity is all about the city, would you really want to be looking at a bunch of buildings with as low detail as GTA’s? MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft have really nice environments, but they’re static. Ironforge isn’t going to suddenly get bigger or become abandoned.
Plus, I don’t know what you’d do in this first- or third-person mode that would be any fun. It would be a novelty, sure, but would there be a point to it other than to be able to see lower-poly versions of your building from the street level? I could understand The Sims going the way of giving you more sophisticated neighborhoods, but IMO SimCity should always be about the city.
