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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.
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2 Problems 3 Add-ons 4 External links |
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 nighttime 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.
More recently, Maxis has released an expansion pack for SimCity 4 dubbed "Rush Hour," which includes extensive transportation improvements such as avenues, 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 resucing cats with a fire truck and drawing images in the sky with a skywriting plane. This feature has some similiarities to SimCopter and Streets of SimCity.
Of note are the exceptionally high system requirements of this game, with users having 2GHz CPUss 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.
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.
Several tools have been 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 avaliable 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.Overview
Problems
Add-ons