
SimCity: Will Wright's City in a Box - danso
http://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity-part-1-will-wrights-city-in-a-box/
======
jprzybyl
I absolutely adore this blog. Each entry is incredibly detailed and well
written. My favorite is the one on Nintendo's influence on the PC industry:

[http://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-
nintendo/](http://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/)

~~~
gohrt
That Nintendo walled-garden story reads like Steve Jobs's playbook for Apple
Mac and iOS!

------
cisstrd
People who liked the old Sim City games might also like OpenTTD, a gplv2
licensed and heavily improved clone of the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe, it
also includes Multiplayer. Under active development and also a nice community.

You are the manager of your own startup transport company and have to build
infrastructure, manage finances, routes, build rail system and set up signals
to manage your trains, ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTTD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTTD)

[https://www.openttd.org/en/about](https://www.openttd.org/en/about)

~~~
RankingMember
OpenTTD is awesome, but it's really not the same without the original
soundtrack.

I remember my friend getting both Simcity (MS-DOS) and Transport Tycoon for
his birthday one year. We were super excited about Simcity, but that quickly
waned once we learned to play Transport Tycoon. Such a great game.

------
hashkb
I, for one, thought SimAnt was one of the most fun games of my childhood. And
SimTower... I have a coding interview modeled after it.

~~~
Ntrails
I would like to try that out - if you're ok sharing?

~~~
erikb
I'm also interested.

------
vityaz_
Great read.

Jumping ahead a little: The Sim City 4 community is one of the better ones
I've ever seen. 13 years after the release, and people are still releasing
high quality mods and custom buildings. The community has kept the game alive
for all these years, and made the SC4 experience many times better.

~~~
erikb
How do you feel about the new games like Cities Skylines? How would you rate
it against SC4?

~~~
speeder
Not OP either...

I am a fan of city games and tried to mod SC4 with official sanction of EA
(more on that later).

Currently I like SC4 much more than C:S, for two reasons:

1\. When properly fixed, SC4 is a much better simulator and challenging game
than C:S

2\. I like SC4 graphics more too, C:S graphics resemble cities that I never
saw in my country, they are too bright, spacious, saturated and "happy" and
"calm", it is nothing like São Paulo for example, so C:S to me is too uncanny-
valleyish, too "Alien" to me.

Still, sometimes I wonder if I should go ahead and make the SC4 successor I
want, I was trying to fix SC4 to make it run properly on new computers and
finish some features, but it required stuff that go against the EULA, so I
asked EA about it (the asking part took months... very hard to ask EA!), and
when they finally replied it was along the lines: "Oh, yes, X, Y, and Z are
broken, X is driver's fault, we will work with hardware makers, Y is serious,
we will THINK about fixing it." then no mention of Z, or much less "W" that I
told them about.

I understand their position, and think the open-sourcing of EASTL in a way was
a great step, still I feel very disappointed they miss the mark about such
stuff.

~~~
vityaz_
>I like SC4 graphics more too, C:S graphics resemble cities that I never saw
in my country, they are too bright, spacious, saturated and "happy" and
"calm", it is nothing like São Paulo for example, so C:S to me is too uncanny-
valleyish, too "Alien" to me.

I really like the SC4 graphics too, looks much more realistic. Guess it's
easier when you just got 4 angles at various zoom levels to handle. Don't you
think much of the problem with CS can be solved with custom content? We got
color mods, and there are buildings being created without the cartoonish art
direction of the default content.

>Still, sometimes I wonder if I should go ahead and make the SC4 successor I
want, I was trying to fix SC4 to make it run properly on new computers and
finish some features, but it required stuff that go against the EULA, so I
asked EA about it (the asking part took months... very hard to ask EA!), and
when they finally replied it was along the lines: "Oh, yes, X, Y, and Z are
broken, X is driver's fault, we will work with hardware makers, Y is serious,
we will THINK about fixing it." then no mention of Z, or much less "W" that I
told them about. I understand their position, and think the open-sourcing of
EASTL in a way was a great step, still I feel very disappointed they miss the
mark about such stuff.

Oh man, when was this?

I've longed for an SC4 like game without grids. That'd be sweet.

------
gohrt
Article forgot SimLife, the most complex but ultimately boring of all, but
made for some fun animations of animals that looked like office furniture:
[http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/4996/SimLife.html](http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/4996/SimLife.html)

From the manual: "The family that Transmogrifies together eats flies
together!"

------
dergachev
Also see the New Yorker's 2006 profile of Will Wright:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/06/game-
master](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/06/game-master)

------
oneeyedpigeon
The black-and-white Mac version looks _so_ good - I wish I could play that. I
got as far as downloading an old ROM image but can't quite get it in a format
that 'Mini vMac' will accept :-(

~~~
erikb
Somewhere there must be a forum where people can help you with that. Or at
least some Wisdom of the Ancients

[https://xkcd.com/979/](https://xkcd.com/979/)

------
wetmore
Really a very compelling telling of the story behind SimCity and its effect on
the world.

------
noir_lord
When I was 10 (so 1990) I broke my foot which required 6 weeks off school (I
wanted to go to school but the school wouldn't let me as it was considered
unsafe).

I spent the entire 6 weeks playing SimCity on my old CGA XT, it is still one
of my fondest memories of childhood and by the end of the 6 weeks I'd pretty
much perfected that city.

------
Cpoll
>Wright shows off some of the RX-7’s gadgetry using the same rapid-fire,
jargon-laden diction that journalists and tech-conference attendees would
later come to know if not always love.

I was confused. Will's not the one talking in that video, I imagine it's the
aforementioned Rick Doherty.

------
sklogic
Interesting perspective, I never looked at Trurl as a "god-like" being.

------
krige
This is an absolutely amazing read.

------
D_Guidi
posted here days ago without receive attention. happy to see that someone
noticed this amazing article!

~~~
andegre
Speaking of SC4, has anyone been able to get it working on Windows 10?

What about OpenTTD on Windows 10?

