(PC) SimCity 4
Look what we have here: Gamasutra Game Sale Charts – Simcity at #1?!
Apr 16th
Gamasutra has published their latest PC Game Sale Charts, they’ve got a weird combination of EA games at weird places:
North American Game Sales Charts
- World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard)
- The Sims 3 (EA Games)
- Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (EA Games)
- Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening (EA Games)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Activision).
The Sims 3 has won the war against all those War games.
Japanese Game Sale Charts
- SimCity 4 Deluxe (EA Games)
- Monster Hunter Frontier Online Season 7.0 Premium Package (Capcom)
- Sacred 2 (E Frontier)
- The Sims 3: High End Loft Pack (EA Games)
- The Sims 3 (EA Games)
Simcity 4 Towers the other games, including the sims 3. It’s very weird considering how old it is.
United Kingdom Game Sale Charts
- Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City (Rockstar)
- The Sims 3 (EA Games)
- Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (EA Games)
- Football Manager 2010 (Sega)
- Mass Effect 2 (EA Games).
Even if the Gangsters win the 1st place, at least the Sims 3 has won over Football Manager 2010… FINALLY! Thanks to InfiniteSims for the tip!
Ocean Quigley’s project blog – lighting buildings in SimCity 4
Apr 7th
InfiniteSims found a new entry over at Ocean Quigley’s Project Blog (former EA worker) sharing insight on how they came up with their lighting technique for the buildings during the night. Very interesting!
SimCity 4 was really a giant compositing engine.
Visually, the city was a collection of sprites all layered and blended on top of each other. As the view panned around, a strip of new stuff was exposed and added to the existing image.
It was kind of like an elaborate, automatic matte painting. Like a matte painting, we used 3D geometry to help with sorting and overlaps, so that realtime elements (like cars and people) could be composited in.
So the natural way to represent night was by layering additional sprites on top of the existing scene. Here was my design proposal for night lighting, one that we wound up more-or-less implementing.
Let’s say that we start out with a building like this, and want to make a nighttime version of it
First, we automatically make a mask for the the windows by assigning them all a particular material so that they’ll render into a separate buffer. We did that was in our pipeline, using 3DStudio Max.
Then we get an artist to light the building, by placing point and spot-lights in the appropriate places. Charlie Aquilina lit most of the buildings we shipped with.
Now the building had to be rendered twice in our pipeline, once with normal daylight lighting, and once to capture the artist-placed lighting.
Then when night comes in the game view, we tint the whole scene blue. We could even animate transitions, if performance allows.
And to show that the building is inhabited (and that the power is turned on) we just add the window lights and the hand placed lighting over the building sprite.
I tried to break the windows into sections, so that they could be turned off and on in groups (showing how full a building was), but we didn’t have enough memory (or disk space!) for the additional window masks. Those big sprites wound up taking a lot of disk space.
Other elements, like streetlights and headlights were nothing but additive textures on quads, placed appropriately. Give how simple the system was, night came out quite nicely.
Ocean Quigley projects: SimCity 4 style previsualization
Mar 28th
InfiniteSims found another interesting update from ex-EA employee Ocean Quigley sharing some insight on the visualization of SimCity 4 (such a beautiful game by the way!).
Here’s a visualization from back in SimCity 4′s preproduction.We were trying to figure out what the game should look like, and while we didn’t hit this look precisely (we punted on the cliffs, for example), it’s still pretty close.
It was mostly done by David Patch and Shannon Galvin, in 3DStudio Max R4 (a great program for it’s day!) And used assets that were sitting around from SimCity 3000 which we’d finished a year or two before.
I didn’t work on this mockup, because I was off designing the asset pipeline (how buildings would get from 3DStudio Max into the game), and thought I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to look like anyway. I didn’t think that it would be that valuable.
Boy was I wrong! It turned out to be crucial, once it was done the project really picked up speed.
It made the project seem much more real at that early stage of production. Everybody on the team looked at it and said “Oh, so that’s what we’re making” or “So that’s what it’s going to look like”.
And not least, it was useful for demonstrating to the various executives who had an interest in the project that we knew what we were doing!
Ocean Quigley’s projects: Sims 2 Roof system & Decorating buildings in SimCity 4
Mar 16th
InfiniteSims has been keeping an eye on the various posts that Ocean Quigley, former Maxis employee, has been writing on his project blog (site contains nude drawings, so please be aware). His most recent posts contain information on how he designed the roof system for The Sims 2 as well as the graphics technique they used for SimCity 4 buildings. Read below for the full scoop!
SimCity4 was a proper 3D engine, with the view constrained to an orthographic perspective.
Buildings were rendered by projecting textures onto very simple 3D geometry. This allowed for sorting and interaction with terrain, that wouldn’t have been possible with simple sprites.
The buildings were basically imposters, a graphics technique that I’d seen at Siggraph back in 2000.
They looked pretty much normal if you saw them from this angle:
But if you rotated the view, the illusion was blown and everything looks weird.
I was hoping to use the underlying geometry to attach details like signs and water towers, but we ran out of time (and in any case, we didn’t want to create an authoring pipeline for sticking them on)
You can see what’s really going on with this view from below
My first experiments with imposters were for Simsville. In that game, we had a perspective camera, so they had to hold up to a little bit more camera motion. You can see some artifacts where the texture is projected through the roof, but all in all, it holds up pretty well.
Simsville didn’t come to fruition, but the stuff I learned while prototyping it fed into SimCity, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Probably the second hardest thing I ever had to design was the roof system for the Sims2.
The roof geometry had to be completely clean, and everything had to snap together perfectly, vertex to vertex and edge to edge without any overlaps (because we had to be able to hide and reveal different roof sections without any ragged edges showing).
And we couldn’t just solve the problem with CSG, as Irfan Zaidi quickly informed me, at least not with realtime performance.
It seems like it would be perfectly straightforward, but dealing with all of the crazy intersections and permutations felt like taking a 2 month long IQ test.
Here was a mockup I made in Maya while trying to think through the problem.
And this was just for the straightforward, rectangular roofs. The tricky problems came up when the roofs were rotated 45 degrees off of the grid.
Ocean Quigley’s Projects: SimCity 4 and The Sims 2
Mar 7th
Ocean Quigley, the Art Director for Spore has shared with us more of his projects from his past time working on both The Sims 2 and SimCity 4. Credit goes to InfiniteSims for the find!
SimCity 4 had this neat feature (put in by Paul Pedriana) where you could have the game advance a single frame and save a screencapture, advance another frame and save a screencapture and so on.
It let me make little movies of the game as I was working on it, without skipping any frames, which was impressive for the time.
Here’s one movie that I captured while authoring an aerobatic flying team for the game:
The airplane movement is all scripted with Andrew’s particle system, which means that there’s really no flight model there at all! Just particles attracting and repelling each other, and chasing the lead particle. It was pretty sweet! I could even have them explode if they got too close to each other or hit the ground.
The camera was just another particle parented to the lead jet.I used that system in all sorts of unlikely ways. I think the coolest use was for the soccer games in the stadium. Eventually you’d notice that the team’s behaviour was a bit odd for soccer, but it held up to a cursory viewing.
The Sims 2 – Stairs
Here’s a design visualization I did for the Sims2 while trying to figure out how stairs should work.
It’s done in my favorite design tool, Maya. Doing visualizations like this is a great design practice for a few reasons.
First, it forces me to think through exactly how a system is supposed to work, step by step. So when eventually I ask an engineer to implement it in code, I’ve got a clear idea of what I’m asking for.
Second it’s way of expressing the problem to the other people who might care about it (designers, producers, engineers). And if it’s a good visualization, it makes the problem (and hopefully the solution) clear to everybody.
Flashback: SimCity 4 trailer
Nov 10th
Holy cow, this brings back memories! This I do remember seeing!
Simtropolis – The dimensions of SimCity 4
Sep 30th
I wish I had more time to dedicate to the lovely SimCity series. I hadn’t touched the series ever since SimCity Societies came out, a game that would like to be forgotten by many fans. Perhaps that is why SimCity 4 is still on store shelves…6+ years from it’s release. That’s a heck of a long time for any game to still be on store shelves – yet I saw SimCity 4 Deluxe still being sold at my local GameStop, along with The SimCity Box. Soldyne over at Simtropolis posted an excellent read of why the game beats the test of time – because it’s not only a game, but a artistic tool used by many.
As a designer’s tool, SC4 offers users a way to create an architectural design and watch it come to life in a simulated environment. The architect may see SC4 as an outlet for their creative skills in designing new buildings and as a way of seeing these designs “live” in relation to other creations in an organic simulation. the designer is not as concerned with the rules or mechanics of the game as they are with taking their idea and seeing it come to life in a simulated world. SC4 provides a creative outlet for all kinds of designers with variying levels of skill to ply their craft and expand their own horizons.
SimCity 4 – tornado on a leash
May 30th
Here’s my early mockup for one of the ideas, done in 3DS Max; The tornado on a leash. I thought of the tornado as a huge, eager, but destructive dog. You could sort of control if you really tried, but it would try and get away and chew up your buildings if it could. A badly housetrained tornado.
The Tornado was my most used disaster in the SimCity games…I can’t really explain why…I have a huge fascination of tornados. I would love to one day go on a Storm Chase to try to view one up close. 
Trashing buildings in SimCity 4
May 10th
Ocean Quigley shares more of his time spent with the classic SimCity 4. This time, Ocean talks a little about the plans for decaying buildings in the game. They were trying to figure out the best approach for the buildings to degrade over time – through various conditions and sprites. But it turns out that they couldn’t do all of the things they wanted to do due to memory and disk space constraints!
Each building could have it’s own custom, automatically generated “crud” map (a combination of ambient occlusion and 3D noise rendered through the source geometry). Just multiply it over the base building to make it dirty.
Each building could also have automatically generated window masks (normally used to make the windows glow at night). Just multiply those over the building and the windows start looking dark and dingy.
We could break the window masks into sections and apply them independently for a further stage of decay (we didn’t wind up doing that, having to save memory as I recall)
As things go from bad to worse, we could mask a tiling boarded-up-window texture through one of the window channels.
Since the game was in an isometric perspective, we could pre-render “crater” decals and lay them over the building, making it look like parts of the facade had fallen off.
SimCity 4 development pictures
Apr 16th
Were you aware that Ocean Quigley also worked on the beautiful SimCity 4? I didn’t until today (I never paid much attention to the credits in the manuals). He has posted a couple of development pictures of the game in his blog.
I’m particularly proud of the roads and networks. They’re composed of hundreds of different tiles that could combine in thousands of ways (intersections of all sorts, and connections between roads and highways, roads and rail, etc.).
And we had to figure out how to conform the terrain to them, adding bridges, leveling, making retaining walls, and the like. And it had to be seamless, so that the player would just draw out what they wanted and the system would figure out what to do automatically.
Designing them was like taking a 6 month long IQ test. These are a few design prototypes that helped me to think through some of the problems.
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