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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

I'm still playing and enjoying SC4k. There's tons of people who love SC3k, and even 2k. I pretty much exhausted all I care to do with this new SC inside of 2 weeks and uninstalled it. It's easily the worst city sim game I've ever played. And not just because of the issues with the AI and city size and all that. It just has no joy in it.

This is what happens when the marketing department takes over a company.

(I would have been perfectly happy with SC4k with curved roads, mixed-use zoning and a few fixes for highways and such).

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It'd be so wonderful to have a SC4.5k. Or, hell, could you imagine what the modding community could do with the source? No chance in hell of that ever happening, but one can dream...

Existential quandary here, but I loathe how we are now hitting the 20 year mark on the modern PC gaming era. 1993 opened the floodgates with Doom, and we are already seeing the loss of many games from that era that just don't run on a modern computer but have never seen a source release to let anyone update the engines.

And it only is poised to get worse over time, especially now that ARM is superseding x86 for a lot of computing. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to know how to run VMs of old operating systems (where you are already in questionable legal water if you download isos of, say, Windows 98, which is no longer available for money but still is copyrighted forever).

And titles like "Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition" I feel hurt the industry hugely by presenting the legal departments an excuse to deny source release, because later on they could touch the game up for a few weeks and sell it all over again. Same way companies like Square will re-release 20 year old games like Final Fantasy rather than do source releases on the original engine code. Except for most games they won't see a re-release, and they will just drift into the binary purgatory of unrunnable titles.

I agree.

We expect English Students to study classic texts. It is hard to impossible (especially with legal considerations) for programmers to play the classics, let alone investigate the source code.

It is a very great shame that so much is effectively locked away and going to be lost.

The original SimCity Classic source code is open source, and instructors like Chaim Gingold and Mark Sample are actually having their students study (and deconstruct) the source code:

Chaim Gingold, Simulation for Games: http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps179/Spring13/

Mark Sample, Criminal Code: The Procedural Logic of Crime in Videogames: http://www.samplereality.com/2011/01/14/criminal-code-the-pr...

Prince of Persia's source is also available... https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

When the culmination of the post-labour economy arrives, we'll realize we have no need for the notion of intellectual property either. Star Trek has set the example for us to follow!

We need a heckuva lot of robotics and AI for that to happen. There's no post-labour as long as human labour is still mandatory for survival. It needs to become entirely optional first.

It doesn't have to happen completely. As it is right now, we are facing a growing crisis of unemployment and underemployment. This has been termed "the Great Decoupling":

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/opinion/global/jobs-produc...

> And titles like "Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition" I feel hurt the industry hugely by presenting the legal departments an excuse to deny source release

You won't get much with just the engine source when what matter in those games is the art and general content. Plus this did not stop people to hack the BG saga into BGTuTu.

Also, http://www.gemrb.org/

This is exactly why I mention Baldurs Gate, because dozens of smart people took thousands of hours to reverse engineer what would have taken the legal team hours and one coder 15 minutes to relicense and release publicly.

Also, the Infinity Engine was used in half a dozen titles, and while it is detrimental that pretty much nobody releases game assets under permissive terms, my point is that games are lost to obscurity because their engines don't work. For better or worse, the game data is just as compatible with its engine as it ever was.

The source code for the original SimCity Classic is open source, called "Micropolis": https://code.google.com/p/micropolis

While it's nowhere near as fancy as the latest version, there are other directions to take it than adding lots of bells and whistles and complexity.

It's simplicity makes it idea for general education, as well as specifically learning about programming, game development and modding, and it's much easier for younger children (and even adults) to grasp and understand.

Doreen Nelson wrote the original SimCity teacher's guide, and her life's work has been "Design Based Learning", like Seymour Papert and Alan Kay's "Constructionist Education" philosophy. I believe SimCity Classic could be developed into a fun and wonderful educational tool, inspired by that work.

About Design Based Learning: http://www.csupomona.edu/~dnelson/intro.html http://www.csupomona.edu/~dnelson/library.html

These are delightfully retro but timeless videos that are inspirational and still totally relevant to SimCity:

City Building Education: A Way to Learn. Written and produced by Doreen Nelson and David Olney through the Office of Charles Eames, l976. 11 mins. (This is well worth watching for the music by Morton Subotnick!) http://video.csupomona.edu/DNelson/CityBuilding-245.asx

Classroom City. Written, directed and produced by Doreen Nelson, l981. Looks at City Building's methods in various classroom settings: traditional, migrant teacher training and educationally handicapped. Students from the first City Building class of l969 are revisited. 16 mins. http://video.csupomona.edu/DNelson/ClassroomCity-245.asx

This is it. There is not much challenging to the new SimCity. It is just not the same experience as SC4. Even with all things fixed, offline mode etc. it makes fun for just a couple of hours.

I think even the unwanted abomination they called Societies is more challenging and rewarding than newSimCity.

Exactly I have been playing simcity for as long as I can remember playing computer games. Possibly even before I played Doom.

The new Simcity is nothing I wanted and really broke the game for me. I dont think I will be playing this franchise ever again, sadly.

I keep trying to play SC4k again, but it feels so out-dated. I haven't tried the new SC, but I've tried Cities XL. I want a new Sim City with the gameplay of SC4k in the engine of Cities XL. SC4k's zones are too small and the road structure is too limiting as you mention, but Cities XL has the horrible resources and trading structure and after your city reaches a certain level the gameplay lags and become unstable.

I even tried Cities in Motion, and dear god is that micro-management hell for me.

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