[grawprog]

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it.

Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water from the sewage run off of the rest of the city, I created roads and bridges everywhere, there's several 'nice' areas along the non polluted areas of water with large mansions, there's a big bustling urban center full of office buildings and highrises not far away from squat, squalid apartments underneath highway overpasses, schools next to landfills, a lack of hospitals and fire departments, many police departments, i've intentionally clearcut as much of the forest surrounding the city as possible, the next step was to create a small gated community out away from the city, for those with money who can't handle the horrid amounts of traffic and infrastructure...

I may have also accidently poisoned the whole city briefly when trying to build the prison island and killed 30% of the people there, but things have been looking up, population growth is finally starting to rise again, though the health of the population is questionable.

[rightbyte]

Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city.

I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt deep and the isometric view didn't make me sad about not doing angled zones.

If Skylines could make roads free of the square course why not the buildings that seem to have to be orthogonal to the tangent of the road.

[Lammy]

Sim City 3000 is my favorite too for all the same reasons and I really wish SC3U shipped with multiplayer like the leftovers suggest it would have: https://tcrf.net/SimCity_3000_Unlimited/Unused_Multiplayer_T...

[ehnto]

Looks like the commands for an IRC client, I wonder if they were intending an in-game community based on IRC?

I'm not sure it indicates actual multiplayer capabilities, or just the intention. It just looks like someone dropped an IRC client library into the repo at some point.

Totally speculation of course, but maybe even just a dev tool in the repo that got sent around to different devs/studios so that they could communicate. Slack being IRC for work wasn't a new concept after all.

[Lammy]

Compare to https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/SimCity_2000:_Network_Editio... for the precedent

[rightbyte]

Interesting.

"The server does not automatically pause when all players are logged out."

So you were supposed to like log in for 30 min per day and play a little and then wait for tomorrow with the game server running? Seems like a Minecrafty way of playing. It would probably be fun for some IT-department to have an instance but it feels very niche.

[ehnto]

It used to be pretty normal for someone in a friends group to run "the server" I think, for whatever game it may have been. Often just from a PC on their home network. I don't think it would have been a stretch, but it would have definitely been niche.

[xattt]

I really wish SimCity 3000 shipped with 3D views.

I remember reading articles on Happy Puppy around 1998 or 1999 that talked about the “promised land” with screenshots of 3D cities. These are still around if you look around

I am hopeful that someone on here that could share some lore about the development of that 3D version.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

There was a racing game called Streets of SimCity, which was mediocre (an euphemism, actually it was just bad) as a racing game, but had the amazing feature that you could drive around your SimCity 2000 cities in glorious 3D.

Sadly I don't know of an equivalent for SimCity 3000.

[MaxBarraclough]

SimCopter also supported SimCity 2000 cities.

[grawprog]

Skylines, at least without the mods, feels like an incomplete game in general. It's fun, but it's lacking the depth I expected. Though reading about all the addons and mods, it looks like they add in just about everything I felt was missing, it's just a lot of money to drop on a game I don't really have enough time to get that into.

[protomyth]

They do a lot of sales. About four sales let me catch up pretty cheaply. Skip the decor stuff and buy the stuff that actually adds play items.

As for mods, really the move it and traffic manager president edition is basically a minimum to not be frustrated.

[grawprog]

Honestly, despite my op, the one I would really like is the park management one. The one that lets you designate custom size parks and stuff. I mostly got disheartened and pollutey when I realized I couldn't turn the large forest into a park. So I cut it all down and proceeded to lower the quality of life for all.

I was tempted once to grab them all during a sale, it would have been $40 down from like $160 or something, but I also don't want to get sucked into a game like that. Games like civ and simcity eat too much time i've been down those rabbit holes before. Even as it is I spent literally two days straight doing nothing but playing this game when I started that map.

[brailsafe]

I feel the same way about it being a time suck, and the same way about the parks expansion. I did end up getting the parks expansion for free when they had some event recently, and it's ok. It's ok, but sort of just that. You still have to build entrance gates on flat edges of roads, and you can only place park specific buildings inside, which is just annoying. I like the addition of bike transport though. One of my biggest gripes with the game is that I can't see where a given workforce is living, so I can't really work on bottlenecks in their commute. Otherwise, I've found that uninstalling the game occasionally helps me get out of the Skylines zone for a while, then I reinstall when it's raining and have some fun.

[grawprog]

>that I can't see where a given workforce is living

With the early game it wasn't so bad, like one or two districts, but as the city grew, it became too much, hence the residential surrounding industrial stuff.

Most of the dystopian stuff came from my frustration with limitations in the game. The massive amounts of roads and bridges came from the traffic congestion problems and my lack of patience in rebuilding roads or designing transit lines, though i do have 3 massive metro lines that crisscross the city.

The interesting thing to me was the disparity in my city and the dystopianness came from my negligence and lack of patience or caring. The ghettos and ramshackle neighbourhoods built themselves around the zones i built out of just the hell of it much of the time. A lot of it came from stuff the game just generated. Zooming into the close up view in some areas was kinda heart breaking.

It mostly showed me how intentional negligence leads to some of the most nightmarish outcomes and that the games modelling of neighbourhoods based on zoning and surroundings is scarily accurate.

[LoSboccacc]

weird I've never managed to enjoy 3000 coming from the first and 2000, which was to me the best; in 3000 I always felt too much in control of the city, while in the other it was a constant struggle against problems.

SimCity 4 felt an incomplete and shallow game at start, but I've come to enjoy it greatly with the rush hour expansion of the deluxe edition, which made the city dynamic enough to feel compelling to work with.

back then it was hard to find in depth technical commentary of the game internals, so I don't know how much my feeling match reality

[EricE]

You can use zoneable paths to break some of the dependencies on roads. And with MoveIt, Anarchy and other mods you can pretty much bend C:S to whatever you want.

Well, with the Steam version anyway. It's the only version that has mods and access to the Steam Workshop with all the community created assets.

For example Sunset Harbor added above ground metro's but the modding community provided a solution years before.

I sure hope they come out with a follow on version that can scale more than the current version but even as it is I love Cities:Skylines!

[AnonsLadder]

I never played 3000 but was going to make a comment a lot like yours about Sim City 4

[sandworm101]

So ready access to roads is preventing the creation of an urban nightmare a la Bladerunner? We better protect our road networks.

[Natsu]

> Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it.

That's NYC, isn't it?

[Natsu]

I wasn't trying to take a dig at NYC with this, rather the prison island and geography reminded me of NYC and I should've quoted that part of the grandparent to be more clear.

[XaoDaoCaoCao]

That's a slice of the horror of our civilization lololol

[bluedevil2k]

I know it's cool and trendy to trash our current society and treat it like it's the worst time to be alive in human history, but in reality there's never been a better time to be alive in the history of our species. Poverty, infant mortality, childhood mortality, crime...all at all time lows. Literacy, income levels, food quantity, public health...all at all time highs.

[andrepd]

It's always the same comment. Yeah most things are strictly better than they have been throughout almost the whole of human existence. Good. Guess what. I'm not content: I want them to be even better.

And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocally yes). The typical "it's the best time to be alive in human history so far" sounds almost defeatist, like a license to become lax.

Also, nobody claims "this is the worst time to be alive".

[roenxi]

> I'm not content: I want them to be even better.

Want what you like; but (1) pretty much everyone else wants that so it goes without saying, (2) it is common for people with plans to make things better achieve the opposite because they are lousy planners. The existence of things we don't like doesn't mean we know how to deal with them. People come up with ideas that sound good and don't work.

[bluedevil2k]

> Some things are worse

Such as?

[brewdad]

Speaking as a USAian, we are 20 years further along the Global Warming/Climate Change path with no significant improvements. Wealth inequality is worse than it has ever been since WWII at least. Access to healthcare has improved, IF you can afford it. A significant percentage of our countrymen can't. Oh, and there's a pandemic going on that our nation's leaders would rather sweep under a rug and call fake news or a Democratic hoax.

If you live in a country whose population gives a fuck about other people, YMMV.

[Kye]

Purchased on the credit card of carbon release. We might get lucky and see some technological or social innovation negate or stop the coming disaster, or civilization could snap back to where it was centuries ago.

[LeifCarrotson]

The worst part is not the horror of mass extinctions and runaway greenhouse gasses might eventually resolve itself on geologic timescales, but that the society that rebuilt might find it impossible to get out of the stone age; much less through an industrial revolution: we've pillaged the highest-yield mines, germs have been developed into antibiotic-resistant superbugs, we've extracted the easiest-to-reach stored hydrocarbons, and replaced natural, hardy, diverse crops and the "basic 5" domestication-friendly animals with inbred monocultures.

[troutwine]

I do wonder how much our extractive technological culture would play to the benefit of a child society that intended to learn from us. There'd be an awful lot of material at the surface that could be recycled or repurposed, if we're talking a reboot on the order of centuries. Idle thought.

[eropple]

There are, but a lot of them can't be reconstituted without other resources. Take, like, rebar, which is the post-apocalyptic author's favorite source of "chunky metal"--it's low-grade steel that melts north of 1200 deg C. If you don't have access to fossil fuels (or an electric arc furnace, and then how are you going to power it?) you're probably looking at a charcoal forge. Charcoal forges require a ton of airflow (relatively easy, if potentially work-intensive) and a ton of fuel to get hot enough to melt even iron, let alone steel (and remember that modern shitty steel is still pretty good by historical standards!).

You can absolutely do it, but you're crawling by your fingernails. And then you have to multiply that by thousands of different factors and different problems. I've thought about this a bunch through the lens of building a game in a world like this and done quite a bit of research, and I tend to think that most of what you might consider "ready resources" in such a world require a pretty significant amount of re-bootstrapping that become really, really hard without easy hydrocarbons.

Maybe doable! Probably really really hard.

[smogcutter]

Something like this is part of the background of Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” series, totally wild books that are set in a far future earth. Mineral wealth is totally exhausted, and “mining” just means digging up the detritus of forgotten civilizations.

I’m really tempted to post spoilers by way of example, but part of the fun of the book is putting the pieces together and realizing what’s going unsaid because the narrator either takes it for granted or doesn’t understand it himself. Very strong recommend if you have any interest in sci fi/fantasy.

[glenstein]

>but that the society that rebuilt might find it impossible to get out of the stone age; much less through an industrial revolution

I don't disagree, necessarily, but I would be fascinated to know if there are any books or articles that game out this scenario in detail. What would industrialization without massive reserves of hydrocarbons look like?

[samus]

There are promising approaches to break down organic matter into basic hydrocarbons. Also, landfills generate huge amount of natural gas. These approaches are not mainstream yet because hydrocarbons from oil reserves are still cheaper. But if they are not available, it might be worthwhile. Again, this assumes sufficient knowledge in chemistry and a vision on what to do with in the first place. Both might or might not be present in a future civilization.

[Wowfunhappy]

For how long would bacteria maintain their antibiotic resistance once antibiotics stopped being used?

[samus]

Most adaptations come at significant metabolical costs. Molecule complexes that funnel toxins out of the cell, alternative metabolimal pathways, exotic cell wall configurations and the like all have disadvantages in the race to the bottom that bacterial evolution is. But it's hard to say how long it takes until gene drift gets rid of them completely. After all, many are derived from the chemical weaponry of fungi.

[take_a_breath]

==the "basic 5" domestication-friendly animals==

Can you expand on what you mean by this? I’m not finding much through search.

[LeifCarrotson]

Sorry, that was a point from Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I should have just listed the cow, horse, sheep, goat, and pig.

Those are the basic examples of the few animals which are docile herbivores, breeding in captivity, growing to a large, breeding adult in a couple years, and which live in social groups that accept humans at the top of the hierarchy. Building a society with protein and labor from cows is much easier than, say, harnessing turkeys. There are a billion cows on the planet, but if human society grinds to a halt and we stop artificially inseminating them and running the feed plots those species might not survive.

[Arnavion]

The list is generally cows, pigs, goats, sheep and horses. But it's not a rigid list; sometimes goats and sheep get merged, and sometimes chickens get added.

[bluedevil2k]

This is a perfect example of the trendy "everything's leading to a doomsday" sentiment among some people on this site.

"We might get lucky" - humans have overcome every adverse condition in our 2 million years alive, why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.

"stop the coming disaster" - again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.

"could snap back to...centuries ago" - this has happened once in the past 2000 years, you really think you're going to be alive when we enter a 2nd Dark Age.

I think it's the same sort of thinking with the "Jesus is coming back in the next 5 years" religious crowd. You want to feel important and part of something bigger than yourself, something planet-wide, so you're almost looking forward to being a part of it so you can feel like you're part of history.

[bmitc]

By the same token, one could argue your comment is part of the trendy progress worship that's been happening since the beginning of humanity.

Mental disorders are at an all-time high. Extinction levels are well beyond their natural baseline rate, due to human activity. Environmental destruction is at an all-time high. Now, with the Internet, we've managed to build a system that can amplify nearly every negative aspect of human society but at the same time offers a shield of sorts from those effects.

Yes, humans are likely to survive in the same way that a virus survives. We find a way but it isn't always a virtuous path. We humans have yet to understand that nature is a balance and that we choose to operate outside of that balance. Everytime we progress we invent new ways for people and other animals to suffer.

[bluedevil2k]

> Mental disorders are at an all-time high

Please provide some references that show mental illness is higher now than during the Dark Ages. Or in Egypt among the slaves under the Ptolemy's.

[retsibsi]

They didn't say the things you're interpreting them as having said.

> why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.

They didn't say we can only survive if we get lucky. The dichotomy they painted was between 'getting lucky' and civilizational regression, not extinction.

> again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.

This is clearly not what they said: they said 'some technological or social innovation' might 'negate or stop the coming disaster'.

You can make an argument that we should lean more heavily on base rates rather than an inside-view attempt to predict the future. But here you've just psychoanalysed a strawman.

[rurp]

Humans being able to invent new existential threats is a very recent development. The way that we have been addressing them so far does not exactly fill me to the brim with confidence.

[streb-lo]

Seems like an awful lot of armchair psychology you're doing here.

[Kye]

Please soapbox on someone else's comment.

[hevelvarik]

Someone had to do it.

[philwelch]

Which is exactly how you like it so it must not be that bad.