Related: https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2014/04/04/the-craft-of-scree... (The craft of screen graphics and movie user interfaces - interview with Jorge Almeida...)
I wish they'd actually shown more/talked about it though.
Road and rail curves are massive and it’s hard to understand just how big they are without having to actually walking them.
So the difference in scale between real life and the sims is 100% on purpose, as more realism makes the game worse. Just like they don't ask for a long permitting system for anything to get built, or demand a decade of discussion and probable lawsuits before you can move move a road, or rebuild an intersection.
One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.
New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses. Many of these are older and more traditional techniques to yield higher density neighbourhoods without building up to large apartment buildings.
It would be really cool to see a game that focused more on creating these kinds of realistic and aspirational living spaces instead of the usual cookie-cutter suburbs linked up by huge roads and a large downtown core.
you need "plop the growables" and "move it" mods at minimum to nudge all the buildings close together.
In more simulation-focused games, cycling and walking paths are often available, and you can use them, but they come with many of the same constraints they face in the real world. In practice, that means they are usually not efficient as the primary way to move large numbers of people across a large city.
Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently, in a way that makes your preferred options the optimal strategy. That is going to be hard to find, since transportation is a core part of city-building sims, and developers tend to pick either realism or a more utopian/fantasy model rather than mixing both in a single game.
That's because SimCity is not a tool for preaching your personal opinions of what makes "more livable cities" to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game.
If you want to make your perfect city builder, go ahead, it's easier than ever now for somebody to create a game. Just don't expect everybody else to share your view of "aspirational", more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.
Tell me you’ve never lived outside North America without telling me you’ve never lived outside North America.
> Do 99% of city-builder players care what shape the corner radius of the intersection has? Most likely, no.
Maybe not... but out of all the players who care corner radius of roads in games, 99% of them probably are into city-builder!
zabzonk•1h ago
Of course the Romans didn't give a shit who's property rights they might be violating. I live in Lincolnshire UK, where Roman roads are still used. The last one that got changed was years ago when they had to put a kink in Ermine Street (now the A15) at RAF Scampton when they extended the runway to accommodate Vulcan bombers.