What Frustrates You The Most About SC4?

[Exla357]

Kinda self explanatory, I'll start 


1: Constant threat of CTDs
2: The 5 minutes loading time for each Gig of plugins
3: Waiting 30 seconds for my parks menu to load.
4: Waiting 5 minutes to load a city.

I actually tried removing every plugin I had this afternoon!

Pros:
Awesome performance; 10 seconds to load a city!
Cons:
No NAM
No plugins
No slope mod
No good houses
No good road networks
Terrain, water, and rocks are crap
Tree controller is just WTH
No money
Demand issues
Few transportation options
Parks aren't good
Airports don't even qualify as such
Scaling is WAY off
Background is fail
Pathfinding is just a joke
Busses don't look good
Trains don't look good
Emergency vehicles don't look good
And that's just a few.

My conclusion? DO NOT remove your plugins. EVER!

[Gringamuyloca]

SNIP....My conclusion? DO NOT remove your plugins. EVER!

been there... it is a very empty menu without custom content.

I am so thankful that there are so many who are willing to share their time with this incredible community! 

[Ramona Brie]

More of a wish list:

1. No subdivisions. To create AZ properly you need subdivisions that have 6 or 7 home styles and look similar. I would love a feature in which, say, I could drag over a large residential space and have distinct subdivisions.
2. Improved terrain and weather handling, but I have a feeling Lowkee33 could release a new weather exemplar and system to handle this.
3. Outdated interface. Though an appearance issue largely related to being a product of 2003, SC4's GUI would look much nicer with an update. I think it would be nicer to have better civic menus.
4. Few school options. Specifically I would like to be able to determine per city, "I want K-5 elementary schools and 6-8 middle schools" or "I want K-6 elementary schools and 7-8 junior high schools" or "I want K-8 schools" or even "7-9 junior high schools, 10-12 high schools" and be able to adjust school capacity as such. Also, if one plops, say, JBSimio's church schools, they still show up as public schools that require funding. What would be nice is to be able to not fund religious schools. Oh, and charter schools would be nice (public funded, but not school district-related).
5. A "Light Industry" zoning type that still covers commercial operations with loading docks, large warehouses, etc. but doesn't imply pollution like the current I-M category and might be beneficial to attract like I-HT.
6. Only for realism, a sewage system. I remember SimGoober finding unused code for it while dealing with a Water Control Board lot. It would be like water: you need pipes, you need treatment centers, and low funding could lead to sewage spills. It also would not be necessary in small towns.
7. A "Low Medium-Density Residential" option for small apartment complexes as well as homes.

Personally I do not think that releasing the SC4 source code would impact EA's bottom line in any way. In fact, I could easily see it being an added incentive to refresh the game, make it more stable, and perhaps even bring it to market. "SimCity 4X", as I call it, would be a good cheap game for digital distribution.

[FrankU]

But maybe EA is thinking of a way to make a new game that would be superfluous if we keep on improving SC4.

My frustration: the long, long menus. I'd like to have a subdivision for menus, or more menus or, well, an easy way to handle the enormous amount of plopable lots. And I don't mean the Damn.

And: building styles. How hard it is to get a neighbourhood exisiting of one type of housing!

[io_bg]

My frustration: the long, long menus. I'd like to have a subdivision for menus, or more menus or, well, an easy way to handle the enormous amount of plopable lots. And I don't mean the Damn.

And: building styles. How hard it is to get a neighbourhood exisiting of one type of housing!

Ad to this the few road angles we've got - straight, diagonal and FAR (thanks to the NAM) and that we can only zone on straight roads...

[inner nerd]

the slow load time with plugins! i can run the game, go downstairs and get something to drink, come back upstairs, click on my city to load it, then go back downstairs and start a load of laundry, come back up and still be watching the hourglass

[j-dub]

About the school thing. The individual lot can be modified so it requires no cost. The funny thing is though, if you lower the bar down anyway, there will still be a strike and Sims carrying signs around by the road, even though it had no monthly cost to begin with. I will have to say if you do not exceed 1.2gb on a dual core processor, it can load significantly faster.

The most I have been able to do is get a line of 2x2 diagonal houses on a diagonal street. I was not the first though, someone introduced me into Mattb325's work. When I saw how the game knew how to do that, I could not help but wonder, what could of been adjusted, had it not been for the hard coding.

[Shark7]

Hmm, while I do have 3 gigs of custom content, I don't have issues loading the game in a reasonable (IE about 1 minute) amount of time.  Now the menus are a different story, they still take a bit to load, mostly I think due to having to generate the thumbnails for the menu items...but only once.  After that, the menus load relatively quickly.

Now granted, I got a new system that has 12 gigs of RAM, and that may be what helps it.

Also, have not had a CTD since I set some command line switches to force the game to play on a single core of my processor rather than switching cores or using multiple cores...that completely remedied the CTD issue for me.

[six9nc]

Not having a street or horizon level view of my cities.  I have to imagine what my skyline would look like off on the horizon if I was driving on an interstate.  I mean I put a lot of time and effort in to having an aesthetically pleasing skyline that is balanced but bold.  Just to see it as if Im on a plane coming in on final approach.

[Lowkee33]

2. Improved terrain and weather handling, but I have a feeling Lowkee33 could release a new weather exemplar and system to handle this.

Actually, this is my biggest frustration with SimCity 4 ever.  The Weather Exemplar functions, cool, we can do a few things with this.  However...

-Weather doesn't start until you enter Mayor Mode
-Trees can be planted automatically on the month, but only before entering Mayor Mode.
-The moisture simulation can only last one year (a property in the w.e. would make one think other wise)
-Disasters pause the game
-Upon entering Mayor Mode, the wind direction switches 180 degrees (totally messing with someone trying to sync a tree controller up with a terrain mod)

The first four things irk me.  If this stuff were open we could have a nature simulation (think wildlife automata responding to wild fires that spread depending upon the wind direction, which can only occur because the moisture happened to be a little dry that year) instead of just cities.

The final one really hinders my terrain mod/tree controller endeavor.  At this point, there is still plenty of work that I can do and ignore this, but one day I will have to meet up.

[RickD]

There are a lot of things in SC4 I find annoying. But there are only two that really frustrate me:

- Prop Pox
It is no fun to start a new city when there is an estimated 50% chance I will lose it all after investing a lot of time in it.

- Performance
I upgraded my computer specifically for SC4 (CPU with good single core performance, 8 Gb Ram, SSD). Still the game is awfully slow.

[Reikhardt]

I'd second what RickD said: My machine is geared up to run modern FPS games at top whack settings yet SC4 runs like an arthritic turtle on tranquilizers.
I accept any other problems as just a fact that this game is pretty old and as yet nothing has surpassed it.

[[Delta ²k5]]

I third Rick D. at the performence point! I can run GTA EFLC fluent, but not SC4

Other Things I dislike:

- Airports: I don't at all like the way they work. One international airport at every city? - Never. Also I don't like that there is no traffic on the taxiways.

- Trucks and freight trains: They don't have any kind of destination. The drive to the border and disappear.

- Scaling: Says it all... Humans as big as signs and bigger as doors... 

[Rady]

Most of all I dislike the fact that the amount of new stuff that is available on the LEX, STEX, .. increases more rapidly then I am able to use the existing stuff in my cities ..

[Kitsune]

I don't get the performance issue either - I think hard drive speed plays a factor into it as it has to load all those plugin's. My computer is also more oriented to stats crunching though (a quad w/ ht @ 4.1ghz & 18GB of ddr3-1600...), so maybe it likes stat's cruncher better. And things that bother me most: the same things as Delta + CTDs.

[jmyers2043]

- Scaling: Says it all... Humans as big as signs and bigger as doors... 

Now that's funny.

Well, Delta. You'll go crazy if you ever decide to bat some buildings. There is nothing consistent about Maxis scale.

- Jim