Sim City 4 Cooperative World (My New Idea using Application and Server)

[francot514]

Hi to all of you, im new in forums and returned to play Sim City 4 this days after years becuase i missed it and discovered this community. I want to share you mi idea:



Sim City 4  Cooperative World.



The main pourpose of creating a cooperative world is have all users share and view all others users creation in real time when playing, of course this will be done ussing a visual application i can easily development, you will not need any other program or cloud storage.



Also the wolrd can have their custom made plugins for all users, that will be downladed with the launcher of course, and each user can own their city and see others players ones, but only will allowed to upload their resources, becuase will be an acount system for that.



Conclusion.



-City synchonization.

-Auto updater for plugins.

-Account settings for uploadings.



What do you say, likes the idea???

[trabman11]

Sounds a lot like you want SC4 to "upgrade" to SC2013. Not that that's a bad thing; your concept is quite interesting, though there would be several issues with the mods people have installed, (as many people don't use the same mods), which would lead to you seeing big brown boxes in other people's cities.

Edit: There would also be several other problems. You would need to have players sit down and play at the exact same time (which is difficult due to the multiple time zones around the world). For example: I doubt that one player would want to get up at 2 AM on one side of the world while another player on another side of the world would be playing when its 4 PM, and vise versa. Also, this type of system has been tested, ( I'm sorry, forced onto a final release of a game with one hour game time limits and limited functionality (referring to God Mode, city tile size, etc.), in which after these problems you decide to tell people that city size limits did not have limits and THAT OFF LINE MODE WAS INDEED POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...........*cough*.......err........) by Maxis, and as we have seen, basically was an unpopular move that got MANY players frustrated    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Though, if you were to find a way to resolve these issues, at least I think of these things as issues, you might have just found a revolutionizing new way to play SC4 !

[MTT9]

This actually is possible if you check NORO's effort. You just need to have the same plugins folder.

The real difficulty is that if you are playing in one tile no one can play any tie limiting with the one you are playing due to the way the game works. If you ask Swordmaster or MandelSoft or anyone from the NORO team they can surely explain it better than me.

If you can get over this difficulties, i've always wanted to play a natural growth multyplayer region

[francot514]

To asnwer all your questions i want to say:

-The server world will use a defined list of mods, that means all users must have same ones, and if any wanna to be added must be advertised.
-The players dont need to play at same time, this is becuase when you save your game city it will be stored in the serve with my application and no cares about timing ( synchonization) becasue every time you wanna play using the application all cities will be up to date.
-Dont know NORO so much, but all the world will be managed and updated automatically every time you get in...


Will do some test about it and reply you back with my concernigs...

[MandelSoft]

-The server world will use a defined list of mods, that means all users must have same ones, and if any wanna to be added must be advertised.

Good luck with getting server space for that. The NAM alone is 250MB (packed) or almost a gigabyte (unpacked). It's one of the must-have mods for SimCity 4. I guess this will take up huge amounts of bandwidth, which will not make the server provider happy. SC4D was down a few times because it ran out of bandwidth because of a new NAM release...

-The players dont need to play at same time, this is becuase when you save your game city it will be stored in the serve with my application and no cares about timing ( synchonization) becasue every time you wanna play using the application all cities will be up to date.
-Dont know NORO so much, but all the world will be managed and updated automatically every time you get in...

This is what I'm mostly concerned about the feasibility of this project. There's a huge risk of potential corruption or unintentional overrides. This has to do with the effect that if you play in one city, the direct neighbours are "locked' and shouldn't be touched. This means you're also not allowed to play in the tiles neighbouring to those tiles, since they will both affect the same neighbour. This all has to do with how the region works. If it's not being dealt with,, especially with automatic updates, certain city tiles can go corrupt without reversion or progress from one player may be lost by an override of his neighbour.

Setting up a co-op region is a real pain. A lot of planning is involved, as well as technical difficulties. Remember that you want something from a game where it has never been designed for...

Best,
Maarten

[francot514]

This means you're also not allowed to play in the tiles neighbouring to those tiles, since they will both affect the same neighbour. This all has to do with how the region works. If it's not being dealt with,, especially with automatic updates, certain city tiles can go corrupt without reversion or progress from one player may be lost by an override of his neighbour.

Dont understand what you mean, what happen if you make neighbors setups with another city??? What is the risk? Can you explain me better, thanks...

[noahclem]

This means you're also not allowed to play in the tiles neighbouring to those tiles, since they will both affect the same neighbour. This all has to do with how the region works. If it's not being dealt with,, especially with automatic updates, certain city tiles can go corrupt without reversion or progress from one player may be lost by an override of his neighbour.

Dont understand what you mean, what happen if you make neighbors setups with another city??? What is the risk? Can you explain me better, thanks...

The way the game works every time you save a tile the game overwrites all the tiles adjacent to it. The point is to update neighbor connections and RCI demand but it will overwrite those tiles even if no changes are made. You can observe this by sorting your region folder by "date modified" and see what happens when you save just one tile. That can be worked around if you're careful, as can changing/growing plugins folders, but neither are easy. Checking out the early pages of the NORO Co-op might help you get a better idea of the technical challenges involved and what we found to be the best ways to deal with them.

[francot514]

Check the application preview image using Sim City 4 color profile.



Also tested for what you mean and get the this solution:

If the city was replaced with a previous version before the tile change the user can load it while inside the game and avoid for overrides, what can i actualy do, is allow the application download instantly the version of the city that was not modified to prevent corruptions and only allow to upload user city assigned to a profile.

As always will be backups of each city in server, corruption can be avoid by a simple download profile city button, and talking about mods line NAM, the must own it to play in coop, i mean will be some requeriments:
-Sim City 4
-Rush Hour or Deluxe
-NAM mod
-EP1 patchs
-And of course sc4 coop application.