A Tale of Two Cities (family gameplay issues)

[Romaq]

As I stated before my wife and I picked up a second copy of SimCity 4 with the goal of both of us being able to play the game, if not at the same time, at least being able to 'share' the region. Things didn't work out as planned, but that type of gameplay is something for Tilted Mill to consider.

SC4's region format in the user directory is fixed. There is simply no easy way to convince SC4 to use some OTHER directory, such as one on a file server, so that members of a file server can independently have access to the data. Also, the data format meant having to be careful in the exchange of data. What she does 'touches' adjacent cities. If we were not careful, it was quite possible for her work in her city to overwrite my adjacent city.

With SC5, it would be useful if she and I could have two 'neighboring' cities that can cooperate or compete over our local network, possibly even in realtime. Or, perhaps, we could both share a city but work within competing neighborhoods within it, perhaps even in realtime.

The metaphor could extend to informal groups of players forming a SimCity 'meta' society. With the proper security in place, perhaps a group of friends can 'share' involvement within a city.

[Ocram]

Good idea! This is far superior to the city sharing on the maxis/simcity/ea whatever website.

[Aushun]

That's a brilliant idea! Maybe there could be entire countries as well!

[Hardin]

SC4 was supposed to have multiplayer but they never implemented it :(.

[Romaq]

I can 'hack' multi-player into SC4 by using Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/) and the SC4 Startup Manager to maintain changes within cities and plug-ins. But it's something like playing monopoly by mail, only better because it's email.

I did make requests to TM in another thread that would 'help' with using software like SVN and CVS on the game data. Versioning Systems would allow 'infinite undo' and even the possibility of starting with the same set of data, but taking it in two different directions AT THE SAME TIME, which I plan to do with my Whatcom County Region: A 'real life' version as close as I can make it, and a 'Sci-Fi' version. And maybe someday my wife would be interested in puttering with one of those versions if I insulated her from the SVN stuff.

Or we could play SC5 instead.

But I did have the goal of making my Whatcom County Region available for multi-user play for those people willing to work with SVN to do it. But I have a hold on that now while I'm spending heaping gobs in the forum in my attempt to steer TM towards my ideas and my point of view concerning what SC5 could become by release date and beyond through custom mods.

--Romaq