City Journals

[Romaq]

There are many City Journals, or ‘CJs’ as we call them for SimCity 4. People will create their cities and showcase them. They will also talk about how they accomplished certain features, special custom content they used or created just for their city journal, and even tell stories. Some of the CJ authors have banded together to create fictional SimOlympics and Football leagues. There are even galactic Sim interplanetary federations. One of the new features with CJs is the use of Shockwave to scroll through tracts of land or fade between day/ sunset/ night views.

I have not started my own CJ. I’ve been too busy simply trying to port Whatcom County into SC4, and now that I have it SC5 is announced. I have yet to see comment about CJing within this forum. Perhaps I have missed it. http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=81158&STARTPAGE=1 is one example of a CJ done by the author of SC4 TerraFormer.

My question and the point I’d like to see in this message thread: What could SC5 do better than SC4 for creating CJ content? I’m sure EAGames couldn’t ask for much more than to have SC5 fans promoting the game by word-of-mouth and tons of in-game demo shots. What can SC5 do to make that easier? Are pre-programmed camera ‘flight paths’ available? Is there a ‘movie record’ button possible in the game, with saved data we can post on the web to be viewed by non SC5 people? Can I record in such a way that game controls and cursor movements are removed? No painful, tedious cropping to remove those elements? Can we set up certain ‘predictable’ elements within SC5 for the purpose of screenshots and movies? What about capturing ‘bragging rights’ as far as goals accomplished within the game? Part of the fun of reading through SimTropolis is to see who has *legitimate* ‘bragging rights’. Wouanagaine has some serious bragging rights. So does SimGoober, MallowTheCloud, Moganite, JPlumbley, Beskhu3epnm, Pegasus and … lots of others. I could make a huge list of people just on SimTropolis. CJs are a part of it. Custom Content and the quality they produce is another.

So what could SC5 do that SC4 simply can’t or doesn’t do easily as far as CJs go?

--Romaq

[offspring_dude]

I doubt journals for SCS would be as long or complex as those that were around for SC4... the maps look like they're going to be much more constrained, and the whole thing's just going to take on a Sims flavour about it.

[Romaq]

Oh, another idea I just had. I don't know how hard it is to do a 'picture in picture' type screen, but what if I could drive a car 3D through my city, but have a corner showing what the car looks like from above and to one side, as if the car were being tracked by a helicopter? Then I could see to make turns and do the actual drive, but for 'presentation' I could use a film of both views. Or perhaps I could still do the 'U-Drive-It' style driving within the game, with more flexibility, but record that as a movie for a CJ. The 'flash movie' would simply fade in, do the drive, fade out, loop. I don't like, I can't stand U-Drive-It driving, but I could see using that particular view to show movies within a CJ.

--Romaq

[Romaq]

I'd like for SC:S to craft a shockwave file I can paste in my web page that does an overhead street view of a specific area, and then overlays a 'streetside view' that looks something like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=100+east+flagler+street,+miami+fl&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=39.047881,82.265625&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&layer=c&cbll=25.78703,-80.18905&cbp=1,314.348633440514,0.5,0&ll=25.78764,-80.189032&spn=0.002079,0.001979&z=19&hl=en

So I capture something specific happening within my city at a very specific point in time, but the image provides a 'look around'. That's something SC4 simply cannot do in a CJ, as '3D' views don't really exist. But it's certainly something SC:S could do, providing it packed the data in the same format that Google Maps is doing with *their* streetlevel views. All I should have to do then is upload the package to my website as part of the CJ, and people have the ability to take a 3D virtual tour of what I've built, even if frozen to only one place at one point in time. I'm quite sure Adobe would license the technology for a fee.

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

I only read one city journal so far.. I think it was called "shulamania or shulamanthus" something to that extent.. was a very interesting one I have to admit:D has me laughing to tears:eek:


I hope that SCS supports these kind of stories.. heck maybe even a special spot here in the forums for city Journals:)

[BourneID]

How about just having a more creative camera suite?

I'm think along the lines of having a more finute control over the camera... hiting the camera button will bring up the camera compass rose (like the comand rose in battlefield2 and 2142) or some other type of control interface where we will have beter control of the features of the camera.

As a journal'est ;) for sc4, I was always bothered by the limitations of the game... pictures were glorified "printscreen" shots...and the video... was.... well troublesome.

Here are some cool features of the camera... I dont expect them... but it would be "Real" nice :)

1) the ability to lock the camera ... I said in anouther thread that I liked the angle of the camera in the big picture on page 60 or GFW(with the bowling ally and the Guggenheim museum).....it would be cool that if we find a specific angle that we like.. that we could lock that view..

2) Being able to have a locked spot view, hiting a button or key command would turn the curser into a bulleye... letting us select a spot or building... locking the camera on that building or spot... letting us move the camera around locked onto that spot...

3) being able to output video... say in .Mov, Wmv, or some other common use format... no more of that png frames that we must edit together. Multi formatt would also be nice... including .swf as said before...

This has already been done in the Sims2...

there are a few more options.... just cant think of them right this second...

[MarkDuffy]

1) the ability to lock the camera ... I said in anouther thread that I liked the angle of the camera in the big picture on page 60 or GFW(with the bowling ally and the Guggenheim museum).....it would be cool that if we find a specific angle that we like.. that we could lock that view..

We have had this in all TM games. TiltedVision is a right-click-hold mouse function. Zoom is the scroll wheel. Don't touch them & just move the mouse & nothing changes but location.

[Romaq]

We have had this in all TM games. TiltedVision is a right-click-hold mouse function. Zoom is the scroll wheel. Don't touch them & just move the mouse & nothing changes but location.

If I understand correctly, that would be within the game. If I could invoke the correct command, perhaps I would get a QuickTime .MOV file I could then host on my ISP's website, and then link to it from the CJ. You would then have that complete control of a camera at a fixed point, but you would have that control from within the CJ itself entirely separate from the running game.

And, of course, once done in one game it would be trivial for TM to propogate the code into all other works in progress where it makes sense to do so. It's only a question of licensing fees and how much it bloats the package. Ah, here is a good example. Would something like this be useful in a CJ? http://rockymountainscenery.com/qtvr/dia.html

--Romaq

[schm0]

Are you talking about SCS or SC5 here? I'm confused.

[Romaq]

SimCitiy: Socities is SimCity5.

--Romaq

[Techleo]

While I agree SC:S is the Fifth instalment of Simcity, I dont know if it preclude them making a Simcity 5. They left that option open depending on the way the market responds to SC:S A very wise move on EA's part.

[Romaq]

Would the ability to post 3D snapshots like http://rockymountainscenery.com/qtvr/dia.html be useful in a CJ?

--Romaq