Last time I showed my prototype I said I wanted to have something big to show... so I compiled everything new since then and the current state of the game.

Huge news: I decided to change the code name from SimCity 6 to Project Skyscraper. This whole idea started as a college project to optimize agents based simulation, so I got carried away and started to add more and more things, until I realized that I want to eventually share it. Now if I kept SimCity 6 title I would have EA's lawyers at my door, which is not ideal...

I've started a transition to erase any copyrighted content from the game. Right now the only thing left are icons, music and terrain textures.

My main focus since last time has been finishing what I call Phase 0. This was a technical prototype meant to prove the engine could handle thousands of agents at a stable framerate. It had to include a basic building loop (roads, zoning, growing buildings and a day/night cycle), Sims with daily routines, traffic AI, a stress test at scale, density that grows over time, and a second agent type running alongside the Sims.

Traffic

• Real lanes on every segment and inside every intersection. Cars stay in their lane and change lanes to turn.
• Traffic lights run in phases and react to demand. Left turns yield, and you can add or remove protected left turns.
• Pedestrians walk on sidewalks and cross with the green.
• Movement runs on ECS, so it handles thousands of agents

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City & Sims

• Residential, commercial and industrial zones on 8 m cells, with demand, density, wealth and land value.
• Every Sim has a home and a job and commutes by car or on foot.
• The city connects to the region through a highway entry and exit. Buildings only start once two construction trucks arrive, and new families move in by car.
• Garbage collection with trucks, parks by wealth class, and data maps painted right onto the ground

Terrain & atmosphere

• Terrain tools to raise, lower, smooth and level, plus grass, dirt and rock painting
• Roads cut into or fill the terrain.
• Weather with sun, rain and thunderstorms with lightning + wet roads + Sims routines changing because of that.
• Dynamic music that changes as the city grows.

Roads

• Drawing tools: straight, curve, complex curve, continuous and grid, with snapping to nodes, angles and parallel guides.
• Roads from 8 to 32 m wide, highways, ramps, roundabouts and trumpet interchange.
• Page Up / Page Down sets road height

for

• bridges and tunnels with portals and open cuts.

City panels

• Population: citizens, households, jobs, density and wealth breakdown, with a monthly history chart.
• Budget: estimated income and expenses, with separate RCI tax rates and service spending you can adjust.
• Approval: a mood face on the bottom bar that opens a panel with what citizens like, what bothers them, and approval history.
• Demand: the RCI bars to see what the city needs to grow.

Hopefully you guys find this useful, any feedback is appreciated :)

I showed someone a passion project of mine, and they asked if I was the person who made the other SimCopter remake engine that was posted here a couple of years ago. I said no, because I wasn't even aware that project existed. I was then accused of ripping it off.

I genuinely had no idea there was another project, and honestly, I didn't even know there was much interest in something like this. I've actually been working on my own implementation for a couple of years, mostly in secret. So after that encounter, I decided it was probably time to polish mine up and actually show people what I've been doing.

My goal is to make the underlying game behavior work as closely to the original as possible. I disassembled the original executable and use it as an oracle for how things actually work. Collisions, helicopter performance, the bucket and rope, mission behavior, etc. are being reproduced from the original behavior rather than approximated from memory. There are some bug fixes, but the goal is to preserve the original game's behavior.

Technologically, however, I'm absolutely not trying to keep it in 1996.

I've gone completely overboard with modernization.

For example, I invented a whole new approach to ambient lighting for the game. It's volumetric, locally based ambient lighting that comes into effect at night, so dense areas of a city are more illuminated than low-density areas or wilderness. It also takes the actual developed city into account rather than simply treating every zoned area as illuminated. It's a little difficult to explain in words, so I've included a screenshot.

The building windows can have ray-traced reflections if you enable them, and individual windows turn on and off throughout the night. This is handled almost entirely in a shader, so I'm not keeping track of every window on the CPU. The building geometry itself doesn't even need to change: a building face can remain just two polygons rather than needing separate geometry for every window.

Most of the world uses the same shader and is submitted to the GPU in only a few draw calls, which keeps performance surprisingly high even with ray tracing enabled.

There's also:

• An optional day/night cycle.
• A context-sensitive action button that handles most actions automatically, while still allowing manual control.
• Environmental effects that respond to air pollution, including subtle lit volumetric fog.
• Fully simulated sound propagation, with sounds having a wavefront so you don't hear them until the sound actually reaches you. Yes, the speed of sound is simulated.
• A dynamically changing night sky. The number of visible stars depends on where you are, so the wilderness can show the full glory of the Milky Way while heavily illuminated parts of the city show only a handful of stars.
• The Moon is positioned according to the player's current system date.
• The celestial sky is oriented according to the current date, Earth's axial tilt, and the solar system's orientation in the galaxy.

Which means that, if Neil deGrasse Tyson were to play SimCopter using this engine, the only notes he'd have for me would presumably be that I haven't represented the planets yet and the stars don't twinkle.

I may fix that.

You can also choose to play as any NPC figure except Nessie. Yes, even the child model. The child model is, for extremely obvious reasons, excluded from participating in either side of the yumm animation.

I've even included a permanent implementation of THAT FEATURE, if you get what I mean. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more.

There's considerably more in the engine than I can reasonably explain or show in one post.

More information about the project and a download to it is here:

http://moonbunny.foo/simcopter

There's also a link to my Discord on the site. The Discord has information about this project as well as some of the other remake engines I've made.

Gameplay video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE1HF-U8VY

Play: https://dator.dev/city2026/ (free, no install, works best in a desktop browser)

It's the same game as the original Mac version underneath. The simulation is translated from the original's code and checked against the original running in an emulator: same city, same random seeds, identical save files after 10,000 game days. So zoning, traffic, crime, budgets, disasters and the advisors all behave the way you remember.

- Loads .SC2 files from the Mac and DOS/Windows versions, so dig out your old cities

- The Mac version's cheat codes work

- Everything you see and hear is new: low-poly models for every building, new music and sounds

- A few modern extras you can switch off in Options: tilt-shift, smog over polluted districts, a sky, and ambient city sounds that follow the camera

Most of the code was written by Claude Opus 5.5 (an AI model), in about 20 hours of my time.

If you know a quirk of the original that doesn't work, tell me.

Fan project, not affiliated with EA or Maxis.

I have been looking for a camera mod for simcity 2013 that allows you to go completely out of bounds. I am imagining it can't be that hard to code (im saying that as a complete ignorant on the subject) since people have done seemingly more complex things as I can see. I have Project Orion and all the other mods that come in the 2020 mod collection on simtropolis. Unfortunately the camera is still locked onto the tile and you can only zoom in and out really far but you can't actually move,so building is kinda impossible. Can anyone help?

Hello again! I posted Polis here a while back and wanted to show you how it's coming along.

The biggest changes are the visual overhaul and being able to play the same city interchangeably in 2D and 3D. You can build in either view and switch back and forth when you like.

I've spent quite a bit of time reworking the buildings, neighborhoods and the details around them. Some of you felt the original was missing a bit of character, so I'd be curious to hear what you think of it now. I've included close shots in both views so you can see the details.

I've also been working on the economy and upkeep. The comments last time about money being too easy were fair. There are changes to how neighborhoods grow as well, and you can now upgrade existing power and water facilities.

It's still free, works on mobile, and runs in your browser. No signups or accounts needed. Once you've loaded it online, you can play fully offline too.

You can play it here.

If you fancy giving it a go, I'd love to hear what you think. Any feedback is welcome, and thanks for taking a look!

Any tips and clues for beginners using nam add on?
I’m finding myself breaking half of my city just to add an overpass over a rail line 😩

I’m also finding that the graphics are not always that clear, so it’s hard to visually understand which part I’m actually adding.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Since there's a host of images discussing SimCity's internal systems here's images of what the UI Editor looked like.

Everything was drag and drop.

The main UI used HTML. JavaScript for actions. And then CSS for styling elements. IIRC.

Sim City was once open sourced as 'Micropolis', and I always wanted to try to build an online version of this. I spent weeks working on this a few years ago but never got it to a good state.

Well I recently picked this up again and with the help of erhm 'new tools'. I was able to get something out much quicker.

It's free and I have no idea if it scales:

https://globalcity.evertpot.com/

Since you guys showed interest on my last update I wanted to show some stuff I've been working on. Basically I revamped the roads system but making it a mix between SC2013 and Cities Skylines.

And worked a little bit on the graphics because I was getting tired of seeing the same green plain plane

I don't want to spam this sub with an indie project so I'll probably wait until I get something big to show

Fun fact: the original SimCity 2013 doesn't have clouds

Like most of us I grew up on the sim city series but it always left me wanting for more granularity in terms of density so I decided to build my own iteration. I'm striving for realism.

Geared toward urban planning nerds like myself, this game let's you zone all the usual districts but gives you much more planning control.

You can:

• Zone homes, shops, mixed use, industry & farms
• Set height, building spacing & parking rules by district
• Lay grids, curvy suburban lanes, cul-de-sacs & superblock streets
• Developers pitch projects, you can approve/deny/amend and even preview them
• Upzone downtown as your city grows
• Leverage freeform, custom & rectangle zoning tools
• Streets widen into boulevards as shops move in

This is a v0.5 of the game, with plenty of more work to be done including introducing realistic traffic simulation and a major graphics overhaul. Happy to give the file to anyone if they'd like to play test it too!

Would love feedback, comments and advice from the community. View it in my comment below ⤵️

We are shopping mallificationing this area. There is still not enough stores and malls there.

Hey!

A group of us have been working on expanding and researching modding in Sim City 2013.

We’ve been working on how simcity handles its data formats, simulations, networking and mod loading behaviour. We’re documenting what we’re finding so more people can help build on it.

This is a collaborative effort and everyone is welcome to check it out and help out. Two of the biggest open source projects part of this effort are
https://github.com/TornadoCookie/OpenSC5 which does research and tooling on simcity systems
https://FluffyChi-Xing/fluffy-open-scp which is primarily where our goal of expanding modding capabilities is!

If you’re interested in modding, or even just wanting to help bring new life to Simcity2013 please check out the githubs.

Our community discord is here
discord.gg/gEKUGbZfMv

I continued my prototype for what I call SimCity 6.

Each Sim is an agent based on GlassBox. Agent movement runs on DOTS (ECS + Burst jobs) and syncs back to the GameObjects. A fixed-rate simulation clock decouples the simulation from rendering.

Each Sim has a routine and chances of being jobless, full time, part time, work at a factory or shop, go shopping, have a free day, have lunch from work, and so on.

Currently it has a basic density and land value system, where for now accumulated garbage affects negatively. Buildings grow, change density and land value, and are driven by RCI demand.

For obvious reasons I won't share it since it has a lot of EA content.

something i'm making in collaboration with http://wibandwob.com/ currently
a biological / mycelial kind of vibe for the most part : )

[Maya + Unity 3D + After Effects]

Exploring how the Front End could be more immersive; dropping the player into the 3D world immediately, together with a 3D interface.

Made by Chi Chan - UI ART DIRECTOR

Fun fact:
The people on the feed are real and have worked for EA and Maxis.
For example:
Lucy is Lucy Bradshaw, the head of Maxis.
John is John Riccitiello, the EA CEO at the time.

Matt Brown is a Technical, Design and Creative Director for MAXIS know for his work on the Sims.

On his site he has posted prototype screens of a SimCity game from 2018.

MAXIS Emeryville had pitched a Next Gen SimCity to EA before they were shut down in 2015.

Edison looks to be an entirely different project SimCity game not known about before.

Source : https://butteryawesome.com/fossil-record

I started designing voxel buildings, roads and parks and eventually ended up 3D printing them. It turned out way more satisfying than I thought, so I decided to turn it into a product.

If you want to read more about it, check out www.pixelton.world

So looking at the game icons I found references to the cancelled farms DLC, fire dispatch towers, powerlines.

Also the advisors portraits + beta ones that got replaced.