The year is 1994.you are playing Simcity 2000 You’re thinking, man, wouldn’t it be great if I could somehow get into the game and walk these streets?
The year is 1997.you are playing simulated helicopter, it says on the box that you can explore the streets of the city you create, but it sucks and looks bad. You’ve been dreaming of a future that seemed out of reach.
This year is 2022, at last, you can do it.you can take Simcity 2000 Except you’ve been dragging your way for almost 30 years, turn it into a modern day video game, and walk down the street as if you were born there and are on your way to work. The only catch is that it’s hard to do.and you’re really playing my worldno sim city.
Software developer Jernej Gosar from Slovenia is the person to thank for this mod, which reads Simcity 2000 Save the file and recreate it as best you can my world“The main reason I decided to create this project was because I thought it would be really cool,” he told me. “Simcity 2000 It’s been one of my favorite games since I was a kid, and one day I thought it would be super cool to take to the streets and explore them. “
In 2014, having gained enough coding experience through his education and various IT jobs, he set out to work on this childhood dream.also like my worldhe saw some mods and people have figured out how to import Simcity 2000 topographic map entry my worldbut not the buildings and the city itself.
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“So I decided to make it myself,” he said. “If I remember correctly, the core idea was implemented within a few weeks. I was really lucky Someone wrote a detailed specification of the SimCity 2000 file format, otherwise the project will not start at all. “
“Probably the biggest challenge was mining the bytes of both file formats and ultimately creating something that could actually be opened in Minecraft,” he said.The next big hurdle is the time it takes rebuild Building, as even the simplest building can take hours, but as an added bonus, since this is a first-person adventure, it’s Gosar’s job to generate the interior (and sometimes even basic furniture) to match the exterior of the building.
“I haven’t finished all the buildings yet, and it will be a huge effort to finish the most complex buildings like Arcologies,” he said. “Typically the smallest builds can be done in just a few hours, including some interior furniture that suits the type of building. The largest can take a few days. By far the most complex builds I’ve done are large corporate buildings, It’s a huge effort.
While the actual working of the mod is very complex — Gosar says “it’s simply not usable for non-software developers right now” — when you break it down, its principles are actually pretty simple.it essentially takes Simcity 2000 Map and match each pixel to my world clogged. This helps mods communicate between the two games, and also helps keep everything scaled.
That’s not to say the transition process is always smooth.In addition to the aforementioned complexity issues, Gosar says “in some cases, I’ve come across 2D building structures that can’t actually be recreated in 3D,” one example being some buildings that are actually Draws like a Penrose ladder instead of a functional 3D space.
“Another question is my world The height is limited to 256 blocks, so if there are a lot of hills in the city, the tallest parts may be chopped off,” he added. “Otherwise the accuracy should be close to 100 percent, and rendering my world Worlds using tools that generate isometric representations should display something very close to the original Simcity 2000“
Here is an example.The picture below is a Simcity 2000 Metropolis built by Gosar:
This is the same city, which translates to my world And perfectly walkable. Note how it manages to grab individual small trees and shrubs from in front of some buildings:
While this video highlights some of the basic interiors the mod generates for some of the game’s buildings:
Going forward, Gosar said he hopes to “make the project more useful” by lowering the barriers to entry for people to use and understand it, preferably in the form of an online tool for users to upload Simcity 2000 saved he gave my world world in return.
But for now, given his busy day job, he “doesn’t have much time to deal with it, but I guess the recent attention the project has received is a good impetus to move it forward”. If you have the courage and want to try it yourself, You can find this project here.
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