I'm not sure it indicates actual multiplayer capabilities, or just the intention. It just looks like someone dropped an IRC client library into the repo at some point.
Totally speculation of course, but maybe even just a dev tool in the repo that got sent around to different devs/studios so that they could communicate. Slack being IRC for work wasn't a new concept after all.
"The server does not automatically pause when all players are logged out."
So you were supposed to like log in for 30 min per day and play a little and then wait for tomorrow with the game server running? Seems like a Minecrafty way of playing. It would probably be fun for some IT-department to have an instance but it feels very niche.
I remember reading articles on Happy Puppy around 1998 or 1999 that talked about the “promised land” with screenshots of 3D cities. These are still around if you look around
I am hopeful that someone on here that could share some lore about the development of that 3D version.
Sadly I don't know of an equivalent for SimCity 3000.
As for mods, really the move it and traffic manager president edition is basically a minimum to not be frustrated.
I was tempted once to grab them all during a sale, it would have been $40 down from like $160 or something, but I also don't want to get sucked into a game like that. Games like civ and simcity eat too much time i've been down those rabbit holes before. Even as it is I spent literally two days straight doing nothing but playing this game when I started that map.
With the early game it wasn't so bad, like one or two districts, but as the city grew, it became too much, hence the residential surrounding industrial stuff.
Most of the dystopian stuff came from my frustration with limitations in the game. The massive amounts of roads and bridges came from the traffic congestion problems and my lack of patience in rebuilding roads or designing transit lines, though i do have 3 massive metro lines that crisscross the city.
The interesting thing to me was the disparity in my city and the dystopianness came from my negligence and lack of patience or caring. The ghettos and ramshackle neighbourhoods built themselves around the zones i built out of just the hell of it much of the time. A lot of it came from stuff the game just generated. Zooming into the close up view in some areas was kinda heart breaking.
It mostly showed me how intentional negligence leads to some of the most nightmarish outcomes and that the games modelling of neighbourhoods based on zoning and surroundings is scarily accurate.
SimCity 4 felt an incomplete and shallow game at start, but I've come to enjoy it greatly with the rush hour expansion of the deluxe edition, which made the city dynamic enough to feel compelling to work with.
back then it was hard to find in depth technical commentary of the game internals, so I don't know how much my feeling match reality
Well, with the Steam version anyway. It's the only version that has mods and access to the Steam Workshop with all the community created assets.
For example Sunset Harbor added above ground metro's but the modding community provided a solution years before.
I sure hope they come out with a follow on version that can scale more than the current version but even as it is I love Cities:Skylines!
I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt deep and the isometric view didn't make me sad about not doing angled zones.
If Skylines could make roads free of the square course why not the buildings that seem to have to be orthogonal to the tangent of the road.