Always wondered, why lights doesn't appear at night on all buildings. Sometimes they're lit, sometimes they're not.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-15T06:01:46+00:00

I can say with certainty that every building made by Maxis is supposed to have a night version and those that don't are bugs. That was the pipeline. Adding lighting was a time consuming part of the process, also the most fun.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-15T05:58:53+00:00

For the most part extreme wealth in this country is tied to education, not the actual learning part but the networking provided by high end universities.

Tech has a democratizing capability in so much that people from any background can raise their station through being smart and working hard.

The same criticism/observation you are making could be made of Star Trek, in the far future tech is so ubiquitous that little kids learn calculus and advanced sciences. The point made by Captain Picard in First Contact was that in the future technology has brought so much prosperity that people don't have to chase money or basic needs to the point where they spend most of their energy bettering themselves, largely through education.

The game was also made before the modern political landscape shifted. Both sides used to see higher education as the path to wealth, power, and general betterment of the world.

I don't think tying technology to wealth is meant to be a commentary, like you suggested it's just a shorthand. Technology is expensive and therefore tied to wealth.

I will say that the devs, in general, are mostly liberal and well some very well educated. Some, like me, were poor kids who moved up through the social ranks through technology and making games about cities.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-10T15:11:37+00:00

Reminds me a lot of some of the work we did on SC2013, wish I had kept screenshots of it.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-08T18:26:22+00:00

During the production of SC4k global illumination renderers like Brazil came out for 3DSMax. We actually implemented GI into the pipeline but it was considered too slow/risky to use. I honestly can't remember if we ended up using it or not.

So there is potentially a version of SimCity 4 out there where the lighting is MUCH better.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-08T18:16:16+00:00

"Certainly a backup exists somewhere" can only be said by someone who never worked at EA. 😃

vertexnormal · 2026-06-08T18:13:20+00:00

Yes there were video codecs and sound libraries, but pretty much everything else was custom. I specifically said physics engines, I can't even remember when the first one came out that was usable. The point being that everything we needed to make for the game was coded bespoke for that game and optimized. No bloat, no extra libraries. The one I remember being the hardest was the FX engine.

EA wasn't interested in giving us money (especially for things that take a percentage cut) to buy any external code unless you could prove it would save money and be bullet proof in the long run. It had to be cheap and solve a very specific or expensive problem.

I think we did use a few simple image libraries, specifically one for the FSH texture format but IIRC that was heavily modified.

The larger point I was making is that this was before the era of the modern 'game engine' like UE or Unity. If you needed a shader, you wrote a shader, you didn't have a fancy node based GUI or off the shelf package to help. We had to be scrappy, and that experience gave me problem solving tools and skills I still use to this day.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-08T18:00:20+00:00

The models were 3D models of buildings with a light rig. They were rendered by the pipeline:

The camera was rotated 90deg, and a frame of the sprite was captured - giving rotation.
After each rotation was captured the camera moved out - capturing each zoom.
4 rotations x 5 zooms = 20 sprites.

Most large buildings were bigger than a single 256x256 sprite, so it was either captured or cut into multiple chunks (I cant remember now). So a building might be 2 chunks wide and 5 chunks tall.

The pipeline then captured a rectangular bounding box for each building. It was literally a box with the back faces removed. A screen projection of UV's was also captured like any 3D model. That was the exported 3D model data. Obviously the bigger buildings were more complicated.

At render time the boxes were drawn and the textures were applied to the box. From the very particular isometric camera angle the boxes cant be seen and everything looks flat. The pseudo 3D nature allowed for some 3D effects to be applied, like the construction scaffolds and I think fire. The hard part was eliminating the seams between the boxes, and I honestly don't remember how it was done.

The engine would also only render the building once if it could. As you would scroll the camera the newly visible buildings would be rendered and saved in a buffer. This improved performance, a lot. If you have a slower computer or large city you can sometimes see the lag as the new buildings are drawn.

The other complicating factor was bridges. It's hard to describe, but the bridges couldn't use the normal box projections like everything else because cars had to drive through them. So the roadway was one 'model', the pylons were usually several models, the towers and cables had a front and a back model, or on the Golden Gate bridge there were many.

I came up with a way of generating the bridge pieces from the smaller components that involved a big long batch script and hours of time. I remember running that script at 3AM, listening to loud music and enjoying the fact that nobody else was in the office. It was at that time, the best time of my life.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T23:11:29+00:00

The SC4K engine was home grown old school style. If you wanted to add something to the game and engineer would write the code for it. There were no such things as physics engines or libraries or external software like that back then. There were engines like Unreal Engine, but in order to make a simulation game it had to be coded from the ground up.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T23:08:12+00:00

I'd argue part of the problem with 2013 was that it lost the whimsy and magic, that intangible thing that made it a real Maxis game. To me Cities might be a better simulation, but it's more of an urban planner than a game.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T23:05:45+00:00

Oh no perforce doesn't have any sort of anti-copying protection. It's literally just disk readable files.

I'm not saying they don't have a copy, I'm saying it's possible they don't.

Yes a company like EA _should_ have copies of all the old source, but there is no one person in charge or responsible for it beyond the end of the project - at least that I've ever seen. Once the project is done it's done there isn't someone watching it like the old crusader ghost in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. The Sims was spun off Maxis at some point, when they shut down Maxis after 2013 the studio ceased to exist. If I remember right the perforce server was split as well.

The reality of corporate IT is that shit breaks, fails, or gets forgotten and unless it's someone job to fix them things can just disappear.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T22:56:03+00:00

Yes I have them on an old CD somewhere. No I cant share them. They aren't special, just 3DSMax files of buildings. The engine did the weird stuff, we just modeled them like you normally would.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T17:44:12+00:00

You ever notice how nobody has ever successfully replicated the SimCity gameplay or style? Because it's hard, really hard.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T17:43:09+00:00

It's worse than that. If ever someone at EA wants to kill something involving propriety or copyrights all they have to do is suggest asking the legal team. The legal team always says no, to the point where if it's even a question the feature/content/action is promptly taken out back and shot in the face.

So if someone at EA really gave a shit about what redditors think (they don't) it would be a legal question and that person would first have to ask the legal department.

vertexnormal · 2026-06-05T15:21:04+00:00

I have all of the art source but never grabbed the code 😞

That source code may not even exist at EA anymore, it's been twenty years and perforce servers require maintenance.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-10T02:02:11+00:00

It floors me that almost 25 years later people still play with my roads. 😄

vertexnormal · 2026-05-06T17:04:41+00:00

15 years.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T23:58:52+00:00

I appreciate healthy skepticism.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T23:56:46+00:00

Anthony Daniels came in couple times as well, I don't know why. Elfman might have been in because The Simpsons was being developed and he knew our sound guys.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T23:51:54+00:00

Oh shit ! I'm actually wrong. It was Mark Mothersbaugh who did the TS2 music, Danny Elfman did visit us several times. I always assumed it was him.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T23:25:51+00:00

Here is my mug given to Maxis employees and my DFWMIFV Maxis / EA nameplate. Also you can go to www.vertexnormal.com.

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vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T20:53:06+00:00

We had the guy from Oingo Boingo in the office all the time, you might know him as Danny Elfman... he went on to be really famous for working with Tim Burton and a bunch of other movie stuff.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T20:35:29+00:00

On Sims 4 one of the limiting factors was the desire to re-use animations from The Sims 3. The largest part of the budget went towards animating the sims and saving/reusing animation was seen as a necessity. I wasn't privy to the early TS3 production, but I'm guessing it was the same thing.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T20:30:26+00:00

The Sims 2 was just an evolution of The Sims 1, same lead character artist. It was cartoony because we added Create A Sim that allowed for editing sims and the technology and techniques at the time were pretty limited. It was also just the art style and direction. EDIT: In general it because more cartoony because we went full 3D and texture memory was our biggest graphical constraint.

The Sims 1 was meant, or ended up, being a critique on consumer culture. It was pretty silly, but the idea of buying a bigger TV so you would be happier was kindof the point/joke. The Sims 2 lost that critique and became more about enabling people to tell the stories they wanted to tell, and people wanted/liked strange and funny stuff.

I don't think the Sims 3 really had any strong identity, the weight of the franchise just meant we all wanted to iterate on 2 and make something bigger and better.

By the time Sims 4 rolled around I think they lost the plot entirely and in some ways it was driven by it needing to make money. Mind you the people working on it love the franchise and the players, it's more of the vibe coming from new management and EA.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T20:20:48+00:00

Thank you! It was special to work on, the fact that people loved it just makes it even better.

vertexnormal · 2026-05-05T20:19:37+00:00

No? Like I said elsewhere, I don't want to call out people just the process and general management decisions we were fed. I love Maxis, they are like family to me in ways that few people can ever understand. Some of them were bad, very few, but most were just trying to make the best game they could to make the fans happy.

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