. . . have seen me get sucked into the time trap that is SimCity4 and the Rush Hour expansion pack. I don’t think you’ve lived until you’re trying to persuade 200,000 sims to use your transit system ;) Ok, sue me – my city’s pretty small, but trust me on this – it’s hard to get your city to that size if you concentrate on a city at a time.
I think a good portion of the game is learning to maximize your use of the “Region” view. Another thing I’ve noticed is that I have much less scope to perform the massive reconstructions that used to be routine in SC3K. Didn’t like something? Well oops – bulldoze half the city and redo it the way you want. No longer… It’s also a lot more problematic than you imagine trying to put in a mass transit system halfway into the game. I’ve got a hodepodge of ELs, surface rail, buses and subways. It looks like it was hacked together (and of course it was – I put in whatever I had money for and just enough to keep my population steady/rising)
The sad part is, in some places my trains are packed to 150% capacity and traffic’s so bad that that’s still the fastest way to travel around. At any rate, if you’re buying SC4, you _must_ buy Rush Hour. Why? Cause it actually fixes quite a few bugs (yes bugs) in the mass transit model in SC4. Now sims actually use the _quickest_ route as opposed to the most direct one. Imagine that…
How many people are actually _in_ when UPS delivers? It’s an honest question – I want to know how many people are actually home during the hours of 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM to sign for the UPS guy. I’m pretty sure a good majority of people are at work. So why do they deliver during that timeframe? I guess cause businesses are open during thta time… ;)
Speaking of which, I’ve been using Python at work and I’ve rediscovered how much I love it. I mean it. Python is absolutely one of the easiest and most pleasant languages to work with. I would actually go as far to call it the free software/open source answer to basic and its derivatives. Now all it needs is to be paired up with a great gui toolkit (PyGTK anyone?), a great IDE and a good RAD tool and we’d be looking at a potent combination. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything like that on the horizon. I think this might be successful. Wouldn’t a good amount of people be interested in that sort of combination?
Been taking a look at Parrot in my spare time. From the webpage and mailing list, it seems pretty dead, but it looks like development’s still going. They released a new version last month… Looks pretty interesting. I’m rooting from the sidelines to see a powerful implementation soon. After all, its gonna be the VM for Perl 6.
Oh yeah, snuck a look at the new mozilla webpage. I like how it looks! Very professional and a huge improvement over the old one. If you have any comments (constructive criticism only please!) drop em a line.