What exactly is SC4?

[SimGirl20]

Hey All,

I have been playing Sim City 4 Deluxe for about 3 days now and I literally have no idea what the purpose is of the game, and I seriously cannot be bothered to read an inch and a half thick booklet all I want to do is to make a simple neighborhood like I have seen others mention they used SC4 for so would anyone give me a run-down of what the purpose of the game is for? I mean I am just not amused in the slightest at making a city for the Sims 1 I thought that the game was to make a city like setting with police stations, hospitals, schools and the like and then export the new 'neighborhood' into the Sims 2 game but I dont know how to do that, I'm pretty angry because I spent 30$ for it at wal-mart the other day and the stupid people at customer service won't take the damn thing back because its copy write protected and now the game is just sitting there staring at me... lol thanks for any help

[Roxy2004]

Sim City 4 is a simulation game.  The purpose of the game is to build a successful city and watch it grow.  I love the micromanagement of the Sim City games.  And the ep Rush hour made it so you could drive the streets of your city.  One of the side benefits from the game was that new terrains/hoods could be made for the Sims 2 game.

I found this tutorial, have no idea if it is any good. http://thesims2.ea.com/help/detail.php?help_id=91  and another tutorial http://compsimgames.about.com/cs/thesims2/qt/simcityterrian.htm

[SimGirl20]

Thank you very much Roxy2004 those tutorials should be very helpful so is the game supposed to be Sims 1 based or no? I tried making a successfull city but failed miserably so I think I'll just take my chances with those two tuts and see how everything goes, also so there is no way you can make buildings with SC4 and export them to Sims 2? I will probably just have to manually build my hood buildings such as hospitals, schools, and stuff like that right?

[saowens]

SC4 is just used to make the neighborhood templates. Land mass, water and road layout. The decorations and buildings you add from the Sims2 game itself.

[fornax]

Simgirl20, if you're still reading this thread.  As explained above, Sim City 4 (SC4) is a City simulation game, it is neither The Sims 1 based or any other of the Sims games, it's Sim City in its 4th reincarnation.  Sim City (originating in 1988) is what actually gave way for the creation of The Sims, not the other way around.  The neighborhoods in The Sims 2 were based on small SC4 cities (there are 3 sizes), and only the basic layout, topography (including some flora), streets, and one bridge in particular could be imported into The Sims 2 via TS2's built-in ".SC4" data file interpreter.  No buildings could be transferred into TS2 through the .SC4 file generated by Sim City 4, so forget about creating a neighborhood with all those.  The saddest part is that once accepted and modified by TS2, you can't bring it back to Sim City 4 for further modification, like adding streets (Sim City 4 cannot read TS2 .package format).  You would have to continue to work with the initially created .SC4 file in order to make further mods to a TS2 neighborhood using Sim City 4, which TS2 will accept again only if you create another new neighborhood, sims and all.  There's a Neighborhood Modder utility by (Mootilda) which makes this process of adding streets a lot less painful, but like I said, once a neighborhood has had lots placed or moved around its topography will differ from the .SC4 file used to create it, and considerable editing will be required for TS2 to accept the re-modded .SC4 file.  In any case, the Neighborhood Modder utility forces TS2 to re-accept a modded .SC4 file as a replacement map for an existing neighborhood, so it's very useful if you give it time.  Another thing worth mentioning is that The Sims 2 imports a mirror image of the original .SC4 file, so in your mind it won't be easy relating to where everything is supposed to be.  I hope this helps.