SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
After more than a quarter-century, SimCity 2000 still receives plenty of interest from nostalgic gamers who like to relive their early gaming experiences. This is likely one of the reasons why developer Nicholas Ochoa decided to code a remake using the Electron framework.
The game, titled OpenSC2K, was released on GitHub earlier this year and received quite a bit of attention on sites such as Reddit and Hacker News.
While it is billed as an “open source” version, the remake did include original artwork, belonging to Electronic Arts. These images and sounds are definitely not free to use, something the developer is fully aware of now.
A few days ago Electronic Arts sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub asking the platform to remove the infringing repository from its site.
“Assets from the game SimCity 2000 are being infringed upon,” EA writes. The company points out that the game can be purchased legally through Origin where it’s still being sold for a few dollars.
While OpenSC2K is far from a full remake, Electronic Arts makes it clear that the SimCity 2000 assets are not for public use.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 31 2018, @01:07PM
It is an interesting project. Streets of SimCity (SoSC) loads any SC2K map, including the custom maps you could make with the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit (SCURK). SoSC's own assets looked like complete garbage to the point where even a non-artist could probably do a good job making the replacements. The game was also a bug-filled mess. Although not responsible for the decline of Maxis, SoSC was the last game Maxis made independently from EA. You would have trouble running it on any computer in the world, not just a modern one. The game did have a good soundtrack (presented randomly as a "radio"), snippets of which were used in later games like The Sims. For an open source remake, these tracks could easily be downloaded and dumped into a folder (like how The Elder Scrolls and other games handle music). You could also have the remake load from Internet radio sources.
Any remake of SoSC could deviate wildly from the original gameplay and it wouldn't matter because the game was so broken to begin with. There were maybe up to 20 enemy, cop, and neutral cars in a map. Most of them would be repeatedly "hopping" in place due to an AI bug. Campaign missions basically consisted of driving around from point to point on the map while picking up packages and fighting other cars. Races were just maps with checkpoints.
There were more than 3 kinds of cars [igcd.net] in the game. Only about 5 playable, with mostly Plymouth Fury enemies and the Oldsmobile Cutlass cop cars. Still, it's not the most difficult 3D modeling job ever.
Ledow wants SimCopter. That was a similar 3D engine to SoSC, but a bit older and with less game breaking bugs. It should be possible to implement both games in one project. Don't forget to include HIMBO mode [wikipedia.org]. It might be possible to load in both SimCity 2000 and SimCity 3000 maps. SimCity 3000 was originally going to be a 3D game with a "street mode", but those aspects were scrapped [lostmediawiki.com].
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/streets-of-simcity/ [hardcoregaming101.net]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]