The lost airports of SimCity - SC3000.COM

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The lost airports of SimCity #0910

Updated: 3/4/02

OS/platforms(s): All

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Contributor/author(s): Simpleton

This is probably the first SimCity archaeological article in Knowledge Neighborhood. Come with me while we look for a part of the program which never made it out of the Maxis workshops, but of which the wreckage and traces are still there in the published program. We will take a look at what was meant to be, and also what you can still have!

First hints. The auto-generated airports in SimCity are horrible looking affairs. The scale is out of whack and they are tiny little things. I fly for a living and naturally wanted something which looked like an airfield if I were to build decent looking complete cities.

Obviously the program was using supplied dedicated 'Airport Tiles' but usually in an ugly, unworkable jumble � could I build my own airfield from the parts? So I learnt about the 'Building Plop' cheat and started reading the Building List the cheat opens.

I found 20 dedicated 'Airport Tiles' in the list (some of which the program never uses). That is a lot of tiles for just one service. (I am giving you the full list as an annex to this article). There were beautifully crafted Air Gates, a range of support buildings, two types of Terminal, two types of runway, two types of Hangar, runway connection and crossing tiles. Obviously something very impressive had been once intended � but is not there now.

Sensing a trail. I decided to give the program a fair go and zoned a large cross area, hooked it up to power and water, then watched. I was hoping to entice the program to give me a much larger airport, hopefully with two runways and preferably with cross runways. The image below shows what was auto-generated!

The runway was only 10 tiles long with that huge (out of scale) control tower standing on one end, a second control tower (for some obscure purpose) and a large area filled with a mess of Airport component tiles serving no functional purpose.

Certainly the Airport worked. Aircraft came and went, landing, taxiing in to the Terminals, stopping then taxiing out and taking off. Even a little pause at the runway to get takeoff permission. I still felt there was something more which should be there, but was not � so I built my own.

Buildings & traces of activity emerge. The next image shows a small to medium sized airport serving Domestic airlines and charter, such as would be a support (or secondary) airport for a large city.

Apart from a couple of parks, fountains, the roads and some open parking tiles � everything else is dedicated Airport tiles. The grass is 'Airport Grass'; the apron and taxiways are 'Tarmac'; the apron is large enough for the Air Gates to be positioned properly, coming from the Terminal Connectors which themselves back on to the Terminal buildings. The multi story car parks are 'Airport Parking Garage'.

On the other side of the airfield is a maintenance facility and there is also a main hangar area somewhat separated from the Terminal area. The Control Tower stands in its usual splendid isolation. The program does not have a Windsock tile.

Another way of looking at the above is that the program could build this itself, the parts are there for it to do so. There is a very good reason why it does not and I will come to that later in this story.

Prior zoning and then 'plopping' does not work � the Query Tool comes back 'Unzoned' even if you have plopped an Airport tile on an Airport Zone. But � I immediately got aircraft animation activity and I got a lot of it. The program identified two 10 tile runways in the long parallel runways I had built, and started using them � at the same time. However aircraft never went near the Terminals. They just followed the normal 10 tile animation sequence as if the program had auto-generated the usual SimCity airport. This meant they turned out onto the grass, got in each other's way and the whole thing looked total chaos (although I was to find it could look a lot worse!).

Anyway � that was a start, now...