SimCity 2000

SimCity 2000 is the second of Maxis’ well received city builders and is my favourite in the series, in addition to being one of my favourite games of all time. I’m not sure exactly why, but it’s the best blend of building and management and the art.

I found that SimCity 4 was all about micromanagement at a scale that wasn’t fun. The game was too hard, at least without mods to fix some of the more serious issues. SimCity 2000’s art style is very well done 8-bit graphics which I knew weren’t supposed to be hyper-realistic and never looked janky, unlike some of the later games. Maybe there’s also some nostalgia too.

Despite being released around a quarter-century ago as of this writing, I still play the game occasionally. I play the Windows 95 version, which is the definitive version. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run on modern versions of Windows without a patch to the executable, so the inferior DOS version is the only one commercially available presently.

Even when I was a child, playing the game, I’d often get to the (admittedly large for the time) limits of the 128×128 tile map and wish my city could somehow continue past it, but actually doing so was beyond my abilities then.

I’d built one city out of 25 individual tiles over several years during high-school and early University, painstakingly reconciling the edges as I went. It was slow going, and I eventually got tired of it as it was getting to be more and more work as it grew.

Thomnar 5x5 — A city I called Thomnar, which doesn’t mean anything, that I built using 5×5 city tiles.

And then in 2014, I was finishing up my last semester of University and working, and I felt the draw to the game again. I still really liked that large, multi-tile city and wanted to work on it more, but reconciling the edges was annoying. Except this time, I had the tools and technical ability to start reverse engineering the game and working on a re-implementation.

My initial goal was simple: figure out the city binary file format and write something to automatically reconcile the edges.

As I figured out more and more of the format, my focus shifted from writing a tool to reconcile edges to a complete re-implementation of the game. This also involved figuring out the complete sprite file spec, as well as working on the text data files.

floating cloud city — Having the (nearly) complete city file spec also means that I can make cities that are impossible to make in the game, such as this city that is floating in the clouds.

I have gotten most of the .sc2 file spec figured out, all of the game sprite file spec as well as the .mif sprite spec and some of the text file specs done, which are kept up-to-date on my GitHub.

I also have written a Python library and related tools to open, edit and save out the modified .sc2 file, available under my reverse engineering project on GitHub: OpenCity2k.