SimCity Ultimate

SimCity 4 offers plenty of options for the would-be city builder, and with its ability to handle a wide range of user-added content, just about any aspect of urbanity one can think of, or even rural development or wilderness, can be rendered in the game. But still something feels amiss at times ...
For instance, most of the pieces needed to create a SimAmsterdam fairly reminiscent of the real city already exist and are freely available. An avid player, vanderaap, has painstakingly created in-game reproductions of dozens of Amsterdam's gabled canalside houses. Another player with great skill and patience has made a true-to-life reproduction of Amsterdam's fairytale-mansion-like Centraal Station. Bike paths and canal sets complete with embankments, bridges and locks can also be found.
Nevertheless, even with all the pieces, it is exceedingly difficult to actually create such a SimAmsterdam. The simulator, for all its complexity, is still far too coarse-grained and inflexible compared to the actual process of development in the real world.
Amsterdam's gabled houses, for instance, despite their varying appearances, are arranged in neat rows, with rounded corners where streets meet, as common sense would dictate. The simulator, however, throws them up in all sorts of configurations: set back from the road at wildly uneven distances, corners in the middle of a row of houses, and so on ... it was built with neither the concept of street corner buildings nor that of row houses.
Amsterdam's canals used to carry substantial traffic, both passenger and freight though mostly the latter, and the remaining ones still act, to a limited extent, as transport arteries. Its bike lanes today carry much more traffic than its roads in the inner city. Yet no matter how wide the coverage of your SimAmsterdam's network of bike paths or canals, the basic traffic patterns will not change---cars and freight trucks will still be king, and the roads will still be clogged. The simulator assumes the default mode of transportation for any trip more than a couple of tiles long is by car---and proceeds to make adjustments based on this fundamental assumption.
The simulator was probably built with American cities in mind. There buildings are placed on spacious lots, and except in a few places like San Francisco and New York there is little historically-formed, densely-packed genuine urban fabric. The prevalence of cars and trucks, also, is definitely a chip off the block of the most motorised nation on Earth.
So perhaps the simulator would do better in creating a replica of an American city---Los Angeles, say, or Chicago? Perhaps ... but still there will be imperfections and flaws. The buildings along a SimSan Fran's Market Street, for instance, will not be able to face the diagonal street, but will be set off at 45-degree angles, due to the limitations of the game's grid system. Many of the finer details of the urban texture, such as cascaded plazas wedged in the midst of skyscrapers or parks beneath viaducts and bridges, which involve innovative use of tightly- and often unusually-packed spaces, will be lost to the clumsiness and low resolution of the simulator.
How can we eliminate these flaws and make the game even more realistic? The most obvious way forward is to refine the rules of the simulator and increase the resolution of the grid system---perhaps even do away with the grid altogether and use some other way to specify location. We could even have individual automata to simulate each SimDenizen and element of the environment, such as the weather, wider economic outlook, etc., and let their interactions determine the city's development---this would be a more accurate model of the actual process of development in many areas than the rough and heavily state-centric model of SimCity now. But this can only ever be a holding measure---after much time and effort has been expended finalising the latest refinement, environmental challenges, human ingenuity and historical circumstances conspire to throw up something new, which the simulator has never seen before and thus cannot recreate. Youv'e taught it to recognise street corners? What about tightly-wedged plazas? Reservoirs and parks under highway ramps? Integrated bike lanes? Underground highway intersectiosn? Underpasses or bridges between buildings? The list is endless ... and the fundamental problem, which cannot quite be fixed, is that the simulator can only recreate things we have told it about---and it is not easy to tell it new things.
A far less exciting way of achieving visual realism is to simply take micromanagement to an extreme. Corner buildings keep turning up in the wrong places? Then build gabled houses whole blocks at a time---neat rows and properly-placed corners pre-ordained. Too many cars despite the bike lanes? Block the roads with artificially-placed roadblocks. No suitably-shaped plaza for this space? No worries, we can create a custom-tailored one ... the same goes for any other feature of the urban )or even non-urban) landscape. The price to pay for thus obtaining a visually-perfect replica is a loss in functional realism. It looks just like the real thing---but do its SimResidents live, work and play just like the real ones? Its development was micromanaged, its traffic systems heavily regulated, almost everything was built by the state and all other builders disallowed ...
So perhaps computer simulations are destined to be limited in some way. But what if you built an imaginary city in your mind instead? The human imagination can be infinitely malleable ... only it would seem difficult to hold in the mind's eye any complete image of the city, in all its glorious detail ... let alone render any such image out on paper.
That is, however, exactly what monsieur Gilles Tréhin has done in Urville---a city created entirely in his head. Urville has towering skyscrapers, imposing public buildings, wide-open public spaces, state-of-the-art public transportation systems ... and all of them come together in an altogether organic, natural way in Tréhin's amazingly detailed drawings.
Yet look closely at his drawings, and you can spot many familiar elements: this skyscraper vageuly resembles the Sears Tower, that the Bnmk of China Tower; the trains look like France's old TERs and TGVs; the churches have many elements of Gothic cathedrals across France ... there is nothing altogether novel or surprising in Urville---though perhaps that is because Urville dates from 1986 and it is now 2009. It is like a subtle hint that Urville ultimately still owes its existence to essentially mechanical instincts and abilities---as the ability to hold exceptional levels of visual detail in the mind may well be---rather than something essential to and inseparable from human consciousness. This is not to demean the still-incredible talents of autistic persons such as monsieur Tréhin or the "human camera" Stephen Wiltshire, only to say their talents are of a slightly different nature compared to, say, that of a composer, or even a pianist or painter.