Judging from the heavy bezier camera movement and zooming, and the plasma noise water bump i'd think it's prerendered in Lightwave 5.0.

The cover for the related game Streets of SimCity supports this theory as well since Lightwave had support for rendering anamorphic streaks in its elaborate lens flare system (which even outclasses Photoshop and 3D Studio MAX in that area 😀).

To think that LightWave started as a Commodore Amiga software package.

Why does the cover of Streets of SimCity make me think of Interstate '76?

It's a hastily-made rival game (and IT SHOWS!!!!). It totally wanted to be part of that short-lived musclecar auto combat genre by hitting SimCopter a few times to be such a thing, relying on the LoadYourSC2Files feature to make up for the losses.

Thanks for the info 😀 I was thinking that they probably used something like LightWave, but I still wonder what internal tool(s) they used to load the SimCity 2000 SC2 city file into it.

Something that I'm sure was never released, and probably long-since lost. 'Twould be extremely cool to get a hold of that utility 😀

Hehe, I was just twiddling around with Streets of SimCity as well... MAN, that game BLEW CHUNKS 🤣! Although, it did have considerably better looking graphics than SimCopter.

I really wish SimCopter wouldn't bug-out on fast machines. Been a long time since I played it last 'cause there's a long-standing bug in the game where the UFO can go haywire and crash the game, and it's entirely related to how much speed the game's getting for processing: The faster your computer, the sooner this bug happens. :P

As for the software used to convert SC2K cities into a format that could be loaded into a 3D rendering package, I imagine that's been lost to time by now, but I would think a converter wouldn't be extremely hard to write oneself if you knew the SC2K city file format. Given how big the cities get though and how slow those earlier computers were for 3D rendering I imagine it must've taken quite awhile to render all those cutscenes. :B

All you need is a CPU slowdown utility such as Microsoft's CPU Grabber, or CPU Killer.

I myself use Microsoft's CPU Grabber ( http://www.mech2.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=55 / http://www.mech2.org/downloads/utils/cpugrab.exe), although for a multiple core CPU you'll need to run several instances of the utility and assign them to each core.

For my single-core Intel P4's (1.6GHz and 2.666GHz), CPU Grabber works GREAT... been recently having a BLAST playing SimCopter again! 😀 I don't remember what I set the utility for the 2.666GHz, but for the 1.6GHz a slowdown factor of 63% works like a CHARM! Only vary rarely does the game crash 😀

I also have compatibility mode set for Windows 95, 256 colors, 640x480, "Disable visual themes", and "Turn off advanced text services for this program".

Lastly, if you have the last CD version, it ships with version 1.0.1.4 of SimCopter... prone to a game-breaking bug with the riot missions (there are NO icons shown in your cockpit's city overview map pointing to the actual riot missions!). BUT... version 1.0.1.3 of the executable does NOT suffer from this problem 😀

The only disadvantage of running version 1.0.1.3 is that version 1.0.1.4 supports A3D 4-channel positional surround sound.

@All, P.S. My SC2K/SimCopter crapola ->

http://jasonwilliams400com.startlogic.com/sno … 00/sc2stuff.htm / http://jasonwilliams400com.startlogic.com/sno … s/simcity_2000/ 😀

P.P.S. It seems that version 1.0.1.3 of SimCopter's executable (SimCopter.exe) is fairly hard to find. You can manually extract the file from the last SimCopter update (they call it "version 1.02" for some strange reason), but that's a PITA. So's... attached here is the version 1.0.1.3 executabe for anyone that might want it 😀

P.P.S. For anyone interested:

Attached is my own MIDI rendition from years ago of SimCopter's "Tkno3Mx2" techno music 😀