About
The original SimCity, as Micropolis, was designed and implemented by Will Wright. A Unix version, Micropolis, was developed by Don Hopkins for DUX Software under license from Maxis around 1990, and was later released as free, open-source software under the GPL in 2008 as part of the One Laptop Per Child program. Divercity is an extension of MicropolisJ (the Java port of Micropolis/SimCity), developed during a three-week programming course in 2014 at Freie Universität Berlin by nine students. It's a desktop Java application (Java 7 or later) that can be run from a prebuilt jar file or built from source with Ant.
How it differs from the original
Divercity adds new buildings not in the original (schools, two tiers of university, a museum, an open-air culture area, a city hall, a big park, and wind/solar power plants), a research system tied to the universities, A*-pathfinding-based traffic simulation that affects zone growth and service efficiency, and gaussian-distributed pollution spread.
Getting started
Requires Java 7 or later. It can be run by double-clicking the included micropolisj.jar file, or built and run from source with git clone followed by ant and java -jar micropolisj.jar.
Media
Additional notes
- License
- Released under GPLv3 with an added clause (per GPL Section 7) stating no trademark or publicity rights are granted — modified versions can't use the SimCity trademark or claim affiliation with Electronic Arts.