New SimCity 4 Mod Gives It a Whole New Look 21 Years Later

A recently debuted SimCity 4 mod adds a fully functional 3D camera to the game, thus giving it a whole new look. This add-on is yet another example illustrating how SimCity 4 continues to attract both player and modder interest more than 21 years following its launch.

Originally released in January 2003, the fourth mainline entry in the SimCity franchise is still touted as one of the best city-builder games ever made. Public data available via the Steam API reveals that hundreds of players continue to enjoy it on a daily basis as of early April 2024. SimCity 4 has also long boasted a healthy modding community, which keeps churning out all kinds of add-ons quite regularly.

The latest example of its efforts arrives in the form of the 3D Camera DLL mod by Simtropolis user Memo. Much like its name suggests, this modification allows players to make much more granular changes to the game's camera angles. Back in the early 2000s, Maxis opted against using a free-moving three-dimensional camera in favor of fixed trimetric orthographic projection allowing only a few angles for performance reasons. But with modern PCs being fully capable of handling more flexible solutions, Memo put together a DLL plugin that helps unlock the full potential of the SimCity 4 3D engine.

The add-on has been making the rounds on social media since early April, garnering quite a bit of praise from the fandom. And while hundreds of players have already downloaded it over the past week, this custom-made 3D camera plugin still had to overcome some initial skepticism. Specifically, Memo dropped the mod on April 1, which immediately led some SimCity 4 fans to wonder if the add-on wasn't an April Fools' joke, judging from the early reactions to this release posted on Reddit and Simtropolis.

Installing the mod itself is as simple as downloading its 46kB DLL file and moving it to the game's mod folder, which defaults to C:\Users\[$USERNAME]\Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins on Windows (the add-on also supports