Simcity 5 Planning Mode Camera


A view from the planning camera with the regular view superimposed overtop. You'll notice a slight lens bevel effect as you look at the corners of the "regular" view.

So, there's an option in the "game settings" menu for the "planning mode camera". The purpose of this option is to allow you to pull the camera back away from your city to give you a better, wider view so you can plan better.

At first, I couldn't really make it work, but somewhere during the course of launch week they fixed it. Now, when you click on the planning mode option, you can see a significant change in the altitude of the camera.

Planning Camera and Street Level

When you have the planning camera active, it is very difficult to get down to the same eye-level as you can with a regular camera. This is most notable when you try to zoom down to see what your Sims are doing on the street. With planning camera turned on, you have to fight to get the camera to get down there and even then, you can't get as low as you can regularly.

The planning camera is meant to give you a wide-angle view for planning. If you find yourself unable to really zoom in to your city, double check your options and make sure you have "planning camera" unchecked.


This article was originally in reference to a bug in which the planning camera did not operate properly. This bug has since been fixed. Thank you/I'm sorry to all the people I tricked into coming here with my original post. It was worth it.

4 comments:

  1. Big time. This little article raked in almost 200 people. Not bad if I do say so myself.

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  2. I've only just discovered this fantastic camera mode and it seems they've fixed any of the old issues it had. You can now go from seeing your entire city down to peeping through your sims' windows with the flick of the mouse wheel. It makes me wonder why this box isn't checked as default on fresh installs.

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    Replies
    1. how exactly do you do it? i still cant get it!

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