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At the max zoomed in setting, I only occasionally hear a sound, otherwise it is very quiet in a large city. if I zoom one time out, I will now hear constant wind but the other sounds still only play sporadically.

Was the ambient sound always this quiet in SimCity 3000 or is something wrong here? Turn the music off and test this for yourself.
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MikeSol: At the max zoomed in setting, I only occasionally hear a sound, otherwise it is very quiet in a large city. if I zoom one time out, I will now hear constant wind but the other sounds still only play sporadically.

Was the ambient sound always this quiet in SimCity 3000 or is something wrong here? Turn the music off and test this for yourself.
I don't have it loaded right now. But the game might have a Sound Control that allows you to increase its level. Not sure to be honest.
It is not about volume. There just is very little in the way of ambient sound. Either it was always this way, or sounds are missing.
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MikeSol: It is not about volume. There just is very little in the way of ambient sound. Either it was always this way, or sounds are missing.
Yes. I have read on sites that the some of the original files in the sound folder were not playing for street noise. Never followed through to see if some tried to fix it. It included the GOG Copy.

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https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/70550-simcity-3000-unlimited-no-ambience/
Post edited January 10, 2021 by macAilpin
Thanks for the link. There is definitely something wrong here. I can't believe no one has ever noticed this. The cities are way too quiet.
The GOG version of this game is definitely broken in regards to ambient sound. I just downloaded the regular edition of the game off of an abandonware site and the ambient sound works fine.

Again, I can not believe that no one here ever noticed this. Don't believe me? Fine. Download the game at this site. Add a .zip extension to the downloaded file and extract and run it. Compare the ambient sound between the two versions. TURN OFF THE MUSIC!!!! --->

https://abandonwaregames.net/game/simcity-3000
This issue with the ambient noise not working correctly seems to happen in all versions of Unlimited, not just GOG's version. I torrented one where you had to mount an ISO and even that one did not work properly. Only the regular vanilla edition of SimCity 3000 seems to work properly wit the ambient sound.

I tried this on two different machines so I don't think this is just happening to me.
Ok, after some troubleshooting, I got the ambient sound to work most of the time. Sometimes I have to load a city a couple of times to get the ambient sound to initialize but I can live with that.

If you want to see if your ambient sound is working properly, zoom in to the closest zoom of your city, then zoom out two levels. If you hear anything, you are fine. If you hear nothing at all, then some ambient sound is NOT working.

Another way to test is zoom in all the way (closest zoom) to your city. If you ever hear long stretches of silence, some ambient sound is not working.

I suggest turning off the music when testing this.