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[Rose]

They say it's been tried 6 times and never has succeeded. They say that it is too ambitious, too broad in scope for people to manage in their free time.

I say bollocks to that.

Basically, this is a planning and brainstorming thread for making a city-builder game, and what would need to be in it for it to be fun to play.

What we are not looking for: a game that can be described as "DF 1.0" or anything similar. This needs to be something that can be realistically made.

I'll start.

Transport: I like transport and everything involved. People need to get from place to place, and the game needs to handle that in depth. transport routes should be splines, and should set, for example, what mode of transport it supports, how fast it can go, and what volume. (though these two may be related). A street may handle pedestrian or road traffic (road is a broad category that actually includes both car, bus, and whatever else)

People: The lifeblood of the city. How do we engage them? Do we do the three zones that simcity uses? Or do we use something else?

Money: simcity has a very simple taxation system. Do we adopt that? How do real world taxes work anyway?

Discuss.

[Djohaal]

Just some thoughts to toss in.

I'm more in favor of keeping the grid, however subdividing it for more control. After a lifetime playing simcity and simcity-alikes I came to the perception that removing the discrete space subdivision where cities are set actually takes away from gameplay. Just think about how having the space subdivided in discrete elements in DF and minecraft actually is a big part of their gameplay. The same can be said for simcity. That doesn't impede us of making the grid more flexibile however.

For the rendering, I'm divided between adopting a full 3d approach or keeping simcity's pseudo-3d pre-rendered billboards, which allow very stunning buildings to be made...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Simcity 4's custom buildings are one of the rare occasions where the community-made art assets are prettier than the stock ones. I beleive not in small part because the workflow is so simple and so much can be done within 3dstudio itself.

[Rose]

The grid has it's advantages and disadvantages. Myself, I found myself continually struggling against it when I was laying out my roads, particularly with trying to shift around those wide avenues. Also, if the game is designed not to use the grid, there's no reason that grid snapping can't be optionally turned on.


As for true 3d vs billboards, that is a hard question indeed. I use a lot of modded stuff when playing SC4 myself, and it is very beautiful, I agree.

But with fully 3d buildings, you're much more flexible with things like camera angles. You can't get a street level view with billboards, for example.

[Jopax]

Well art assests can always come at a later date. We can do with simple blocky placeholders if we're going 3D.

Also the question of size arises, how big do we want the cities to go? Are they going to be the only viable outcome of long term play or should we enable small towns that are full of atmosphere and character?

I agree on the road bit, grids are pretty good and they've been proven to work but they hamper creative layouts of the city. So some degree of bendyness would be nice.

Also to consider, some sort of angle tool that would allow placing a road, then a second one originating from it, with the angle decided by the player, to allow symmetrical radial layouts and the like.

I have a bunch of ideas for this, just need to refine them a bit

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Something that I would find interesting would be greater detail in the city-to-city interactions, such as rather than population appearing out of nowhere, it would migrate from city-to-city via connections.

Another thing I have thought of would be more governmental relations.  Where-in a state/province/etc or national government impose regulations upon your cities that would hinder growth in some sectors and you would need to plan around them.

[Sergius]

Your taxes are going to have to be oversimplified anyway, unless you want the programmers and players to spend 3 years becoming an accountant.

[MonkeyHead]

Will there be some eleent of zoning, and if so how specific or restrictive will (or should) the zones be?

[Rose]

Zoning I think should definitely be in, though in what capacity is the question. Plopping down all the houses manually would be way too tedious. Far nicer just so say "This is where people will live"

[Jopax]

And more realistic too I think, designating an area and saying this is safe for living, you will get utilities and other services if you live in this area is a good way and works. We could have bigger buildings and residential high rises by subsidising construction costs and encouraging invetstors to contsruct them.

So designating an area, having some uilities like water and power connect to it, say building a transformer substation and a water tower supplies the needed stuff (we'll just assume that the construction crews will build the specific plot connections (or that they're spread with roads automatically)) and then allocating a certain amount of funds to subsidies. We could even have merged comercial and residential sectors (like it's often the case with real life) and decide upon the number of both buisnesses and houses by dividing the subsidies into different categories (high rises, offices, small shops, malls etc.).

[Knight of Fools]

If we're starting off an open-source project, we might as well keep it simple. Not as simple as the original SC, of course, but stuff like bendy roads should be secondary to building a solid baseline for a game. If we can manage it or someone gets a muse to create some bendy roads, that's fine, but it shouldn't be a required feature.

Speaking of bases, we should decide if it's going to be built from the ground up or use some sort of free pre-built game engine. There's a few options out there, but Unity seems like the only freebie where we'd be able to do full 3D. Building a game from scratch could be a fairly daunting task for a bunch of hobbyists, but if we manage to not break the entire thing, we'd have a stand-alone system that only includes what we need and what we've built.

Target audience should also be a concern. It's obvious that we are the target audience, but are we going for more accessibility for lower end computers? What about graphics junkies who demand something that looks nice? What about folks who don't care how it looks, but want meaty background processes running, such as path finding and other calculations? Should we find a balance, or try to please everyone by having more options?

What RTS elements, if any, should we include? It'd be fun to raise an army to fend off enemy forces, but should we be forced to do that? Could it be optional, so that we can expand the player base? This decision will dictate the setting that we'll be using, not the other way around. Game play comes before all, and if something will improve game play, we should make concessions to other things to improve that.

Spoiler: Setting Idea (Tangent) (click to show/hide)

I'm actually liking the idea of a city builder with optional combat. Sort of a futuristic frontier deal, with a large wall or other barrier separating danger from the inner territories. Inner territories would be safe, ideal for production, agriculture, and just about everything else. The only thing it will lack is a wealth of natural resources.

Cities along the border will be built half in- and half outside of the barrier, allowing a degree of safety with richer resources outside of the walls. Traffic through the wall would, obviously, be dangerous, as whatever enemy there is may get in through brute force or subterfuge if you're not careful.

Cities outside the border will be extremely dangerous, but will have the most access to resources. Eventually, with enough supplies, they can construct their own walls, but it'll require a lot of time, money, and effort.

Another thing to think about is scale. Do we want a cartoonishly large, SC-like scale of buildings, where you can see individual details, or do we want a sense that the world is tiny, with smaller looking buildings that show how insignificant the individual parts seem?


I'm actually a little excited about this. If anything, we could come up with a solid idea board for a city builder that someone else could pick up and run with.

[Rose]

When you mentioned combat, it got me thinking about another great city builder.

Caesar 3

[sneakey pete]

somewhat relevant

[Skyrunner]

Ain't gonna succeed unless someone keeps trying!

[BigD145]

I think these people are on the right track: http://wildfireworlds.com

[GalenEvil]

Transit splines can be done probably in a way similar to what Railroad Tycoon 3 did. Click and drag a piece around and it will set up control point as necessary to fit the shape you describe while dragging. It may snap have a bias towards snapping onto existing transit pieces if they would line up correctly and not cause weird interactions (ie: one way roads snapping together and causing a conflict of --><-- or similar). Cost of construction would be determined by: the length of the spline - existing transit interactions + construction costs necessary to create junctions between new and existing transit pieces + misc factors like altering terrain or additional infrastructure construction (bridges, tunnels, ect).

If the zoning is done with additional density information like the SC games then determining what building(s) to propagate could possibly be done with an implementation of activity heatmaps or pressure systems. In a pressure system implementation: jobs may cause low pressure areas, the pressure from the jobs would propagate along transit pieces, and this could determine which areas are more favorable to residential growth. The amount of pressure would be determined by the number of jobs available. The biggest problem with this system would be keeping track of which entities have claimed jobs and where that job is located, since we would not want to have someone who lives far away from a jobsite to get pushed out by one who just moved into an area that happens to be closer to the job than the working entity.

A few questions before I head off:
How detailed of a simulation would this need to be for the entites living within? Would a supply chain be implemented that encourages sprawling farmland in order to feed the city a few miles off? What about intercity supply lines? In SimCity4 all industrial productions are shipped out of the tile without any regard to the products' usefulness to the sims within it, or maybe that is abstracted away so that we just don't get to see it...