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[Jopax]

Something similar to Anno could be cool I think. Where you'd progress higher up with your cities as you obtained certain resources. Needing dirty industry like mines and processing plants in order to have manufacturing appear, and afterwards needing education and exotic resources in order to have high tech appear and so on.

If we're going with the frontier world in the future thingy we could have the players start out in the middle if they want to play it safe, build up farmlands and some industry to support the population and then move to the borders where they would only need to obtain the exotic resources and high education to kick start the high tech industry that would enable production of advanced defenses or weapons or whatever.

This way we could encourage different styles of play like specialization or diversification of cities, where the only factor wouldn't be available space but also resources, safety and time. Do you want to rush it, or take it slow, do you risk your entire population or play it safe.

[GreatWyrmGold]

If you do go with the splines idea, be sure to reticulate them. I have no idea what that means^[1], but it sounds important.

Anyways, the biggest obstacle I see in your path is competing with DF. Be sure you offer a game experience different from it, but comparable in quality.

[Djohaal]

I'm more in favor of the absolute sandbox concept. Simcity 4 did it while at the same time arguably being the best city builder ever made. You have no obligatory "tech tree"  to follow when growing your city. You can skip directly to high tech industry with the proper tax incentives, or skip farming. Depending on your region you could make a commerce-only city as other needs were satisfied via neighbors. And the citybuilding gameplay still was there.

My thought about the grid comes because the fun of it is the work of fitting your idea of a city into the grid, much like how in minecraft or DF you have an concept of a building you want to build and you have to "fit" it in the voxelized world. I'm not talking about the grid just as a placement helper, but as an essential component of the game.

The 2d-billboard-versus-full-3d isn't a small matter either. Making a 2d billboard and rendering it is much easier than a fully 3d. You can go very sloppy with textures, and specially modelling. No polygon budget, no keeping everything into a single manifold, no UVW unwarpping, no texture painting. Workflow is much faster and that is one of the big reasons the simcity community has so much good quality custom content. And it has some potential too... Clicky

[Aseaheru]

Posting to watch.

and an idea: can we have buildings that change what they do or are a mix?
alot of old stores, for example, had people living there too. some old industrial buildings have been changed to businesses or homes, visaversa and so on.

[sneakey pete]

The wildly varying ideas of what peoples ideal city building game is not boding well for anything happening...

[Djohaal]

The wildly varying ideas of what peoples ideal city building game is not boding well for anything happening...

That.
In that sense you can already notice by my previous posts that I'm more of a traditionalist. Simcity 4 + Rush hour did its job spot-on and set a par in 2003 no game managed to get anywhere close. And I see no reason why the wheel should be reinvented.

I have contacts with some NAM team modders who know how the transit system in sc4 was done like the palm of their hand, I could contact them for help if this project starts to look like it could get somewhere.

[Jopax]

Well we could always have a sandbox mode where resources are abstracted away like in SC4. But if we're going for a frontier world where you have nothing but the few things you came with it'd be rather unrealistic, and the requirements aren't that much more complex than what already existed in SC, you'd just add another layer to it that would allow specialization and better connections between cities.


And the way I'm seeing this is that it's one big brainstorming that will last for a while before everyone either loses interest or we agree upon a certain set of suggestions/ideas that would work well together before going to town on it.

[Rose]

Pretty much. My aim with this thread is as much to talk about stuff as to plan stuff.

[GreatWyrmGold]

And I see no reason why the wheel should be invented.

I'll assume you meant reinvented.
Because some people prefer legs or treads over wheels.

[Djohaal]

Yes. REinvented.

[miauw62]

Deinvented.

Either way, what do you guys think about randomly generated worlds to play in? Because randomly generated is always a plus.

NOTE: I have not played simcity 4. And those masks for building decay look really nice.

[Skyrunner]

How random? SimCity 4 did have some random maps, if I'm not mistaken...

[miauw62]

Seeing what we are planning, just a semi-generic world generator that places resources.

[Djohaal]

Sure. However keep tools to place resources as players see fit (no matter how unbalanced that may be). Worldcrafting in simcity 4 was both fun and relaxing.  Something simcity lacked that would be a lot of useful is biomes.

[Sergius]

How random? SimCity 4 did have some random maps, if I'm not mistaken...

SC4 has no random maps AFAIK. You either sculpt the terrain by hand in-game, or import a heightmap for an entire region.

Comes with 4 or 5 pre-made regions.