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[darkflagrance]

Another problem with these cities is that there no large buildings: keeps, palaces, town halls and government buildings, grand markets, parade fields (the Romans were big into these), armories, and in the future, museums, libraries, docks, factory-type things or workshop complexes, warehouses, mage towers, and so on.

It would also be nice if there was an indicator on the map that showed your relative distance from large buildings, which you would use in real-life as a landmark.

[tfaal]

Another problem with these cities is that there no large buildings: keeps, palaces, town halls and government buildings, grand markets, parade fields (the Romans were big into these), armories, and in the future, museums, libraries, docks, factory-type things or workshop complexes, warehouses, mage towers, and so on.

Addressed in the Devlog here:

The different buildings will be workshops and houses -- there aren't any really large ones because we haven't gotten to manors/taverns/inns etc., but the system can easily encompass that sort of thing. Those buildings are for future releases though.

[cephalo]

The cities look great, but I really think that there should be a radial organization to them. This provides a focus point where most of the points of interest could be found. That way, if a city is large, you don't have to nevigate this inpenetrable maze to conduct your business here. I think this is also why real cities often grew this way in the days before the automobile.

Algorithmically, you would:

pick a city center
grow outwards until the city is attacked in world gen
encase it in a wall
continue to grow outward.

[TolyK]

the above would be awesome.

[PTTG??]

The variability thing is a myth to. Almost everything smart enough to have a civilization would be just as adaptable and varied.

The actual real specialities of humans, the things we evolved to do better than other animals, are endurance running and politics.

You forgot throwing. Human hand-eye coordination is quite good, allowing us to throw projectiles with precision and force.

Ah, cities!

They look fantastic- though I agree with cephalo that they could use some radial organization. In particularly large cities, this may include multiple "center points."

There's also a very small thing that stood out- in a real city, any external walls are basically thought of as free siding. You'd expect to see houses built against the walls, if not into the walls.

[Greiger]

I always figured it would be pretty cool if just asking a townsperson where a particular kind of building is caused the civilian to tell you the general direction the nearest building of that type is but it actually throws out a pathing check from the adventurer and attempts to path to the building.  If it succeeds it highlights the ground mining designation style in a line to the destination.  The player can chose to follow it to get to the location.   It could even use traffic zones built into the towns to avoid backyards and alleyways.  It works, it's easy to understand, and most of the code needed should already exist.

Of course that's more of a suggestion I guess.

I can't wait to get lost in those cities.  Way back when I remember Toady saying that he wants you to be able to have a full adventurer without ever having to leave a major city.  Wonder what kind of quests will be available... Muggers? Fugitive hunting? Monsters causing trouble in the sewers? Haunted manors need clearing? Pizza delivery?

[Mel_Vixen]

Well i think the citys grow atm around theyr "centerpoint" atleast we could asume that. The lack of terrain and important places (markets, temples etc.) is what makes them so "bland". 

edit:

heh i can see tons of fetch-quests already

[freeformschooler]

heh i can see tons of fetch-quests already

As absurd as it sounds, I would fall down and roll over for fetch quests in DF (especially ones completely inside the cities!). Something to do other than kill kill kill!

[NW_Kohaku]

Ugh... it's really painful to lose a longish post because my browser crashes again.

The cities look great, but I really think that there should be a radial organization to them. This provides a focus point where most of the points of interest could be found. That way, if a city is large, you don't have to nevigate this inpenetrable maze to conduct your business here. I think this is also why real cities often grew this way in the days before the automobile.

Algorithmically, you would:

pick a city center
grow outwards until the city is attacked in world gen
encase it in a wall
continue to grow outward.

Anyway, as someone said before, many cities start out as a military outpost where the city grows as services to the military that is stuck in that one point.  Other cities, like London, grow around a port (See Jiri's map again) and then fan out from there.

There is a reason for this - many of the industries that grow a city are fairly flexible - you can set up a clothier's shop anywhere you can ship cloth or fabric.  The "seeds" of cities are typically things you can't move, but which attract people to live near them to perform industrial activities there.  Either it's because the government moved a military base there, and the people live near the military base, or because the river is there, and you can't move the river, or because some natural resource only occurs in regions like that one, and the industry based on that resource cannot be moved very far away from that sort of resource because it is difficult to ship properly.  In modern times, almost all aluminum factories are built near hydroelectric powerplants - aluminum smelting requires phenomenal amounts of electric power to heat the ore, and the cheapest electricity is found right next to a hydroelectric dam, where the energy comes from free water rather than expensive coal or gas, and the least electricity is wasted through resistance in the electric wires.  In more distant times, rivers were the best way to transport many goods downriver to port - you can just shove a log onto a river, and know it will float downriver on its own, so you can send loggers far upriver of a trading port and cheaply get logs or barges down to them for their building projects and industry and trade.

Further, cities in the middle ages were built and populated by the younger children of farmers who could not inherit land.  They left for cities because that's where the jobs were.

In a time before good transportation, cities developed packed together, even though it made for terrible living conditions, only because they had to live within walking distance of their jobs and all their services.  As soon as people had access to personal cars or public mass transit systems, people started spreading out from cities, and living in the suburbs around cities.

Hence, if you want to accurately model cities, you need to start with a city centered on some sort of industry that acts as a source of jobs that attract people to live there, preferably one that has to be in that one specific location for some reason (rivers, major iron foundries on sites where there is both iron ore and fuel for the iron industry, major military outposts, major trade crossroads, etc.).  All the first houses crowd around that job center, and then commercial districts and support industries pop up around the initial wave.  These smaller, more movable industries can be placed anywhere there is a market of people to support them.  (This is something like clothiers or leatherworkers or small-time blacksmiths or metalsmiths.  Things that can set up anywhere their market goes.)  These act as job centers on their own, creating a fractal effect as each smaller, minor job center pops up off of the outskirts of the other job centers, causing the city to spread out radially along more and more individual points. 

Rivers, especially the mouths of major rivers are historically THE place where cities formed, however - rivers are trade hubs, sources of water, destinations of sewage, and, with fishing fleets, even a source of food.  (It's your highway, sewer, drinking fountain, and sushi bar, all-in-one!)

As a trading crossroads, all the towns upriver of the mouth of a river could easily send goods down to the mouth of the river by river barge, but then had to change over to ocean-going vessels, where they had access to the rest of the world (and it was easier to ship large volumes of trade goods halfway around the world by ship than to the next town over by wagon), meaning that almost all the trade in the entire region had to take place at the ports at the mouths of the nearest major river.  This, in turn, is where the wealth of the nations gravitated. 

EDIT:
Oh, and shipyards - docks are their own job center, but so are shipyards, and if you have forests upriver from a city with a port, you're going to have a separate industry built around some sort of shipyard, as well.  And those are even more major industrial centers.

EDIT 2:

Err, to make the point a little more concise,

You need to start from a "city center" that is some sort of immobile source of jobs, but then you start creating fractal mini-city-centers based around some sort of industrial districts as the city becomes better-formed and developed.

If cities are procedurally generated over time, rather than instantly, then you could even model their growth from the very start, with crowding only coming into play as more and more houses are built into the nooks and crannies that were once the alleys between previously standing buildings.

[Chthonic]

This is going to make the obsessive-compulsive in me that always has to comb every inch of every city and comparison-shop for the very best armor or weapon of the particular kind I really really want because I have to be kitted out as thoroughly as possible . . . just about die.  But it looks awesome.

For a city of the size presented, are shops going to be scattered throughout?  Is there going to be one great central market?  Or little clusters of shops serving different parts of the city?  Are cities going to be segregated by individuals of different social class (i.e., the good parts of town, where you can pay extra for the good booze and gem-encrusted duds, and the other side of the tracks where all you can buy are swill and rags)?

[freeformschooler]

This is going to make the obsessive-compulsive in me that always has to comb every inch of every city and comparison-shop for the very best armor or weapon of the particular kind I really really want because I have to be kitted out as thoroughly as possible . . . just about die.  But it looks awesome.

For a city of the size presented, are shops going to be scattered throughout?  Is there going to be one great central market?  Or little clusters of shops serving different parts of the city?  Are cities going to be segregated by individuals of different social class (i.e., the good parts of town, where you can pay extra for the good booze and gem-encrusted duds, and the other side of the tracks where all you can buy are swill and rags)?

I would imagine markets would be integrated pretty well into the cities.

• Better town maps involving workshops/markets/shops based on world gen economic activities

Though social class is less likely to be going in. But who knows!

[PTTG??]

I don't see the essential problem with fetch-quests- it's having the same complications that's the problem. Delivering a notarized document that must be kept perfectly clean through the town's traditional Celebration of the Throw Tomatoes is a very different quest from collecting an idol from a wealthy noble's house and delivering it to a hovel without being seen by either part. Both of these are different from a quest to deliver serious bodily harm to the kobolds living in the sewers.

And anyway, Streets of SimCity was pretty awesome and it was entirely fetch quests.

With flying, force-shielded, rocket-armed combat cars.

PS: NW_Kohaku is awesome.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, a bit of a rambling post that I split off from the last post when looking over cities, and giving them more thought...

Toady's got pics of the city up!

And by Armok, they're ENORMOUS! I'm looking forward to doing some exploration.

Those are max-sized cities, so I'm looking forward to them.
I hope they will have more than  z-level.

Here's the problem I have - cities seem to have really funky models for how their population goes up and down right now.  They seem to need the caps that are placed over their population to prevent rampant growth at times, because there is no downward pressure on their population growth unless it actually gets to starvation.

I'll ask my question first, then let the rest of the post get taken up by all the random musings I have on the subject.

What models are there governing population growth and decline?  Where do you want it to go - a simple and streamlined abstract model of growth and decline based upon a tally of upward population growth forces and downward pressures on populations, or a very gritty and detailed model where every wave of disease is tracked, so that there will be history events of the great city fire of 231?

The problem with that is that starvation doesn't seem to be modelled very well at all - people just keep eating normally right up until there's only food for 30% of them left, and so 70% of the population just sits there and waits to die. 

Realistically, you'd have hoarding before the crisis point, and inflated food prices so that only the really wealthy or those who saw the crisis coming furthest off and hoarded early would have a chance to really stockpile some food to weather the storm.  People are going to want to protect themselves and their families, after all.

After that, people who are faced with starving and their families starving are going to want to protect their families, after all, so they're going to start rioting or trying to kill and steal food from those who are hoarding it for themselves.

I doubt a city would actually see 70% of its population just plain starve - you'd rather see 80% of its population die in riots and an orgy of crime, and the other 20% probably not be able to put the city back together again, except in a fractured state, and most of the survivors would probably scatter as refugees. 

In a real city of the Ancient or Medieval world, there were serious downward forces on population thanks to the utterly rampant diseases that flourished in crowded cities with close human contact for disease transfer, with water sources tainted by sewage, with no proper sewer system, especially in the most crowded, poorest parts of town that received no city planning, and as such, the larger and more crowded and less-maintained a city was, the more ravaged by disease it would become.

The Total War series models this, especially in its earlier, more abstract and "clean" games by just plain having a -0.5% population growth rate modifier due to "Squalor" per every arbitrary amount of population in a city.  Public sanitation projects (among others) give a +0.5% or +1% population growth benefit to help counteract this, although at the highest levels of population, it's pretty hopeless to try to stave off the problems of overcrowding.  As population grows geometrically quickly, but the time it takes to build more complex sanitation systems becomes even more lengthy and cumbersome, and there are only a finite number of things you can do, population levels just naturally plateau on their own as disease and overcrowding's downward pressure on population hits equallibrium with the upward pressure of birthrate.

Now, that's a fairly abstract system (and not even Total War stuck with it, which is a bit of a shame, honestly), and I know that DF likes to go for the nitty-gritty realism...

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there were procedurally generated diseases with procedurally generated mortality rates in DF.  Each one coming through some different disease vector.

Infant mortality rates can be modeled abstractly or with greater detail, as well - areas with more crowding, more pollution, less sanitation, and poorer food quality and availability just plain have lower "fertility rates" in an abstract model, versus having the children being born then dying off in greater numbers than adults due to weaker immune systems and tolerances for the lack of food. 

(Oh, and now I just thought about how childhood diseases and malnutrition also leads to poor development of the mind and body - leading to permanent loss of intelligence and smaller body size and disease immunity.  That would mean tracking some sort of average population malnutrition factors for different population centers in worldgen...  I honestly like abstract models better than the really gritty ones most of the time, but being able to tell that someone is from a city rather than a village because they're shorter would be kind of cool...)

Especially since it's possible to split off each district of a town as a separate area (where the best parts of town have better sanitation than the worst parts).

DF could simply have a simple birthrate bonus or penalty system, or it could actually model waves of diseases killing off individuals, food riots, infant mortality rates, violent crime rates, etc. and do these by individual town district (so the docks are a nasty part of town, but the clothier's district is fairly safe).

As I said, though, I honestly like Rome: Total War's simpler model (although that was when I had to actually control it, personally), but given how much gritty realism DF crams in versus how difficult it would be to code and store many of these things in memory, I honestly think Toady could go either way on how much detail he wants, here, so I'd say it's worth asking which way his winds are blowing.

[monk12]

In regards to the lag concern a few pages back, I recall Toady saying something (I think in a DF talk) about how there isn't much lag because all the city folk just stand around doing nothing all day. Release 2 is Villager/Farmer schedule/activities, part of which is finding ways to make the towns feel alive with people in the streets and such without having to simulate pathfinding for every single resident of the city even when you can't see them.


Personally, I'd rather see more of the realistic version of mass death in a city, so that when you visit you can ask around and hear about the Great Fire of 102 or the Eighth Plague of Whippedgranite in 227. Even better would be if there was visible changes to the city as a result- the Great Fire burns down the north side of the city, which is then redone in stone. Your adventurer is walking around and notices all these buildings are stone even though its not a really important place, so you ask around and the old-timers tell you this story about a horrible fire they rebuilt from.

Or in short, I'd rather see tracking of the little details, because you need to track them first before you can do interesting things with them.

[NW_Kohaku]

Some other random, brainstormy thoughts to be segregated from those other two big posts I just made:

Another problem with these cities is that there no large buildings: keeps, palaces, town halls and government buildings, grand markets, parade fields (the Romans were big into these), armories, and in the future, museums, libraries, docks, factory-type things or workshop complexes, warehouses, mage towers, and so on.

Addressed in the Devlog here:

The different buildings will be workshops and houses -- there aren't any really large ones because we haven't gotten to manors/taverns/inns etc., but the system can easily encompass that sort of thing. Those buildings are for future releases though.

Now, now, it's easy to see something that thought provoking, and completely forget to actually read the rest of the devlog post because you get so lost in thought.  So let's be forgiving...

What I'm most wondering about while looking at those cities is what happens with all that open space in the middle of those buildings...  Are they used as neighborhood parks?  Or is there no way to directly access them, and nobody uses those open areas?

I'm pretty sure that's what he was referring to with the following:

The buildings often enclose yards where several families will keep their pigs and other beasts and birds. Later these yards will be used for additional buildings and they'll also be expanded out in this release and merged with roads to support things like market squares.

 


Looking at those enclosed areas, one of the other things I think of is that if you boarded up the enterances to those common, fenced-in areas, and then buy two or three small houses with access there (for escape routes when the guard comes), you could have a thieves' den in a fairly large area that is cut off from the rest of the open city. 

Speaking of thieves, smugglers like those from Robin Hood's Bay would use the closely crammed buildings to build tunnels where smugglers, with the implicit blessings of the townspeople, could pass goods through the houses of the townsfolk without ever using the streets to avoid having to pay taxes on goods like alcohol and tea, which had tariffs.

More recently in history, there were Chicago apartment building projects that were so heavily controlled by gangs that they could occupy all the upper floors of the buildings, and punch holes through the walls dividing the building up - when police raided one building, the criminals would just go through the maze of holes they punched through buildings to escape out another building.

Are cities going to be segregated by individuals of different social class (i.e., the good parts of town, where you can pay extra for the good booze and gem-encrusted duds, and the other side of the tracks where all you can buy are swill and rags)?

Well, if Toady said he'd be making larger buildings like manors, it makes sense that he'd make exceptionally crummy parts of town at the same time that he makes exceptionally nice parts of town.


Something else I notice is that many of those enclosed areas aren't actually closed - some are crescents, and others have a corner where you could squeeze into the common enclosed area.

In regards to the lag concern a few pages back, I recall Toady saying something (I think in a DF talk) about how there isn't much lag because all the city folk just stand around doing nothing all day. Release 2 is Villager/Farmer schedule/activities, part of which is finding ways to make the towns feel alive with people in the streets and such without having to simulate pathfinding for every single resident of the city even when you can't see them.

In many modern games with advanced graphics that take up a lot of time, but want seemless transitions through different areas without loading screens, you typically have individual sections of a map that are being modelled at once.  In Adventurer Mode, you wouldn't have to model that much beyond what the adventurer can actually see, except in a fairly abstract manner. 

That means you could basically just have people teleporting places so long as the starting and destination points are not close enough to you for you to actually notice the difference.

Of course, we might also just want some people walking the streets to create the illusion of business.  Many games like GTA just generate random people who simply walk on sidewalks with no real destination in mind, and just follow sidewalks randomly.  I somehow doubt Toady would want to have players capable of following a randomly generated person around all day, and seeing that they just walk in circles all day...

However, there could be tricks to evading that sort of problem.  You could wind up with a "Shroedenger's Gun" situation, where random walkers suddenly have their empty backstory filled in if they stay in the adventurer's sight for long enough, or the adventurer actually asks them questions.  Basically, the first 150 steps, they are just walking randomly, but then suddenly, they were going to the market that's in the direction they were walking in the direction of, and their home was in the direction they were walking away from, because now that the adventurer is following them and presumably might be looking at them, they have to have a purpose all of a sudden.

That would require a largish reserve of completely ambiguous buildings, where none of the details of who lives there matter until the player is actually looking at them.  It might also get complicated if a player can basically set up shop in a single neighborhood, and starts to get to know all the neighbors, at which point a large chunk of territory in the city might become "known", and you can't pull some of these tricks as easily.


Bah, I know I've got enough for a suggestion thread in here somewhere, but I'm not sure what I want to suggest, yet.