CityMania

[JoeST]

I would suggest it should follow terrain upto certain gradients (set by the user at/after drawtime) then it should start smoothing the terrain.

Joe

[Lowkee33]

I can't say when embankments should be used, because I don't know the real-world engineering of roads (how curved a highway can be compared to a street).  However, if terraforming costs money, then after I drag my road from point A to point B I could get something like the sc4 bridge option chart.  Perhaps there would be different types of roads, but my focus is on the slider, which would display the different paths the road would take as I change the cost of the road.

I think that this idea would be have to be, say, alt-road.  I wouldn't want to have to choose options after every road that I place.  Straight and smooth would be a good default.

[Ocram]

Nique, according to your pictures, the buildings all seem to be stuck to the 90 degree squares. In most 3D games, the buildings can at least be rotated 45 degrees and still take up the same number of tiles (with a small offset and overlap of tiles not occupied by the building). Even Children of the Nile did this. I must admit that Caesar IV was better at this. Even if the grid cannot be freely rotated, a building should still be able to take up a space not limited by a 90 degree (NWSE) rectangle.

[townscape]

Nique, according to your pictures, the buildings all seem to be stuck to the 90 degree squares. In most 3D games, the buildings can at least be rotated 45 degrees and still take up the same number of tiles (with a small offset and overlap of tiles not occupied by the building). Even Children of the Nile did this. I must admit that Caesar IV was better at this. Even if the grid cannot be freely rotated, a building should still be able to take up a space not limited by a 90 degree (NWSE) rectangle.

Building are not directly plopped usually, unless it's specialty buildings like police hq's and schools. Everything else is placed in free-form zones (similar to simcity 4)
Please take note of the Quick 'n Dirty prototype here for, if not a precise model of the final construction tool, a good display of the main concept and wanted end results

[Ocram]

I saw the video months ago but the pictures seem to show that the buildings are at 90 degree angles.

[Lowkee33]

I replied to a CityMania post, and got thinking again.  I decided to post here, as I noticed my name in the thread...  The topic I replied to was about how accessible the game will be to the young crowd.  I listed a few games that I liked, but then kept thinking about them I will list some more.

Civilization 2 (and maybe others): Google it if you dont know.  Unit characteristics (and a lot of other things in the game) were controlled by a .doc file.  Want your militia to kill a tank? set the strength to 100!  Perhaps there is a way to transfer something like this to CityMania building characteristics.

Railroad Tycoon 3:  Marvelous economy, but also nice fully 3d graphics that runs well on 16mb graphics and 128mb ram.  The trees had only one side though.  Quite modifiable too.

I have also been thinking about the road vs building system.  I saw the video about roads and the way they curve and have the "parallel option".  Very nice.  But there is a grid there, and that is good.  Could the game potentially calculate the function of the road vs a set axis?  By knowing the slope of the road at a certain point the game could also know where a road is not.  A buildings foundation could then be told to be say, a little up on the y-axis here and a little left on the x-axis there.  That would probably take some work though   

How possible is something like this?  Can I help?  I have no skill with programing, but I could do the math part.       

[townscape]

Any help, especially on the technical part, is more than welcome. You can start a topic with a detailed suggestion.

If anyone has any favorite game mechanic from other games you think would go well in this project, you can name it here or any topic that is relevant to that game mechanic or interface element.

Anything like: how do they display information, how do they handle tutorials, humor and writing, tools used in-game and out of the game.

How do you imagine the graphics should look like in a decent setting (we're not talking citiesxl graphics... yet) so you wouldn't complain about em?(it's planned to be in 3d)

[townscape]

Actually, I would very much like to hear what people think about this. Now, keep in mind that network is done differently thatn in SC4, where roads were tiles on the grid, while here roads are straight and curved lines. So, when you draw a road, you point and click, the same way as you would do when you draw lines in drawing programs. Now since terrain between endpoints can vary question arises about what should road surface do between the endpoints. Should it stick to the terrain level and follow it, or should it stay on it's mathematically assigned course and set up embankments, tunnels and bridges along it's way?

I think that cities xl had a great approach concerning bridges and roads, separating them. As for embankments or not: depending on the type of road or highway. We could also make so that by default by dragging a "road", it will conform as much as it can to the surface (flattening or not constructing on extreme angles and surfaces, but holding for example CTRL while setting it could enable more embankments. I recall a Road Slope Mod for Sim City, which would raise or dig embankments to the extreme to straighten the strip of road you set. That was not always a good thing. Although I would strongly recommend bridges as a separate tool, it could easily be activated by holding the Shift key,for example, during road construction, so we could not abrupt the flow of road building.

Slope mod:

(Source)

Concerning terraforming, I always thought "holding the mouse button to raise the ground" a little bit complicated. Why not hold a point and raise the ground manually for more precise and not messy terraforming. A point or radius which would raise the ground to the altitude the user requires. It would be simple to manipulate from any angle because the point will move the adjacent ground on a vertical line with variyng smoothness. It is similar to a tool in the Blender 3d Software and I think it is quite a great system, especially radius influencing how much space adjacent to that point will level also. (Here is a wiki page describing its works). Basically, you drag a point and based on the radius you choosed it created a hill, or a sharp cliff, or a tall mountain. It would also lower the number of terraforming tools required.

Blender 3d terraforming capabilities:
 

Also separating a "river" or "water" tool (basically a tool that by lowering a portion of land adds water to it) would allow us to create high altitude lakes and rivers. We could probably even make procedural waterfalls if the tool was concient of water limits and extreme variation in adjacent terrain (could be something like a script which was enabled by connecting two bodies of water from different altitudes). This will not influence the sea level which will sink into water any land that goes beneath the line.

[Nique]

I think we have to become more simple regarding the current development state of this game. The development looks dead to me. I do not want to throw all the effort people made away. My first idea was to 'clone' SC4, improve it in basics and later on -> expand it. The Isometric (2.5d) approach is brilliant because it wont 'eat' that much gpu/shared cpu resources, making place (leaving enough resources) to do more and better (intensive) cpu calculations. The graphics stay very pretty, we can even improve it more with some 3d atmospheric and water effects. We can add another 'zoom' level, and increase the quality of the zoom5 level because we now have better network/storage capacity. (@2003 most games where still sold on CD-ROM and network speeds were slow). This means we stay with 4 (rotation) views, we stay with the grids.. and the zoom levels stay the same (if we do not add another one).

So what about making a new start, take what we have created / learned from this project and just clone the SC4 game as close we can. Of course with better modification abilities for the community. But i think you guys get the point. With Panda it is possible to create a 2.5d game.

Do not start with network projects etc. because it will make the game programming complicated. Just start with basics with a simple client version. Later on, we can expand it more, and we can add networking functions with new patches / updates.

[townscape]

A great proposition, but we should seriously look into searching for more volunteers, only where to get them?

[WC_EEND]

I'd love to help out, but I have zero skill in programming

[townscape]

I'm talking more of an external to these forums source of volunteers, as this forum is depleted it seems

[Lowkee33]

I think a good place to start is the buildings.  If you can get the SC4 models to work with a new program then I think there will be a lot more support for an open-source simcity

[catty]

I think a good place to start is the buildings.  If you can get the SC4 models to work with a new program then I think there will be a lot more support for an open-source simcity

Good point Lowkee33, I would hate to lose all my favourite SC4 Models, and all the hours people have put in to create them it would be a great loss, but maybe that's the sacrifice that has to be made if we want an open-source simcity clone replacement or its back to hoping that one of the existing open-source city builders simulation games eventually end up with the kind of details that we want to see in a city builder and so far the best of them seems to be Lincity-NG found here

http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

hopefully they will sort out the bugs in the Windows version as it only really works in LINUX at the moment.

Or there is choice number three and that's the "the Metropolis Project"

The Metropolis Project is a community-controlled non-profit organization dedicated to creating an open-source urban simulation game called Metropolis. We are hoping to create a next-generation successor to the ground-breaking Sim City series.

Unlike many open source projects you might be familiar with, the Metropolis Project is based on a community funding approach: Instead of relying solely on volunteer development, we aim to collect funding for a full-time, professional development team from community contributions.

see their website here  http://themetropolisproject.org/  and here  http://themetropolisproject.org/about  for details

As to whether that would work who knows, but something to think about anyway.

[catty]

Hi Guys

Back again

Have been following a new city builder game that is being build by three canadian university students, it may be worth the CityMania team having a talk with them and see if there is any common ground between the two projects.



Anyway they are called Synekism, their website is here;

http://www.synekism.com/

and the topic they have started at Simtropolis is here;

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=39&threadid=117429



@catty

[Nique]

My little Christmas gift
Try this, as an attempt to clone sc4, i made this using the Unity (Indie) Engine. Nothing really special (yet!) in the game, but to clone sc4, i think i'm getting close with the 'look & feel', at least with the terrains, the zoom levels and the input controls. (no mouse pan control yet). (can be exported to both Windows & Mac, Must be possible to distribute to linux to because the use of mono (the .NET alternative).

For now: only windows:
Download the zip file, extract it somewhere on ur computer, and run the CityMania.EXE

Keys:
Arrow keys to move around (+ shift moves faster)
Use mouse-wheel to zoom in and out.

--
Maybe a 'framework' to build on? Just clone sc4.. so all the mod teams can say goodbye to hardcore modding with hex-codes and back-engineering. More community friendly.. Design better a plugin database/storage organizing program (with dependencies in the back of the mind), and not to forget..a high resolution 6th zoomlevel!. I know people want 3d, but let's go back and stay realistic. bridges (slopes) will look ugly in 3d (like CitiesXL). I think we have to stick with SC4 as a goal. The texture is just seamless now, but can be made just as in SC4 of course!

Download Mirror 1 (MegaUpload) | Mirror 2 (dropbox)

[catty]

The picture looks good, unfortunately I can't install it, as my Norton Anti-Virus has a meltdown at the sight of it, I've got it out of quarantine four times each time telling Norton to ignore it, but it still says its a security risk and won't let me run it   

[Nique]

The picture looks good, unfortunately I can't install it, as my Norton Anti-Virus has a meltdown at the sight of it, I've got it out of quarantine four times each time telling Norton to ignore it, but it still says its a security risk and won't let me run it   

Weird, it's not a virus for sure. It's fresh baked by the compiler.. I don't know but i really didn't like Norton since begin 2000's.. to heavy..  i would almost say, turn it of for now and run it, afterwards turn it on.
I have no solution for this as i'm pretty sure this is no security risk.

[townscape]

Should I get you the green logo?

Here ya go if you need it:

[catty]

Weird, it's not a virus for sure. It's fresh baked by the compiler.. I don't know but i really didn't like Norton since begin 2000's.. to heavy..  i would almost say, turn it of for now and run it, afterwards turn it on.
I have no solution for this as i'm pretty sure this is no security risk.

While I trust you, that's not something I'm going to risk on this computer, but I will try it out on my backup computer once the holiday guests go home