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Improving region play

Started by croxis, September 08, 2009, 09:03:17 AM

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daeley

and to add to that point, I think that the performance and detail in games like city life and citiesXL shows that, in contrast with what some people claim, it is still impossible to create a full 3D city simulator with a level of detail close to that of SC4 - a "free camera" SC4, so to speak.
1. Install SC4+RH
2. Install LEX (CD&DVD helps) and latest NAM + updates
3. Play the game
4. ? ? ? ?
5. Profit!

croxis

Ahh, the dev blog made it sound like the buildings were fully modeled 3d. So in this they are billboards, just a little more fancy!

I had a fairly lengthy post on the gameplay and optimizations of squaring off the terrain. But apparently everything I said so far was unreasonable (which irritates the crap out of me, partly because of the insult, and partly my lack of experience inhibiting me on articulating my views better). I'll just ask you a gameplay question.

How do you intent on preventing a griefer from surrounding a neighboring city with a road to prevent the neighbors expansion?

dragonshardz

Actually, as far as I know the plan is to have roads be free-owned, IE, the individual city does not own roads that are outside it's borders, SimNation does.

You do raise a point, what is to prevent griefers from, well, griefing? Perhaps a reporting system?

JoeST

yeah, I wouldnt suggest it a good idea that roads are owned by a player...maybe roads are owned by the city thats closest...
Copperminds and Cuddleswarms

Jonathan

#44
well if the concept of war was introduced into the game, you could just fight griefers, but cities fighting each doesn't sound right. <<< sorry didn't intend for this line to be taken seriously, though I can see how it could

Also another suggestion involving regions, being able to have like make Countries (in other games called and alliance), and then each city can vote to have a capital (not being able to vote for themsleves though) and like the city has to pay taxes to the capital, and then these can go to cities that have airports and ports(so not every city will have an airport, most will use the airports in their country) and such to help then pay for it, and goes towards like regional transport  (There has to be other non-transport related regional things), to get workers from city to city.

Jonahtan

croxis

I am going to state a few obvious statements that I hope we can agree on.
This is a city simulation game, not a war game or a nation simulation.
The game has multiplayer (multiple cities and multiple players per city) but NOT massively multiplayer.
Multiplayer ideas so far:
- Mayor can restrict who can play the city
- Mayor can restrict tools the players can use on a player by player basis (transportation manager, utility manager, etc)
- Mayor can restrict different construction layers on a player by player basis.

When designing a game the objective is to remove chances of griefing. This is done by having non griefable mechanics, not by adding more. Having a way to report a player, or adding an additional mechanic (war) is managing the problem not preventing it. In the most extreme players wont be able to do a thing. That is no fun. But we can make sure the game mechanics keep people from making other lives miserable.

It also sounds like people want to abolish the city boundary. There are gameplay and technical ramifications to this. How do we define what parts of the simulation are running or not? How do we define ownership?

It is a bad, bad direction this is going.....

catty

I play Simutrans which I realize is a

QuoteYour goal is to establish a successful transport company. Transport passengers, mail and goods by rail, road, ship and air. Interconnect cities, districts, public buildings, industries and tourist attractions by building a transport network you always dreamed of

But it does have something which might be worth looking into and that's how it does its regions, you can randomly create a region or you can import an existing place, you then have a set of options for that region

How many starter cities?
How many industries ie a coal mine etc?
How many landmarks?

and so on

you can add new cities and industries once you begin playing and you can link all the cities up by road or rail

http://simutrans.com/index.html
http://en.wiki.simutrans.com/index.php/Main_Page
http://maps.simutrans.com/

:)
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?" DEATH thought about it. "CATS," he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE.

Jonathan

Well I meant in RL cities get help for managing airports, by the government or pirvate organistion. And intercity transport is also funded not by cities. It then makes it more realistic, to have someone spending on the bigger intercity things. And as always when I post on this board I'm only throwing in a sugestion.

Atomius

The idea for a randomly generated region with pre existing or without pre existing cities is great imo. it reminds me of simutrans and simcity 2000, two of my favorite games in the simulation genre

it could perhaps be incorporated with a game difficulty so that instead of just affecting initial money amount and adviser messages game difficulty affected everything?

dragonshardz

croxis, no one ever suggested abolishing the city boundary, just the fixed shape and size.

Strategist01

Well, I was having a little think yesterday, and came up with an idea:

You know how in SC4 you can create any city you want to, be it an industrial powerhouse, commercial centre or a tiny town, an you were only influenced by the geography in that the was a river/mountain/hill that you built a bridge/dug a tunnel/built around, and that was as much interaction with the landscape as was possible.

I was thinking, when CityMania is released, in the startup regions, which could be made from RL places, that the geography and location will do something more than that.

Eg: Say you're playing a map of the Rhine river in Germany. Now most people might create a huge megalopolis, or a few tiny towns, but that's not how it's like in RL. The Rhine is a very busy waterway, with lots of industries in it. So, in order to maybe recreate the Rhine river accurately, the region could have like a 10x multiplier added onto the demands of commercial and industrial?

I suppose I'm saying let the cities be influenced by location and resources, say if you were to create a region and could choose what kind of bonuses you could have, say a 5x commercial multiplier, and a 0.5x industrial multiplier for the whole region, but the 0.5x multipier could be cancelled by the fact that in a city tile in which you play, there could be coal, which increases industrial demand by 2x. Resources could be divided up into easy medium and hard categories, with trees being the easiest say, and oil being the hardest. Then if you were to give your region a difficulty rating, easiest would have up to 3 types of resource a tile, and hard would have 0 to 1 resource a tile. This would then influence your city building, determining what you could build. If you were creating a region, your choices would also help you to build a certain type of city.

This is all a suggestion, but I hope you like it!

townscape

A campaign type gameplay is something to really look into.
By this I mean special maps with a starting situation, some special settings like raised crime or industry multipliers, and maybe even some infrastructure already built up. It would give a great starting point.

funny how I link the banner to the only place I ever post :)
The Greatest place to get a game name

Vyckeil

#52
about regional play... how about making city size tiles standard.
Create a square "brush selection tool" in regional view with an option to select its size via a box menu or mouse scroll, then hover the mouse to select the tiles you want to play. Depending on your computer resources, you could play 1x1, 2x2, 3x3 etc.

It's like playing small, medium or large cities in SC4 without being confined to preexisting regional city seperations... a bit like playing 1/4 of a large city (i.e. medium city), or play half/half medium cities at the same time, or 4 corner mediums. You could even scoll to the next city tiles, saving the data of the exiting tiles and loading the ones you're scrolling to (a bit like Grand Theft Auto) without changing the current size of tiles you're playing simultaneously. This way, people with low-end computers could still play region-wide cities seamlessly and people with powerful computers could play big chunks at the same time...

I don't know how you guys want to implement the overlapping data such as pollution, civic radius, commuters and other forms of data but the option of having municipalities (or borough, district, chunk of city, whatever the name suit you) would make managing civic funding better in the case of dealing with underfunding or, for example, teacher strike. The municipality could overlap to the next city tile that is "frozen in time" because it is not simulated, but the access to it's services remains from the next tile, kind of like just importing the data of the municipality in the adjacent city and render it real-time. Selecting the right civic and the right building by naming the schools (now naming stuff would have a real use!) Same here applies with radius. You could always re-size your municipality if the services are overcapacity.

I have no idea how you guys want to implement multi...

  • either split the region equally so everyone has their own turf and leave a separation between cities with overlapping ownership so that any development must be agreed by both parties (or plan ahead and agree to transit connection if there are no separations).
  • total coop: region revenue split between players and they do anything they want, even destroy, rezone etc. (no whining, not for playing with strangers, may break relationships, etc) but the ability to use multiple computers to simulate more tiles at the same time and create weird original cities.

What ability I would like to see is the ability to plan development, just like building roads and zoning normally but "on hold" and grayed and/or 50% transparency, then accepting the development by buying it. Basically, you could plan out everything first and then buy a zone there, a road here, or whole chunks of planning at once. The single player would benefit alot from this, multi-playing would be way more dynamic.

Players could plan their stuff, then must be accepted by other players to enable that development, either in a unanimous fashion of democratic fashion (needs majority). Each player could have their own color, plan a development, then propose so other players could see (otherwise it just becomes a jumbled mess of overlapping plans), could base their own development on their colleague's and modify the original plans (and applying their own color to it) if they don't like it... so you could have multiple players making the same city, while at the same time running the simulation with their computer to make the city grow by chunks or the whole city if enough players are there at the same time...
Or simply split the city into municipalities with each player having their own to do his will.

That's pretty much it. A lot more than I originally wanted to say... hope you read it.

croxis

You will be happy to know that most of the stuff you listed is planned or implemented.

The region is divided into tiles, and the tile have an owner flag, 0 is no owner, or a number representing the city id. Cities can acquire unclaimed tiles or negotiate for them with other cities. The simulation processes the stuff in the active tiles, but spatial data, such as pollution, will affect inactive tiles. The region itself will also be simulated like a city, but at a very infrequent rate.

Multiplayer will be competitive/cooperative. Players can set their cities to be view only, or inaccessible, or set permissions on who can do what allowing multiple people to participate in building their city.

Construction will also be similar to as you describe. Construction is planned first, and then committed and construction begins.

Vyckeil

wow very cool!  &apls
thanks for the reply! can't wait to see this in action.

i wish i could participate, but i have no knowledge in programming, though i am learning python. if you wish, you could send/direct me to learning resources. i intend to use this knowledge to help you guys out as best i can as i always wanted to program my own games. this could be an great learning experience for me.

croxis

Totally. The source code is up on my github (the post should be somewhere... like here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=365.0 ). It is probably quite daunting for someone new, but feel free to ask questions about it as you learn stuff. It will also help me keep my code cleaner and as simple as needed.

Some resources

How to think like a computer scientist: http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/
Dive into python (more for experienced programmers, but some examples may be more clear): http://www.diveintopython.org/
And of course the tuts and docs on the python website: http://docs.python.org

If you have questions about it feel free to make a new thread (I am trying to keep this one on topic :) ), contact me by google wave, forum pm, or catch me in the chatroom.