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Poil
Mar 17, 2007

Neat, but cars only being able to turn right after leaving a plot was something that caused a lot of anger over in the sc2013 thread if I remember correctly. :v:

That solution to the time passing is probably the best way to go about it. It reminds me a little of how Europa 1400 The Guild solved it. Way back when that game was made they had day/nigh cycle, seasonal changes and years all combined. It worked like this,
Day 1, spring 1400
Day 2, summer 1401
Day 3, autumn 1402
and so on.

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Yaoi Gagarin
Feb 20, 2014

That is an interesting solution for time, to be sure. What will you do when things cost money? Have cash flow determined seasonally?

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
Eesh, right turns only? I hope that's temporary. Only divided boulevards should prevent cars from turning left into a home or business.

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co

Banemaster posted:

Good compromise would be that when city is starting, player has to make a major road from edge of map to another. This way there is something to build the city around, but player can still decide where the road goes.

I think this is a good result of the discussion.


Baronjutter posted:

So what you're saying is that time is a 4-season cube?

Exactly. I guess.


VostokProgram posted:

That is an interesting solution for time, to be sure. What will you do when things cost money? Have cash flow determined seasonally?

I think it will be immediate, i.e. citizen goes to work, gets money, later goes shopping, shop gets money.


Iunnrais posted:

Eesh, right turns only? I hope that's temporary. Only divided boulevards should prevent cars from turning left into a home or business.

Yes, I know, I know. It's only temporary. I didn't have time to add crossing the road from a plot and it would have been a waste since I will redo the road system now anyways.

heap
Jan 27, 2004

Anselm, you're doing great work and it's really cool to see your progress.

I have no idea how you can handle all the backseat driving that goes on around your project though. There's some good discussion (like this thread has shown) but I really hope you don't get bogged down with

Dear Mr Anselm, you need a pause button.
Dear Mr Anselm, I think the buildings shouldn't just pop up instantly.
Dear Mr Anselm, will there be police chases through the city?

I'm not trying to be mean, just want to give you kudos on how you're handling a very enthusiastic community :)

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co

heap posted:

Anselm, you're doing great work and it's really cool to see your progress.

I have no idea how you can handle all the backseat driving that goes on around your project though. There's some good discussion (like this thread has shown) but I really hope you don't get bogged down with

Dear Mr Anselm, you need a pause button.
Dear Mr Anselm, I think the buildings shouldn't just pop up instantly.
Dear Mr Anselm, will there be police chases through the city?

I'm not trying to be mean, just want to give you kudos on how you're handling a very enthusiastic community :)

Interesting point, let me elaborate on that.

This backseat driving is actually what surprised me most about the community (it's not like I have any experience with this).

These "stupid" questions can be pretty annoying, but I think I'm beginning to understand where they come from.
I think it has to do with people not being used to seeing something as complicated as a game at a very early stage.
Maybe most people aren't even familiar with the process of creation at all (we live in a mostly-consumer society after all).

So these questions are their idea of contribution.
It just means that they care so much about what they saw, that they want to be a part of it, even if it just means giving their opinion.

Framing it like this helps me to stay patient and even to appreciate these kinds of comments.

LonsomeSon
Nov 22, 2009

A fishperson in an intimidating hat!

anselm_eickhoff posted:

I think it has to do with people not being used to seeing something as complicated as a game at a very early stage. Maybe most people aren't even familiar with the process of creation at all (we live in a mostly-consumer society after all).

This part is actually pretty loving awesome to me. Like most 90s kids, I thought I wanted to grow up and make videogames for a living but was also completely floored by the reality in the industry (to the point where I never even tried, gently caress all that noise).

That being said, I'm still all kinds of curious about and interested in what game development is actually like. This is a pretty neat way for me to learn about at least this one creative process, and it requires basically zero effort on my part! :getin:

anselm_eickhoff posted:

Framing it like this helps me to stay patient and even to appreciate these kinds of comments.

Your remarkably levelheaded approach to basically everything involved in Citybound is basically awesome.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord

LonsomeSon posted:

Your remarkably levelheaded approach to basically everything involved in Citybound is basically awesome.
Yeah a ton of my faith comes from this right here. You've done a great job so far, especially with all the added pressure from the failure of SC2013. I'm incredibly excited to see this game grow :).

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

The fact that you can read through my ridiculous mega-posts shows amazing patience.

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
New update, everyone!

Space Kablooey
May 6, 2009


This maybe is what you were referring to when you mentioned dozen of tools that only intersection nerds would like, but do you have plans to let the player manage traffic stuff like the placement of traffic lights on certain intersections, set the speed of streets, and things like that?

Tytan
Sep 17, 2011

u wot m8?
Dude that looks amazing. Never thought I'd get this excited about spaghetti. As you said some automatic junctions would be good, and maybe some kind of circle tool for creating nice neat roundabouts?

Eiba
Jul 26, 2007


Oh wow. That looks incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful. A combination that usually indicates something has been done right.

Tytan posted:

Dude that looks amazing. Never thought I'd get this excited about spaghetti. As you said some automatic junctions would be good, and maybe some kind of circle tool for creating nice neat roundabouts?
Rather than a circle tool, I think a nice grid overlay (one you could rotate and move around) would give you what you need. As long as all your ramps start in the same places, your interchange will be nice and symmetrically rounded.

Edit: I want to make a city of entirely one lane twisty roads, adding new ones carefully around buildings only as traffic demands- a perfectly functional city that no human would be able to navigate in real life without going mad.

Eiba fucked around with this message at 03:50 on May 14, 2014

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord

Eiba posted:

Oh wow. That looks incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful. A combination that usually indicates something has been done right.
Yeah I read the video notes first before watching and still thought it may be convoluted, but nope. It's pretty amazing. I never really bothered with fancy road systems in SC4 or their modded variants, but this looks way easy. I really cant wait to see how this looks like in the coming months.

Phrosphor
Feb 25, 2007

Urbanisation

I am really impressed with that lane system!

I wonder if anyone has approached you with job offers yet.

Supeerme
Sep 13, 2010
I am excited for this game. However I want to recreate my town right down to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempstead)

Is it possible to do this?

lizzyinthesky
Mar 24, 2010

Take drugs! Kill a bear!
All of these videos make me go :3 I need to go to sleep with these playing, would surely relax me better.

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?
Anselm, I don't know how you make progress with this so fast while reading and responding everyone's city game diatribes at the same time. It's looking great, keep it up. Just don't get burnt out.

Obsidius
Nov 18, 2009

If you ever drop your
keys into a river of molten
lava, let 'em go, because
man, they're gone.

Supeerme posted:

I am excited for this game. However I want to recreate my town right down to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempstead)

Is it possible to do this?

Now I understand why the only people I have met from Hemel Hempstead used a helicopter for work.

Jamfrost
Jul 20, 2013

I'm too busy thinkin' about my baby. Oh I ain't got time for nothin' else.
Slime TrainerS

I am... impressed. That seems to be the sexiest road tool I've seen. Good to see you're on the road to success.

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013

That looks really cool. Will you make it so that you can actually enter a first person perspective too and walk around your city?

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



Just make sure you can build an SPUI. Supposedly traffic engineers love those.
Meanwhile, please don't build any more cloverleafs, they have giant weaving problems!

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
That is a fantastic road tool. I hope the intersectional AI won't be too tricky, particularly for multi-lane traffic lights (how many left turn only lanes, how many left turn or straight lanes, how many straight only lanes, etc). A lane based traffic system like this is admittedly a good use for agents, as much as I keep harping on how I don't like them.

Can you put nodal points in the middle of an already built road?

I wonder what would be an easy interface for overpass/underpasses? Maybe something like hold shift or alt? But how would you do multi-level overpasses, like the Baltimore I-695/I-70 junction? (I always thought that one was a thing of beauty)

zxqv8
Oct 21, 2010

Did somebody call about a Ravager problem?
Any chance that the road tool will have a way to start with 2/4/6/etc lanes when initially laid down? I like that you can add or subtract lanes at a whim, but I just know the ability to start at 4 or 6 or whatever is going to be a quality of life thing that I'll continually be hoping for.

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



zxqv8 posted:

Any chance that the road tool will have a way to start with 2/4/6/etc lanes when initially laid down? I like that you can add or subtract lanes at a whim, but I just know the ability to start at 4 or 6 or whatever is going to be a quality of life thing that I'll continually be hoping for.

That, and probably also having some fixed spacing between lanes in different direction (maybe as "dead" lanes that contain nothing but grass). And let players make lanes that run in the "wrong" direction if they really want. Hopefully there will be a way for mods to have intersection templates or generators, for making quick standardized roundabouts, highway interchanges, road/highway onramp systems etc.

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012
Yeah, that looks like a great start, but I think it needs to be fleshed out. Watching you use it, it appeared to be really fiddly, requiring a lot of very precise mousing, deleting pieces and starting over, breaking up your road into segments ahead of time based on your planned construction, etc.

I'm sure you're aware of all that, just thought I'd share my impressions.

e: Some specific feedback - instead of drawing all the lanes manually, I can imagine cases where it would be much easier and more convenient to be able to select a length of road, and then just click an "add lane" button a couple times.

Supraluminal fucked around with this message at 15:38 on May 14, 2014

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
Note: I think the majority of us here are "intersection nerds". :)

zxqv8
Oct 21, 2010

Did somebody call about a Ravager problem?
Has anyone ever seen and/or will we be able to make this?

https://goo.gl/maps/TlVXd


It's two lanes each way that cross one another with stop lights. There's no actual satellite image of it yet, but I work right near it and have no idea what the name of such an intersection is.

The tool presented seems like it might make this possible.

nimper
Jun 19, 2003

livin' in a hopium den

zxqv8 posted:

Has anyone ever seen and/or will we be able to make this?

https://goo.gl/maps/TlVXd


It's two lanes each way that cross one another with stop lights. There's no actual satellite image of it yet, but I work right near it and have no idea what the name of such an intersection is.

The tool presented seems like it might make this possible.

That's a Diverging Diamond intersection :)

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

That's a good start for a tool to get really fiddly with roads, but that's something the average user is going to find a little too fiddly. If I want a 4 lane road with wide sidewalks and a treed boulevard I don't want to have to manually lay down those elements every time. I want to just click on a road tool, click on the "4 lane boulevard" tool and lay down some roads. At the same time I'm not a traffic engineer but I know there's a lot of "correct" styles of highway junctions. I just want to click a button, junctions, and plop down a cloverleaf.

Now it's rad to be able to then fiddle with these pre-set items. Maybe the terrain means one "lobe" of my cloverleaf needs to be a bit funny shaped, that's where the tool comes in. Or if I want to design something very custom my self of course. But for "day to day" road building I really hope you give us a good simcity style of presets. Fiddling with each and every road from scratch and having to eye-ball all the geometry would really turn me off.

Another cool idea would be to select an area of roads and save it as a pre-set. So maybe you designed a really weird interchange but want to exactly reproduce it 10 more times and don't want to spend 10 min trying to draw it exactly the same every time. Or you see a bunch of nerds online made a bunch of realistic intersections and saved them as presets to share.

And for the roads them selves I'd much rather have one of those sort of street cross-section view tools to design my pre-set roads. Obviously have a tool like yours to then tweak situations in-game, but give us some standard pre-sets.

Also how are you going to differentiate between different speeds? A 4 lane avenue is very different from a 4 lane highway. Heck a highway shouldn't even be able to have buildings along it. Once again I think we'll need some hard-coded presets for things like "freeways" and "city road" and "lane". What about things like dirt country roads? Or super low-speed shared roads where cars can't go faster than bikes?

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

That's a good start for a tool to get really fiddly with roads, but that's something the average user is going to find a little too fiddly. If I want a 4 lane road with wide sidewalks and a treed boulevard I don't want to have to manually lay down those elements every time. I want to just click on a road tool, click on the "4 lane boulevard" tool and lay down some roads. At the same time I'm not a traffic engineer but I know there's a lot of "correct" styles of highway junctions. I just want to click a button, junctions, and plop down a cloverleaf.

Now it's rad to be able to then fiddle with these pre-set items. Maybe the terrain means one "lobe" of my cloverleaf needs to be a bit funny shaped, that's where the tool comes in. Or if I want to design something very custom my self of course. But for "day to day" road building I really hope you give us a good simcity style of presets. Fiddling with each and every road from scratch and having to eye-ball all the geometry would really turn me off.

This is the crux of what I was trying to say above. It looks like fun to be able to do super-detailed stuff with individual lanes every once in a while, but probably 95% of the time I just want to plop stuff down and get on with the game.

heap
Jan 27, 2004

anselm_eickhoff posted:

These "stupid" questions can be pretty annoying, but I think I'm beginning to understand where they come from.
I think it has to do with people not being used to seeing something as complicated as a game at a very early stage.
I'm a little late in responding to this, but I think you hit the nail on the head here. You've got a great attitude about it and it's really inspiring to see your project grow and develop.

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co

HardDisk posted:

This maybe is what you were referring to when you mentioned dozen of tools that only intersection nerds would like, but do you have plans to let the player manage traffic stuff like the placement of traffic lights on certain intersections, set the speed of streets, and things like that?

Yes, all of this will be handled automatic-by-default, manual-when-desired.


Eiba posted:

Rather than a circle tool, I think a nice grid overlay (one you could rotate and move around) would give you what you need. As long as all your ramps start in the same places, your interchange will be nice and symmetrically rounded.

There will be geometrical helpers. Guidelines, maybe grids.

Phrosphor posted:

I wonder if anyone has approached you with job offers yet.

In what way do you mean?

Supeerme posted:

I am excited for this game. However I want to recreate my town right down to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempstead)

Is it possible to do this?

Yes, it will be.

Shibawanko posted:

That looks really cool. Will you make it so that you can actually enter a first person perspective too and walk around your city?

Maybe in the very far future.

nielsm posted:

Just make sure you can build an SPUI. Supposedly traffic engineers love those.
Meanwhile, please don't build any more cloverleafs, they have giant weaving problems!

Haha, I looked forward to traffic engineer snobism :D

Iunnrais posted:

But how would you do multi-level overpasses, like the Baltimore junction?

You will be able to freely adjust the height of end-points, ramps, bridges, trenches and tunnels will be created as needed.

zxqv8 posted:

Any chance that the road tool will have a way to start with 2/4/6/etc lanes when initially laid down? I like that you can add or subtract lanes at a whim, but I just know the ability to start at 4 or 6 or whatever is going to be a quality of life thing that I'll continually be hoping for.

Yep, I'll add something like that.

nielsm posted:

That, and probably also having some fixed spacing between lanes in different direction (maybe as "dead" lanes that contain nothing but grass). And let players make lanes that run in the "wrong" direction if they really want. Hopefully there will be a way for mods to have intersection templates or generators, for making quick standardized roundabouts, highway interchanges, road/highway onramp systems etc.

Yes, there will be median lanes and intersection generators that you can mod.

Baronjutter posted:

That's a good start for a tool to get really fiddly with roads, but that's something the average user is going to find a little too fiddly. If I want a 4 lane road with wide sidewalks and a treed boulevard I don't want to have to manually lay down those elements every time. I want to just click on a road tool, click on the "4 lane boulevard" tool and lay down some roads. At the same time I'm not a traffic engineer but I know there's a lot of "correct" styles of highway junctions. I just want to click a button, junctions, and plop down a cloverleaf.

With the planned road templates and intersection generators that should all be possible.

Baronjutter posted:

Another cool idea would be to select an area of roads and save it as a pre-set. So maybe you designed a really weird interchange but want to exactly reproduce it 10 more times and don't want to spend 10 min trying to draw it exactly the same every time. Or you see a bunch of nerds online made a bunch of realistic intersections and saved them as presets to share.

That could be a simple mod.

Baronjutter posted:

Also how are you going to differentiate between different speeds? A 4 lane avenue is very different from a 4 lane highway. Heck a highway shouldn't even be able to have buildings along it. Once again I think we'll need some hard-coded presets for things like "freeways" and "city road" and "lane". What about things like dirt country roads? Or super low-speed shared roads where cars can't go faster than bikes?

I think you will be able to just toggle the road/lane type and it will propagate its type to new connected roads/lanes.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

So we're getting presets, intersection generation with options, and different types of lanes, perfect.

Also I really really hope we can do dutch style fully separated bike infra. I also hope pedestrians are not ignored and we can determine how wide sidewalks are, or at least have a few different types/widths. Sidewalks can get just as jammed as roads can, designing areas for good pedestrian flow can be very important. That busy shopping high street with a subway entrance is going to need a good 12m wide sidewalk.

I also hope pedestrians flow more freely than cars. Less constrained by paths and more free-roaming. I think the first Cities in Motion handled this nicely. Roads had sidewalks but pedestrians were like a gas, they'd simply flow through every crack. They'd cut through the field, they'd go through the building's parking lot. They didn't care about pre-set paths but would simply freely path anywhere they could walk, be it an official sidewalk or just a gap between two buildings. They'd also cross streets just about anywhere they could get away with it, only using crosswalks if there was one near enough. Basically they acted like real pedestrians rather than "tiny cars".

Bikes are an interesting half way point. They mostly follow official paths like cars do, specially if you have good cycle infra, but they can and do often take creative and unofficial shortcuts. And all they have to do is hop off their bike and walk it and they are instantly a pedestrian with all the flexibility that entails.

Check out this guy's youtube for some bike infra inspiration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHFLiPIMEo

reignonyourparade
Nov 15, 2012
From your whole "delete a big section so that I put down to halves to have a break in the middle" you should add the ability to just split a chunk of road into two chunks.

Baggins
Feb 21, 2007

Like a Great Wind!
You better watch your back Anselm, a new challenger appears!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/361428954/city-simulation-game-made-immensely-more-realistic

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Ohhh god the people in the video. Watch the video.

MyFaceBeHi
Apr 9, 2008

I was popular, once.
I only watched some of that video and all I got from it was the people in the video looked like basement dwelling nerdlings and they care a lot about bike lanes and "vacuum tube rail" or something!

I wasn't sure if they were making a city builder or a statement.

Ofaloaf
Feb 15, 2013

More disconcerting, it seems like they're intending to still use a grid system and mention using puzzle pieces like in NAM for stuff like the bike paths.

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ShineDog
May 21, 2007
It is inevitable!
Will you eventually have accidents/breakdowns or similar failures in the transport network?

This might sound a kind of pointless frivolity, but I guess it's interesting to me since it's kind of the industry I work in. It's really interesting to see the difference between a well designed and a poorly designed road network when it comes to routing around and recovering from a problem.

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