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anselm_eickhoff posted:The map size right now is actually 50km x 50km 
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Jul 16, 2014 15:40
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Still would be nice to be able to link the nebulous outside "region" to another city you control.  Buuuuut.... yes. 50km x 50km is very nice. That's around twice the square mileage of NYC, if maybe not the full length of NYC. (NYC is kinda long and narrow) On the other hand, 50km x 50km is not quite enough for the NYC Metropolitan area (which would require 185 x 185km). On the third hand, filling that amount of space will take ages. On the fourth hand, collaborative efforts could be fun. I have too many hands.
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Jul 16, 2014 16:05
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I would empty quote this if that was still a thing because this is amazing news.
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Jul 16, 2014 16:09
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anselm_eickhoff posted:The map size right now is actually 50km x 50km  Are you working with some kind of black magic or is this the hard limit the engine can handle before putting in anything else? I don't understand much about the processing requirements, but I'll be incredibly amazed if this game can simulate the entirety of NYC with the level of detail you are proposing here.I mean, this is what 50x50 looks like:  Would be so awesome though.
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Jul 16, 2014 16:45
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Don't stop until I can recreate the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area!!  
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Jul 16, 2014 16:51
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My take on map sizes: Making the map physically big right now is very easy because the game isn't really in yet. Anyone (ok not me) can make a 50x50km flat area to draw splines in. I'm also sure the game will be able to handle a 50x50 map covered in countryside, farms, and a few towns. The question though is if it can handle a true 50x50 urbanized area. Mass-market games like the simcity series could probably handle bigger maps, but they sized them based on "how big of a fully built out map can our average target computer handle?" They'd rather give people small maps no one will have problems with than big maps some people do have problems with. In fact the Simcity4 large map on release had a lot of people complaining that the game becomes unbearably slow once they start to fill it up. So in that way it's a bit of a design choice. Do you set the map size far smaller than it can be in the name of avoiding potential complaints about performance, or do you let people push their computer to the limit knowing if they pick a 50x50 map they may not be able to fill it all up. Of course if the map size is an option that would solve a lot of problems. Still, people WILL complain. If maps are too small people will complain they are too small. If maps are too big to fully build-out people will complain "I've been playing this city for 3 months and my computer keeps crashing when I go past 8 million people!" So will we see 50x50 maps? Probably! Will we be able to build new-york or moscow? I doubt it. Unless he super abstracts traffic and population I just don't see the game being able to handle the pathfinding for 10+ million people. I'd much rather see an improved simcity4 style region system and more detailed simulations, maybe even with built-in PBM features for nerds like me who used to try to do collaborative regions.
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Jul 16, 2014 16:59
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Donated 20 bucks towards a new computer for you  With 50x50 maps, you'll probably need it.
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Jul 16, 2014 18:24
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Baronjutter posted:So in that way it's a bit of a design choice. Do you set the map size far smaller than it can be in the name of avoiding potential complaints about performance, or do you let people push their computer to the limit knowing if they pick a 50x50 map they may not be able to fill it all up. Your post is exactly right, 50x50km is easy for me to "offer" right now, if it will be playable depends on how well-optimized the game will be and how good your PC is. But I will go this route and won't add any artificial restrictions. In other news: Read all about yesterdays livestream & please consider donating for a new PC For those of you who watched it, also let me know your feedback of course! Edit: thanks Meatbag, that was quick!
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Jul 16, 2014 18:25
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Hat fund is growing.
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Jul 16, 2014 18:34
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anselm_eickhoff posted:Read all about yesterdays livestream & please consider donating for a new PC Donated a some spare balance I suddenly discovered I had on my PayPal account. Could you consider putting up another donate button for sending in Euro instead of USD?
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Jul 16, 2014 18:47
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Donated $20 as well because you are awesome anselm and this game is awesome and everybody who likes SimCity(!5) is awesome.
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Jul 16, 2014 18:48
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nielsm posted:Donated a some spare balance I suddenly discovered I had on my PayPal account. Here is one just for EUR Thanks in advance! Thanks everyone else also!
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Jul 16, 2014 19:49
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anselm_eickhoff posted:Your post is exactly right, 50x50km is easy for me to "offer" right now, if it will be playable depends on how well-optimized the game will be and how good your PC is. Consider adding a warning at least when people set it above whatever arbitrary size seems appropriate for a low-to-mid computer.
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Jul 16, 2014 19:59
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reignonyourparade posted:Consider adding a warning at least when people set it above whatever arbitrary size seems appropriate for a low-to-mid computer. Well you wont really "set" a map size before you start, you just start building a city and the map and terrain and everything will grow with your city. A warning when it gets close to too big for a smooth experience is a good idea.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:05
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reignonyourparade posted:Consider adding a warning at least when people set it above whatever arbitrary size seems appropriate for a low-to-mid computer. Better: Collect telemetry data during alpha and beta, typical framerates for cities of particular sizes on various hardware configurations. With enough data, you should then be able to dynamically produce a "recommended maximum" city size based on the player's computer. Don't prevent anyone from choosing any absurdly large size, just give them a warning that it might be frustrating to play. (Bonus feature: When the game peaks out on framerate, try to determine whether it's due to CPU, physical memory size, memory bandwidth, or GPU.)
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Jul 16, 2014 20:06
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anselm_eickhoff posted:Well you wont really "set" a map size before you start, you just start building a city and the map and terrain and everything will grow with your city. Woah that's interesting. I'd love to have to buy land to expand onto. That's a feature I liked in the first Cities XL or what ever it was called. How are neighbour connections handled then if the edge just keeps expanding?
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Jul 16, 2014 20:08
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Baronjutter posted:Woah that's interesting. I'd love to have to buy land to expand onto. That's a feature I liked in the first Cities XL or what ever it was called. yeah that's kind of the problem with this approach, I guess a good inital way to do it would be to just have them off to infinity and connection roads automatically extend when the map extends.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:18
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anselm_eickhoff posted:yeah that's kind of the problem with this approach, I guess a good inital way to do it would be to just have them off to infinity and connection roads automatically extend when the map extends. What if the map extends into mountains or a river or something? How will the game know how to nicely lay the road in a way that doesn't look ridiculous? Seems like a lot of work to then code in a road-building AI or what ever. Maybe just leave it up to the player to continue the road off to the new edge? Also I hope it's optional, some people like to just fill up a little map and have nice defined edges. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jul 16, 2014 |
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Jul 16, 2014 20:21
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anselm_eickhoff posted:Well you wont really "set" a map size before you start, you just start building a city and the map and terrain and everything will grow with your city. That's really awesome and interesting, but how will it work? Will you have to buy/acquire extra space to build on, or will it grow naturally as you build towards the edges? Either way would be great, the first for those who want to be able to afford expansion as an extra challenge, the latter for the more casual player (like me) who would love to start with a small plot of land and really feel the growth of your town-city-metropolis, but not have to worry about buying more land. Seriously, being able to start with a 1km by 1km plot of land, put down a few farms and a small village and expanding it slowly but surely would give me a sense of accomplishment I wouldn't get if I started out with a bigass plot of land. Perhaps a combination of the two would work too. Like you'd acquire more land as your city grows but if you want to expand in a certain direction (because you want to add an industrial area away from your farmer's community) you can buy extra land.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:21
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Taeke posted:That's really awesome and interesting, but how will it work? Will you have to buy/acquire extra space to build on, or will it grow naturally as you build towards the edges? Either way would be great, the first for those who want to be able to afford expansion as an extra challenge, the latter for the more casual player (like me) who would love to start with a small plot of land and really feel the growth of your town-city-metropolis, but not have to worry about buying more land. I will go for the "grow naturally" route, but actually having to buy new land would be a nice new mechanic that a mod could explore. Thanks for describing this feeling of accomplishment that you expect to get from this! I hope it actually turns out like that, but it makes rational sense so far.
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Jul 16, 2014 23:09
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Baronjutter posted:What if the map extends into mountains or a river or something? How will the game know how to nicely lay the road in a way that doesn't look ridiculous? Seems like a lot of work to then code in a road-building AI or what ever. Well good road-building AI would be nice to have anyways, maybe it can assist the player in some other cases or just make the road laying UI more intelligent in general. I think most of these questions will get resolved when I actually implement this growing map thing.
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Jul 16, 2014 23:15
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It would also be nice if we could sort of see what the new terrain will be like at least. A city would never expand into terrain it has no idea about, it's not like they'd need to send explorers. Maybe just have terrain that's grayed out for a few km. Also how would this work for custom maps? What if someone say wants to import terrain data from a real place, how would that then work for the expanding/random maps?
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Jul 16, 2014 23:17
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ExtraNoise posted:I love this idea. What if the dots were simple geometric shapes to help make it colorblind friendly? Circles, diamonds, triangles, and I really like this idea (aesthetically). But as someone who isn't colourblind, I'd say to really ask them about what would work best (pretty much just ask Baronjutter - they seem to be the best person to look for for input as is! ^^)
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Jul 16, 2014 23:25
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The vast majority of "colour blind" people can see colour, just have a hard time seeing some exact shades, and sometimes get certain shades of different colours mixed up. As long as there is contrast, specially with the luminosity, it's a-ok. For instance dark blue and yellow will never be confused. But something like a light green and a light brown are easy to mix up. Or if you get red and green but at the exact same "lightness" it's very hard to tell apart. But if you do lighter green and a darker red it's no problem. This is how a lot of colour blind people tell colours apart, but how dark/light they are and our brain associate that with different colours. I know in traffic lights that a red light is darker than a green light so it's easier to tell from a distance. Newer LED traffic lights have an almost blueish tinge to the green and are super easy to tell apart, but old ones can be tricky. 8% of men are colour blind so it's a pretty big demographic.
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Jul 16, 2014 23:38
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Baronjutter posted:It would also be nice if we could sort of see what the new terrain will be like at least. A city would never expand into terrain it has no idea about, it's not like they'd need to send explorers. Maybe just have terrain that's grayed out for a few km. Of course you would be able to already see further. Well if you want to use custom terrain data, that will have it's own size limit of course and can't be extended beyond that.
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Jul 17, 2014 12:51
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Just found this thread and this game is intriguing as hell just from a technological standpoint. I don't think many (any?) "fully fledged" games have been written in Three.js or Node. It'll be interesting to see how it performs. Fake edit: poo poo game dev tycoon used node-webkit. Now I have to go buy it just to see how it works.
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Jul 17, 2014 13:34
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A naturally growing city could work if you ever intend region play. The first part of building a new city would be picking any point on the map, and your city is centered in a small tile based on that point. Your city would expand as others have described, with your borders shifting as your population density increases or you purchase more land. The added benefit of something like this might be city borders that mirror actual cities better. If you start a city close to a metro, you might find your expanding in a certain direction stops when you hit an existing city border, allowing you to create sprawling suburbs that are actually different cities. The biggest problem with this is obviously the resources. You''d have to tone down the detail and use simplified models to represent everything outside the current city borders so your small suburb isn't bogged down by the calculations of the big metro next to it or by any other city on the region. Co-op play also comes to mind. You could have several people working on a city metro by splitting it up into suburbs and districts.
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Jul 17, 2014 14:28
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xergm posted:If you start a city close to a metro, you might find your expanding in a certain direction stops when you hit an existing city border, allowing you to create sprawling suburbs that are actually different cities. Even without a region system, you could probably save yourself a lot of work dealing with expanding borders and connections by letting the player select in which direction(s) their city will have neighbors, and then not allowing the map to expand any further in those directions. Not being able to expand into neighboring cities would make sense, and as long as there aren't neighbors in every direction the map could still grow forever.
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Jul 17, 2014 15:51
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anselm_eickhoff posted:Of course you would be able to already see further. If you need to do neighbour connections when your city doesn't fill the whole map, my suggestion is just extend the road as a straight line but give it like a semi-transparent, ethereal-looking shader so it's clearly representational instead of real. Put an arrow marker or something on the city border as well to further indicate "this is a region connection". When the city size grows, the player will need to manually extend the road to the new border. That wouldn't work well if you let players connect cities in a larger region, but it sounds like that's not your plan anyway. Trying to do some sort of AI controlled road system would be a nightmare and users would always complain about the AI's road placement anyway.
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Jul 19, 2014 00:06
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If my google map measuring tool is correct, a 50km x 50km square is enough for all 5 boroughs of NYC to scale, with bits and pieces of New Jersey (including all of Hoboken, Secacaucus, Jersey City, Fort Lee, Bayonne and most of Newark) as well as parts of Long Island. So 50km x 50km square would have a perimeter of 200km correct? I am not misremembering my elementary school geometry here? This square I have drawn is 200km when all four sides are added. 
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Jul 19, 2014 00:39
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At its furthest points, London is 55km east to west and 45km north to south.
Metrication fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Jul 19, 2014 |
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Jul 19, 2014 10:05
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anselm_eickhoff posted:The map size right now is actually 50km x 50km This is a dream come true.
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Jul 19, 2014 10:38
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Tres Burritos posted:Just found this thread and this game is intriguing as hell just from a technological standpoint. I don't think many (any?) "fully fledged" games have been written in Three.js or Node. It'll be interesting to see how it performs. I'm worried that performance won't be good since everyone in this thread is suggesting what appears to be every feature under the sun and Good Guy Anselm hasn't really rejected any of them. I want to believe, but unproven technology worries me..
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Jul 21, 2014 20:23
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I'd much rather have "little" 5x5 or 10x10 maps but with lots of detail and gameplay vs massive 50x50 maps with no depth or charm. Cities XL proved bigger isn't always better.
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Jul 21, 2014 20:27
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Baronjutter posted:I'd much rather have "little" 5x5 or 10x10 maps but with lots of detail and gameplay vs massive 50x50 maps with no depth or charm. Cities XL proved bigger isn't always better. Cities XL didn't really prove anything because it was basically bad at everything it did. Unless every map is going to be specifically hand crafted, there is literally no downside to allowing huge map sizes. And crafted maps for this kind of game SUCK because ultimately there are going to optimal builds for each one discovered. Map editing tools and random map generation is the way it goes for this sort of game.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:21
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I didn't mean anything about bland maps, I meant bland cities due to lack of personalization and details or the little things even mattering because the scale focus is so massive. When you make the scale of the game absolutely massive you have to sacrifice your simulation detail.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:28
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Keep in mind, Dwarf Fortress is what happens when you want to simulate everything. DF can run reasonably, but it tends to bog down massively on its own complexity over time. Definitely do fake some things as needed to keep the simulation complexity manageable. As long as something about the size of an SC4 large city is possible I'd be happy.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:38
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Baronjutter posted:I didn't mean anything about bland maps, I meant bland cities due to lack of personalization and details or the little things even mattering because the scale focus is so massive. When you make the scale of the game absolutely massive you have to sacrifice your simulation detail. That's fine but you can't use Cities XL as proof of that when the game was completely bad from just about every perspective you could examine it from. And no other city game has tried to go that big.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:39
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Baronjutter posted:I'd much rather have "little" 5x5 or 10x10 maps but with lots of detail and gameplay vs massive 50x50 maps with no depth or charm. Cities XL proved bigger isn't always better. As long as it doesn't end up as Townbound like SimCity 5, I'll be a happy camper. The map size really just feels like a limiter being removed allowing you to go as big as you can handle before that burning smell hits you. I remember when we submitted names for the shops/buildings, so there's a bit of personalization already. Oh man, what if we could name streets? I'd go for max goofiness. SimCity 5 is a Countach, very flashy. Townbound will hopefully be a Gallardo with its good handling representing good simulation(Top Gear, mmm). SimCity 4 is the Citreon Saxo due to all the modding. Boom.
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Jul 21, 2014 22:00
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Honestly I think it's way too early to really say much about city sizes. Not enough work has been done on the game to see how it all plays out. The bigger a city gets the more complex its systems get. We've barely got the most basic of roads and zones right now and only cars. There's still so much that needs to be added in. Then there's the ultimate question: is it fun? Does the massive map make the game more fun, or could those resources have been traded for something else? Of course it also really brings up questions as to level of detail. A game focused on building a 50x50km city will have a level of detail suited to that. You'd really need automated road building systems and lots of automation in general to make it not tedious. You'd never be getting into details like worrying about individual intersections because you'd have thousands of them, let alone deciding about the street furniture or parking in your historic district. You'd of course trade that lack of detail for bigger-picture stuff. Massive highway projects, rail systems actually to proper scale and scope, being able to zoom out and see a huge endless city in front of you. There's pros and cons, but I don't think you can have it both ways. Eventually the game will have to set a target scope and design around that. If the scope is smaller we'll have more detail and flavour, if it's bigger we'll have bigger maps and more realistic scale. So far even the biggest city anselm has made would barely be a village, even in sc4 scale. We really have no clue what the system will support. I doubt the poor simcity2013 devs set out to have such tiny maps, they just got stuck with a lovely engine and made a super lovely traffic system, plus were bad and dumb and probably ugly. Personally I'd solve the "scale issue" by having smaller simcity4-ish sized maps. Maybe 5x5 to 10x10 or so. If you're really crafting your city, detailing and personalizing it, that's more than enough space. Make a simulation that can support a filled-up map of that size and put in as much detail as possible knowing the target map size. Then have suburbs and farms and all that more region-level things. You'd zoom out to the region map and build your surrounding areas with tools better suited for that scale and a simulation better suited for the scale. Both areas would be running at the same time, not like simcity4 regions that get frozen, there'd just be a border where the simulation gets far more abstracted and you have a slightly different toolbox. That's not going to happen, but it's what I'd do. Best of both worlds, or at least as close as one can get. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 22:12
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