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Tres Burritos
Sep 3, 2009

Mandalay posted:

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..

We'll see. I'm also very skeptical of the 50km x 50km target. I would love to be proved wrong but the reason you write games in c++ instead of JavaScript is performance.

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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

He always tactfully says he'll see or he'll consider it. Actual promised feature list isn't that big and still fairly up in the air. I have a lot of faith in Anselm, I'm really rooting for him, but most people are expecting something at least as complex as simcity4, but with huge maps and procedural buildings and way more complicated roads and a whole kitchen sink of other features. Huge corporate teams have trouble making this poo poo, anselm is just one (very talented) guy. We may end up "only" getting a very simplistic but solid game that disappoints a lot of people who projected their dream game onto this project despite it delivering everything actually promised (like banished). Or maybe we'll get amazing bones for anselm and modders to grow the game over time into peoples dream game, it may be something like dwarf fortress that is always in development (but hopefully doesn't go off the rails into useless feature hell). Or maybe this whole thing is an awesome scam and he'll take all the money and retire somewhere and swim around in a mountain of hats Scrooge McDuck style.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jul 22, 2014

gman14msu
Mar 10, 2009
Regardless of size, some type of regional system is important. Basically municipalities in the same region interacting with each other, but each operating independently in some ways. I.e., pollution or commuters can cross borders but public school students, and the taxes paid for those students, don't. Having multiple municipalities in some form, I think, is essential to get that feel of a region rather than one big blob of a city with everything in it. Whether there's some way to do it all in a 50x50 km map or several 10x10 km maps depends on the engine and gameplay choices.

No city game has gone with user drawn borders which could follow geographic features like rivers or ridge lines. Splitting up a 50x50 map with user drawn borders would probably be the ideal situation for a region.

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
I'll just make the same 1x1km town and replicate it 50 times, linking each town to its neighbors in some kind of terrifying grid.

Call it the OmniGrid. :awesomelon:

drunkill
Sep 25, 2007

me @ ur posting
Fallen Rib
The mapsize will shrink as the game continues to be made. More detail and things going on will require an artificial limit to the sizes unless simulation is faked on a larger scale.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


drunkill posted:

The mapsize will shrink as the game continues to be made. More detail and things going on will require an artificial limit to the sizes unless simulation is faked on a larger scale.

The only reason for an artificial limit is to avoid people complaining about performance. A farming community could perhaps be 100x the size of a dense metropolis in land area without taxing the system any more.

I don't see a reason to limit based on assumptions about your target hardware, in this case. A warning that large cities may slow the system down would probably be warranted.

ToastyPotato
Jun 23, 2005

CONVICTED OF DISPLAYING HIS PEANUTS IN PUBLIC
And we also have no idea how long this game will even take to be made and what an average PC is going to look like, power wise, when it is done, so talking about adding limitations now is pretty stupid, especially when the base engine itself is still largely unfinished.

FutonForensic
Nov 11, 2012

DrSunshine posted:

I'll just make the same 1x1km town and replicate it 50 times, linking each town to its neighbors in some kind of terrifying grid.

Call it the OmniGrid. :awesomelon:

Is this you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

Jamfrost
Jul 20, 2013

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

I've never been so scared.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

ToastyPotato posted:

And we also have no idea how long this game will even take to be made and what an average PC is going to look like, power wise, when it is done, so talking about adding limitations now is pretty stupid, especially when the base engine itself is still largely unfinished.
Future computer hardware is kinda irrelevant unless the program can handle it. Even now some devs are making games that can't utilize 64bit or multicores properly. :(

The Glumslinger
Sep 24, 2008

Coach Nagy, you want me to throw to WHAT side of the field?


Hair Elf

Poil posted:

Future computer hardware is kinda irrelevant unless the program can handle it. Even now some devs are making games that can't utilize 64bit or multicores properly. :(


Threading is really hard :(

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?
You guys are reading way too much into this 50x50km city thing. Anselm by all means appears to be an excellent programmer, but he's just set new maps at an arbitrary 50x50 size. He could have set it to 500x500; it doesn't take much to run a blank map. He hasn't tested building a city that anywhere near fills the map yet (correct me if I'm wrong Anselm), and even if he does and it runs OK, the game is still missing a lot of features at this stage.

I'm just worried that everyone is going to be angry when cities end up being 10x10 and "we were promised 50x50!"

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013

The solution seems to me to simply use regions, like in Simcity 4. That was just a great system.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...
I'm glad that we are all designing the game for the OP, making it should be easy for him thanks to us! :allears:

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?
I wonder how SimCity 4 calculates traffic flow to/from other cities in the region. The hardest part of a region-based simulation would probably be getting accurate commute data without having to actually simulate the surrounding cities. Sharing power and stuff isn't so bad because that can just be a number.

Does SimCity 4 take into account cities that aren't a direct connection? Like if I have a large map connected to a small map, and the small map has a highway running right through it to another large map, can people travel through the small map to commute between the two large maps? That could get pretty complicated.

Nition fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Jul 22, 2014

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Nition posted:

I wonder how SimCity 4 calculates traffic flow to/from other cities in the region? The hardest part of a region-based simulation would probably be getting accurate commute data without having to actually simulate the surrounding cities.

Poorly. Traffic can transit through regions, including in a loop, potentially resulting in a traffic ouroboros that only gets larger and larger until you demolish the roads.

Or put up toll booths and make obscene sums of revenue :getin:

There's no TTL concept or original region info, just a number on a connection road.

Jamfrost
Jul 20, 2013

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

Volmarias posted:

I'm glad that we are all designing the game for the OP, making it should be easy for him thanks to us! :allears:

I demand a driverless car system for cities with tech prowess. It will reduce fatalities and congestion! It is neat though to see Google working on robo-cars.

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?
I demand a 3D region grid where I can connect my underground cities, ground-level cities, and sky cities with transport links.

Nah but to be fair, other people are mostly making reasonable suggestions, it's just that many of them (including a region system) would take a lot of extra work to implement.

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

I knew what you were gonna link before I even clicked that. But no, I only wish!! Magnasanti: It's truly an inspiration to all city-builders everywhere. :allears:

Jamfrost
Jul 20, 2013

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

DrSunshine posted:

Magnasanti: It's truly an inspiration to all city-builders everywhere. :allears:

If you want to realize a terrible dystopia where people are nothing more than brainwashed cogs in a machine, then yes. No one lives past 50 in that city. It's scawy and interesting.

http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city

Elentor
Dec 14, 2004

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

My favorite part is definitely him explaining the names.

"Armadasanti translates to floating fortress city".

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
Wow, missed a lot of discussion, I will reply soon.

Meanwhile, quick update:
 
The Road to Alpha, Week 20 - The Calm Before The Storm

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

All safely ignored useless speculation discussion for the most part.

The Deadly Hume
May 26, 2004

Let's get a little crazy. Let's have some fun.

Nition posted:

I wonder how SimCity 4 calculates traffic flow to/from other cities in the region. The hardest part of a region-based simulation would probably be getting accurate commute data without having to actually simulate the surrounding cities. Sharing power and stuff isn't so bad because that can just be a number.

Does SimCity 4 take into account cities that aren't a direct connection? Like if I have a large map connected to a small map, and the small map has a highway running right through it to another large map, can people travel through the small map to commute between the two large maps? That could get pretty complicated.
It kind of does but it does so pretty badly, which isn't helped by the neighbourhoods generally being out of synch. What you'll often find is you'll get a shitload of traffic routing around the corner of one tile that's travelling between two other tiles - to jobs or shops that might not even exist on the destination tile once you've edited that tile.

It was seriously the most annoying thing about SimCity 4 and one of the reasons I don't do much with SC4 anymore. (And if anything Simcity 2013 handled it even worse.)

Pathfinding is a really tough programming problem though - doubly so when you're trying to simulate traffic congestion along with it. So it'll be interesting to me to see how it's handled here, and how well it scales.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Yeah, the pathing limitations is the only thing holding simcity4 back from being nearly perfect. But no amount of mods or tweaks can fix it unless maxis made that poo poo open source or something. And even then, pathing is loving hard to do right/cheap.

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
Livestream today 4PM GMT, 9AM PDT, 12PM EDT on http://twitch.tv/ae_play

More details: http://www.reddit.com/r/Citybound/comments/2brylj/livestream_today_4pm_gmt_9am_pdt_12pm_edt/

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009




It's on now, or at least the preparations are.

Cruseydr
May 18, 2010

I am not an atomic playboy.
Yay I got my question answered live!!! :swoon::allears:

Ineptitude
Mar 2, 2010

Heed my words and become a master of the Heart (of Thorns).

DrSunshine posted:

I'll just make the same 1x1km town and replicate it 50 times, linking each town to its neighbors in some kind of terrifying grid.

Call it the OmniGrid. :awesomelon:

If the map is 50x50 you need 2500 1x1 cities to get the same size :eng101:

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Interesting article on japanese zoning. They get by nationally with only 12 zones.

Subyng
May 4, 2013
Re: scale versus granularity discussion

How about a system where your city consists of a bunch of nested black boxes? Say you have a 50x50 km city. That city would be divided into regions of arbitrary size (say, municipalities), each a black box with certain inputs and outputs. Select one of those regions and you can then look into the box. That region would then consist of smaller regions (say, neighbourhoods), again, each of them a black box, which you can look into. At each level, you have different management options depending on the scale you are currently viewing your city at. All of the different things you can do eventually funneled into a set of outputs (which might be encapsulated by the attributes of people entering/leaving the region). The surrounding neighborhoods will take in those outputs, but run the parameters through a simplified model so that other areas of your city will still react to changes you make in another.

So, for example, instead of running a traffic simulation for the entire 50x50km city, you only need to run it for the 5x5km neighborhood that you're looking at. Traffic entering you neighborhood would be based on a simplified model that just gives you a few parameters. For example, traffic density over time, composition of traffic by car/pedestrian/bike, composition of population by <whatever way we want to categorize our population> etc.

Subyng fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Jul 27, 2014

Crash74
May 11, 2009
What are the plans for Mapping and Terraforming? Is something like sim city 4 planned where you can upload a image and out pops a 3d map? Pull off from google maps? Draw out your own maps?

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Ineptitude posted:

If the map is 50x50 you need 2500 1x1 cities to get the same size :eng101:

50 times each side, obviously.

Ah yeah, you got me, haha!

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Crash74 posted:

What are the plans for Mapping and Terraforming? Is something like sim city 4 planned where you can upload a image and out pops a 3d map? Pull off from google maps? Draw out your own maps?

Anything outside of what's been shown in his video updates is up in the air really. He's expressed a passion for pretty terrain though and said he'd like to have both random maps and the ability to generate from height maps or what not, plus nice tools to hand craft or edit.

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?

Subyng posted:

Re: scale versus granularity discussion

How about a system where your city consists of a bunch of nested black boxes? Say you have a 50x50 km city. That city would be divided into regions of arbitrary size (say, municipalities), each a black box with certain inputs and outputs. Select one of those regions and you can then look into the box. That region would then consist of smaller regions (say, neighbourhoods), again, each of them a black box, which you can look into. At each level, you have different management options depending on the scale you are currently viewing your city at. All of the different things you can do eventually funneled into a set of outputs (which might be encapsulated by the attributes of people entering/leaving the region). The surrounding neighborhoods will take in those outputs, but run the parameters through a simplified model so that other areas of your city will still react to changes you make in another.

So, for example, instead of running a traffic simulation for the entire 50x50km city, you only need to run it for the 5x5km neighborhood that you're looking at. Traffic entering you neighborhood would be based on a simplified model that just gives you a few parameters. For example, traffic density over time, composition of traffic by car/pedestrian/bike, composition of population by <whatever way we want to categorize our population> etc.

I think not only is the a good solution but it's the Only Solution to an arbitrarily large city area. This must be essentially what SimCity 4 is doing with its regions. The only real difference is that here I think you're suggesting that some sort of macro-management could still be performed on multiple "regions" at once?

Having said that, this would be so hard to get right, and prone to all sorts of weird edge-case (and not so edge-case) bugs and issues. There's just no way a one-man operation is going to get this solution working well unless Anselm is a genius with infinite motivation. Having the whole city run the same simulation is just so much simpler, even considering the extra optimisation work required.

Subyng
May 4, 2013

Nition posted:

I think not only is the a good solution but it's the Only Solution to an arbitrarily large city area. This must be essentially what SimCity 4 is doing with its regions. The only real difference is that here I think you're suggesting that some sort of macro-management could still be performed on multiple "regions" at once?

Having said that, this would be so hard to get right, and prone to all sorts of weird edge-case (and not so edge-case) bugs and issues. There's just no way a one-man operation is going to get this solution working well unless Anselm is a genius with infinite motivation. Having the whole city run the same simulation is just so much simpler, even considering the extra optimisation work required.

Yeah, basically you would be able to micro/macro manage depending on what level of the city you're focused on (individual road -> city block -> neighborhood -> municipality -> city -> metro area...just as an overly ambitious example). You're right that getting everything to mesh well would be a challenge, and it would require lots of testing and many iterations to get the "formula" for the black box to a satisfactory state. Having the whole city run the same simulation is of course the optimal solution but we already know that there will at some point be a performance wall. So the question is simply at what point do we want to black box our city and create a new connected region, and that's where the fact that these boundaries can be arbitrary comes in. If we let the players decide this then the system is much more scalable with regards to computer performance.

Subyng fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jul 28, 2014

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
New Update!



The Road to Alpha, Week 22 - Let's do this!

Ofaloaf
Feb 15, 2013

Using your livestream audience as a means to solving programming challenges almost feels like cheating, but drat, that's a good way to use that.

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
I really like the merging lanes. Before, it was really jarring, now it looks awesome! Progress!

Have you gotten into agent AI yet with regards to lane changing and navigating intersections?

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Jamfrost
Jul 20, 2013

I'm too busy thinkin' about my baby. Oh I ain't got time for nothin' else.
Slime TrainerS
Nice little joke in there, anselm.

That road building tool continues to become more and more fantastic.

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