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German/English understanding population but not the primary language. Good internet infrastructure, likes tea, city on the coast. I'm guessing Denmark, Holland, or Scandinavia.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:14
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Are any of those places famous for their tea-liking though?
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Oct 15, 2014 22:29
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OwlFancier posted:German/English understanding population but not the primary language. Good internet infrastructure, likes tea, city on the coast. Scandinavia has a fondness for coffee not tea. Denmark is a part of Scandinavia.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:34
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Tea drinking I dunno, but the rest sort of fits. Also I never know whether to call Denmark Scandinavia because it doesn't have the mountains in it. Edit: Apparently the mountain range is named after the region, not the other way around. Makes sense. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 22:37
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OwlFancier posted:Tea drinking I dunno, but the rest sort of fits.  Denmark yes, Finland NO. The very word Scandinavia comes from a danish (now swedish) region called Scania so it's a very Danish thing. Fins like to flip out a little if you include them in Scandinavia though. Depending on one's definitions, Finland, Iceland, and Greenland are "Nordic" though, along with Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. And maybe Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania... Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 22:40
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My vote is Russia. Cities that are bound mean good times, comrade general.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:43
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Baronjutter posted:
There are 5 Nordic countries and they are Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland. Greenland is not a part of Nordic. edit: I am informed that the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands and Greenland all belong to Nordic, but all of those belong to the nations mentioned earlier. WirelessPillow fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 22:47
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Baronjutter posted:
Finland I know is not, Denmark would be odd if it was based on the geography but as it's a cultural name it makes more sense. I guess you could be in Wales, some people there speak Welsh as a primary language and even in English, most of the places are nigh unpronounceable by mortal tongue. Though I would guess the internet would probably not be that great as it generally isn't in a lot of the more rural parts of the UK.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:50
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http://satwcomic.com/how-the-north-works 
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Oct 15, 2014 23:59
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Test Livestream today (10/18/14) 6:30PM UTC
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Oct 18, 2014 08:19
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Trying out a new format for keeping all of you informed: Introducing Livestream Reviews (including the first one)
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Oct 20, 2014 10:23
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anyone here? *echo returns* I guess everyone in normal timezones is still asleep. Livestream 6:30PM UTC today (10/22)
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Oct 22, 2014 11:00
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Everyone's been hanging out in the traffic engineer thread instead. Personally, my interest/engagement in Citybound has been lower recently, I think largely since focus has been more on small, fiddly things rather than larger scale gameplay/economic simulation. However someone tried making a lot more parking in SC4 than usual. Let's talk about parking again, or something. Brotato Broth posted:Old and busted.
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Oct 22, 2014 11:20
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On the topic of parking. Wouldn't parking garages be a kind of commercial building? Also a lot of dense residential and dense commercial buildings have parking garages, so you don't have to make it a parking simulator. Of course some parking makes sense and in particular where land value is lower it would make sense to have big parking lots.
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Oct 22, 2014 11:50
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I think an amount of parking is often mandated in zoning ordinances, i.e. requiring at least one parking space per X workplaces/homes in a building. Presumably that kind of requirements can also be offset by dedicated parking houses, which could either be private, or constructed or subsidized by the city.
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Oct 22, 2014 12:33
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Zteuer posted:On the topic of parking. Wouldn't parking garages be a kind of commercial building? Also a lot of dense residential and dense commercial buildings have parking garages, so you don't have to make it a parking simulator. Of course some parking makes sense and in particular where land value is lower it would make sense to have big parking lots. Parking is a pretty big part of cities. I've heard of people buying parking spots in New York City for like hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:33
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Parking is a pretty big part of cities. I've heard of people buying parking spots in New York City for like hundreds of thousands of dollars. It maybe a part of them, but is it sufficiently interesting to simulate in a game? If so, at what level of granularity? Personally I'd be happy to see it incorporated as essentially an aesthetic component, with surface parking integrated into lots in sparse areas or parking garages spawning as commercial structures in dense areas, but I don't know that I'd want to fiddle with it much directly as a player.
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Oct 22, 2014 17:09
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anselm_eickhoff posted:anyone here? *echo returns* 6am EST is a pretty quiet time here at SA. That aside, I'm pretty sure interest in this will expand quite a bit once you hit alpha and have an actual game to start showing off. And then again when you have a playable version that supporters can get in on, if you decide to do early access at all. Even if not, beta versions tend to grab a bunch of attention too.
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Oct 22, 2014 17:14
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I'm lurky.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:22
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Off-street parking is mandated by zoning and is often the absolute key factor in density and affordability. Your parking bylaws are the single biggest factor that will decide the form of your city. Surface parking is a magnitude cheaper than underground or multi-level parking, if you mandate parking this means economics will dictate only the most valuable high-density zoned land will ever see any structure dense enough to need anything other than surface parking. Surface parking requires cheap land, lots of cheap land, which requires a massive highway system to allow cars to travel the vast distances between destinations due to the sprawl created by the parking requirements, it also ensures the city becomes absolutely dependent on cars and cheap parking to function leading to a unstoppable cycle of sprawl. Within urban planning parking bylaws are honestly seen as one of if not the most powerful influence over the development of a modern city. If you model cars you have to model parking or you're only modeling half the situation. If cars don't need parking you're missing the massive physical cost of a car-centric based city plan. The solution to every traffic situation is easy, just build more roads, it's not like those cars need to be parked anywhere. I believe parking could be abstracted sufficiently though. This isn't something the player would be actively managing, it would simply be part of the zoning bylaws and effect the form of development. People cant drive to a destination if there's no parking, but parking isn't some minor part of a building that can be hand-waved away. Look at the amount of parking a basic big-box store needs in relation to the footprint of the building, this is a massive amount of land. Once surface parking is maxed out on a lot that's basically it for density as there's no more room for cars, unless they build a multi-story parkade or underground parking but you've just made the parking cost 50,000 a stall rather than 1,000, the economics don't work. You could zone that area what ever you want, but the cost of parking will be the limiting factor. Now if parking was not required, or less parking was required, that lot could support much greater density. But of course if 100% of the people using the building drive, there's not going to be enough parking so you can only relax parking requirements if other methods exist. But if you have a vast sprawling city full of cheap parking everything's too far to walk so you're hosed. These are the very powerful and interesting choices a city has to make. You can go ahead and try to make a city without off-street parking demands, but you sure as hell better make sure it's a walkable mass transit paradise or it's not going to work. Citizens will fail to get to work because their work has no parking and it's too far to walk and there's no transit. Retail will go out of business because only a few neighbouring houses can walk to them while the thousands of customers they require all need to drive and park. Of course developers aren't completely brainless. Even if you don't have mandated parking requirements, if driving is the primary way of getting around builders will include it. But it still comes back to the issues of the financial and physical cost of parking. If you have a car-centric city you will get development more akin to big-box stores and office parks. If you DO have parking requirements you absolutely can not get dense urban buildings unless they are huge enough projects to afford underground parking. This is why so many american cities are just a sprawl of single family houses, big box stores, and then a core of skyscrapers. The zoning simply doesn't support anything else due to the parking requirements and the system creates induced demand for more parking and more roads.
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Oct 23, 2014 00:38
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Could it be as simple as scaling the minimum distance between buildings to the share of vehicle traffic to the destination? Thus you can have more compact R,C,I,etc if you have more mass transit? For any given building sized X, you could basically create a lot size Y based on the mode of commuters there, make the lot size bigger if there are more cars going there, and fill in the lot (Y-X) with parking.
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Oct 23, 2014 00:57
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You guys are making me realize the impact of parking on a city, maybe I just have been blind to it because it has never been important in city sim games (that I know of). I'll think about how it can be incorporated in a simple way, that is still interesting and meaningful from a gameplay mechanic perspective - perhaps as part of zoning laws is a good idea. Here is the review of yesterday's livestream: 10/22 Livestream Review
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Oct 23, 2014 17:31
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Do we know what yellowish country he's moved to yet?
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Oct 23, 2014 17:33
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It took livestream viewers less than 5 minutes to figure out that I moved to St. Petersburg, Russia 
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Oct 23, 2014 17:35
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anselm_eickhoff posted:You guys are making me realize the impact of parking on a city, maybe I just have been blind to it because it has never been important in city sim games (that I know of). I think it's never been implemented because it's tricky to get it right while retaining whatever the core gameplay loop is. Not to mention the majority of uninformed citizens [spoilers]America[/spoilers] might not find it intuitive.
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Oct 23, 2014 19:00
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The most ridiculous thing I ever realized about parking was when I was doing some planning work in the suburbs and they had a zoning requirement for 1 parking space per 300 sqft of office or retail (which isn't uncommon.) Seems ok, until you realize that a typical surface parking space takes up (including isles, etc.) 350 sqft. So by law we're dedicating more raw lot square footage for cars than we are people. So dumb. 
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Oct 23, 2014 20:34
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pistolshit posted:The most ridiculous thing I ever realized about parking was when I was doing some planning work in the suburbs and they had a zoning requirement for 1 parking space per 300 sqft of office or retail (which isn't uncommon.) Seems ok, until you realize that a typical surface parking space takes up (including isles, etc.) 350 sqft. So by law we're dedicating more raw lot square footage for cars than we are people. So dumb. Cars are bigger than people, so naturally we need to allot more space for cars 
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Oct 23, 2014 20:49
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anselm_eickhoff posted:You guys are making me realize the impact of parking on a city, maybe I just have been blind to it because it has never been important in city sim games (that I know of). In a lot of cities you can see parking lots manned by attendants. People pay monthly fees just to have a reserve space there, or will even pay hourly. These fees are absolutely insane, and will often exceed what a normal person might pay to live in a house for a month. The amount of money generated by these lots has got to be significant.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:21
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Parking prices get even better when they're controlled by private interests whose only concern is to make as much money as possible from the parking.  But the average car can easily hold 4 people so you could probably halve the parking required for work places.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:30
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If you want to make parking really complex, keep track of every single car and its owner, and let people leave them in garages outside the city core and then continue on foot or public transit, complete trips to several sites in the core, and return to the car and head home. For a simpler model, perhaps only allow on-lot parking, with the number of users of a building potentially capping out if the parking space is too small and some of the users don't have public transit options to get there. A slight extension might be to also allow nearby parking space (in dedicated garages, public or private) to be available for buildings within walking distance. In the end, the simplest in implementation might actually be the former, generalized model, since it probably avoids having a lot of special cases. The downside would be potentially more computation and bigger data to keep track of. When parking is limited, there's also the questions of carpooling, if you're going to handle that at all. And taxis.
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Oct 23, 2014 21:39
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I don't understand why any of you would want to see parking modeled in Citybound. It'd be right up there with electricity getting stuck in traffic on the fun-o-meter. Yes, in real world cities, parking is a major determinate of the built environment. But the game environment does not have to respect every factor that shapes metro areas. Is every knock on effect of parking availability going to be included? If there is no parking available, will cars patrol and circle until spots open up? Are we going to have to dedicate a lane for on-street parking, set meter rates and have that influence mode choice for every trip, with price sensitivity checked against the wealth of the sim in question? Is every car going to be a persistent entity which belongs to a particular citizen? If not, why not merely pretend that excavation is a tiny fraction of its real world cost, assume every building has more than adequate subterranean parking, and not bother modeling parking space seeking? Even a very approximate model of parking space seeking is going to be a large increase in pathfinding computation, with no material benefit other than yet another factor which unless optimally managed creates congestion on the streets. Not to mention that from an aesthetic perspective requiring most land uses to take up additional space in the playing area is not the right choice in my mind. When seen from above, parking lots are loving ugly. I don't want to have all that asphalt diarrhea in my toy city. Too much verisimilitude with respect to vehicle behavior is as big a danger to gameplay as none at all. When real world accuracy advances gameplay mechanics, it's good to pursue that. I fail to see how accurately representing parking will enhance the city building experience. If what comes out of Citybound turns out to be a traffic engineering simulation, replete with user variable speed limits and signal timers, at the expense of a rewarding city builder, that would be a completely different experience from the one I'm hoping comes out of this. Hermsgervørden fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 00:08
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It's no deal breaker for me but I can imagine the joy of being able to spectate a citizen's entire journey right down to the parking lot space  Also Hermsgervørden posted:verisimilitude
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Oct 24, 2014 00:33
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Dicky B posted:It's no deal breaker for me but I can imagine the joy of being able to spectate a citizen's entire journey right down to the parking lot space Would this experience be significantly worse if you just watched their car disappear into a garage door? Dicky B posted:Also IDGI?
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Oct 24, 2014 00:46
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Hermsgervørden posted:Would this experience be significantly worse if you just watched their car disappear into a garage door?
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Oct 24, 2014 01:01
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From what I know of the game so far and my limited understanding on how the agent based traffic AI works,this is how I'd handle parking to give the minimal amount of detail but maximize the meaningful choices the player has: Mostly let the AI handle it all. When a building is built it looks at the area, sending out feelers to its potential customers. If it's an office building that will employ 200 people it does a quick count on nearby potential employees, reaching out looking for residents until it's found the employees it needs. It then has a pretty good idea about its parking needs. If 150 of those people are far away and there's no good transit options, it knows it will need 150 parking spaces compared to the 50 people that potentially live close enough to walk or bike or take transit. Now of course this is just a guess based on the conditions when the building is built. If conditions change that building could suffer as only 150 people could ever drive to it. Office could be in demand, free workers could exist, but those 50 missing parking spots could result in employee shortages. The building could then report this concern as "Commute problems due to lack of parking". The same for retail, if a retail centre needs X customers a day to make a profit it looks at its neighbourhood for those potential customers, assumes modes of travel, and provides more or less the right amount of parking. Why is this interesting, why is this worth modeling? Like I said before, parking can be the #1 factor shaping the buildings and form of your city. A 200 person office building built at the edge of the city will end up needing 200 parking spots. Obviously the AI developer in the game will only built buildings that are profitable and when the cost of parking is factored in this has a huge huge impact. That 200 person office building with 200 parking spaces might only be profitable if all 200 spots are surface parking, meaning it ends up needing a huge parking lot bigger than the building its self. You're going to get a suburban office park. That exact same 200 person office building built in the middle of a dense city core with tons of people within walking distance and even more a short tram or bike ride away might get away with no parking at all, meaning the same building that needed an acre of land now fits snugly in a row of wall to wall buildings. The player will see their transport policies reflected in the form of their city. If you make a spread out low density city you'll end up with strip malls and big box stores for retail, office parks for office, and everyone living in single family homes with big garages. You try to add density in areas, but it just isn't working, it just isn't developing because those buildings require so much parking that it just isn't cost effective to go denser because of the massive difference in cost between surface parking and parking structures/underground. Only in the highest value areas does it become worth while for the developer AI to densify because they now have to include the massive cost of putting that parking underground. Now of course not all parking happens at the building its self. The player or even the AI could build parking lots and garages on their own which would then be included in the maximum parking for all buildings within a short walk away. Once again the AI would work the same way as with buildings. An employee would first attempt to path to their workplace and if no parking was available there it would check if any parking was available at nearby parking lots and if there is it would path to work using the parking lot as its destination then walk to work from there. The AI wouldn't actually drive around looking for parking as it wouldn't even attempt to drive if the workplace doesn't have available parking, and parking lots simply add to nearby buildings parking totals. This would allow the player to zone "parking" and even fiddle with its budget just like with hospitals or schools. At the minimum it would be a surface parking lot, at a huge increase in budget the player could build and maintain a multi-level parking structure. Many cities build and own garages like this in the name of providing better access for drivers to come into the city and work and shop as it's more efficient than expecting every building to provide parking. (100 individual buildings each providing 10 underground parking stalls is a lot more expensive than a single purpose built building providing 1000 parking stalls). In many cities that developed before parking was a big concern, these garages became essential to the city center, but this dependence is entirely because of the city's planning of course. If the player gets sick of these parking issues they could click a check box in their city policies to demand all buildings provide 100% parking, or some system to assign this option only to certain parts of the city. Street parking could be modeled just as easily as parking lots. Divide up roads into segments, maybe 100m long or what ever number works just for the sake of having less potential pathfinding destinations and calculations. The game knows there are X parking spots in that chunk of road, and those X parking spots add to the parking totals of all buildings within Y meters. No special pathfinding needed as the AI treats all parking attached to its destination equally and claims the spot the moment its sets out on its trip. Street parking would simply be a check mark to include when laying a road, or a lane type or what ever. So it's as simple as that. The AI looks at the area for how it's users will most likely arrive and must pay for enough parking and won't build bigger than it can provide cost-effective parking. Purpose built lots and garages and street parking simply add X parking spaces shared between every building within Y meters as if the spots were part of the building. Parking spots are claimed by the AI the moment they set off on a trip and the AI instantly knows if there is no parking at its destination, eliminating the option for driving and forcing the citizen to use an alternative, if that alternative doesn't exist or is uncomfortable they will get mad and complain or move even move away. I think such a system wouldn't tax the pathfinding AI as all the AI would need to do is check if there is parking at its destination rather than actually search for it, it's a simple "car: yes/no" question before the citizen even tries to path anywhere. I also think it's worth including, not just because "realism" but because it's a massive influence over the form of our cities and that's the primary concern of these sorts of games. anselm_eickhoff posted:anyone here? *echo returns* Not enough thread activity for you? Here's a wall of text to make up for it. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 02:18
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That, sir, is a term paper.
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Oct 24, 2014 07:22
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It also sounds like the antithesis of fun, and a lot of Dev work for something that will only interest and satisfy traffic nerds, while turning off casual players. It's me, I'm the filthy casual who just wants to draw roads and watch cars go by and little houses spring up.
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Oct 24, 2014 12:04
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Thread lurkin'.Volmarias posted:It's me, I'm the filthy casual who just wants to draw roads and watch cars go by and little houses spring up.  Now let me tell you all about the importance of switching yards and terminals in a proper urban light rail system, why we need to be able to establish separate color lines with ticketing systems for each zone, and NIMBY influence in political decision-making.
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Oct 24, 2014 12:26
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Hmmm I'm not persuaded. I've two big concerns about modelling parking: opportunity cost (in terms of processing power and developing time) and gameplay (or should I say,  my gameplay )First, this: Baronjutter posted:When a building is built it looks at the area, sending out feelers to its potential customers... Sounds like an awful lot of calculations for the game to be doing and an awful lot of code to write for the game. That of course isn't a problem in itself because it might give the player interesting choices and lead to interesting outcomes, but in my mind the choices and outcomes just aren't interesting enough to justify the time invested. Baronjutter claims parking has the biggest effect on the form of your city and I've no doubt that's true, but it seems from his post that there isn't much variety in the forms - it's just "amount of surface parking" ranging from none to let's say 50%. The player choices are interesting of course - there is so much that can be done (not just implementing mass transit and building roads, but implementing and building them well) - but the outcome is pretty dull for the amount of processing involved. Obviously it's not the only outcome - congestion is another - but congestion won't take much more code because it's fully emergent and in fact we've already seen it in Anselm's lane-merging demo. But implementing the above will take a hell of a lot more calculations on top of just telling cars to drive directly from house to office to shop, where each building has a mysterious yet convenient infinite parking garage. My concern is that the processing involved will either limit the size potential of the cities, or make it less viable to better simulate other more interesting parts of the game, like the economy, job market, housing market etc. Also, the time taken to implement it will take development time away from those parts, though I can't speak for Anselm as to whether that's actually an issue. If I were going to implement a parking mechanic, then I'd abstract it heavily. I normally don't like abstractions because I'm one of those agent-obsessed emergent gameplay spergs, but to entertain the idea here's what I would do: I'd have a desirability heatmap and treat a parking lot as a zone in itself (or sub-zone of the commercial lot). The heatmap would be aimed at getting parking lots to spring up in appropriate places - there would be hotspots in places with lots of (occupied) homes, (visited) shops and (filled) jobs, leading to demand for parking. Anything that relieves pressure on parking - such as bus stops, rail stations, and parking lots themselves (including street parking), would have a negative effect on the heatmap. In an ideal steady-state city, the heatmap would flatten to zero as parking lots appear where they're needed and take the pressure off (assuming there's available zoning). In places where land value is high, the parking lot developer AI would build up instead of out, giving multi-storeys in built-up districts. The availability of parking would then feed back into the desirability heatmaps for other zones - offices will happily build downtown so long as the parking heatmap isn't shouting "oh my god no don't bring a car here". The financial success of any car park can be determined from the heat map. If demand for parking plummets (after say, building a state-owned car park next door or running a light railway downtown), the carpark either goes out of business and gets abandoned or gets bought out by a developer wanting to do something more useful with the land. Pathing need not even be touched. Commuters could just move from house to office to shop as before, like the car parks didn't even exist. This would not be an appropriate abstraction if there was a park-and-ride mechanic, but in absence of that it seems suitable to me. Well, it would be suitable if I didn't dislike abstraction so much. I'm with Dicky B - I'd enjoy watching a citizen all the way to parking his car. My other concern is gameplay/aesthetic but that's entirely subjective. I simply wouldn't want to be punished with sprawling asphalt for failing to implement mass transit. It looks ugly. I'd rather have horrible congestion, because then at least my city continues to look pretty even if it has underlying issues. I guess it depends where you fall of the "simulator or game" spectrum.
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Oct 24, 2014 12:35
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The crux of parking is that it takes up a lot of extra space. That's easy to achieve very simply without getting complicated at all. You don't even need to tie it into the actor system unless you want to. All you need to do is include parking attachments to buildings as appropriate, and then if you want to get fancy, populate that that space with car(s) based on the occupancy of the building. In high density areas just have parking lot buildings spawn here and there. Not sure parking is a necessity though
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Oct 24, 2014 13:07
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