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Vahakyla
May 3, 2013
Where has the Public Services like trash, possible road crews, poh-leece and fire-ems services been covered? What is known about them?

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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Nothing really mentioned so far other than that they will be zoned and the structures will be variable, procedural, and probably upgradable via funding. There is no promised feature list, only what you see in the updates and everything is subject to change. No missed expectations, no broken promises.

NatasDog
Feb 9, 2009
Road repair crews would be really awesome; I don't think any sim has ever done that. Being able to watch as traffic backs up and starts seeking alternative detour routes would be fun to see.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

NatasDog posted:

Road repair crews would be really awesome; I don't think any sim has ever done that. Being able to watch as traffic backs up and starts seeking alternative detour routes would be fun to see.
You could fund road repair in towns in Transport Tycoon. It spawned road constructions on random straight road pieces throughout the city, completely blocking traffic for several months. Its only purpose was to gently caress over anyone running buses or trucks. :)

NatasDog
Feb 9, 2009

Poil posted:

You could fund road repair in towns in Transport Tycoon. It spawned road constructions on random straight road pieces throughout the city, completely blocking traffic for several months. Its only purpose was to gently caress over anyone running buses or trucks. :)

Yeah, I was thinking something more along the lines of blocking off two of four lanes in an avenue or one of two on a side street, slowing the flow but not stopping it completely. TT was a whole different animal released something like two decades ago; so I imagine the engine limitations aren't going to be nearly as inelegant.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

I'm 100% ok not having to manually coordinate road repairs and road shutdowns for my huge city. That might be fun if our cities were all tiny and the game was just traffic-engineering focused but would be an absolute nightmare on a larger scale. And if it's just controlled by the computer then all we're getting are random traffic jams and detours every year or so with everyone having to re-calculate their routes.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

I would have to be impossible to remove lanes/roads that were undergoing construction or players would just bulldoze and rebuild to avoid dealing with them. Also if road maintenance ends up on a slider, you can't cut back on funding to avoid having construction work messing up traffic without regretting it.

Poil fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 14, 2015

PoizenJam
Dec 2, 2006

Damn!!!
It's PoizenJam!!!
I think Anselm mentioned you can pre-plan a road and fine tune it before constructing, unlike SC. If that's the case, I'm wondering if he'll implement construction times? It seems to me a good work around for implementing maintenance (without someone just deleting and re-paving), is to have road/transportation construction and destruction actually take real in game time to complete.

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.

Poil posted:

I would have to be impossible to remove lanes/roads that were undergoing construction or players would just bulldoze and rebuild to avoid dealing with them.

Not if building roads in the first place required construction crews (e: didn't read above post).

I quite like Prison Architect's idea of everything having to be built by workers who take the raw materials to the construction point and then spend time putting it in place. Such a breath of fresh air compared to games of endless ploppables.

Poil posted:

Also if road maintenance ends up on a slider, you can't cut back on funding to avoid having construction work messing up traffic without regretting it.

:golfclap:

PoizenJam
Dec 2, 2006

Damn!!!
It's PoizenJam!!!
You can never cut the transit budget. You will always regret it.

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
Wow! So much discussion, nice! I hope to respond to all of it soon!

Here is the new dev diary:

Developer Diary #4: Traffic Anarchy

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

I hope you're not sad there isn't as much discussion going on as before. I think people are just as interested, there just isn't a lot to talk about when you're working on pathfinding and roads and stuff. Also you seem to be focusing more on actually coding than interacting with the community as much, so I think people are cool just watching your progress and silently nodding in approval.

I'm actually pretty excited at this latest diary. It shows the cars will be smart enough to handle more "cutting edge" european traffic engineering ideas like shared-spaces and unmarked/unsignaled intersections by going slow and giving way to the right and generally just figuring their poo poo out. We could even be like some of those german towns that just reduced speed limits and took away all signals and crosswalks and the cars and peds and bikes all figure it out (and have hugely increased safety too!)

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Jan 14, 2015

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co

Baronjutter posted:

I hope you're not sad there isn't as much discussion going on as before. I think people are just as interested, there just isn't a lot to talk about when you're working on pathfinding and roads and stuff. Also you seem to be focusing more on actually coding than interacting with the community as much, so I think people are cool just watching your progress and silently nodding in approval.

Not sad at all, I completely understand! I'm glad you guys are still with me, even though I'm still working on traffic and am forced by real life to just code and interact with you only minimally. Thanks for keeping up your interest! :)

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012
I think if you make a good game, you'll get all the interest you could want when the time comes. I guess the CiM guys have their thing, but I feel like SC5 built up so much hype and then left such a vacuum in the city-sim genre that there's a lot of fertile ground for multiple strong entries.

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.

anselm_eickhoff posted:

Wow! So much discussion, nice! I hope to respond to all of it soon!

Here is the new dev diary:

Developer Diary #4: Traffic Anarchy


I'm surprised you're putting so much effort into collision detection that would be mostly irrelevant if you just put traffic lights on every intersection. That's some dedication to realism right there :psyduck:

At first I was like "holy poo poo, surely no need!" but on reflection I think it would really highlight the choice a player has to make between leaving an intersection to take care of itself and installing traffic lights. If cars just flowed through each other there wouldn't be a choice to make. I can't wait for you to implement traffic lights and see how it compares to naked intersections when traffic reaches a certain density :f5:


e: I hope you intend to release a traffic management mini-game to tide us over until you polish off this magnum opus.

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



Naked intersection or light controlled.
Or a roundabout.
Or yield from two of the roads.
Or an all-way stop.
Or the dreaded light-controlled multi-lane roundabout.

There's several more choices for intersections. And yes roundabouts ought to be an explicit type of intersection, not just something the player fakes with one-way roads.

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013

I'm curious to see how roundabouts will function, or double roundabouts, or the Magic Roundabout quintuple vortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_%28Swindon%29

Generation Internet
Jan 18, 2009

Where angels and generals fear to tread.

nielsm posted:

Naked intersection or light controlled.
Or a roundabout.
Or yield from two of the roads.
Or an all-way stop.
Or the dreaded light-controlled multi-lane roundabout.

There's several more choices for intersections. And yes roundabouts ought to be an explicit type of intersection, not just something the player fakes with one-way roads.

Clearly the player needs to be in charge of all signage in the city, placing yields, stop signs, speed limits, etc. Thus you are free from pre-determined intetsections and the only limit is your imagination. I will accept no substitutes.

Dicky B
Mar 23, 2004

Shibawanko posted:

I'm curious to see how roundabouts will function, or double roundabouts, or the Magic Roundabout quintuple vortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_%28Swindon%29
In Hemel Hempstead we have a sextuple magic roundabout :smug:





and nothing else of interest :smith:

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.

Dicky B posted:

In Hemel Hempstead we have a sextuple magic roundabout :smug:





and nothing else of interest :smith:

Hemel Hempstead blew up once, that was pretty interesting :colbert:

Nition
Feb 25, 2006

You really want to know?

Generation Internet posted:

Clearly the player needs to be in charge of all signage in the city, placing yields, stop signs, speed limits, etc. Thus you are free from pre-determined intetsections and the only limit is your imagination. I will accept no substitutes.

And custom road rules of course! "If a car approaches a T intersection from the bottom of the T and wants to turn left while another car approaches from..."

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013

Actual real life traffic behavior is very difficult to simulate because it concerns psychology. There's a double roundabout near my town which connects to a long stretch of 100 km road with no opportunities to overtake, and which is used mostly by long distance commuters and trucks. Nobody wants to be behind a slowass truck for 30 km straight so everybody rushes along the inner lane of that double roundabout, speeding in front of any trucks that are there, because they have foreknowledge of the fact that the roundabout is the last opportunity to overtake (at least, without breaking the traffic rules on the road). This would be difficult to simulate in a game I think so there's always going to be at least some abstraction.

Subyng
May 4, 2013
Citybound - a new intersection management game

Just kidding, this is really interesting stuff!

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

I'd like to see a double roundabout with another double roundabout above it to handle larger volumes of traffic. That'd be fun to see in game (possibly not to drive through). With a bit of clever ramp placement it shouldn't be too difficult.

Mandalay
Mar 16, 2007

WoW Forums Refugee
Cityboundstrasse, now coming to a German software-market near you!

crabrock
Aug 2, 2002

I

AM

MAGNIFICENT






Subyng posted:

Citybound - a new intersection management game

Just kidding, this is really interesting stuff!

I want to play this :(

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
Not sure if the city sim part will be up to snuff yet, but the traffic stuff is looking interesting enough to play with.

nimper
Jun 19, 2003

livin' in a hopium den

Iunnrais posted:

Not sure if the city sim part will be up to snuff yet, but the traffic stuff is looking interesting enough to play with.

Traffic IS the city sim, for the most part.

How much of city life involves getting from point A to point B? Everything else is just tied into that.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

nimper posted:

Traffic IS the city sim, for the most part.

How much of city life involves getting from point A to point B? Everything else is just tied into that.

See I disagree with this and am a bit tired of this idea that city sims are just traffic sims. Traffic/transport is just one of the things a city deals with but is generally solved in boring ways by engineers. Where the actual make or break choices are made are in land use, social, and economic policies. They're all connected with each other and it's how all those issues connect you get this emergent system of "the city". The traffic sim can be a work of art, but if the land use sim is lacking you won't have a city building game you'll just have a traffic engineering game.

How do your land use policies (zoning) fit into your traffic engineering choices and which is leading the other? (parking parking parking)
How is your city dealing with social/economic issues like homelessness, unemployment, or income inequality? Is your recent quest to attract only high-tech industry creating a city where only rich tech-working newcomers can afford to live, driving out your working class existing population? Is your gross working-class industrial city having a brain drain as everyone educated enough moves out to find better opportunities? Your super low office taxes certainly attracted some office jobs to your lovely town, but are the low taxes sustainable, and will the jobs stay if you raise them to something reasonable?

Those sort of questions and strategies are at the core of a city building game, the less you have of those sort of things the more it's just a traffic sim.

nimper
Jun 19, 2003

livin' in a hopium den

Baronjutter posted:

See I disagree with this and am a bit tired of this idea that city sims are just traffic sims. Traffic/transport is just one of the things a city deals with but is generally solved in boring ways by engineers. Where the actual make or break choices are made are in land use, social, and economic policies. They're all connected with each other and it's how all those issues connect you get this emergent system of "the city". The traffic sim can be a work of art, but if the land use sim is lacking you won't have a city building game you'll just have a traffic engineering game.

How do your land use policies (zoning) fit into your traffic engineering choices and which is leading the other? (parking parking parking)
How is your city dealing with social/economic issues like homelessness, unemployment, or income inequality? Is your recent quest to attract only high-tech industry creating a city where only rich tech-working newcomers can afford to live, driving out your working class existing population? Is your gross working-class industrial city having a brain drain as everyone educated enough moves out to find better opportunities? Your super low office taxes certainly attracted some office jobs to your lovely town, but are the low taxes sustainable, and will the jobs stay if you raise them to something reasonable?

Those sort of questions and strategies are at the core of a city building game, the less you have of those sort of things the more it's just a traffic sim.

Totally agree that a city is more than a traffic sim, but if the traffic sim doesn't work then how does the rest even work? Maybe I'm just super jaded by SC2013 here.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

nimper posted:

Totally agree that a city is more than a traffic sim, but if the traffic sim doesn't work then how does the rest even work? Maybe I'm just super jaded by SC2013 here.

Oh yeah, I get what you mean. But it's a bit like saying which major organ in the body is most important. If any of them don't work, you're dead.

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.

Baronjutter posted:

Oh yeah, I get what you mean. But it's a bit like saying which major organ in the body is most important. If any of them don't work, you're dead.

The body is just a gene replicator. Everything else is just tied into that. Next! :colbert:

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

nimper posted:

Totally agree that a city is more than a traffic sim, but if the traffic sim doesn't work then how does the rest even work? Maybe I'm just super jaded by SC2013 here.

SC4 abstracts traffic pretty heavily and manages to be a great game. I would go as far as saying you could build a pretty cool city sim with almost no traffic simulation per se. It really depends on what aspects of a city you're interested in. Personally I don't care much about traffic; I think SC4 provided about as much detail as I want in that department. Maybe having parking be more of a factor would be interesting, I dunno.

But mostly what I want from a city sim is decisions about the high-level stuff Baronjutter mentioned - tax policy, social programs, zoning decisions, utility management, budget balancing, etc. etc. I would be OK with traffic principally as window dressing in a sim that delivered on the other parts.

Sovy Kurosei
Oct 9, 2012

anselm_eickhoff posted:

Wow! So much discussion, nice! I hope to respond to all of it soon!

Here is the new dev diary:

Developer Diary #4: Traffic Anarchy


I was giggling to myself watching the drivers be so terrible in that first GIF since I've seen it happen so many times out in the real world. It unleashed my inner :argh:.

This is a game I'm looking forward to.

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...
Hey, Anselm, are you planning on having sensible defaults for intersections etc for filthy casuals like myself who just want to place roads and zones, and watch my minions citizens go about their day?

ModestMuse
Jun 25, 2011

I see a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn't for your GPS
I'd be a heavenly person today
The entire first part of this video reminds me on Anselm's work on intersections.

What do you think of this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_6UwJ-JQ_s

PoizenJam
Dec 2, 2006

Damn!!!
It's PoizenJam!!!
Bit more enthused about Cities now. My excitement dipped tremendously when I heard about possible low population caps and abstracted agents. Still think it's dumb- along with small farms and airports. But between mods and the potential for really big cities/regions I'm cautiously optimistic.

I wish the game didn't look like you were playing SimCity 2013 with a permanent mild haze/smog. The washed out look isn't doing it for me. And it's not just the pastel thing because I actually like Citybound's aesthetic in its current state.

PoizenJam fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Feb 12, 2015

Ineptitude
Mar 2, 2010

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

Poizen Jam posted:

Bit more enthused about Cities now. My excitement dipped tremendously when I heard about possible low population caps and abstracted agents. Still think it's dumb- along with small farms and airports. But between mods and the potential for really big cities/regions I'm cautiously optimistic.

I wish the game didn't look like you were playing SimCity 2013 with a permanent mild haze/smog. The washed out look isn't doing it for me. And it's not just the pastel thing because I actually like Citybound's aesthetic in its current state.

Here is the Cities: Skylines thread :)

PoizenJam
Dec 2, 2006

Damn!!!
It's PoizenJam!!!
I'm posting in it, I was just commenting on the link in ModestMouse's post and the general aeshtetic of Cities vs. Citybound.

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Dicky B
Mar 23, 2004

Did Anselm die? :ohdear:

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