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nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

Pharnakes posted:

Here, let me help.

Oh great, show all the old WIP broken stuff instead of the current WIP broken stuff. :)

is fairly recent (revision 34, and we're now at revision 39) We went through a lot of drama to get it working, and a lot of fussing and learning all the hidden bits of the paper that don't quite work.

The drafting program's code is exactly a straight skeleton implemented roof system. Sides are pushed inwards simultaneously, and the roof geometry appears where sides collapse. I don't think the Sims actually does straight skeletons; from what I know, they just draw extrusions and then either do CSG to make it work or just throw in the damned towel and let everything self intersect and sort it out with the Z-Buffer.

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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Nition posted:

I had a demo of Chief Architect 4.0 on a single floppy disc in the 90s that could also do that, so the magic involved can't be too intense.

Yeah, minicad on my black and white mac classic in highschool had this feature with basically the same interface.

soundsection
May 10, 2010
Straight skeletons are a bastard to implement. I wrote one for the sims on ios. I found methods that shrink the footprint had too many degenerate cases, but treating the problem as a 3d plane intersection task much easier. It handled every case I could throw at it including footprints/polygons with (multiple) holes in them.

http://twak.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/engineering-weighted-straight-skeleton.html

soundsection fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Apr 29, 2015

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co

soundsection posted:

Straight skeletons are a bastard to implement. I wrote one for the sims on ios. I found methods that shrink the footprint had too many degenerate cases, but treating the problem as a 3d plane intersection task much easier. It handled every case I could throw at it including footprints/polygons with (multiple) holes in them.

http://twak.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/engineering-weighted-straight-skeleton.html

I showed your post to Michael, he had the pleasure of implementing straight skeletons for Citybound.
He says your description of getting them right is 100% accurate.

nvining
May 30, 2011

tunnels through walls with its odd, rubbery nasal appliance

soundsection posted:

I found methods that shrink the footprint had too many degenerate cases, but treating the problem as a 3d plane intersection task much easier. It handled every case I could throw at it including footprints/polygons with (multiple) holes in them.

This matches my experiences exactly. In fact, Thomas Kelly's entire blog is super useful as the procedural extrusions paper he put up is missing a few details (such as how to actually convert your straight skeleton/procedural extrusion/whatever to geometry.) The key thing here is the priority queue for intersection events and height changes. For bonus points, you can also use the same straight skeleton code to generate borders and bevels around roof pieces. You'll also need a 2D polygon clipping library to do anything useful later on; I recommend clipper (http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php) which is open source, fast, and stable; you will also need a triangulator that supports holes but I don't remember what the heck we use... I might have written that.

I'm surprised they used SS for the Sims in iOS - I didn't think they used it for the roofs in the PC games, so I guess I learned something new today.

(CityBound thread: come for the simulation, stay for random people talking about computational geometry)

nvining fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 30, 2015

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
Big New Update!



June 2015 Update (Mystery Feature)

D_W
Nov 12, 2013

Wow! That's such a great idea for a system. This project is really going into amazing places.

That lane splitting is something I'd love to have in Cities: Skylines. My spaghetti road systems could be even more absurd.

But seriously the whole planning system could really give each little area of a city some personality by having so much variety to the intersections. I'd imagine we'd be able to split roads then zone in between them, right? So we could have road ways like this part of Route 22 in New Jersey

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

I've gazed into the abyss of seriously spergy road tools. :stare:

Jamfrost
Jul 20, 2013

I'm too busy thinkin' about my baby. Oh I ain't got time for nothin' else.
Slime TrainerS
You could have an instruction manual dedicated just for the road building aspect of Citybound.

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



This is what I've been wanting always. Continue down that road. (No pun intended.)

One thing I also sort of want, but I'm sure is much more controversial, is having non-instant construction. Rather than the planned stuff appearing instantly, just modifying existing roads etc and working right away, instead it has a construction period. During the construction period the cost is gradually drawn, so it's not just one large one-time expense. Additionally, changes to old infrastructure and buildings need to be carried out so it might actually disrupt old roads.

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.
I reckon that once you're finished with your road system, you could easily release it as a traffic management mini game and rake in a fair bit of cash to fund the rest of the project (i say this as someone with no business acumen and who just wants to play with your pretty roads as soon as possible)

nielsm posted:

One thing I also sort of want, but I'm sure is much more controversial, is having non-instant construction. Rather than the planned stuff appearing instantly, just modifying existing roads etc and working right away, instead it has a construction period. During the construction period the cost is gradually drawn, so it's not just one large one-time expense. Additionally, changes to old infrastructure and buildings need to be carried out so it might actually disrupt old roads.

Oh me too. But not just for the realism - I like the idea of the challenge of keeping everything running while redesigning your road network. Imagine city skylines if you couldn't pause the game :v: I actually like to do this for fun, and build in bypasses to stop everything collapsing

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



KKKlean Energy posted:

I reckon that once you're finished with your road system, you could easily release it as a traffic management mini game and rake in a fair bit of cash to fund the rest of the project (i say this as someone with no business acumen and who just wants to play with your pretty roads as soon as possible)

Road Intersection Simulator 2016.
It could work.

You start with a blank map except for some fixed road stubs near the edges. Each road generates an amount of traffic with destinations. You get graded on various efficiency and cost parameters.
Or for alternate challenges, you start with a pre-built intersection and is told to fix it.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Those are some very detailed road tools. I guess I've got more than enough road-centric stuff out of Skylines, I'm excited about the actual city part of the game. The buildings, the economics, the people. Hell I'd be fine with a simcity4 style tile and grid system as long as we got a deeper simulation. But I know most people come to these games to road/traffic-sperg rather than city sperg.

Mandalay
Mar 16, 2007

WoW Forums Refugee
Maybe someone can make Jane Jacobs simulator to go along with Robert Moses simulator.

(I'm under no illusions, the latter would outsell the former by quite a bit because gamers and power fantasies)

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co

D_W posted:

I'd imagine we'd be able to split roads then zone in between them, right?

Right.

nielsm posted:

One thing I also sort of want, but I'm sure is much more controversial, is having non-instant construction.

Gradual construction that also dynamically depends on budget is exactly my plan ... for ... plans.

nielsm posted:

Additionally, changes to old infrastructure and buildings need to be carried out so it might actually disrupt old roads.

This could be something for the hardest difficulty level.


Baronjutter posted:

I guess I've got more than enough road-centric stuff out of Skylines, I'm excited about the actual city part of the game. The buildings, the economics, the people. Hell I'd be fine with a simcity4 style tile and grid system as long as we got a deeper simulation.

I hear you! I also really want that and I hope to make some more nice progress on the conomy system soon! If everything works out, the simulation will be, well, pretty drat deep.

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

Those are some very detailed road tools. I guess I've got more than enough road-centric stuff out of Skylines, I'm excited about the actual city part of the game. The buildings, the economics, the people. Hell I'd be fine with a simcity4 style tile and grid system as long as we got a deeper simulation. But I know most people come to these games to road/traffic-sperg rather than city sperg.

I think there's room for both. I've enjoyed Skylines as mainly a fun city-painting toy with roads and transit as the main challenge, but I would also like to see a game that focuses more on the other stuff.

That being said, I would advise caution about adding depth and complexity for its own sake. The road tools in this video look very powerful, but is that power going to be useful and fun to more than a handful of dedicated traffic nerds, or will it just be intimidating? Are you sacrificing usability for the majority of potential players and use cases to make it possible for a few people to fiddle in endless detail with a handful of the roads and intersections in their cities?

nimper
Jun 19, 2003

livin' in a hopium den

Supraluminal posted:

I think there's room for both. I've enjoyed Skylines as mainly a fun city-painting toy with roads and transit as the main challenge, but I would also like to see a game that focuses more on the other stuff.

That being said, I would advise caution about adding depth and complexity for its own sake. The road tools in this video look very powerful, but is that power going to be useful and fun to more than a handful of dedicated traffic nerds, or will it just be intimidating? Are you sacrificing usability for the majority of potential players and use cases to make it possible for a few people to fiddle in endless detail with a handful of the roads and intersections in their cities?

Looks like you can sperg all over the roads if you want to but the casuals can just leave them alone and they'll still work fine.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Supraluminal posted:

I think there's room for both. I've enjoyed Skylines as mainly a fun city-painting toy with roads and transit as the main challenge, but I would also like to see a game that focuses more on the other stuff.

That being said, I would advise caution about adding depth and complexity for its own sake. The road tools in this video look very powerful, but is that power going to be useful and fun to more than a handful of dedicated traffic nerds, or will it just be intimidating? Are you sacrificing usability for the majority of potential players and use cases to make it possible for a few people to fiddle in endless detail with a handful of the roads and intersections in their cities?

Yeah it's always a balancing act, mostly an interface balancing act. You can add all the detail in the world so long as it adds to the gameplay and is intuitive to use/interface. For instance even though Skylines is a very traffic-management centric game and I really don't enjoy designing highways or interchanges at all, I got very frustrated not being able to solve more simple urban traffic issues that could be solved by limiting turns or changing lanes a bit. Traffic++ and other mods came to the rescue and developed fairly easy to use intuitive controls. It adds an extra layer of control for where you need/want it, but it's not required.

Take Citybound for example. Currently it looks like you can just free-form roads all over and they automatically create default intersections, that's easy and quick and if the default intersections get the job done in most situations that will work great. Where things turn into a giant pain in the rear end is if the default intersection isn't great, if there's a strong reason to micro-manage every intersection and the tools to do so are time-consuming. Solving a single intersection issue with some fancy priority lanes and light timing can be fun, doing that 100 times is excruciating.
Now, if the tools to change intersections were quick and easy, then it's another story. Perhaps have a few types of default intersections that you can cycle through with a click, or set the default to when laying them out in the first place.

Different people like different levels of detail. I'm a huge transit nerd but I really don't give a poo poo about timing or schedules. I'm fine just laying out a metro or a bus and setting some generic "frequency" or "number of vehicles" option and off they go. Actually having night/day rushhour type situations don't work in time-compressed games, it makes no sense to have a rush hour or schedules when a single loop of your metro system can take an in-game day or longer, it makes the schedule absolutely meaningless (hello CiM2). That's a bad level of detail that was added because people all shouted "give us schedules! Give us control!" without understanding the context of the game.

Detailed simulations can be great too and not actually complicate things for the player. For example, adding parking would be mostly a lot of under-the-hood detail, but it would express its self to the player by shaping how the city evolves in a very intuitive and organic way. The player doesn't need to count parking spots or worry too much about the specifics of the simulation, they just see it happening and respond to it. Everyone understands the idea of parking. People are complaining they can't go shopping or to work because there's not enough parking near their destination? Or maybe destinations suffering parking problems would get a little icon floating above them. Ok, so you see a clump of buildings all complaining about parking, so you plop down a big city parking lot. Easy. Or you institute an ordinance that all new buildings need to provide enough off-street parking. That'll work too but now the only buildings you get are strip malls and office parks because your land values can't really support underground parking so to get more growth you need to sprawl out. Once again, it's all intuitive stuff that the player is responding to and the city is being shaped in a very natural way because of the player's choices. Players cities can turn out very different, not because they drew their roads like a guitar, or have crazy interchange designs, but because they made meaningful choices. They made a choice to deal with their parking problem by building huge ugly surface parking lots and now their city looks like Dallas, but Dallas is a real place so why not simulate the forces that create it? Or maybe they solved their parking problem by making their core shopping area pedestrian-only, provided excellent transit to the suburbs, and house a majority of their population in denser buildings close to the centre. Cities like these are real as well, so why not simulate those forces?

That's always the question to ask: will this extra detail actually provide more outcomes, more options? Adding detail to a system where there is generally a single correct solution is boring, it's just adding a puzzle with a single solution for the player to be distracted with. But adding detail that presents the player with a choice, with multiple equally valid outcomes, that's at the heart of a city builder.

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

nimper posted:

Looks like you can sperg all over the roads if you want to but the casuals can just leave them alone and they'll still work fine.

I mean sure, hopefully they'll work fine, but that depends to a great extent on the traffic simulation, as Skylines has shown us. As Baron points out, Skylines doesn't have very fancy road controls, but the traffic/pathfinding AI is such that it greatly benefits from a couple of mods that provide that control. (They're not required but they can save you some real headaches.)

Fundamentally, there's a bit of dynamic tension in the design of a citybuilder here. If the traffic sim is forgiving enough that you don't need complex road controls, then what's the point of adding them? On the other hand, if the sim is demanding enough to call for complex controls, then you're raising the bar on what's required of the player to do well.

It's not impossible to strike a balance that gently incentivizes fine-tuning without requiring it, but it might make sense to supplement that with difficulty settings for people who want a real reason to do this stuff (or the option to ignore it). Or just say "gently caress it" and present it as a purely creative/aesthetic tool; another thing Skylines has amply proven is that plenty of people will be happy to draw elaborate dickbutts with their roads even if it doesn't help their city.

Baronjutter posted:

Different people like different levels of detail. I'm a huge transit nerd but I really don't give a poo poo about timing or schedules. I'm fine just laying out a metro or a bus and setting some generic "frequency" or "number of vehicles" option and off they go. Actually having night/day rushhour type situations don't work in time-compressed games, it makes no sense to have a rush hour or schedules when a single loop of your metro system can take an in-game day or longer, it makes the schedule absolutely meaningless (hello CiM2). That's a bad level of detail that was added because people all shouted "give us schedules! Give us control!" without understanding the context of the game.

I don't actually know how CiM 2 handled it. What didn't you like about it?

I don't see time compression as being contradictory to a rush-hour type system at all, if you decouple it from the day/night cycle. How exactly to implement it would depend on the underlying simulation (Entirely agent-based? Abstract sim? Hybrid?), but one way or another it seems like it would be easy to vary the volume of traffic in a cyclical fashion.

Maybe a bigger obstacle is spatial scale. If agent trips can take on the order of 10+ minutes real-time to execute - as is the case in the largest Skylines cities - your rush hour would have to be on a very long cycle. That could be hard for players to cope with because of the long delay between acting and getting feedback (change a road right after one rush hour, wait 20-30 minutes or more to see results in the next rush hour). This is a benefit of Skyline's more or less steady-state model; you make a change and you start seeing changes fairly quickly.

quote:

Yeah it's always a balancing act, mostly an interface balancing act. You can add all the detail in the world so long as it adds to the gameplay and is intuitive to use/interface.

[...]

That's always the question to ask: will this extra detail actually provide more outcomes, more options? Adding detail to a system where there is generally a single correct solution is boring, it's just adding a puzzle with a single solution for the player to be distracted with. But adding detail that presents the player with a choice, with multiple equally valid outcomes, that's at the heart of a city builder.

It is a balancing act, but I think you're risking oversimplification and potentially laying out a trap that developers can fall into. There's a point of diminishing returns on adding complexity, even if it's "good" complexity - and more than that, a point where it can become actively harmful if it distracts from the core gameplay or overwhelms the player, which it eventually will do even with the best UI in the world.

There's no hard-and-fast rules about it, though. Like you said, different people like different amounts of complexity, and nothing is going to please everyone.

Pharnakes
Aug 14, 2009
I've always wanted to see a city builder try linear time compression. Rather than compressed time but realistic agent movement, make agents move at a speed matching the compression, so it looks like the time lapse images you see of cities. It'd probably get boring once the novelty wears off and you just want to admire your pretty city, but it'd be an interesting experiment at least.

nimper
Jun 19, 2003

livin' in a hopium den

Supraluminal posted:

It's not impossible to strike a balance that gently incentivizes fine-tuning without requiring it, but it might make sense to supplement that with difficulty settings for people who want a real reason to do this stuff (or the option to ignore it).

Anselm mentioned difficulty settings so this is probably the direction he'll take it.

quote:

Or just say "gently caress it" and present it as a purely creative/aesthetic tool; another thing Skylines has amply proven is that plenty of people will be happy to draw elaborate dickbutts with their roads even if it doesn't help their city.

Aesthetics are an important part of designing a city, after all!

Curvature of Earth
Sep 9, 2011

Projected cost of
invading Canada:
$900

Pharnakes posted:

I've always wanted to see a city builder try linear time compression. Rather than compressed time but realistic agent movement, make agents move at a speed matching the compression, so it looks like the time lapse images you see of cities. It'd probably get boring once the novelty wears off and you just want to admire your pretty city, but it'd be an interesting experiment at least.

City games don't do that because it takes even more computing power than a regular agent system, because not only are you modeling thousands of agents, but you're modeling them at high speed.

Cities: Skylines already can't run faster than the default slow speed once you hit 600,000+ agents. I think it's a bit much to expect a two-person team to solve a problem that a much larger team of well-paid full-time programmers couldn't overcome.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


Also, given that city simulators go through at least a month per minute on even the lowest speed, everything would be a blur.

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

Baronjutter posted:

That's always the question to ask: will this extra detail actually provide more outcomes, more options? Adding detail to a system where there is generally a single correct solution is boring, it's just adding a puzzle with a single solution for the player to be distracted with. But adding detail that presents the player with a choice, with multiple equally valid outcomes, that's at the heart of a city builder.

Have you ever played Prison Architect? Seems like a game you would enjoy.

nielsm
Jun 1, 2009



Supraluminal posted:

I don't actually know how CiM 2 handled it. What didn't you like about it?

I don't see time compression as being contradictory to a rush-hour type system at all, if you decouple it from the day/night cycle. How exactly to implement it would depend on the underlying simulation (Entirely agent-based? Abstract sim? Hybrid?), but one way or another it seems like it would be easy to vary the volume of traffic in a cyclical fashion.

The main issue with the rush hour implementation in CiM2 was that it became pointless due to the movement speed of everything else.
The speed of agents/vehicles in relation to the speed of the game's time-of-day clock that controlled traffic generation meant that by the time the agents that left for morning rush hour reached their destinations, the evening rush hour had already ended. Effectively agents often took 12+ game hours to reach their destination, smoothing the spikes out so much they were barely noticeable at all.

A later patch introduced tweakables that let you adjust the relation between game clock and agent speed. That allowed you to slow down the game clock enough that rush hours made sense. However it had significant impact on the financial part of the simulation, since the fiscal period was also lengthened by the same amount. It also made everything more tedious, you had to play for longer real time to get similar results.

The overall result was that, while the game allowed you to simulate a rush hour with peaks and lows, the developers had almost entirely tweaked the effect of it away by default, to make the game playable for the average person. And with the rush hour simulation being pointless, there wasn't much point in having different amounts of vehicles on a route depending on time of day and day of week either, an entire other feature bullet point made redundant. In fact they could just have removed every system that depended on time of day and have had an almost identical game.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

ModestMuse posted:

Have you ever played Prison Architect? Seems like a game you would enjoy.

I got a weird vibe off the devs and the game in general so haven't, and don't really like the subject matter. I love Rimworld though.

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.
I think my favorite thing about Prison Architect is that nothing is built instantly. Everything requires a worker to travel to the site of installation, and then time to install it. That kind of realism is something I'd like to see in a city simulator. Ploppables are a bizarre concept really, just a hold over from the simcities of the past.

Curvature of Earth
Sep 9, 2011

Projected cost of
invading Canada:
$900

KKKlean Energy posted:

I think my favorite thing about Prison Architect is that nothing is built instantly. Everything requires a worker to travel to the site of installation, and then time to install it. That kind of realism is something I'd like to see in a city simulator. Ploppables are a bizarre concept really, just a hold over from the simcities of the past.

To preface my rant: I think it's fantastic that Anselm is willing to engage with his audience while developing Citybound, and I'm extremely grateful that he's making it. I'm looking forward to the finished game, and will almost certainly buy and play it regardless of the rant below. Begin rant:

I caution use of the term "realism" for a city simulator, because all city simulators have to abstract away certain elements, and which elements and how they are abstracted is fundamentally political. For example, Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, was a libertarian. So, naturally, in SimCity flat and low taxes were good and there was only one kind of tax available (property), as opposed to the quadrad of income, sales, property, and business taxes that most cities can draw upon. (Not to mention the games' "high taxes drive people away" thing, despite research showing that businesses will go wherever there are skilled workers and paying customers, and that people will accept high taxes if you can convince them the services it'll pay for are worth it.) Ultimately, there isn't a single element of a real world city that you can simplify or abstract away without altering how it works compared to the real world, and, whether intentionally or not, making a political statement in the process.

Of course, if you're really dedicated to realism, consider this: in a real city, infrastructure gets more expensive to maintain the older it gets, and eventually maintenance costs become so high that you're forced to tear it out and rebuild it again.* The reason nobody's done this before in a city game is that this system would kill the massive financial surpluses that most city games encourage you to have — your job becomes "minimize debt payments" rather than "go scuba diving in your huge pile of cash". Everything you build would have to be carefully balanced against its potential tax revenue. (Want to build a road connecting two small towns on opposite sides of the map? Well you can't, because its maintenance costs would outweigh any increase in tax revenue that building such a road would bring you.)

The point of this long, blathering post is that, ultimately, Anselm is going to pick and choose which parts of reality are going to be reflected in the game. There's no point in requesting a feature because it's "realistic", because if you judge a city simulator on realism, then no game can or ever will live up your expectations. You might as well just read the financial reports for the Chicago city government and masturbate to infographics of transit systems; it's more honest and you'll never be disappointed.

*Incidentally, this is why so many cities in the real world are perpetually in debt. Cities which build lots of infrastructure to accommodate a low-density population (aka post-1970s suburbia and small towns in general) will eventually find the maintenance and replacement costs for infrastructure outweighing the economic value that the infrastructure enabled in the first place. It's pretty brutal.)

Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Jun 11, 2015

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.
I don't disagree with your rant, but that said, knowing this, we can at least consider trying to de-abstract different aspects of city-building than have been covered before. It would be interesting to have a NON-libertarian economic assumption model, for instance, because no one else has even tried it. It would be interesting to include parking requirements, because basically no one else has attempted to model it, and it's interesting!

Just because you have to choose what to abstract doesn't mean you have to abstract everything exactly as before.

Microplastics
Jul 6, 2007

:discourse:
It's what's for dinner.
I don't disagree with your rant either. I think everyone wants a certain level of realism in their simulation games and people are going to draw the line at different places. For instance I wouldn't want to do away with the god-mayor role and force the player to contend with competing elements of leadership, like a city council blocking your crap, or a state governor banning your poo poo. That would go too far for me. But I do draw the line pretty far in, provably more so than most players.


E: Lol "provably". I meant probably!

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Man, I'd love a "realistic finances" mode that shows how car-centric sprawl is financial suicide for who ever is stuck maintaining the infrastructure and forces regions to then make tons of short term deals with developers to keep that permit money coming in all while piling on more roads that they won't be able to replace when the time comes.

Sprawl big and wide on cheap land, rake in short term money, then watch your city crash and burn as the upkeep and replacement costs catch up.

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013

It's funny how Simcity is based on libertarian assumptions but those assumptions only work within a command economy where a man in the sky puts parks where they are needed and funds the fire department.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Who said it's based on liberatarian assumptions? Simcity, especially the old ones, were liberal as hell. All the government services, government healthcare, massive public transport basically required to get a functioning large city...

Pharnakes
Aug 14, 2009
Didn't some big game dev (might have been will wright actualy) say that he started off as a libertarian, but building his game made him realise what a lovely attitude it is?

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.

MikeJF posted:

Who said it's based on liberatarian assumptions? Simcity, especially the old ones, were liberal as hell. All the government services, government healthcare, massive public transport basically required to get a functioning large city...

The taxation system, in particular, is extremely libertarian. At the very least it's reaganomics. Tax the poor high, tax the rich less, and your city will thrive.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Iunnrais posted:

The taxation system, in particular, is extremely libertarian. At the very least it's reaganomics. Tax the poor high, tax the rich less, and your city will thrive.

Only because you're managing a city rather than a country and you can just drive the poor out to be neighbouring cities' problems.

Iunnrais
Jul 25, 2007

It's gaelic.

MikeJF posted:

Only because you're managing a city rather than a country and you can just drive the poor out to be neighbouring cities' problems.

Which includes the common libertarian assumption that mobility is an option for the poor. That if they can't afford things, they'll go elsewhere instead of live in worse and worse squalor. Camden, NJ suggests otherwise.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Yeah, almost every city builder has been built on libertarian core "physics" on how the world works. It's more you're mayor of a company town, you choose to build a school or a hospital only because it improves your bottom line or lets you build a taller skyscraper or attract a better class of people. There's no downside to rapid gentrification and no real downside to vast industrial slums, it's what ever works out best for your bottom line and ego.

anselm_eickhoff
Mar 2, 2014

aeplay.co
New Update!



The Road to Alpha, Week 66 - More on Planning Mode

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KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


Holy fuckballs.

That is seriously slick, dude. Can't wait to see some buildings in those new zones.

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