|
I am glad you switched to a language that can handle the task. C++ is not hard to learn but very hard to master. I suggest getting some design pattern books for event driven programming and plan out your main game loop in minute detail before you commit to a solution. Rewrites in C++ can be very time consuming. Gruss aus Muenchen
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2016 02:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 09:14 |
|
|
anselm_eickhoff posted:Hi everyone! Just a short update! Thanks. I think these short kinds of updates are a good idea, especially if it means you can post them frequently. Helps keep the game in the periphery of people's minds, plus I imagine it could help you to maintain your own development pace more effectively than big milestone-based updates.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2016 14:31
|
|
|
Agreed. I want you to succeed!
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2016 06:29
|
|
|
A new update, while something is cooking! Background: A Tale of Two Worlds
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2016 18:14
|
|
|
I don't understand any of this, but I'm glad you're doing stuff that will eventually lead to a city builder with actual proper wall to wall buildings.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2016 20:34
|
|
|
and parking simulation amirite?
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2016 21:26
|
|
|
anselm_eickhoff posted:and parking simulation amirite? unironically, yes
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
anselm_eickhoff posted:and parking simulation amirite? Impossible to even abstractly model a modern city without so I assumed thats a given !
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2016 02:14
|
|
|
Euro Truck Simulator 201x is consistently on top of Steam, release Parallel Parking Simulator 2016 as a funding stopgap and coast on those sweet deutschmarks.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2016 02:26
|
|
|
Another background-style update! Background: An Architecture for Millions of Things
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 19:41
|
|
|
I'm no code-ologist but I don't understand how you're reaching for a goal of millions yet want to simulate all people and traffic. Skylines tried to do that and most people can get to about 100k before things start to bog down and the simulation takes a hit. How will Citybound be that much more efficient?
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 21:35
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:I'm no code-ologist but I don't understand how you're reaching for a goal of millions yet want to simulate all people and traffic. Skylines tried to do that and most people can get to about 100k before things start to bog down and the simulation takes a hit. How will Citybound be that much more efficient? This is exactly what I tried to illustrate in this post: Citybound will be that much more efficient by using a lot of specialised solutions that make direct use of the hardware and are fully aware of its quirks. Skylines in contrast even adds a couple of "inefficient generalisations" on top of what I talked about in the post: a very generic game engine using a garbage collected language. Don't be surprised to find several orders of magnitude of faster by avoiding all that.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 22:23
|
|
|
Yeah, all that optimization stuff went way over my head. Sounds like you're doing some ground-breaking stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jul 13, 2016 22:35
|
|
|
Yeah, while Anselm is a small dev and Colossal Order is a big company, Cities: Skylines is a Unity engine/C# game and that brings with it a not-insignificant amount of inefficiency (and I say that as someone making a Unity game that's on Steam right now). So it's not totally crazy to say a lot more could be simulated. Who knows what SimCity 5 was doing, considering they did have a custom C++ engine.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 00:11
|
|
|
Nition posted:Yeah, while Anselm is a small dev and Colossal Order is a big company, Cities: Skylines is a Unity engine/C# game and that brings with it a not-insignificant amount of inefficiency (and I say that as someone making a Unity game that's on Steam right now). So it's not totally crazy to say a lot more could be simulated. SimCity 2013's UI itself was JavaScript.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 00:19
|
|
|
Which would take up a bit of processing time, but the simulation code should still be able to be fast. Still, it's hard for sure - hence the years of work from Anselm.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 00:26
|
|
|
Sounds like something that Google would acqui-hire you for if you figured it out on your own, and it was better than what Maxis could come up with for SC5.
|
|
#
?
Jul 14, 2016 00:34
|
|
|
This is all sounding very impressive.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 19:16
|
|
|
Cache lines are probably not the best thing to be looking at so early, especially since things are likely to change a whole lot as you continue development; micro-optimization is particularly fragile to changes in your codebase. I'd recommend looking at ways to reduce algorithmic complexity first, since performing fewer operations in the first place is usually a better strategy than making each operation as micro-optimized as possible. Since you're making a game, your simulation doesn't actually have to be perfectly accurate; it only needs to look accurate. Making some simplifying assumptions can drastically reduce the amount of computation required; for instance, you could use aggregate traffic computation for any district of the city you're not currently looking at. People wouldn't notice the difference, simply because they're not observing it. (However, this does require that your aggregate traffic model be pretty accurate.) This probably wouldn't significantly reduce the amount of data you need to store (each citizen would still have their own internal schedule, workplace, favorite shops, etc), but it would make it easy to instantiate each citizen on the fly: if you know it's 8:33 AM and aggregate traffic downtown is bad, you can predict where Alice Anderson's SUV should be and then simply create it when the user is looking at that area. It's important to remember that games - even simulation games - have soft real-time constraints and are made for entertainment. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, a good contrast here is Doom 3 vs Half Life 2. Doom 3's rendering engine had a very advanced (for its time) lighting model that's significantly more "accurate" to the real world. However, Half Life 2 looks much better because they saved a lot of GPU resources by making simplifying assumptions, especially about lighting.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 19:44
|
|
|
You can also save a bit of CPU time by making commuter behavior realistic. The vast majority of commuters will go the same way every day unless they are confronted with a truly horrid traffic jam. Once you've simulated out the route between residential and employment once, let them continue spilling onto that road until X congestion happens, at which point they start spending CPU time on an alternate route. E: Also this models what happens IRL when a major artery is closed, everything gets slow as poo poo because every single actor is acting for themselves without thinking of the greater model. goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jul 19, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 03:50
|
|
|
Avenging Dentist posted:Making some simplifying assumptions can drastically reduce the amount of computation required; for instance, you could use aggregate traffic computation for any district of the city you're not currently looking at. People wouldn't notice the difference, simply because they're not observing it. (However, this does require that your aggregate traffic model be pretty accurate.) This probably wouldn't significantly reduce the amount of data you need to store (each citizen would still have their own internal schedule, workplace, favorite shops, etc), but it would make it easy to instantiate each citizen on the fly: if you know it's 8:33 AM and aggregate traffic downtown is bad, you can predict where Alice Anderson's SUV should be and then simply create it when the user is looking at that area. I don't know, having a simplified model for non-viewed areas and an agent model for viewed ones is a great idea performance-wise in theory, but I can also imagine it being a never-ending nightmare reconciling the two and making them match.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 05:22
|
|
|
Nition posted:I don't know, having a simplified model for non-viewed areas and an agent model for viewed ones is a great idea performance-wise in theory, but I can also imagine it being a never-ending nightmare reconciling the two and making them match. Traffic modelling is a pretty well-studied field in applied mathematics, and in fact the mathematical modelling course I took in university focused on traffic modelling in aggregate (the textbook was Richard Haberman's Mathematical Models: Mechanical Vibrations, Population Dynamics, and Traffic Flow). Academic research would be a great way to get started with aggregate models, since real-life traffic modelling must be accurate, or it's not useful. To help confirm that your model matches the game's actor-based simulation, you could construct automated tests of your aggregate model: run the full simulation on some interesting test cities and see if your aggregate model accurately predicts the results. In fact, if you found yourself completely unable to use existing research on traffic flow, you could probably do something clever and design a neural network that learns how to approximate the traffic by feeding it all your test data. Then you just need to ship the neural network's internal state along with the game. I don't think this would actually be necessary, and it's probably excessive overkill for this problem domain, but I'm pretty sure it would still help large cities. (The best is probably to use real-life research though, since smart people have already done it.) While using aggregate models is a bit lacking in conceptual elegance (it's fun to watch higher-order patterns emerge from a system like this), I think it's a compromise worth making, since good simplifying assumptions could drastically increase the maximum size of the simulation. Of course, I don't have access to any of the code here, so I can only make guesses. In any kind of optimization, measurement is extremely important, and I'd urge Anselm to at least look at the feasibility and scalability of performing aggregate traffic modelling vs a full actor-based simulation.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 06:19
|
|
|
Avenging Dentist posted:Traffic modelling is a pretty well-studied field in applied mathematics, and in fact the mathematical modelling course I took in university focused on traffic modelling in aggregate (the textbook was Richard Haberman's Mathematical Models: Mechanical Vibrations, Population Dynamics, and Traffic Flow). Academic research would be a great way to get started with aggregate models, since real-life traffic modelling must be accurate, or it's not useful. To help confirm that your model matches the game's actor-based simulation, you could construct automated tests of your aggregate model: run the full simulation on some interesting test cities and see if your aggregate model accurately predicts the results. Good ideas, I've got nothing to say against those. I wonder how hard it would be to train a neural net well enough that it found a good generalised model for any user's crazy city layout.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 08:31
|
|
|
Anybody has any idea where this is going? Dude seems to have vanished?
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2016 17:45
|
|
|
uXs posted:Anybody has any idea where this is going? Dude seems to have vanished? https://twitter.com/cityboundsim/status/797100412901986304 "I'm working on it silently", he says.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2016 18:02
|
|
|
Ok cool, I didn't find anything more recent than somewhere in July, that's why I asked.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2016 18:10
|
|
|
It's to be expected. Building an engine and frameworks and the boring nitty-gritty sort of stuff doesn't really make for compelling visual update material.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2016 20:54
|
|
|
Thirsty Dog posted:This seems like a massive change and one that I would suggest severely threatens the chance of this game ever being finished. Yeah, still relevant
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 18:30
|
|
|
goon project guys. he probably gave up a while ago. "starting all over" was the death knell.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 18:38
|
|
|
Imagine four red skyscrapers on the edge of a cliff...
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 18:55
|
|
|
I got an email last week about a "Christmas surprise."
|
|
#
?
Nov 30, 2016 21:23
|
|
|
...and here is this "christmas surprise"! Christmas 2016 Announcement
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 02:11
|
|
|
Glad to see you're back and back at it! I like the way you're trying to be transparent about the development process. It's certainly a lot to ask of folks in the fraught early-access culture we're in, but I think you're doing it right. Great video, but you may want to take the time to tweak some audio levels if at all possible, it was very difficult to hear you speak in some of the early parts.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 06:29
|
|
|
This is in fact very exciting. I'll definitely take a look at the prototype later. One thing I'm wondering is, does "open source" extend to "free software" (in the FSF sense), and does it extend to assets like sound, textures, models? Could the game support a "commercial asset packs" model? Also interesting choice of AGPL as license. I can see it being meaningful since it prevents commercial closed-source exploitation via remote access loopholes. I could imagine someone could make a mobile device client from scratch and keep that closed source, then connect to a hosted simulation core running a modified version of the Citybound engine; without AGPL the changes to the Citybound engine could stay secret since they technically weren't distributing any Citybound code. nielsm fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Dec 25, 2016 |
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 10:11
|
|
|
How well is the traffic going to scale once you add in point to point routing, etc? Presumably each car is just going to follow the one in front of it in the demo's simulation? Having to readjust speed of each car due to merging cars on and off the highway, faster emergency vehicles etc increases overhead on top of the best case grid scenario. I really like where this is going with the new demo, but is it going to scale as shown? A bunch of interconnecting figure 8s with high speed emergency vehicles weaving in and out of traffic (or something!) Would have been a better example of capacity. I'm really interested in the project but I'm going to wait and see how it looks with the economy roughed in and highway merging etc before I jump on the paetron bandwagon. It looks pretty close though. Hadlock fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Dec 25, 2016 |
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 18:53
|
|
|
As far as I can tell, what the demo does is place a number of cars randomly, and give each car a random destination. (I think a destination right now is a lane segment.) None of them should be just following another, they are already doing individual pathfinding here. If driveways up to buildings can also be integrated in a good way, things could end up looking really natural. nielsm fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Dec 25, 2016 |
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 19:04
|
|
|
Any video is better with sheep and ponies in the background. Really impressive amount of agents, already beyond what Skylines does. Of course that's just doing nothing but cars on roads. Peds, bikes, tracking people's inventories and building stats, the economy and resources, that will take a chunk too. And of course the absolutely essential simulation of parking in some respect. A huge geographical grid of streets is one thing, but a dense network of old-town streets with a million weird intersections is another. I'm still optimistic about this because he's shown he can do extremely flexible free-form roads and lanes like no one else has even attempted, and really loving nice procedural buildings. Also, Anselm, over the last year I've been doing some work and hobby related research into the development industry and the nitty gritty of housing markets and and construction, actually interviewed some developers I know and city planning and zoning officials! Also in my job I pour over building plans all day and I have access to all the financial and construction cost stuff so I've been collecting info on how much a building costs to build, it's square footage, and how many people end up living in it or working in it. Been working on a simple card/tile based city building board game but with a focus more on the economic and political side rather than a car-simulator. If you ever wanted to "talk shop" to fine tune how/when/why buildings grow I'd love to share my research with you. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Dec 25, 2016 |
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 19:13
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Been working on a simple card/tile based city building board game but with a focus more on the economic and political side rather than a car-simulator. Finally! There needs to be one of these.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2016 22:35
|
|
|
Question: in ythat video, you showed being able to modify lanes in a very awesome manner... but can you actually edit the intersection to suit? For example, if you create a right turning lane as in the example, can you then set the intersection so that right turns are prohibited (except in the dedicated lane)? From the video, it looked like all the turning logic might have been locked in place.
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2016 01:22
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 09:14 |
|
|
JeremoudCorbynejad posted:Finally! There needs to be one of these. Have you played suburbia? It's pretty fun but doesn't really even try to model any actual city building, but the whole hex based aspect is fun.
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2016 08:42
|
|