Citybound - a new city building game - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Citybound - a new city building game

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Hi everyone!

A few months ago, I started working on my own WebGL-based city simulator, Citybound.

A few weeks ago, I created a DevBlog for it, where I announced and described the project.
I then submitted the post to the /r/Simcity subreddit - the reaction was mindblowing.

Since then, I started writing weekly posts on the development process, here are the first ones:

The Road to Alpha, Week 1 - A Slow Start
The Road to Alpha, Week 2 - Camera, Action!
The Road to Alpha, Week 3 - A Fresh Canvas
The Road to Alpha, Week 4 - REBRANDING (April Fools)
The Road to Alpha, Week 5 - Every Town Starts Small (First update with video!)
The Road to Alpha, Week 6 - Intermezzo & Community Activity
The Road to Alpha, Week 7 - First Signs of Gameplay Detected

A few articles about the project have already been written, most notably:

"Citybound: One man's attempt to build a better SimCity" (Gamasutra)
"Interview With Citybound Developer Anselm Eickhoff" (Thirteen-1)

Most of the discussion so far happens in the /r/Citybound subreddit.
But since some of you started talking about it in the SimCity thread here, I wanted to have a place for it here as well.

I'm looking forward to your comments and questions!
(But please read the FAQ first)

anselm_eickhoff fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Apr 23, 2014

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 18:38

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 13:00

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

pistolshit posted:

I notice you say in the FAQ that roads will be customizable. Can you go into any more detail on what you mean? It would be really cool if you could essentially build a road out of a kit of parts either in plan view or as a cross section. Something like the below image. Where you could maybe drag and drop things like drive lanes, bike lanes, medians, Right-of-way(to allow for future expansion), planting strips, side walks, etc. And then make them wider or narrower based on your preference. Certain aspects of the road could then inform what kind of buildings pop up. Wide lanes and no side walk creates out-lot style commercial, narrower lanes with a bike lane and a wide sidewalk would create something akin to new urbanism or traditional development, etc.

Then again, only city-planning nerds might really be interested in that level of granularity.

I want to add essentially what you are describing, but make it more intuitive by embedding it directly inside the game world.
Image selecting a "lane tool" and just clicking on a road and dragging away to fork off a new lane, etc.
This should allow for complex interchanges and all kinds of shenanigans without being complicated to use.

Iunnrais posted:

When it comes to traffic simulation, how many "trip types" do you have?

To my knowledge, in SC4, there were three types of traffic. "Morning Commute to Work", "Evening Commute Home", and "Industrial Goods Heading Off The Map (and then vanishing)"

Now, I understand fully why there's a seperate morning and evening commute-- that's interesting. I also think there's room for traffic to stores to buy things-- walmarts, and big malls are MAJOR traffic generators in real life, and its not because they employ a lot of people. But this traffic likely should be segregated from commuting traffic. Midday or weekend traffic mode maybe? It'd have to handle round trips.

You could also throw in recreational traffic that heads to parks. And if you're doing that, tourist traffic that starts off map, goes to a hotel, then goes to parks/stores/etc, then back off the map again. This would build up airport traffic and hotel districts.

Midday traffic could probably stand to have higher road capacity to simulate people going shopping/tourism over the course of the entire day, not just during a single rush hour.

SC4's "traffic bonus" to retail stores really annoyed me because they didn't generate traffic themselves. Doing this might help a lot. A midday traffic bonus to retail would work a lot better than commuting traffic granting that bonus.

I basically want to do all of this.
For every need that a citizen or tourist or business or whatever have, they will actually need to go there and get it.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 19:15

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

ExtraNoise posted:

Thanks for including a shoutout to the subreddit in the OP.

I think a thread here will do great, and I'm glad to see the dev getting involved directly on SA. Too often you'll see devs shy away from these forums or, if they do get involved, do it behind an anonymous puppet they are masquerading as a fan. Being able to interact directly with the lead developer is great because it offers us a chance to ask questions and have them answered instead of the thread devolving into wild speculation.

Question: How many polygons/faces does it take before you start seeing a performance hit at this point in time? We've seen some screenshots with thousands of buildings but who knows how fast the game is running at that point.

Hah, didn't know you were here too!
When I first saw SA pop up in Google Analytics and I went there I thought "what, you need to pay to register?"
But I think it's more than worth it, people here seem very interested and civilized.

I wouldn't worry about poly count. I've seen WebGL handle about 2 million polygons, which should be enough even for huge cities, even more so, if I implement a level-of-detail system for the buildings.
The difficult thing is actually having the simulation run smoothly and that is currently CPU bound.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 19:28

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

nielsm posted:

How are you planning on handling player construction in the long run?
In SimCity, things have traditionally just poofed into existence as soon as you release the mouse, which is obviously a "game" thing, but also means you can't experiment with different layouts of a neighborhood before putting out the money and potentially having to bulldoze everything and start over.
Would it be feasible, and do you expect to, have a planning mode, and once a city expansion/improvement has been approved it starts gradually building and draining cash? Or just stick to the old insta-build model?

See this reddit post and my reply: http://www.reddit.com/r/Citybound/comments/22oonm/advance_planning_tools/

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 19:30

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Although the gameplay focus is a different one, Banished has been a great inspiration for me.
Just to name one thing, it showed me that a single dude could actually make and finish such a game.
In what ways did you find it too simple?

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 19:39

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Iunnrais posted:

So, followup: SC4 only did commuting and freight for what are clearly CPU reasons. Heck, on big cities, SC4 -still- chugs just pathfinding what it has. How will you handle this? How often will you update?

I have an agent based simulation that is updated all the time.
As I said above, I am confident that I can scale it from just medium sized cities as it is now to large cities.
I don't know why SC4 pathfinding takes so much CPU when it doesn't even simulate individual cars.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 19:50

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Dark_Swordmaster posted:

How do you combat a sped up day/night cycle with agents? As is from leaving a house and driving in real-time and obeying the flow of traffic, a commute would be hours long potentially. Would you either speed up the traffic animations (you monster!) or just allow them to take their time, have a four-hour work day, and leave at 5 get home at 9?

A combination of both. Speeding it up isn't as bad as it sounds, the cars already have 3x the acceleration than would be realistic, but because they are so tiny, it looks ok.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 21:25

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Hmm I don't think it would be feasible to collect all that information for each street section all the time, but you could start a query and get the exact result with maybe even more info after 1 ingame day.

I agree that traffic simulation is the most important part and that is why I actually want to use agent based simulation, to make it as realistic and transparent as possible for the player.
I actually think that the abstract pathing and density calculation of SC4 and earlier don't do a great job at representing something as chaotic and emergently complex as traffic.
I will try my best to struggle through the challenges that agent based simulation brings, but I wouldn't give up something that awesome and immersive just because it didn't work well in SC13.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2014 22:25

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Tytan posted:

Just wanted to say it's great to see a developer who seems to really "get" what people want from a city builder, and I love that you're taking people's suggestions on board.

Just a simple thing and it's probably something you've already thought about, but it'd be great to be able to paint/zone parks instead of having set ones to use. One thing that annoyed me in SC2013 (among many things) was that you could never get the parks to fit nicely next to the roads, they always looked odd. Would be nice to be able to fill the awkward little gaps.

Also, will there be a way to make buildings 'historic' like in SC4, assuming that buildings will be demolished/rebuilt over time? Or will there be an option for ploppable permanent buildings? (Obviously the simulation stuff would take priority over this, but I like my pretty cities!)

I'm already planning on a park zone. They will then be generated procedurally.

Marking buildings as historic would be a great way to keep procedural buildings that you like.

nielsm posted:

True. While SimCity 4 (and 3000) do have big, ploppable, monumental buildings, all they do is sit there and suck money while providing a bit of YIMBY effect. They don't actually provide anything to the city, be it homes or jobs.
It'd be cool to have that kind of "projects" that required cooperation from public (i.e. player) and private investors to get off the ground. It could perhaps be initiated from either side, the player could indicate they wanted a monumental building and get bids from investors, or an investor could approach the player with a business plan. Ideally, these projects could also fail for reasons, maybe general recession, competition from other sides, private investor failing, or whatever.

I'll think about I how I could incroporate such a mechanic.

Iunnrais posted:

I'm still very wary of agent based traffic. It seems that some of the problems with SC2013 were entirely inherent to agents.

For instance: How will an agent reroute to avoid heavy traffic? If the road segment doesn't know how much traffic it's getting, you can't really recalculate an A* or Dijkstra array with higher weights to avoid it.

You are going to give your agents full knowledge of where they PERMANENTLY live and work, right? And agents won't simply be spawned as tabula rasa from buildings each morning and evening?

The road segments already know how many cars there are on them.
I'm currently doing a kind of cached, distributed A* where routes are kept for other cars and are invalidated after a while.
So the system might not instantly react to changed traffic and update weights, but after a while it will (which is also realistic).

Citizens have permanent and unique homes and workplaces, their agents will travel between those.
SC13's traffic simulation is actually more of a liquid simulation where homes are sources and workplaces are drains, in the evening the other way around.
I will do none of that.

Ofaloaf posted:

Where does that music from the Road to Alpha video come from? It's incredibly relaxing.

It's "River Meditation" by audionautix.com

# ¿ Apr 12, 2014 00:27

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Onion Knight posted:

Anyway, in terms of density management have you considered letting demand determine density then allowing the player to paint height limitations?

This is exactly how density will work. Based on demand and a tool to paint max. height.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2014 13:56

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Yes, if you donate via PayPal, because then I have your email address and can send you the alpha when it's ready.

I also don't like preorders, that's why I only offer this indirect way and don't market it as a preorder.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2014 22:19

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

New update, kind of:

The Road to Alpha, Week 6 - Intermezzo & Community Activity

(Sri.Theo: Yes!)

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 19:41

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Awesome thanks, I will use it for reference and if it is still active maybe ask something myself.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2014 21:05

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

drunkill posted:

Just wondering how you'll set the game up, being from Germany you'll probably call trams Trams or Light Rail and (hopefully) not streetcars, but will there be an option to have left hand drive cities or roundabouts or even bikelanes as a road/vehicle type?

You might like this website then, allows you to customise a cross-section of a street, add lanes, bike paths, tram tracks and dividers and street furniture.
http://streetmix.net/-/124828
http://blog.streetmix.net/

There will be all three: there's an option to switch to left hand driving, you will be able to build roundabouts and there will be bike lanes.

Streetmix has a nice interface, but I will do it differently. You'll see when I get around to it.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2014 00:48

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

New Update!

The Road to Alpha, Week 7 - First Signs of Gameplay Detected

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 01:26

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

IceLicker posted:

This looks so promising and again, it's nice to see a developer so involved with the community. Made a small donation to show my support.

Much appreciated!

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 01:58

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Jamfrost posted:

I'm really liking what you've shown so far. And the size. I like the size.

That's what she said.

Iunnrais posted:

I'm still skeptical of agent based simulation for large scale simulations like a city, but... I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for the moment.

Right now, you have things being provided by "neighboring cities". Are you going to offer region based play like SC4, or will all neighbors be implied, as in SC2k? I'd prefer a hybrid of the two... a "SimNation/SimWorld" outside your region, and then a region that is all your own.

I'm assuming that you are intending to require neighboring connections, and that neighbors won't be able to just magically supply you with food/resources/etc?

Right now, neighboring cities are abstract and invisible, but they will require connections.
Additionally there will be regional demand that is unlocked by train stations/highways and global demand that is unlocked by air or seaports.

Later on there might be the ability to connect multiple player-cities together.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 18:25

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Additionally to the global demand, there will be something that models very local demand (could just be "heatmaps" or something similar).
So even if there is a global demand for food sales, vendors won't move in if there is no place that is easily/quickly reachable by customers.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 18:44

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Communist Zombie posted:

When your doing videos in the future can you record the game while in a small resolution? Or atleast when your pointing fine UI details. Because in your latest video I had to switch it to HD resolution and the fullscreen for me to be able to easily read the RCI graphs.

Ok, I might create a zoom-in effect in post-production.

Shibawanko posted:

Please include some kind of pedestrian infrastructure too! Most cities in the world have large pedestrian downtowns, the typical Simcity model where everything is next to a big road only exists in a few American cities.

Yes I will! But first I will focus on only cars, just to make development simpler.

Iunnrais posted:

Local demand, yes, that makes sense... but what about local supply? Again, the situation where there's plenty of global supply, but maybe there's only a single tiny road leading into one part of town and it's flooded with traffic 24/7.

Well, if a resident can't realistically get to any supply he needs he wont move there in the first place.
This might sound like there will be a deadlock, but residents will be ok with having to travel long distances in the beginning.
If their situation worsens because of traffic jams etc. they might move out, however.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 22:37

anselm_eickhoff: Mar 2, 2014; aeplay.co

Lots of questions, lots of answers:

CADPAT posted:

Regarding one of the previous comments about re-playability/challenge: In previous versions of Sim City, one of the driving factors of the game, (and arguably what made it fun) was the challenge of coaxing your city into developping the way you want it to by using the tools at your disposal.�

An example is, say you want a bustling skyrise metropolis, you needed to invest in a lot of infrastructure while balancing against available income and build up in your city in order to get to the point where you get the high tech and high commercial buildings that make that metropolis as you imagined it.

Earlier on you somewhat spoke to this, but what is your plan for making things fun to play and still challenging after a few hours of city growth?

One major source of challenge will be the need to constantly generate more interest in the city, I talked a little about that in the video.
First you will be able to use the first neighboring city as a source of growth.
Then you will have to shift your city to become more self-sustained.
Then you can afford or will be offered the opportunity to build new transport connectivity opetions like highways or railway.
This opens you up to a wider market that you can use for further growth.
Then you would have to really start managing the needs and problems of your by now quite large city.
If you succeed you will be able to build seaports or airports, opening your city up for global trade, immigration and tourism.
This constitutes the end-game and is also the hardest part, you now have to manage a whole metropolis.

This whole path is of course full of smaller budget, city style, and other interesting decisions.