Simtropolis 1000

[+Guest]

Possible titles:

- Urban Tropolis

- Utopian Nations

- Neo Empires (I like this title, as it will describe our eclectic, urban empires. They will be new and very neo like, but they were be OUR own empires with out heart and soul right through them.)

[Crazy_Ivan80 35]

Originally posted by: edmonton_stinks The "zone by wealth" idea is great. It's annoying having eyesore tenements across the street from huge mansions.quote>

 

an eyesore yes, but for many parts of the world (even western parts) not all that unrealistic.

[+Guest]

I know in Adelaide Australis it is. But then you head over to Brisbane and you will see mansions NEXT to old, weather board homes. Crazy and a little bit dirty. Hee.

[munchkin5 0]

I've been dissapointed about the SCS news, so this seems to be a very good idea for me, and wether it's been said of not i'd like to metion that there should be an option not just to gbuild citys but to build all kinds of settlements and turn regions more into nations or anything smaller you want, with still being able to expand it though.

[tommiej 0]

the auran engine can produce something nice!! iCity sounds the best to me..

looking forward for how this is going to develop, will read every comment

[rodent1989 9]

Good call, dev.  when i compile the maste rlist I won't include that information.  We really need to hammer down our goals and solutions.

Instead of iCity we should call it rCity kind of like "Our City" only not.  Just a suggestion.  Even if this never happens, the outlet of suggestions proves that simcity didn't need to be simplified, we all wanted more!

[MadSim 1]

The Auran Jet engine's full comercial license costs US$ 30.000

[sc4melbourne 0]

If the game were to be distributed for free and be open source, then we wouldn't have to purchase the open source, would we? The non-commercial version, however, is much cheaper, around $200. I imagine though that a number of copies would need to be purchased for all the individuals working on the programming.

However, we're not even close to deciding on a game engine yet. I'd be interested to hear joerg and others' opinions as to which game engine would best serve our needs and would be the most economical. Best to leave it to the experts.

Furthermore, before we become too involved in worrying about even these basic details, some of the ground framework needs to be laid. Influential members of other sites need to be contacted and we need to bring some big names onto our side. That is BATers and MODers and programmers who have a good reputation and know their stuff. Even after that, much more consensus over what direction the game should take needs to take place before we can really know what software will suit our goal. Fundamentals such as to what extent the game should be 3D, grid or no grid, level of zoning, etc.

As I said in an earlier post, everyone out there who supports this project and who are members of other forums and have other contacts, spread the word.

I've been taking down key points and collating some key contributions to this forum, so I propose that if you are posting about ST 1000 on another forum, PM me and let me know, and I'll monitor the reaction there.

[Explodingsims 3]

Would this game be compatible with Sc4, eg. you could import old reigons and cities?

[Alakazam 3]

That would be unreasonably hard to do.

[gml_josea 2]

Instead of following the old RCI model, we should look at creating a new system

basically, there would be 5 kinds of demand

Residential

Retail and Entertainment

Office

Industry

Hotel

quote>

That would complicate the gameplay. If you think, Retail, Entertainment and Hotel are part of the Commerce, or if the word 'commerce' disturbs you, why don't call it the 'tertiary sector' like in real life?

There's nothing wrong with the RCI concept, and I see no reason to change it.

[patriots_1228 51]

i think the current residential, commericial, and industrial works fine

[tommiej 0]

but tourism really should be in it.. it's something that i really mis in sc4, tourism is a multi-billion business in the world.. we want realism, if we want it, tourism should be included with it.. airports are pretty unrealistic in sc4, it's only for business.. in rl, airport are overloaded with passengers, for business, but for a very big part, for vacation, tourist..

so hotel is a part of the tourism, airports, retail, all are related to tourism.

[ianpaschal 77]

I like rCity or Urban Empires or Metropolis for names.

BLaM has been taking leaps and bounds in the direction and have started working on getting the basic structure there, and soon we have a game engine I belive.  Although the concepts are still being worked on, I created light rigs and have been working on the cameras for rendering.

The bad news: We can't have perspective without full 3D and that is totally beyond current computers.

The good news: We've already got by on orthographic projections (no perspective), and appart from that it looks pretty good.  Also we hope there will be nice enough lighting, reflective water, streets at any angle, etc, perspective is not something to worry about.

Light Rig:


You can see that there's actually a gradient on the side of the box, I have built in this feature so you don't need to use gradient textures any more.  This lighting is much more realistic than SC4's.
The box is the maximum LOD size, 200 by 200 meters and 800 meters tall.  I was using the maximum size to make sure that the entire LOD would be lit correctly.

also i was thinking about development, and this is what I came up with:

Zones & Development

First of all, the player places areas of the 5 zones; R, RC, C, I or A.

The simulator then finds areas that it would spawn buildings on, like in SC4.  Then, it selects large areas of similar potential buildings, ie. 200 tiles of R$$.  It would then select 1 building family.  This family would be made up of 1-4 different buildings.  A new bulletin would appear in the Approval menu, for you to approve new projects.  You could then click on that project and see the area that it is intended to fill highlighted, as well as an image of each type of building to be constructed (such as 3 different houses that will form a suburban neighborhood, or 1 kind of row house to fill up 2 3 blocks).  You can then approve or reject this project.  If you aprove, the simulator will begin constructing those lots in that area.  Otherwise it will remain blank until another opertunity for development arises.

As buildings get larger, the developments will get smaller.  In a downtown setting, one massive skyscraper will be it's own development, whereas in a low density residential setting, a developments size may be up to 200 meters square.  Through this system the player will be given a lot of control over what develops in their city, without the hassle of individually plopping buildings.

Of course, the ability to plop certain buildings wherever you want will remain, the above system is merely a repleacement to SC4's zoning system.



Tell me what you think everyone!

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Originally posted by: ardecila

Originally posted by: Jasoncw Hawkpride147:  NONE of the BAT models, or their source files will be usable in any new game in any way. quote>

I think you're being a little overzealous on this one.  Maybe I'm just an overachiever when it comes to Max, but I would feel perfectly comfortable putting my buildings in a 3d environment, because I design them to look good that way.quote>

Some buildings are designed with realism in mind, but even so, they are too complex to use in a 3d game.  To make them lean enough, they'd need to be remodeled or heavily modified.  I think the polygon limit might only be 1 or 2 thousand at most.

I think for RCI, it should actually be based off industries.  A car factory would increase demand for the variety of materials, tool and die workshops, engineering related business, design related business, paint business, etc.  A little bit of the hospitality industry for business trips, etc.  Some of those industries would then create demand for warehouse space, and everything would grow in that way.  Each industry would have some kind of profile which would determine how much 1 job in that industry affects other industry demands.  I don't know which industries would be included at first, but more could always be added by modders.

For zoning (retail+residential, etc.) I think my idea solves that, the custom zones could be customized according to any property in the game.  There would be presets which would include common things, but players would be able to customize the zoning for each individual lot, and would also be able to save custom zones they make.

So if you want a building which has ground floor retail, an underground parking garage, a hotel, and some condos all in the same building, you could do it, and something would grow as long as their is a proposal which meets those specifications, and there is proper demand to build it.

I think we should try hard not to just remake SC4, or think inside of the box.  We want to make a new game with new ideas, while staying true to what we like and what makes the previous games fun. 

People are still talking about grids and predefined lots, and only have one type of job in a building, and these other things.  We don't have these limits while making our own game, so everyone needs to drop assumptions based on the older games and think more outside the box.

For content sharing, I agree with what david1314 said:

I think a concise directory structure should be set up, with an effective plugin-manager for the game to make it user friendly. Basically, the program will be a zip extractor (utilizing the windows .zip process), to which we add a special header that will install the plugin to the right directory. The header will be added by the developer selecting the directory(ies) in the same installer, which adds the heading to the .zip directories they've created (I think basic cross reference files should be used for an object to occupy two families to stick to a directory managed plugin system).

The plugin manager could also add a header or something of the sort to allow the server to easily track each file within a plugin, so that dependencies can be found by searching the ST1EX by an individual filename, so users don't have to hunt them down.

With that, I think the need to a p2p style of content also goes away. I see your main reason for this being to keep the dependencies updated, no? I think the above offers more freedom to users with a more bullet-proof indexing system.

I think that all custom content will need to be checked by the original development team to make sure that it's ok.  Content for this game will be harder to make, so there will be less of it to check (it won't be checking 10 files a day), but there is also more chance for someone to mess up.  If the objects aren't well made, the game will be slow and ugly, so it's important to make sure things are well made.

[edmonton_stinks 5]

I know eyesore tenements are realistic, but they should be across from other eyesore tenements.

The neighbourhood idea is great, as well as designating schools by roads/neighbourhoods and such. You could name your neighbourhoods and say that each school covers certain neighbourhoods.

As for the retail/office/hotel thing, I say we can keep the RCI zoning, but retail, office and hotel can just be different types of commercial zones.

[drevilshenchman 4]

*drools... wow this whole thing looks great. I don't know a thing about programming, but i'd be glad to do anything i can.

[MarcosMX 222]

I like the overall idea!!

My two cents:

The Residential Zone menu should be sub divided into the following

1. Mobile Homes

2. Mid Wealth Suburban Houses

3. Rowhomes

4. Mansions

Commercial Zone Menu

1. Commercial service

2. Offices

3. Tourism

Indutrial Zone

1. Agricultural

2. Polluting Factories

3. Manufacturing Industry

4. High Tech Industry

And the menus should be like:

1.Flora, fauna, and props (street lights etc)

2.Zoning

3. Goverment Buildings

4. Infrastucture

1. Police Department

2. Fire Deparment

3. Schools

1. Elementary

2. Middle School

3. High School

4. Electricity

5 Water

6. Garbage

5. Parks and Recreation

5. Misc

As for the development of the game, I guess it will take some years to actually develop it and I doubt anyone will like to donate some cash to an open source game smply because it more likely the development will halt and all the money will be gone.

Anyways that all I can think of

[ianpaschal 77]

^^ That looks WAY overcomplicated to me.  I think we should use the RCI system pretty simply with the following changes:

- Zones = R, RC, C, I, A
- Screw density, do building size.
- ANY building, can have any occupant types, you just add this in when you create custom content.  Instead of only specifying that it's an R building and its wealth, say it's an R building, with 300 R$$$ occupants, and 10$, 5$$ jobs (peeps gotta keep up appartment buildings).

[patriots_1228 51]

This sounds very good, im starting to think this may actually happen. however a game like this will probably wreck havoc on most computers, so, in areas like zoning, we might not want to get too complicated. I think R, C, I are fine for zoning, then we could involve tourism in the game some other way.

[the olive 0]

The RCI is pretty good, I believe office and retail should be seperate though, that way as your city grows offices don't take over your retial stores.

Edmonton_stinks, are you from Calgary? Doesn't really matter because you agree with everything I say, this is how all people should think lol

[munchkin5 0]

may i recommend a new site be made to house this collosal project

[hamsterTK 93]

I was just thinking, what engine should this REALLY use?

the auran idea sounds great, but the cost factor, does anyone know a free option?

Also, has anyone who offered to help write code showed back up yet? Obviously this isnt going to happen without a programmer

So anyways, I was just thinking about the 3d aspect, and im glad that it could be that way because then I could use blender to make models. Because not all of us are serious expert 3d people who have MAX

[+Guest]

Who are we going to do this guys? Who wil;l put this together? THIS though has me really excited. I hope it hapens. I'm drunk but I can't wait.

[joerg 280]

In real like buildings are zoned by the number of occupants that can live in a building and permits can be granted for people to run business in their homes. We could have a 10 person occupancy zone, then a 50, and then a 100, and a 1000 or something. This way there is no reason for mixing commercial and res because the requirement doesn't say anything about how many people could work in the shops below. The problem is the game only has a demand for jobs, sims have other needs like shopping, dining, entertainment, health, and shcool. Hence the possibility to just make one demand system to account for every need a sim has, this would simplify things sooo much. Combined with the neighborhood thing each neighborhood could have its own demands. Well off to work.

[+Guest]

But WHO will build this game guys?

[the olive 0]

Who will biuld it, you don't have to worry about that, if theres a will, theres a way, and from the looks of it theres a big will.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Regarding skirting EA's corporate gloves, we must think of a new currency. Obviously, Simoleans are out of question (

[+Guest]

But who will pay for it? Simtropolis can only afford to pay for itself. Oh but I'll loveto see this game really come about. Will there be a 3D graphics game or 2.5D?

[bixel 1,223]

What ever engine we decide better have a really nice script editor with a filterable search function library and a nice compiler with debugging notification. I hate command lines. Srry guys, just hate them.

so to give you guys some examples of code we are going to have to deal with and functions we are going to have to write. BTW I love strings...string are great, as are arrays. You can store tuns of data in them.

SetModelID(Rn, Mn, Cn, In, CMn, CEn, CPn, CLn, Pn, PRn, LMn)

//adds suffix identifiers on the Model name for array retrieval. This basically tells the game the properties of the object.

Only one or 2 properties need to be defined. n = 1-5, or the hierarchy of the function. Example C3 = Commercial High Wealth, CE2 = Civic education Highschool, CE5 Civic education Museum

R = Residential

M = Mixed Use (only when combining R & C)

C = Commercial

I = Industrial

CM = Civic medical

CE = Civic Education

CP = Civic Public transport

CL = Civic Law (police, court)

P = Park

PR = Prop

LM = Landmark

Example of Model names

SydneyOperaHouse_CE4.Model

JorysAppartmens_R1.Model

KlevmansCondos_R3MC2.Model <

GetModelID()

//Retrieves the above data.

I am really good at creating variables, defining them, retrieving them. And basically writing the structure method for the game mechanics...I am a little hairy on creating functions but I just need some practice its been awhile.