Simtropolis 1000

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I've just recalled more ideas I have about the game.  Yes, I have thought about SC5 A LOT over the past few years, lol.

Design Mode:

-Original Problem:

In Sim City 4, I found that I was building something, but building one tile too far, or messing up an intersection, or just not getting what I want in general.  So I bulldozed and restarted.  Or I zone something too big, or I quickly change my mind about what I want built there, so I need to redo it.

This was a problem with the game being "too complicated" in previous Sim Citys.  Players can't get what they want, along the way they accidentally bulldoze things, and in the end what they got didn't work anywhere near what they thought it would.

Also in Sim City 4, everything is rediclously cheap.  In real life, infrastructure like that is a major expense.  Highways and transit lines can cost millions and billions of dollars.  But if the prices were made realistically significant in SC4, we'd go bankrupt after needing to redo something after it didn't work right.

-A Solution:

So what I suggest is a design mode, where the game is paused, and what you build is completely free.  Somewhere on the interface it would tally up how much it would cost to build it, a button to confirm construction, and a button to leave design mode.

There would be an option to do "studies" on the system, where you would pay some money, and it would basically unpause the game and show you what would happen if you built what you designed.  Of course, this would be at a decent cost, so you can't just do excessive studies for everything you do.

So this way, you always get exactly what you want (designed) the first time, and you always have some kind of idea of how the system will work once completed.

Because of this, infrastructure can be realistically priced (although not exactly accurate, so that it would still be fun to play, in real life many of these things are mindbogglingly expensive).

Money would not be free flowing, and the game would be more challenging, but the system is also intuitive and fair.

The Game and Money:

I don't like how the SC4 game design represents costs.  My biggest concern is how much zoning costs relative to other items, and how cheap everything is in general.

-Zoning:

In real life, zoning things does not cost a lot of money.  It just costs however much money it costs to employ the people at city hall.  To employ urban planners and lawyers and secretaries and whatever.

-Bureaucracy:

In real life, bureaucracy costs money.  To represent this, I think there should be a game mechanism so that for every action you do in the game, it increases some "number" somewhere, that helps generate the cost for the employees at city hall, how long it takes for certain things to be done in the game, and how effective certain things are in the game.

-Infrastructure/utilities:

In real life, infrastructure/utilities is expensive, and it should be expensive in the game.

-City Services:

In real life, city services (police, education, fire, etc.) are expensive, and very important, and that should be reflected in the game.

-Income:

This comes from taxes, but money also comes from the county, state, and federal level, for various purposes (although this means that citizens would also have to pay taxes to those levels as well).  A variety of taxes (property, income, gas, cigarette, etc.) could be utilized, and each should have some kind of impact on the citizens.

-Money in General:

I think that bringing funding aspects into the game would be fun.  Lining up funding sources to have enough money for a subway line, or a convention center.  I think that finding money for a big project, and then designing it in design mode, and seeing the "studies" on it, and approving construction, is more engaging and rewarding than clicking on subway on the menu and dragging a line.

-Game Difficulty:

Overall, this would probably make the game harder (although more engaging, and more fair).  The solution for that is to simply have difficulty settings that make things cheaper, and increases revenues.  I also think that the game difficulty should be able to be changed at any time during the game play.

[Duper 0]

Hey someone said something about" black mesa taking two years and they even had models and props" what about all the 3d max files you custom content artists use? maybe outsource to some willing artists? i know f all about coding/ gaming engineering, but i have some artistic abilities. Leadership, then Manpower. holla back boyeeee...

[Jasoncw 11,840]

The files made for BATs were not intended to be used in such an environment, so they can't be used.  They are too complex, and the stylings, proportions, and details were meant to look good in SC4.  Also, each creator does things different ways, so there would be no unity in the design, and the game would not look and feel good.

Off the top of my head, I would think that modeling everything as realistically as possible (proportions, details, colors, etc.) would be the easiest and the most appreciated.  However, it could end up looking drab all together, so a slightly more vibrant use of color might be needed.

[the olive 0]

I have LOTS of ideas that would improve on Simcity 4. If this actually becomes reality, and I hope it does, I hope to be a part of the team. I'll put done a few of my ideas later if I have time, which i hope I do.

[the olive 0]

Here is my idea on zoning, only a small part of my "complaints of SC4" if you will.

ZONING:

First off, if high density is zoned, only high density should grow, that way you have more control over your city, while being even more realistic, and everyone wants that.

There should be more spesific zoning tools.  Zoning by wealth would give you the power to make your "rich areas" be in one spot, and and "poor areas" in another spot.  There should also be zoning options that allow you to make one area a townhouse area, and another a detached area.  This gives you much more control over the way your city develops, and is very similar to the way it is done in real cities, and agian almost everyone wants realism.

Well this is just a brief explanation of what I think can be done with just the zoning part of the game, which I think is a very important part of creating the city you want.

[hjanfield 0]

I don't have time to read this entire thread right now, but I will throw in that I have some experience in game design and development and am more than willing to join such a team, if you can convince my wife to give me the time

But a team would need good leadership and clear goals and design philosophy before any work starts. I've been on a couple "Free***" game clone projects and democratic groups always splinter and fall apart...

I've been tossing around the ideas for a FreeCity clone for some time now (as I'm sure many here have), so if a team is being put together, please contact me immediately!

Also, I don't know if it's been covered, but on the LOD comments on the first page, LOD can also be abused to improve performance on low-end computers. While there would obviously be low-polygon models with low-res textures for zoomed-out views, you can also include some medium-resolution textures but continue to use the low-polygon models, making rendering easier on low-end systems.

Another interesting feature to help our low-end system friends (like my poor little XP2400/R9600 system, heh), if the game has a fixed trimetric display like SC4 is viewport saving and scrolling. In a game like SC4 you usually spend thousands of renders looking at one spot.. you can save a lot of effort with this method: You render your terrain, buildings, roads, etc, then save the screen. You then separately render automata, animations (ie. water, building animations), etc with blank stand-in polygons to hide things that would be behind buildings. Clouds can be layered on top as well. After that, composite everything and pass it on to the antialias system and display. On the next render, you can pull up that saved screen, re-render your automata, animations etc. This system also saves a lot of render time on the UI. Rather than copying the separate images every time (adding to dozens of screen copies per frame), do it once, save, then output changing text. This is essentially how all of Windows works.

But anyway. Bleh. I'll catch up on my reading later. Have your people call my people. We'll do lunch at Depessie's.

[Ntq€310 1]

lately the simtropolis 1000 idea has somepeople saying it's impossible, to hard, would take too long to make it.

BUT people do you think maxis, or ea, or even other game companies were made out of dust and people just bought there game...NO!

these companies, mostly worked hard to make there games big, the first 2 simcity's were made from hard work, and determantion.

simtropolis 1000 could become a big time game, and a franchise, so lets see the ideas and we could make it work

[flame1396 9]

Originally posted by: TheOneThird Developing a game is a lot more difficult than just saying, "Let's make a game! Here's a list of all the features it should have, who wants to help?". Fleshing out the idea (like what's being done in this thread) is the easy part, development is the real problem. It sometimes costs $1 million USD just to license an engine. An open source SimCity-like game does sound quite appealing, but without huge funding it's unrealistic at best.quote>

 

correct but not really.

people here are pretty devoted to simcity. Lots of people here enjoy that work anyway, and as for cash thats a big limiter BUT... we ahve 170k members... iif everyone donated 10 bucks thats a good amount of cash

[the olive 0]

We must make this game now, its our destiny, AND IT MUST BE DUAL CORE COMPATIBLE

[Jasoncw 11,840]

hjanfield, That is an interesting feature.  I think every trick like that is mega important in making the game look good.

Your experience will be very valuable in making this.

[edmonton_stinks 5]

I love this idea. If I had anything to contribute, I would. However, I'm pretty pathetic at modding.

Suggestion (this is only if you guys really want complexity and to build on SC4): Change the transit system a little so you'd have "routes," rather than just placing stops and stations and having all the buses and trains go everywhere at once.

This is some great stuff so far.

[vgcpapa 5]

Originally posted by: the olive There should be more spesific zoning tools.  Zoning by wealth would give you the power to make your "rich areas" be in one spot, and and "poor areas" in another spot.  There should also be zoning options that allow you to make one area a townhouse area, and another a detached area.  This gives you much more control over the way your city develops, and is very similar to the way it is done in real cities, and agian almost everyone wants realism.quote>

 

I do like your thoughts on zoning and having more control. However in my view, I think it is too unrealistic to zone for rich areas and poor areas. In having more control over what class of resident moves in I think that the tax system should be the focus. Taxes should be more in-depth and give you control to set invidual property taxes. To have more control over what type of resident (or industry) occupies the land there could be a land tax that will be determined mostly by the land value with some room for the mayor to change and a property tax which would be a set figure related to the structure that occupies the lot.

[the olive 0]

We need a team of people to do this, we could discuss topics forever, there are so many ideas. Has anyone here won the lottery and is looking for an investment?

[edmonton_stinks 5]

The "zone by wealth" idea is great. It's annoying having eyesore tenements across the street from huge mansions.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I'm sorry to keep going on about my ideas, but I think they solve a lot of problems.

For the wealth issue.  If you design a new neighborhood, and then put some expensive desirable statue somewhere in it, that would help attract wealthy people.  Then, if you start to only approve wealthy proposals, more wealthy people will come, and they will attract even more.  That is, once the area is half-way established, there should be very little chance of poor people moving to the area, and you could change the setting so that most proposals for that area are built automatically (less micromanagement).

So in this way, if you design an area a certain way, and initially accept proposals of a certain nature, then from that point on the game would automatically "sense" your intention, and would evolve along that path.

I had the same problem in SC4.  I'd design this really beautiful area with nice parks and stuff, and then I'd get a bunch of R$ apartment buildings.  Or sometimes I'd build a poor area for the town and the R$$$ would all of a sudden move there instead.

[Sc4jeeks 35]

Okay, I'm not sure if this has been said, but think about it...

Team of dozens of professionals that know what they're doing and get paid to do what they do full-time to make SimCity 4: 3-4 Years

Teams of dozens of people who, for the most part, have only little experience of what they're doing and are working part-time and not-for-profit... 18 years? 20 years?

It just doesn't seem practical..

[zzsim 3]

Wow, I'm glad to see this is really starting to gain momentum. I like the ideas I've heard about more user defined zones (ie. zone for height, density, wealth, service...), as well as a proposal system and design mode. However, I still think ploppables need to play a role in the game. For example, say that I wanted to put a sound barrier wall along a highway, or a bike path along one of my roads, how would I be able to zone that? I think ploppables, especially in regards to creating park systems, need to still be apart of the this game's design.

On another issue, while interest in this project is high, the organization and direction of it are still lacking. I think the first step we could do to gain a footing would be to create an initial design team to work out the gameplay elements, while later on when actual developement starts a team of programmers will now be able to create exactly what has been envisioned, without having to apply a trial and error system to create the game (ie. we change an element of the game's design mid developement, and now the programmers have to go back and change coding essentially wasting hours of work). Now ofcourse as a community effort everyone should be able to make suggestions, but it would be up to the design team what suggestions are used based on what they think will work best to accomplish our goals for the game.

The absolute first thing that we need to do is convince Dirk to give this project its own sub forum (ie. like the CJ or BAT subforums). This way we could spread the different aspects of this game into multiple threads while keeping it organized. The ideas and suggestions are already becoming too spread out in this thread to a point where not everyone who is proposing worthwhile suggestions is being heard.

Finally, good luck with this project, I hope I can help in whatever way possible; while I don't have experience with modeling I would certainly be willing to learn as well as contribute my own ideas/suggestions for this game.

[Creathir 3]

Originally posted by: Jasoncw I'm sorry to keep going on about my ideas, but I think they solve a lot of problems.

For the wealth issue.  If you design a new neighborhood, and then put some expensive desirable statue somewhere in it, that would help attract wealthy people.  Then, if you start to only approve wealthy proposals, more wealthy people will come, and they will attract even more.  That is, once the area is half-way established, there should be very little chance of poor people moving to the area, and you could change the setting so that most proposals for that area are built automatically (less micromanagement).

So in this way, if you design an area a certain way, and initially accept proposals of a certain nature, then from that point on the game would automatically "sense" your intention, and would evolve along that path.

I had the same problem in SC4.  I'd design this really beautiful area with nice parks and stuff, and then I'd get a bunch of R$ apartment buildings.  Or sometimes I'd build a poor area for the town and the R$$$ would all of a sudden move there instead.quote>

 

I believe the best way to do this is with property values. How do you keep poor people from moving into an area, the wealthy people, who create high desire for a piece of property, causes the value of the property to rise. 

Another idea, just a thought, would be to make little "neighborhoods" that you define to be able to have a HOA (Home Owners Association) which would have set dues, figured by and equation based upon the value of the land in the area.

This will make areas which are too expensive for certain sims. Of course, if there are no jobs for all of those rich people, the lots stay empty, with little for sale signs in front, or the property is put up for sale (people move out) causing the grass to overgrow and what not, but not the entire building to turn BLACK. Depending on how you set the neighborhood up, the HOA could have high enough dues so that the landscaping is handled by them, and not the home owner, meaning when a house is empty, it just has a for sale sign and no lights on at night.

This is a common practice in very high end neighborhoods such as the Woodlands outside of Houston.

 - Creathir

[the olive 0]

I agree with your point about having to accept a proposal from someone who wants to develop in an area. This would give you the freedom to have areas for rich and for poor, and wouldn't be super easy, it is a compromise between having what you want and having a little difficulty.

[hawkpride147 1]

with the creations we already have from BAT's, the buildings would already be done. the coding seems to be the longest hardest part of this project, but entirely possible. we have plenty of members who excel in this area...plus think about how the game would never be obsolete...anything we decided we wanted or needed, we could just put in because we would have all the coding and we would know it inside and out. this is a genius idea. im about to email some of my friends with programming degrees to see if they would like to join in this incredible project

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Creathir, I think those are good ideas.  Property values play an important role in real life, as well as the social standards enforced in communities.  Read about my neighborhoods idea, it's in a long post a page or two ago.

And I definitely agree about the abandonment graphics.  I suppose that a few models (representing a few levels of abandonment) could be made for each building could be made.

At this point it seems like each building will have a lot of individual models that would need to be made for it, but I still think that's very possible.  The number of buildings isn't too much of a concern because the game will be continually modded after the initial release.  The filesize is a concern though, since each model needs another texture, and that could add up when there are 10+ models for each building.

Hawkpride147:  NONE of the BAT models, or their source files will be usable in any new game in any way. 

[the olive 0]

This neighborhood idea is good, each neighborhood could have its own school, police station etc. that way we solve the problem of covering all the city with circles, which ends up costing more, and the boarders of the coverage usually have low E.Q. which makes no sense because they still go to the school.

[Creathir 3]

Jasoncw:

This could be my ignorance here, but if we were building this in a 3D environment, theoretically the models would be totally detatched from the textures, correct? Would we need seperate models for the different views? Could we not get away with having alternate textures? Certainly if there was structural damage to a building, you would want alternate models, but otherwise, would we need them? Just curious. This could be my inexperience with game development.

 - Creathir

[Jasoncw 11,840]

The neighborhoods would be too small for that unfortunately.  In real life, a single high school covers a few miles, and I think Elementary schools are closer together since there's usually more, but they're still about a mile apart.

For reference, in SC4, a large tile is 4x4 km.  In real life, there would probably only be one high school that services that entire area.

Although maybe you could click on the school (or police station, or whatever), and then assign neighborhoods that it is supposed to cover.  I suppose there would be bussing costs depending on how far away the neighborhood is and how many people are in it though.

This could simplify those things though on the programming side.  "everything in this neighborhood gets this neighborhood-wide education bonus".

I was also thinking about music for this.  I think that a very simple and lean music player could be built in, which would play music files just like SC4's.  Some fan-made music would come with it, and players could put in their own music in the music folder too, to have it played as well.  Or the player could turn that off, and just use their own program outside of the game.

For sound effects though, I think good sound would add a lot to the feel of the game, but I have no idea on how to get high quality sounds.

Edit: Creathir, No, you're right, for early abandonment I think you'd only need to replace the textures.  For later stages (when roofs start collapsing, and that sort of thing), the model would need to be changed like you said.

[the olive 0]

Another way to solve the boarder problems for schools, fire stations, police stations etc. could be by using the roads, this is how it is usualy done in real life, so the roads you select would be the boarder for the schools, but there would be a maximum and the expenses would be higher for larger boundaries. This would be harder to program, I would suspect, but there would be no gaps or overlapping.

No wonder it took them years to develop this game, there are so many aspects to look at.

[hamsterTK 93]

The abandonment thing sounds kind of unneccesary and really hard for the building modelers. Couldnt we code it where a dilapidated building eventually gets replaced with something crappy, like say a surface parking lot?

Anyways, I have some more ideas:

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

This setup would introduce two new things to the game that were only minimally present in SC4: 1. the service sector, and 2. tourism

Hotel demand in the game would depend on the amount of attractions, entertaiment, and business in the city. With this, the "visitors" would move into hotel rooms like residents, and their "jobs" would be to eat out and buy crap, supporting the Retail/Entertainment businesses.

This would allow a city without a lot of big business or rich citizens support higher wealth CS earlier and really push its economy along

Retail/Entertainment would be basically any stores or entertainment venues. Most of the people employed by these businesses would be low weath regardless of what weath the establishment is. These would need to have also have customer base and as well as a source of jobs. One Idea Ive had is that now sims will "shop" 2-3 times a day at random places. So CS demand will be based on more than just how many jobs are available. It will also add more traffic and make transit planning more realistic

No wonder it took them years to develop this game, there are so many aspects to look at.quote>

Yeah

you know, all these ideas are great, but seriously I think the first few versions are going to be really really simple, and that the main team should focus on getting the bare bones at first

This is really fun talking about though

[ardecila 124]

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.

As for building styles...  all of the custom content now has wildly differing styles and model quality, yet many players are perfectly happy to put a textured box office building next to a highly-detailed porkissimo building. 

Unity in building design is not a total necessity - not that it's impossible.  Between you, me, Don Miguel, marcszar, and others, we have enough vintage Northern-City buildings for a tileset.  There are quite a few Parisian/German/European batters that already have enough buildings for a tileset.  The Japanese community has enough for a major tileset as well, but involving them would be a significant language barrier.

3dsmax is an extremely versatile tool and I see no reason why it cannot become the tool of choice for the content of ST1000.  If it is the tool, then why not save some time and use the buildings we already have?

[the olive 0]

I agree, retial should be seperated from office, that way you don't have offices taking over and not having any retial.

I think there should be another catigory called retial/residential. Very often there will be retial stores at the bottom of a residential building downtown, and outside the downtown there are usually one or two floors over the store. Retail would have high traffic from all ther people who live in the same area, this would also take advangate over space, not having to waste space for a one story store, now it can be integrated with a residential building.

If this gets enough support a group should be made to think of as many ideas as possible and to gather suggestions from others, you never know what may come out of this.

[joerg 280]

As far as content goes guys, here is my idea.

Basically we use a P2P interface like i mentioned before that would be built into the game and when you load the game up you basically just download content from other users plugins folders simply by searching.

Each plugin would be a simple format like a .plug file or something and would contain a header unit that would specify every detail about the lot and could be digitally signed by its original author.

The header file could contain info like the tile set it belongs to, its size, its type, everything pretty much. And the when you open the game up you simply say hey i want to start a euro city so you do a search for buildings in the euro set and the game auto generates a list of popular euro content on other members computers and you then download them, could take a while but it would finish up eventually and of course you would have your own local content too. This method could be as manual as finding one specific building or finding 100 buildings that all match the same tile set.

Another cool thing with this is that when we start a new city you could simply tell the game which tile sets to include in a city. So no more going back to windows and digging in your plugins folder.

Further more i envision no dependency problems, first off the content would be purely open source, but becuase each header is digitally signed people would still get credit for their work, but we couldnt worry about permissions any more. The great thing about this is that dependencies could be included in the original downloads, and then when people p2p share their plugins the game would automattically see that you already have this item id in you data base and wouldnt need to be downloaded.

Finally item ids would be given to every model and texture. The p2p network created by the game could auto asign ids to content uploaded by the original creater by simply uploading it to the network, and if its unique on the network the id would be registered with one centeral reference point.

I know this sounds complex but their are actually quite a few p2p programs out their for us to just adapt into the game, and ilives reader can already be used to make item ids and such.

Finally the lots would simply be container files and could contain as many models textures and scripts as we want or as few each with its own unique id that the game would log and never duplicate.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

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>

Wow, that sounds like an awesome idea but what about agriculture?

I also think we should stick to the whole Yellow- Industrial, Green- Residental and Blue- Commercial thing too, just to keep the old sim city players from getting things mixed up all the time!

I think a hotel zone is very improtant, I'm not sure why it was never included in and previous Sim City games. It could have a joint effect that adds people to the overall population and gives jobs too