Collaborative City Project

[Mithrik 562]

Hello everyone.

 

I've been away for some time from SC4, leaving my CJ's completely neglected and staying away from some projects I had around it, but today I go out of obscurity to ask you people about this idea I had, and to know what do you think of it, as well as how plausible you consider said idea to be.

 

The Idea: A collaborative city project

 

I know what you may be thinking, this has been done and it's not original, but I don't think that there has been a project like this in regards to how it has been done.

 

I came up with the idea while thinking about another community project -on which I had the honor of participating- the Piece by Piece project of the Age of Empires II fansite, Age of Kings Heaven. Piece by Piece was first conceived in 2006 as a community project where the scenario designers of the site would join up to create a single playable map with a story, each participant having a certain space to work on. To this day, Piece by Piece has spawned a total four maps, with the fourth being released last year after a 5-year hiatus.

 

Now, back to the project itself, what I came up with was that this kind of things would be pretty cool to do in SimCity 4, but unfortunately, I have never seen one of these launch up. Therefore I decided to take the way the Piece by Piece project has been managed in AoKH, and adjust it to SimCity 4.

 

Finally, after some thought, I created these basic project guidelines (the ones in Italics are merely suggestions and could be scrapped):

 

• We will all build a city together in the same region, said region will be chosen by the participants but will have a size limit.
• The manager of the project will act as a medium for the city to pass from person to person, so as to preserve the integrity of the project.
• Each participant is like the mayor of the city, and every set time he/she will be changed for the next person in the list.
• There should be a changelog for the relevant changes done to the city.
• To ensure that there are no plugin conflicts, these will be heavily restricted and you will have to make sure you are only using the ones that are allowed. The allowed plugins will be held in a list with links to where they can be downloaded should there be a person that does not have one or more of them.
  • As an extension of the above rule, if someone wants to add a plugin to the plugin list, it will have to pass voting from all the participants.
  • Alternatively, the city will be played in vanilla SC4, no plugins allowed.
• No cheats and custom content will be allowed. The project manager will check each participant's progress, and if something is found to be out of place (sudden increases in money, reward building acquired without prerequisites, etc.), the city will be roll-backed to the last save the manager had.
  • As an extension and to prevent confusion, U-Drive-It Missions should be forbidden, as most of them unlock reward buildings and/or give extra money.
• The project will be finished when one of the following happens:
  • There is no more interest in the project.
  • The city achieves a level of development with which everyone feels comfortable.
• At the end of the project, the city will be showcased in a City Journal, and all the due credits will be given to all the participants.

Feedback is accepted and encouraged, I'd like to hear your opinions on this.

[burwellian 16]

As you've said, it's being done, and done well.

 

It'd take a fair bit of organising I'd expect, and co-operation while you play as city tiles can impact on each other, etc... But if you can pull it off then I'd look forward to seeing it. 

[Mithrik 562]

Thanks, I had seen that one before, but even if a collaborative effort, it's not really as open as what I have in mind here.

 

I think you are under the impression of me proposing multiple cities being developed at once, that's not the case. Let me explain this more.

 

I was thinking of making the sign-up open for those who want to participate, obviously with a limit capacity. What I want to change respecting other projects of this kind that I've seen is that instead of each player taking care of one tile, they will be in charge of the whole region, as if the whole region was under the same mayor's jurisdiction. In fact, the players will play as if they were the mayors of the city, they "govern" the city, and after a set amount of time, a new mayor takes over, in the way passing the city to the next player in the line.

 

The reason for this change is, that since many cities growing at the same time would be hard to control in many levels, from things like expansion into other tiles, to players abandoning or disappearing suddenly, leaving their cities adrift; with this model I propose, I want to prevent this. One mayor, one city, said city is played for a certain amount of time by someone, and then it gets sent back to the manager of the project as a control measure and then to the next person. If a player is unable to play on their turn, then they are skipped or moved at their request and if they there is a cheater detected, the city can be roll-backed to a previous clean state.

 

When I reference the external case of Piece by Piece I talk about how the community managed that project, there is always one person acting as the manager who is in charge of making sure that everything works as intended, and only one person makes their part at a time, otherwise it would be an incredible mess, and it would an ordeal to organize and coordinate everything. My proposal is different because I propose this to be as big as people want it to be, but everything has to be streamlined this to work.

 

I hope this makes everything clear.

[MandelSoft 2,769]

I see both of our approaches differ, and they differ quite a lot. While the NORO Co-operative is mostly about aesthetics, this projects seems to be about functionality, which will require a bit different organisation. However, it's still a good thing to give insight in how we are doing it...

I have to agree that such a project needs co-ordination. With the NORO co-operative, a lot is discussed on the private forums and on the Skype chat. There is a general plan mapped out and we set up some rules and norms. This is to prevent that this will turn out to utter chaos. Currently, the project is fortunately quite structured now and the only chaos that can be found are in the chaotic residential street patterns.

With the NORO Co-operative we work with a check-in-check-out (CICO) system. If someone wants to work on a city, he checks in on the CICO-thread (which is a private thread on SC4D), stating which city tile he'll be using. After he's done, he syncs the tiles affected directly and indirectly on the cloud server (in this case, Google Drive) and checks out on the CICO-thread. This way, everyone involved in the project can see who is working were and what cities are occupied. Given the size of the region and the limited amount of players, there's always a city tile open you can use. In fact, the map is so large, that most of the time, 80% of the map remains unclaimed by the players.

We also have set up a plugin set on Google Drive to make sure that we all use the same plugins. Most of us use a separate plugins folder for this co-op region. If plugins need to be added or removed, we have to discuss this team-wide and we need to keep our plugin folders synced. However, we do allow some cheats in our game, because we want to make a visually pleasing city. If you try to go for a playing the game approach, then I can see that you won't allow cheats.

For this project, it's best to set up a cloud server like Dropbox or Google Drive. However, Google Drive often comes with more space than Dropbox. On this cloud server, you store the region, as well as a plugins folder which everyone has to use. It's however NOT recommended to use the files directly from the cloud server in-game due to corruption risks, but rather copy the files over to their rightful locations and sync manually.

This is just to give you a little insight on how we do it on the other co-operative project

Best,

Maarten

[Mithrik 562]

Thanks for sharing this, Maarten. I like the NORO Co-Operative, it's an example of good organization, but a small team surely helps with that.

 

What you guys did is not really on my scope in this case, but it's a very good way to do it.