Total Overhaul Mod Thoughts

[Ocram's Razr 963]

If your Total Overhaul Mod has 3 common wealth levels (plus uncommon executives and event-driven elites and poverty), 12+ growth stages for RCO, and discreet/unique/separate zones for hotels and either warehouses or free-form (á la Cities XL) light/extraction industry (removing dense zones), I'm certain several modders will step in and provide assets to fill in any gaps.

 

EDIT: Changing it so that immigrants are (primary school) educated or uneducated and working/low class (except through events to attract middle and upper class professionals or a ton of impoverished refugees) would greatly help immersion and realism.

[ethansprang 41]

Sounds interesting!  For me, I like separating wealth and density more.

The problem with commercial being over-represented is from the inability to add mixed-use zoning.  Although strip malls and shopping centers are purely commercial in post-war cities, that's only because planners decided that mixed use was "bad".  Older cities' commercial is just the first two floors of most buildings, so every office and many residences are also commercial.

 

If you're going to touch education, at least re-purpose the levels - the idea that "Uneducated" means No Primary School is absurd.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

5 hours ago, ethansprang said:

(snip)

If you're going to touch education, at least re-purpose the levels - the idea that "Uneducated" means No Primary School is absurd.

How is it absurd? Uneducated means no education. The alternative is 

Illiterate - no school

Uneducated - only elementary school

Literate - middle school

Educated - high school/preparatory school

Well Educated - community college

Very Well Educated - University

By adding middle school, you can separate manual laborers from farmers and artisans. By adding community college, you can separate doctors from nurses and corporate middle management from specialists and executives.

[hbn 244]

That looks like one heck of a challenge. It is odd to have to put a massive barrier to split industry and residential up when you plan that residential area to provide low-educated workers for that. Typically there isn't as much space needed as that since local commute times are favoured more to it. It's also annoying that every industrial unit generates pollution, when smaller scale local manufacturing and other distribution warehouses generate virtually none... least not noticeable pollutants. Small industries aren't surprising to find in between residential areas or outskirts of the city centre, larger scale heavy industries you do tend to find on the outskirts because they churn out such muck.

There are some differences in how retail works in real life than in game. I've noticed in game it's not out of place to find someone commute to the opposite side of the city just to visit a little shop or the park or something. Real life that would never happen. Most areas have their own parks and a small shopping area, typically a street or two. Some of the larger areas may have two separate small shopping areas. These shops would provide basic foods, such as bread, milk, stuff like that. You'd then have a city centre providing larger shops selling more stuff, larger items or things like clothes, electronics, weekly grocery shopping, etc. Perhaps that can be implemented somehow into the new commute system or something. Parking spaces and transport would also have a bigger effect on the success of the retail, hence the growth in out of town supermarkets.

There is an idea for overhauling roads but that might make things too ambitious. You have can have your preset roads, but you create roads by traffic lanes. If your road becomes busy, rather than just use the upgrade tool to change it to a preset thing, you get your lane tool, it snaps to whichever side of the road you want to add another lane of traffic to, and you just drag to create the new lane. Say you just have a normal road but one direction is too busy you just create it on that side. It doesn't require you to do it only at a junction it automatically transitions it between start and end. It can de snap if you want to break the lane off from the road. Would make it highly flexible but might be awkward to do depending on the limitations of the game.

-----

Uneducated works typically have primary school education at some level and basic secondary education. They may not have graduated secondary (dropped out) or have done poorly but they typically don't just skip the entire thing. Illiteracy would only really exist in areas where there is no education system. It's very rare in developed countries. Might over complicate things but even very highly educated workers could be distinguished out of universities, where you have basic undergrad degress, post-grads and doctorates/masters.

 

[boformer 3,169]

17 minutes ago, hbn said:

There is an idea for overhauling roads but that might make things too ambitious. You have can have your preset roads, but you create roads by traffic lanes. If your road becomes busy, rather than just use the upgrade tool to change it to a preset thing, you get your lane tool, it snaps to whichever side of the road you want to add another lane of traffic to, and you just drag to create the new lane. Say you just have a normal road but one direction is too busy you just create it on that side. It doesn't require you to do it only at a junction it automatically transitions it between start and end. It can de snap if you want to break the lane off from the road. Would make it highly flexible but might be awkward to do depending on the limitations of the game.

I would really like to see this, but the whole network system of the game is static. A road/train track/etc. is always a fixed mesh with a fixed number of lanes, and the textures for network must be created manually. That's what Network Extensions is built on.

Creating the the virtual representation of a dynamic lane-based network system in code is possible. The problem is the graphical representation. It requires highly complex geometric calculations and advanced shaders, and modders don't have access to shaders.

[ethansprang 41]

19 hours ago, OcramsRzr said:

How is it absurd? Uneducated means no education. The alternative is 

Illiterate - no school

Uneducated - only elementary school

Literate - middle school

Educated - high school/preparatory school

Well Educated - community college

Very Well Educated - University

By adding middle school, you can separate manual laborers from farmers and artisans. By adding community college, you can separate doctors from nurses and corporate middle management from specialists and executives.

Over 90% of OECD adults have a high--school equivalent degree.  Primary school completion rates have been close to 100% for nearly 80 years.  In game terms, that means that 90% of Cims are at least Ed2.  Auto workers, farmers, retail, and food service - all are typically Ed2 in the real world. In fact, most of the jobs the game treats as "Uneducated" or "Some Education" would NOT consider hiring a person without a highschool degree or equivalent, to say nothing of never having been to primary school.

It wouldn't matter except it makes the education system totally unrealistic.  If you try to have real-world education services, i.e. universal primary and secondary education - you get a city that is actually VERY hard to keep stable.  Your specialized industry will have insufficient workers, esp farms and forests. Trying to keep a persistently high unemployment rate to force-fill the jobs exacerbated death waves.

 

[Ocram's Razr 963]

On February 20, 2016 at 3:57 AM, ethansprang said:

Over 90% of OECD adults have a high--school equivalent degree.  Primary school completion rates have been close to 100% for nearly 80 years.  In game terms, that means that 90% of Cims are at least Ed2.  Auto workers, farmers, retail, and food service - all are typically Ed2 in the real world. In fact, most of the jobs the game treats as "Uneducated" or "Some Education" would NOT consider hiring a person without a highschool degree or equivalent, to say nothing of never having been to primary school.

It wouldn't matter except it makes the education system totally unrealistic.  If you try to have real-world education services, i.e. universal primary and secondary education - you get a city that is actually VERY hard to keep stable.  Your specialized industry will have insufficient workers, esp farms and forests. Trying to keep a persistently high unemployment rate to force-fill the jobs exacerbated death waves.

 

Upon further reflection, I realize how unrealistic wealth and education are. Wealth should be tied to jobs. Food processing factories (agricultural specialized refining industry) should require elementary school and high school educated workers and L1 industry should hirer fewer illiterate workers. Forestry extraction (working forests) should hire elementary school and high school educated workers and processing should hire all high school educated workers.

[hitzu 139]

What do you think about a separate zone type and demand for parking space: flat parkings and multilevel parkings?

[boformer 3,169]

1 hour ago, hitzu said:

What do you think about a separate zone type and demand for parking space: flat parkings and multilevel parkings?

2 problems:

1. Parking doesn't seem to be simulated at all (pocket cars).

2. I would consider inner city parking as a public service provided by the city, not a private growable, except for the parking lots that belong to commercial stores

If you really want to implement a realistic parking simulation, I would go for a fill tool for flat parking lots (Cities XL-like) and plopable multilevel parking.

[hitzu 139]

3 hours ago, boformer said:

1. Parking doesn't seem to be simulated at all (pocket cars).

There could be an optional dependency of the Rush Hour mod that forces cims to use parkings.

The basic idea is to eliminate the unrealistic pocket car behaviour and to bring a gameplay based on the tradeoff between car-using/large-parkings/long-distances/single-use and alternate-transportation/dence-development/walkable-distances/mixed-use. In the current state of the game there is no penalty if there is no parkings nearby the target lot - cim can just put its car into his pocket. This not only shows the wrong view of the reality, but also has lack of challenge.

Parking zoning would be just a simplest way to build them for the player - there would be just two buttons in UI instead of handful of ploppables. They shouldn't provide any direct income (though maybe it could be regulated by a policy) but they would cost undirectly by consuming electricity and requiring roads.

  Edited February 26, 2016 by hitzu  
typos

[Homernoid 1]

The mod idea sounds great. What I really miss in C:S in comparison to SimCity is the very good distinction of different wealth classes in SimCity. The high wealth houses really stand out which isn´t the case in C:S. But I guess that this is not really the objective of this mod as you aim for the simulation part of it, not aesthetics.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

1 hour ago, hitzu said:

There could be an optional dependency of the Rush Hour mod that forces cims to use parkings.

The basic idea is to eliminate the unrealistic pocket car behaviour and to bring a gameplay based on the tradeoff between car-using-large-parkings-long-distances-single-use and alternate-transportation-dence-development-walkable distances-mixed-use. In the current state of the game there is no penalty if there is no parkings nearby the target lot - cim can just put its car into his pocket. This not only shows the wrong view of the reality, but also has lack of challenge.

Parking zonong would be just a simplest way to build them for the player - they would be just two buttons in UI instead of handful of ploppables. They shouldn't provide any direct income (though maybe it could be regulated by a policy) but they would cost undirectly by consuming electricity and requiring roads.

I would call them warehouse zones, with the smaller lots being no more than parking lots and the bigger ones using semi-tractor-trailer trucks for high capacity and low congestion freight shipping over roads.

[hitzu 139]

@OcramsRzr hmmm they serve absolutyly different purpose. And there are huge parkings around some structures like stadiums, airports and malls. It would be weird if there would pop up large warehouses.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

6 minutes ago, hitzu said:

Hmmm they serve absolutyly different purpose. And there are huge parkings around some structures like stadiums, airports and malls. It would be weird if there would pop up large warehouses.

@hitzu Warehouses would grow on 4+ tile deep lots, according to my idea. Combine 3-tile deep blocks with with 2-lane roads without raised sidewalks and you can get sprawling parking lots. My idea would have 'Rush Hour' as a dependency.

[wallacet 336]

Parking is one of the things that drives me crazy in this game...maybe it's different in Europe as compared to the US,  but there are virtually no parking lots in this game..There's a paid parking lot or garage every other block in the downtown of my city. I would love to see a policy that doesn't allow street parking, and buildings can abandon if there aren't enough parking lots nearby...

[DaHindi 11]

2 hours ago, wallacet said:

Parking is one of the things that drives me crazy in this game...maybe it's different in Europe as compared to the US,  but there are virtually no parking lots in this game..There's a paid parking lot or garage every other block in the downtown of my city. I would love to see a policy that doesn't allow street parking, and buildings can abandon if there aren't enough parking lots nearby...

The US are more Car-heavy, mainly cause of the mentality, bigger distances and less or less accepted public services (bus, metro etc.)

In the US are still even more parking lots so finding a parking spot in the US is less a problem than in Europe.

 

But there are still less parking lots than in Europe by far

[boformer 3,169]

One challenge of a parking simulation would be performance.

Right now the game pre-calculates the whole route of a vehicle, and it would be unrealistic to search and reserve a parking space before the car arrives at it's destination.

So after the car arrives, there are 2 possibilities:

1. There are free parking spaces on the building lot
2. There are no free parking spaces on the building lot

If there is no parking space on the lot, the mod has to search for one in the surrounding area (closer parking is preferred). The mod would try to find 4 or 5 parking lots in the search radius, then reserve the closest one for the vehicle.

Depending on the distance the cim has to walk, a car accessibility rating will be given to the building. The cims happiness will also be reduced when the walk is too long. When the car accessibility rating is low, rich car-loving cims will avoid the building. Also, you will see a warning in the newsticker that informs you about the lack of parking spaces in the area.

Especially the parking lot search would be a quite complex.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

"Depending on the distance the cim has to walk, a car accessibility rating will be given to the building. The cims happiness will also be reduced when the walk is too long. When the car accessibility rating is low, rich car-loving cims will avoid the building. Also, you will see a warning in the newsticker that informs you about the lack of parking spaces in the area."

Certain buildings should have parking garages (some underground), which real cars cannot park in (no parking props) but would provide good car accessibility ratings.

 

My idea for warehouse zones would function like street parking and hire 1 uneducated worker per 2 tiles of parking. If the lot is at least 4 tiles deep, then it would function like a processing plant or generic factory that produces nothing (except logistics) but accepts 1-2 resources for storage and distribution (for local industry and commerce) and sends out high capacity freight trucks to maintain 20-80% capacity (importing or exporting) which won't disappear on their way to the cargo train depot or highway.

[hitzu 139]

18 hours ago, boformer said:

Depending on the distance the cim has to walk, a car accessibility rating will be given to the building. The cims happiness will also be reduced when the walk is too long. When the car accessibility rating is low, rich car-loving cims will avoid the building. Also, you will see a warning in the newsticker that informs you about the lack of parking spaces in the area.

I don't like this concept cause it wouldn't fit into pedestrin city centers that IRL service people of different wealth including rich ones. It is based on the false assumption that walking is something bad and uncomfortable rather than enjoyable and pleasurable.

[Judazzz 1,936]

19 hours ago, boformer said:

So after the car arrives, there are 2 possibilities:

1. There are free parking spaces on the building lot
2. There are no free parking spaces on the building lot

The latter could then result in going home angry and disappointed, throwing a hissy fit on Chirper and punishing the player with decreased happiness.
Bonus: if it happens for the third time, start a riot!

[boformer 3,169]

wouldn't that be too extreme? In europe it's quite common that you have to park one or two blocks away.

[wallacet 336]

24 minutes ago, boformer said:

wouldn't that be too extreme? In europe it's quite common that you have to park one or two blocks away.

If you find a free parking spot a block away from your destination in any US city you're doing alright!  My city charges $5 an hour for some of the parking lots. A nifty policy would be paid parking lots at the expense of citizen happiness. I in no way expect that to be an actual policy but it would be interesting.

[boformer 3,169]

actually that's an interesting idea for a policy.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

I have refined my idea to work with current restrictions: make L1 exclusively lower class, L2 split evenly between lower class and upper class, L3 mostly middle class (can have some upper or lower class), L4 split evenly between middle class and upper class, and L5 exclusively upper class. Property taxes per tile should increase by 50% for each subsequent wealth level. That means that new wealth levels are unneeded. When I have time after your mods have been released and tested, I might add an education level and 2 wealth levels to the game. However, poverty must have already been included and I must have free time when applicable.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

25 minutes ago, AJ3D said:

We got some more refined design documentation put together if anyone wants to take a look.

Although this is a brainstorm, we need to bring things into focus and come up with some tangible design outlines. Adding new wealth levels and zone types is out of scope for now. Were going stick with the current 3 wealth levels and zone types.  We think we can re purpose the current leveling system and have it represent only density.

I would like to see 15 levels (low, medium, high) for housing and offices, 9 levels for industry (light, moderate, heavy), maybe have props, colors, and lot size change when a building changes occupant type.

[Avanya 2,605]

It sounds really cool.  Love that wealth and density will be separated. I wish I could help, but I have no programming skills at all.  I'll gladly create buildings to fill in holes that might be with the new setup. ^^

The idea of hedges/fences generating automatically sounds awesome! Would love it if it's doable  

[wallacet 336]

20 hours ago, boformer said:

actually that's an interesting idea for a policy.

I'll also contribute what I can. Please don't hesitate to contact me. What I really think we are going to eventually need with this game are modding teams, similar to what you saw with SC4. There's so many talented modders out there, but the models are all over the map, both in content and quality.  Without a focused effort on one particular wealth level or an individual focus on industrial lots or commercial lots or what have you, it will be a long time coming before this idea is realized.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

Well, baby steps before flight...

 

However, I can code and provide residential assets

[boformer 3,169]

2 minutes ago, wallacet said:

I'll also contribute what I can. Please don't hesitate to contact me. What I really think we are going to eventually need with this game are modding teams, similar to what you saw with SC4. There's so many talented modders out there, but the models are all over the map, both in content and quality.  Without a focused effort on one particular wealth level or an individual focus on industrial lots or commercial lots or what have you, it will be a long time coming before this idea is realized.

A team of modellers and developers would be great and really speed up the process.  I think such a team should focus on what we have:

• Improve default buildings (color variations, textures)
• Create alternative versions of default buildings, so we get enough variety for a building style (maybe sharing the texture with the default building)
• Create must-have assets which are missing in the default set, for example a few "normal" villas

The most important thing is that the quality of textures, meshes and LODs matches with the default buildings. For example, about 95% of the LOD meshes and textures produced by asset creators are too detailed compared to the default assets. Before the team gets started, quality standards must be defined.

Another important thing is that all asset source files are uploaded to a service like Dropbox (so every team member has a backup), and if possible there should be a shared Steam account for workshop uploads.

[Koesj 659]

2 hours ago, boformer said:

For example, about 95% of the LOD meshes and textures produced by asset creators are too detailed compared to the default assets.

I feel like you're kinda speaking to me here 

By what measure? Tris or pixels per square cell?