KotCity 0.49.3 (last updated 4/13/2018): an open source city simulator

[Flat Raver 59]

1 hour ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Certain appliances would be powered by gas, like a gas stove or (in my family's house) the fireplace. The alternatives to natural gas would be firewood and electricity, which makes gas an optional utility.

(I had to look this up just now; also, don't look at the pie chart's colour code.) Apparently, natural gas can be fed through a pipe or stored in a tank on the property. Uses of natural gas inside a home include space heating and heating up water and it's mostly made from methane and other hydrocarbon gases such as propane. (Methane is especially interesting because you can also get that from a landfill.) Oh, and certain vehicles can use CNG as fuel.

So far, heating would only make sense if the city is in a cold environment (think C:S and the Snowfall DLC) and winter, and I don't see a weather, season, or biome system just yet (or maybe there is and I missed it); otherwise, if you want gas for grilling, you could get that in a canister from certain stores. (I've never watched King of the Hill, by the way.)

Yeah, it's hard for me to justify natural gas as its own utility when it could also be used for all sorts of things, like a natural gas power plant (SC4 has one but C:S doesn't) and an alternative fuel (and alternative fuels is its own interesting subject). A better icon in those cases would be the CNG diamond.

I may need to remind you that here in Sweden, we don't really use natural gas for heating. We keep ourselves warm through properly insulated housing and waste incineration powered district heating.

[ww2commander 7]

5 hours ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Yeah, it's hard for me to justify natural gas as its own utility when it could also be used for all sorts of things, like a natural gas power plant (SC4 has one but C:S doesn't) and an alternative fuel (and alternative fuels is its own interesting subject). A better icon in those cases would be the CNG diamond.

That's the thing....when you break it down into game mechanics of input/output....it represented just another power sources regardless of application (i.e. cooking instead of lighting). Unless there should be a unique gas mechanic that does something other than power output,  it would probably not make a difference if it is lumped into the power buildings.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

8 hours ago, kotcity said:

Wow! This is really shaping up. I'll be incorporating some of these icons soon, as I'm rapidly adding new features.

Is this the first version you are trying out? What caught your eye? What makes you want to jump in more than ever?

Well, if I wanna do any sort of alpha/beta or quality assurance testing (if that makes sense at this point), I need to devote a save.

The fact that my spring break has been taken up by multiple 100+ mile trips isn't helping, either. (The irony here is that I have to use a city-building game to explain to my family how to drive through the freeways.)

6 hours ago, Flat Raver said:

I may need to remind you that here in Sweden, we don't really use natural gas for heating. We keep ourselves warm through properly insulated housing and waste incineration powered district heating.

2 hours ago, ww2commander said:

That's the thing....when you break it down into game mechanics of input/output....it represented just another power sources regardless of application (i.e. cooking instead of lighting). Unless there should be a unique gas mechanic that does something other than power output,  it would probably not make a difference if it is lumped into the power buildings.

The only thing I can see natural gas being used for is heating (as its own utility), and that would be one of several different heating options.

Now it's starting to sound like C:S Snowfall. The Snowfall DLC has several things added to it: trams, heating as a utility along with associated policies, and snowy maps (presumably to justify adding heating as a utility). Alternative heating methods in C:S includes using electric heating, which (of course) uses more electricity, but I can't remember if insulation was an option... (Of course, this means I have to switch out the gas icon with a heat icon.)

[velrox 39]

now there's one-way roads, how about highways? it takes up 2 tiles and more expensive to build, but how do you code them? also, highways will be elevated.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

47 minutes ago, velrox said:

now there's one-way roads, how about highways? it takes up 2 tiles and more expensive to build, but how do you code them? also, highways will be elevated.

I'd imagine the proper next step would be avenues (4-lane roads with a median). Whichever way highways are implemented will be based off of how avenues are implemented. (Not the way SC4 does it, but rather using the footprint of an avenue as effectively a jumbo-sized high-speed one way road with no zoning allowed with either a smaller version to use as the offramps and onramps or premade interchanges to go along with it.)

[velrox 39]

when highways are added, how do we fit 3 lanes into 1 tile?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

14 minutes ago, velrox said:

when highways are added, how do we fit 3 lanes into 1 tile?

I was thinking it would be 3 lanes plus the shoulder and median space across two tiles. That roughly corresponds with the C:S avenue and highway.

There is an alternative, however: make a two-way highway that straddles three tiles.

[kotcity 110]

3 hours ago, velrox said:

now there's one-way roads, how about highways? it takes up 2 tiles and more expensive to build, but how do you code them? also, highways will be elevated.

Ground & elevated highways are both planned. (pretty much anything SC2k has for transit is planned)

[LivingInThePast 364]

9 hours ago, velrox said:

when highways are added, how do we fit 3 lanes into 1 tile?

We don't. It has been mentioned by @Ganaram Inukshuk and myself that tiles will be smaller than SimCity 4's 16m². Looking at a freeway in my area (before they expanded it at least), I see that two lanes in each direction +shoulders + concrete barrier between them are 30 meters, which would be about two tiles (basically RHW) with the 2 meters being used for right of way space. (and speaking of multiple lanes in one tile, there was a time where they fit all four lanes into the shoulders...it was awful). That section was also used with "frontage roads" (parallel roads that connect at-grade with exits/entrances onto them), and where there weren't frontage roads there was a generous median. Altogether, the right of way was 90m-95m, which would be three SC4 tiles (96 m). The good news is that due to tighter ramps, "custom" interchanges would not take up as much space (in theory).

Also, I mentioned the "materials" thing (see the "Settlers of SimCity" post), while I still agree that having "materials" (wood, etc.) to build items is a bad idea (the "oil tokens" in CXL to have even gas stations was stupid, for instance) with ONE exception--to build concrete roads (which would be more durable but also more expensive than asphalt roads) you would need a concrete plant in your city (and we all know concrete is highly perishable). This would be one of the first industrial buildings to develop in your city. I had a document that mentioned a few building types along with the people that worked there. I need to finish it up to a semi-workable state (with the "status/wealth" of citizens there, but again, I left that paper elsewhere, so I need to go home this weekend to get it).

One more thing I'd like to add to the conversation is that laying gas lines is another extraneous thing that I'm not sure I'd like to see, as it would basically be another line to use (water pipes were bad enough, and while I do like to see some customization in that area, I would prefer that urban roads add that automatically), plus the advantages of gas for heating (especially for hot water heaters, etc.) are not necessarily cheaper where you live. It seems like a toss-up of if your house even has gas or not for that sort of thing.

[kotcity 110]

28 minutes ago, LivingInThePast said:

Also, I mentioned the "materials" thing (see the "Settlers of SimCity" post), while I still agree that having "materials" (wood, etc.) to build items is a bad idea (the "oil tokens" in CXL to have even gas stations was stupid, for instance) with ONE exception--to build concrete roads (which would be more durable but also more expensive than asphalt roads) you would need a concrete plant in your city (and we all know concrete is highly perishable). This would be one of the first industrial buildings to develop in your city. I had a document that mentioned a few building types along with the people that worked there. I need to finish it up to a semi-workable state (with the "status/wealth" of citizens there, but again, I left that paper elsewhere, so I need to go home this weekend to get it).

I'm not sure how deep I want to get into the economy re: production chains. I might just leave it at GOODS. However, I don't mind the idea of "unlockable" buildings one bit.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Well, here's where I'm at with the icons. I finally got around to drawing the staff of Hermes and another symbol that I refer to as "worm on a stick".

Here's the breakdown so far:

• Zoning
  • Residential
  • Commercial
  • Industrial
  • Mixed
• Civic and Administration
  • Health
  • Fire
  • Police
  • Education
• Transportation
  • Roads and paths
  • Highways
  • Rail
  • Bus and taxi
  • Tram, elevated rail, subway, and monorail
  • Airports
  • Seaports
• Utilities
  • Electricity
  • Water
  • Heating
  • Waste management
• Everything after that is unpopulated...

New icons:

• Reward buildings
• Star of life
• Planning tools; this would contain ghost versions of zoning, roads and utility lines, buildings and lots, and maybe even signs and labels; this is much like Prison Architect's planning tools except I lumped in the signs and tools feature from SC4
• Emergency vehicle dispatch icons: six of them

Thoughts:

• Should I turn "landmarks and tourism" into "points/places of interest"? Are these subcategories still appropriate: landmarks, tourism, memorials and remembrance, reward buildings, seasonal buildings(?)
• Should I subdivide the transportation system a little more, as in, put the mass transit stuff like this: bus and taxi, tram, elevated rail and subway, monorail (I think I explained this already)
• Should I still put RCI specialisations in zoning as a sub-subcategory?
• Prison Architect has an unlockable feature called micromanagement. Should we mimic that for, say, turn lane configurations, really fine-grained taxation, timed systems, and anything else that needs micromanaging?

EDIT: Well, points of interest grew on me and I ended up populating it as such (circled in red):

Oh, I forgot to explain the icons: landmarks (star), tourism (beach; I may switch it out for something else), memorials and remembrance (obelisk), reward buildings (gift box)

EDIT 2: May as well get this out of the way first. I figured out a suitable icon for tourism: a luggage case with stickers all over it. (This is currently the only icon with a hidden easter egg on it.) This also solved the problem of what icon to use for commercial offices: a suitcase.

I'm considering this breakdown for zoning until a better place for specialisations can be found:

• Zoning
  • Residential
    • Singular houses (default)
    • Housing complex and gated communities (?)
  • Commerical
    • Retail stores and shops (default)
    • Tourism
  • Industrial
    • Agriculture and livestock (and fishing?)
    • Manufacturing (default)
    • Logging and forestry
    • High-tech
    • Mining and quarrying
    • Petroleum and natural gas
  • Mixed

[ww2commander 7]

@Ganaram Inukshuk its looking great.

The 'commercial' icon seems to not hit the spot for me as it reminds me too much of residential. Would a multi-story building not suit commercial better.

This is probably why I keep looking at the 'mixed' icon and thinking commercial instead.

Also, zoomed in I noticed the obelisk has straight sides...maybe make them slop inwards as they go to the top.

Finally, you might want to add a 'communications' icon...I gather I'm not the only one that thinks phone and internet is actually important to modern and higher level industry and commercial zones!

 

[velrox 39]

I think my idea on roads is:

• Roads
  • Road
    • Two-Way
      • 1-tile Roads
        • Street
        • Road (2 lanes)
      • 2-tile Roads
        • Avenue (4 lanes)
        • 4-lane Road
        • 6-lane Narrow Road
      • 3-tile Roads
        • Wide Avenue (6 lanes)
        • 6-lane Road
        • 8-lane Narrow Road
        • Narrow Boulevard (8 lanes)
      • 4-tile Roads
        • 8-lane Road
        • Boulevard (8 lanes)
    • One-Way
      • 1-tile Roads
        • 1-lane one-way
        • 2-lane one-way
        • 3-lane Narrow one-way
      • 2-tile Roads
        • 3-lane one-way
        • 4-lane one-way
        • 5-lane narrow one-way
        • 6-lane narrow one-way
      • 3-tile Roads
        • 5-lane one-way
        • 6-lane one-way
  • Highway
    • Ground
      • 1-tile
        • Two-Lane Two-Way Highway
        • Two-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Narrow Three-Lane One-Way Highway
      • 2-tile
        • Three-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Four-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
        • Four-Lane Narrow One-Way Highway
      • 3-tile
        • Four-Lane Two-Way Highway
        • Four-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Five-Lane One-Way Narrow Highway
        • Six-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
        • Six-Lane One-Way Narrow Highway
      • 4-tile
        • Five-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Six-Lane Two-Way Highway
        • Six-Lane One-Way Highway
    • Elevated
      • same as the Ground, except elevated.
• Transitions
• Prefabs
• and others...

if the choices are too much...

• Roads
  • Road
    • 2-lane One-Way
    • Avenue
    • Road
    • Street
  • Highway
    • Ground
      • Two-Lane Two-Way Highway
      • Four-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
      • Six-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
    • Elevated
      • same as the ground, but elevated.

does the choices seems good?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Sorry about the delay; dentist...

3 hours ago, ww2commander said:

@Ganaram Inukshuk its looking great.

The 'commercial' icon seems to not hit the spot for me as it reminds me too much of residential. Would a multi-story building not suit commercial better.

This is probably why I keep looking at the 'mixed' icon and thinking commercial instead.

Also, zoomed in I noticed the obelisk has straight sides...maybe make them slop inwards as they go to the top.

Finally, you might want to add a 'communications' icon...I gather I'm not the only one that thinks phone and internet is actually important to modern and higher level industry and commercial zones!

 

I'll look at making an alternative commercial icon; I have an unused icon that could be used for that purpose.

The obelisk actually has sloped sides, but I guess they're too subtle. Easy fix, though.

I'm thinking of using a radio antenna for the communications icon; anyone have a different suggestion?

2 hours ago, velrox said:

I think my idea on roads is:

• Roads
  • Road
    • Two-Way
      • 1-tile Roads
        • Street
        • Road (2 lanes)
      • 2-tile Roads
        • Avenue (4 lanes)
        • 4-lane Road
        • 6-lane Narrow Road
      • 3-tile Roads
        • Wide Avenue (6 lanes)
        • 6-lane Road
        • 8-lane Narrow Road
        • Narrow Boulevard (8 lanes)
      • 4-tile Roads
        • 8-lane Road
        • Boulevard (8 lanes)
    • One-Way
      • 1-tile Roads
        • 1-lane one-way
        • 2-lane one-way
        • 3-lane Narrow one-way
      • 2-tile Roads
        • 3-lane one-way
        • 4-lane one-way
        • 5-lane narrow one-way
        • 6-lane narrow one-way
      • 3-tile Roads
        • 5-lane one-way
        • 6-lane one-way
  • Highway
    • Ground
      • 1-tile
        • Two-Lane Two-Way Highway
        • Two-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Narrow Three-Lane One-Way Highway
      • 2-tile
        • Three-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Four-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
        • Four-Lane Narrow One-Way Highway
      • 3-tile
        • Four-Lane Two-Way Highway
        • Four-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Five-Lane One-Way Narrow Highway
        • Six-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
        • Six-Lane One-Way Narrow Highway
      • 4-tile
        • Five-Lane One-Way Highway
        • Six-Lane Two-Way Highway
        • Six-Lane One-Way Highway
    • Elevated
      • same as the Ground, except elevated.
• Transitions
• Prefabs
• and others...

if the choices are too much...

• Roads
  • Road
    • 2-lane One-Way
    • Avenue
    • Road
    • Street
  • Highway
    • Ground
      • Two-Lane Two-Way Highway
      • Four-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
      • Six-Lane Two-Way Narrow Highway
    • Elevated
      • same as the ground, but elevated.

does the choices seems good?

I already proposed CuRB, or Custom Road Builder; alongside some popular presets, the roads can be customised by the user either in a separate editor or in-game on an individual road segment. That's far too complex for version 1.x, but the basis of that road system requires a grid system where the smallest cells are 4×4 meters instead of 16×16, which is also really complex. I had also initially envisioned this to have absolutely no curve support or free placement (so it's still bound to a grid so it's nothing like C:S), which is also really complex and hard to explain, but let me explain CuRB first.

Road sizes come in multiples of 4 meters, and apart from the sidewalks (which takes up 4 meters, 2 meters on each side), the space is partitioned into lanes, medians, and buffers of various sizes. (I can also consider widened sidewalks and grass strips alongside the sidewalks, but those will eat into the asphalt space, and if a sidewalk is not suited for where the road is being built, the sidewalk can be deactivated and replaced with a shoulder space or just dirt.)

Travel lanes are 3 meters wide except in some cases where they're 4 meters wide (I don't envision supporting increments smaller than 1 meter). Medians can be as small or wide as you want, but the default is 4 meters. Bike lanes could be 2 meters (that's wider than what I see, but C:S also does this), and parking strips can be 2 meters or more (depending on a parallel, angled, or perpendicular parking setup.

That said, I want and envisioned the presets to be based off of the first-ever roads (or the first roads can coexist alongside CuRB roads except they can't be customised), and here's what I propose for the most basic roads (and assume all measurements here use a 16×16 meter tile and elevated variants are present for the highways):

• Dirt road: 2 lanes, 2 ways, 1 tile
• Street: 2 lanes, 2 ways, 1 tile (usually an unpainted road)
• Two-way roads (roads with a single line separating the two sides)
  • 2 lane road, 1 tile
  • 4 lane road, 2 tiles
  • 6 lane road(?), 2 tiles
• Avenues (roads with a median)
  • 2 lane avenue(?), 1 tile
  • 4 lane avenue, 2 tiles
  • 6 lane avenue, 3 tiles
• One-way roads
  • 2 lane one way road, 1 tile
  • 4 lane one way road, 2 tiles
  • 6 lane one way road(?), 2 tiles
• Highways (two way)
  • 2 lane highway, 1 tile
  • 4 lane highway, 2 tiles
  • 6 lane highway, 3 tiles
• Highways (one way)
  • 1 lane highway, 1 tile (use this for offramps unless premade interchanges are to be used instead)
  • 2 lane highway (?), 1 tile (also used for interchanges)

Notes:

• There are a lot of dirt roads in my area...
• I also don't want to differentiate between narrow and non-narrow roads (at least not now, unless there's a space advantage, but I'm honestly not sure if that's worth implementing right now).
• There are roads with a turn lane median in my area, but notice I never listed that down as an option; no city builder that I know (basically SC4 and C:S) has ever had that as an option unless you use mods (NAM and NExt).
• The only example of a 6-lane TLM road that was in my area was recently converted into a 4-lane TLM road with parking spaces and bike lanes.
• There's only one 2-lane avenue close to me. Everything else that would be medians are TLM roads.
• Most of the 4-lane road sections in my area were eventually converted into 4-lane TLM roads.
• There are no one way roads in my area, but I've recently been to Palm Springs which has examples of a 4-lane one way road. I've personally never seen a 6-lane one way road, however.
• NO, it's not for Coachella, but Highway 111 (which leads into Palm Springs) is a 4-lane highway that accepts level crossings; it connects to Interstate 10 as a partial Y interchange; after that and some 90-degree turns, it joins back together as a 6-lane avenue.
• The distinguishing feature between avenues and roads is zone access: assuming left hand drive or right hand traffic (LHD and RHT are not synonyms), zone access can be achieved on the left and right sides, and zone departure (I never had a name for entities leaving a zoned area so let's call it zone departure) can be done on the left and right sides, whereas avenues can only do that on the right side.
  • TLM roads grant left and right side access and left and right side departure, but these roads are apparently a thing only in North America (and apparently, even the US and Canada paint these roads differently).
  • In my experience, zone departure on the left side is tricky, no matter what.
  • Uhh, I can draw this out if necessary.
• No matter what's decided on, there should be a minimum of two size options for avenues, streets, one way roads, and highways.

[LivingInThePast 364]

Rather than a variety of options for roads and avenues that seem redundant and limiting at the same time, what if it was one main road tool with settings for number of lanes and speed limits? Highways are going to be different just in terms of lane width and separate maintenance, but a lot the difference between roads, streets, and avenues in SimCity 4 was speed limits. I've been pretty busy this week but hopefully this weekend I should be able to make an outline of what I like about these ideas and what I don't like.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Update with the icons:

This menu breakdown is starting to grow on me, but I have a problem with where to put specialisations: so far, I had to put it as a separate category from zoning. That said, I have the following icons for zoning specialisations:

• Residential: RC Mix
• Residential: Housing Complex (not shown)
• Commercial: Shopping Centre (not shown)
• Commercial: Office
• Commercial: Tourism
• Industrial: Agriculture, Livestock, and Fishing
• Industrial: Forestry and Logging
• Industrial: Mining and Quarrying
• Industrial: Petroleum and Natural Gas
• Industrial: High-Tech

I'm not sure if I already showed the emergency vehicles yet. The telecom utility icon is new (as per suggestion), as are the planning tools:

• Zone Planning (use this to plan out where zones go)
• Building Planning (use this to plan out where buildings and lots go)
• Road and Utility Planning (...where roads and utility lines go)
• Signs
• Labels

Signs and labels directly come from SC4. Even though I put them with the planning tools, they can be used for more than just planning.

I wanna go back to a few topics, though.

First, the VLS. If I have residential and commercial complexes like this, the lot loses the ability to be upgraded/expanded, but then if you want to expand a housing complex, you just add a second zone right next to it. Is that OK? In either case, the lot gets treated like a giant building (even though it may be separate buildings) that tracks individual houses/stores and still has a running total of tenants/occupants.

Second, the roads. Avenues are a bit restrictive (as I tried to explain earlier), so how about this breakdown for roads?

• Dirt road
• Street
• Two-way roads
  • 2 lane road
  • 4 lane road
  • 6 lane road
• One-way roads
  • 2 lane one way road
  • 4 lane one way road
  • I'm still unsure about the 6 lane one way road
• Highways (two way)
  • 2 lane highway
  • 4 lane highway
  • 6 lane highway
• Highways (one way)
  • 1 lane highway
  • 2 lane highway (?)

[kotcity 110]

1 hour ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

First, the VLS. If I have residential and commercial complexes like this, the lot loses the ability to be upgraded/expanded, but then if you want to expand a housing complex, you just add a second zone right next to it. Is that OK? In either case, the lot gets treated like a giant building (even though it may be separate buildings) that tracks individual houses/stores and still has a running total of tenants/occupants.

I believe we are on the same page with this. It's part of a larger "complex" even though it may appear separate cosmetically.

 

1 hour ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Second, the roads. Avenues are a bit restrictive (as I tried to explain earlier), so how about this breakdown for roads?

I miiiiight not even go that complex. Have you looked at SC2k's highways?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

13 minutes ago, kotcity said:

I believe we are on the same page with this. It's part of a larger "complex" even though it may appear separate cosmetically.

 

I miiiiight not even go that complex. Have you looked at SC2k's highways?

I've never played SC2k before.

[kotcity 110]

3 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

I've never played SC2k before.

It is pretty easy to try online @ https://classicreload.com/SimCity-2000.html

Or you may simply get DOSBOX on your PC and it is relatively simple to try.

If you have a couple minutes, give it a shot and it might give you some context to the stuff I'm talking about.

If I hit my goal, KotCity 1.x should be about as fun as SC2K is. I'm hoping KotCity 2.x or 3.x meets SC4

 

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Alright, let me make a few statements about my first test-run with SC2K (all I've ever known is SC4, so this is new to me):

• Marching cubes terrain. I love the marching cubes terrain and that's something I wish to see again.
• Interesting how you can plant a tree in a single square and you can just plant more trees in the same spot to make a tiny forest.
• It took me a while to understand the menu, but apparently, hold down a button to reveal more items relevant to that menu.
• Wait, textiles are a thing in SC2K?
• This also explains the erratic nature of how KC houses appear: that's how it is in SC2K. (Is it also that way in SC classic?)
• Apparently, there's just a road, railroad, and seaport here. That's far more sparse than I thought. o_o
  • KC has a two-way road and one way road so far; maybe I have to play both games for a while first...
• This game is as old as I am; no wonder I never heard of it.
• I was also thinking about how the menu's supposed to work: since I have so many icons already, I figured all of them could be implemented as menu buttons but maybe also hidden, but they can be activated as the features they represent get populated.
  • The aesthetics of SC2K represent an era that I've never personally experienced, and all I know is skeumorphic design, flat design and low-poly art. It'd be wild to see that old of a game modernised to modern-day standards and interfaces. This is also why I'm so fond with making super-duper simplistic icons.
  • I've not played Cuphead but I have a similar but inverted statement about Cuphead: I don't see Cuphead as a game in which the aesthetics it represents persisted into the modern day, but rather a "what if video games were first developed in the 1930s and Cuphead is an 80-year-old video game?" kind of deal. KC is more like, "what if Maxis was founded only recently and their first city-builder was being made now?".
• I definitely feel like I'm on another planet right now...

[kotcity 110]

1 minute ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Marching cubes terrain. I love the marching cubes terrain and that's something I wish to see again.

Marching cubes? Never heard of this....

1 minute ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Interesting how you can plant a tree in a single square and you can just plant more trees in the same spot to make a tiny forest.

I believe they even effect pollution.

2 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Wait, textiles are a thing in SC2K?

Yes, I think there are 10-12 different industries, with different requirements and profitability.

2 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

This also explains the erratic nature of how KC houses appear: that's how it is in SC2K. (Is it also that way in SC classic?)

That's right! It's supposed to be pretty close to SC2k. SC classic is different because you just "plop" zones. They are all 3x3.

2 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

This game is as old as I am; no wonder I never heard of it.

Don't worry, you'll be saying that about 2018 games eventually

3 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

I was also thinking about how the menu's supposed to work: since I have so many icons already, I figured all of them could be implemented as menu buttons but maybe also hidden, but they can be activated as the features they represent get populated.

A crazy thing was they had to implement their own windowing system. The target was MSDOS and it didn't have any notion of a UI.

4 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

The aesthetics of SC2K represent an era that I've never personally experienced, and all I know is skeumorphic design, flat design and low-poly art. It'd be wild to see that old of a game modernised to modern-day standards and interfaces. This is also why I'm so fond with making super-duper simplistic icons.

I HOPE this is what KotCity will blossom into.

4 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

I definitely feel like I'm on another planet right now...

Yeah... imagine Maxis being a great studio and releasing 5 hit games in 1 year, instead of 15 DLC (what's that!) packs for "The Sims X"

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Oh, marching cubes terrain. I'm tempted to explain how it appears in one less dimension, and apparently there is a 2D analogue to marching cubes called marching squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_squares

If you made a simple contour map using marching squares, the end result is a shape made only straight edges parallel to the grid lines and at 45-degree angles to the grid.

Suppose you have a 4×4 grid of squares you want to fill with shaded tiles. However, that grid will have 25 vertices (5×5). Suppose you have certain values associated with each vertex and you normalise it so that they're either 1's or 0's. An example could look like this:

0 0 0 0 0
0 1 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 0
0 0 1 1 0
0 0 0 0 0

// Let's also assume the vertices are labelled like this:
 0  1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9
10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24

You want to shade the tiles such that it covers up all the vertices with 1's but not the vertices with 0's. Each grid square is filled using 1 of 16 possible tiles, and the appearance of each tile depends on where on the corners of the tile the 1's are. (If you did this with physical tiles or well-made sprites, you'll find you don't even need 16 tiles, but in this case, rotations are considered unique permutations.)

For example, the upper-left grid square (vertices 0, 1, 6, 5) has a tile that looks like this, and the entire shape looks like this:

The 3D analogue (marching cubes) requires twice as many vertices and has 256 possible cube layouts.

[kotcity 110]

8 minutes ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Oh, marching cubes terrain. I'm tempted to explain how it appears in one less dimension, and apparently there is a 2D analogue to marching cubes called marching squares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_squares

If you made a simple contour map using marching squares, the end result is a shape made only straight edges parallel to the grid lines and at 45-degree angles to the grid.

Suppose you have a 4×4 grid of squares you want to fill with shaded tiles. However, that grid will have 25 vertices (5×5). Suppose you have certain values associated with each vertex and you normalise it so that they're either 1's or 0's. An example could look like this:

0 0 0 0 0
0 1 1 1 0
0 1 1 0 0
0 0 1 1 0
0 0 0 0 0

// Let's also assume the vertices are labelled like this:
 0  1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9
10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24

You want to shade the tiles such that it covers up all the vertices with 1's but not the vertices with 0's. Each grid square is filled using 1 of 16 possible tiles, and the appearance of each tile depends on where on the corners of the tile the 1's are. (If you did this with physical tiles or well-made sprites, you'll find you don't even need 16 tiles, but in this case, rotations are considered unique permutations.)

For example, the upper-left grid square (vertices 0, 1, 6, 5) has a tile that looks like this, and the entire shape looks like this:

The 3D analogue (marching cubes) requires twice as many vertices and has 256 possible cube layouts.

Very cool! I hadn't heard of this.

[LivingInThePast 364]

8 hours ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

Update with the icons:

This menu breakdown is starting to grow on me, but I have a problem with where to put specialisations: so far, I had to put it as a separate category from zoning. That said, I have the following icons for zoning specialisations:

• Residential: RC Mix
• Residential: Housing Complex (not shown)
• Commercial: Shopping Centre (not shown)
• Commercial: Office
• Commercial: Tourism
• Industrial: Agriculture, Livestock, and Fishing
• Industrial: Forestry and Logging
• Industrial: Mining and Quarrying
• Industrial: Petroleum and Natural Gas
• Industrial: High-Tech

I'm not sure if I already showed the emergency vehicles yet. The telecom utility icon is new (as per suggestion), as are the planning tools:

• Zone Planning (use this to plan out where zones go)
• Building Planning (use this to plan out where buildings and lots go)
• Road and Utility Planning (...where roads and utility lines go)
• Signs
• Labels

Signs and labels directly come from SC4. Even though I put them with the planning tools, they can be used for more than just planning.

I wanna go back to a few topics, though.

First, the VLS. If I have residential and commercial complexes like this, the lot loses the ability to be upgraded/expanded, but then if you want to expand a housing complex, you just add a second zone right next to it. Is that OK? In either case, the lot gets treated like a giant building (even though it may be separate buildings) that tracks individual houses/stores and still has a running total of tenants/occupants.

Second, the roads. Avenues are a bit restrictive (as I tried to explain earlier), so how about this breakdown for roads?

• Dirt road
• Street
• Two-way roads
  • 2 lane road
  • 4 lane road
  • 6 lane road
• One-way roads
  • 2 lane one way road
  • 4 lane one way road
  • I'm still unsure about the 6 lane one way road
• Highways (two way)
  • 2 lane highway
  • 4 lane highway
  • 6 lane highway
• Highways (one way)
  • 1 lane highway
  • 2 lane highway (?)

I do want to put in my two cents about roads and other things discussed recently.

• There should be an option for reversible lanes and other features. Notably this would affect, say, a high-occupancy vehicle lane that could switch depending on traffic flow, but can have other uses too. There's a road near my commute that has three lanes with a broken double yellow line (yes, you read that right) with signage indicating if it was one lane in each direction with a turn lane, or two lanes going in one direction, or (possibly) all three lanes going the same way.
• I don't like the idea of kneecapping Avenues to be "zone entry only on right". Where I live there are many roads with medians, but the gaps in the medians allow for turns (even if there's not enough room for a car to fit in the medians completely to turn left). You could also have just multiple lanes separated by a double yellow stripe (this has become the de facto "default" in many of the modern city sims) even though it's difficult (though allowed) to turn in and out from the left. Some areas prohibit this but most just leave it as is. There was actually a highway south of town like that with houses and small businesses, so cars would slow down in the inner lane, then turn left...even if traffic in the opposing direction was going 70+ mph. In 2006, work began to convert it to a traditional freeway with medians and frontage roads. (Highways do not have accessible medians, except for the occasional carved-out trail meant for emergency vehicles).
• A lot of the reason why SC4 had different network types was tied to speed, with Streets being the slowest and highways the fastest. Because of this, there were all sorts of weird conversions and limits, like RHW being unable to have any outlets to it (even if it was a rural stretch).
• The industries in SC2k were basically "invisible", I mentioned it in the PDF a few pages back but it did affect the industrial areas by having them work differently in terms of clean vs. dirty and what was needed to actually run it.
• 6 lane highway seems to be a bit small for bigger dreams (how am I supposed to make my Southwest Freeway stand-in?) but I suppose that can be mod territory...
• The windowing system for DOS was a nightmare to code, and the reason why DOS never got the 1.1 update (fixing bugs, having Launch Arcos actually launch, the African Swallow speed, and many others) was because that nobody wanted to touch the code. The DOS 1.1 update was just a patch for different machines.
• I'm a bit torn for the VLS, as some parts sound good for things like schools and civic facilities but others seem overly complicated, one of which is adding bicycle racks to encourage bicycles. To me, bicycle use is mostly determined by vehicular facilities (bike lanes in roads), accessibility (massive subdivisions will really limit bicycling as transit), flat area (hills discourage biking), and wealth levels (so your poor and yuppie kots will prefer bike, but elite and blue collar kots won't). Just like SimCity had Sims, KotCity has Kots.
• There's more than road, rail, and seaport in SC2k, you just have to wait until they get invented.
• There was mention of toll booths earlier in this thread, and I have a whole thing to explain my idea and the three types you can place.
• On zoning, while zoning for agriculture is realistic, I felt it was unrealistic to zone for agriculture in my city to have the corn fields and pastures before I would end up developing it. Maybe there could be "starter cities", like one with agriculture zones, a railroad, a two-way highway, and a pre-existing power grid, as if you were developing something along the highway (or railroad) that could grow into a metropolis.
• There's a lot of interesting features that could be added but I hope that KotCity doesn't take the wrong turn from the start and do "socialized everything", and I'm not even talking about things like healthcare, it's when you start placing theme parks that I would have a problem with (maybe a "theme park zone")
• I really have to find all my old documents before I can make an update to that PDF a few pages back. I have more things to write, just wait...

[velrox 39]

8 hours ago, Ganaram Inukshuk said:

• Dirt road
• Street
• Two-way roads
  • 2 lane road
  • 4 lane road
  • 6 lane road
• One-way roads
  • 2 lane one way road
  • 4 lane one way road
  • I'm still unsure about the 6 lane one way road
• Highways (two way)
  • 2 lane highway
  • 4 lane highway
  • 6 lane highway
• Highways (one way)
  • 1 lane highway
  • 2 lane highway (?)

why not 1-lane one-way road, 3-lane one-way road, and 5-lane one-way road? how about 7-lane one-way road and 8-lane one-way road? how about 8-lane road? or 3-lane one-way highway? 4-lane one-way?

and... can you add a "grid button"?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Oh, I'm skipping odd-numbered one way lane counts for a reason: Under the CuRB system, the lanes should be 3 meters wide, but since there are an odd number of lanes fitting into a space that's an even number of lanes wide, there will be a piece of unused space somewhere that's an odd number of meters wide. For me, the easiest solution is to put one meter of unused space in the middle lane and then distribute the rest (if any) as buffer spaces on each side. (I'm personally not fond of putting all the buffer spaces on one side of the one way road just yet, unless there's a way to ensure the road never reverses direction without also reversing the lane configuration; either that or add half-meter increments, which I'm not entirely sold on just yet.)

A one lane one way road has no size discrepancy to care about because there are no other lanes to compare it to; I also forgot that there are one way roads in my area, but they all have one lane.

And it's not that I don't want to consider any other exotic lane configuration or wide roads, either; I only want to consider the simplest possible road setups first before I worry about how CuRB should be implemented, even more so given how simplistic SC2K is. (Note: I was told there would be highways so I looked it up to make sure and found that, yeah, there are highways; I just couldn't play with them yet.)

Back when I first brought up CuRB, I brought up the example of having a 4-lane avenue and you want to incorporate a turn lane. At an appropriate piece of avenue (between nodes, preferably), you would replace the median with a turn lane. Doing this to multiple sections of avenue will turn it into an 2+3 asymmetrical road, and if a preset doesn't exist, you can make one (how about a "save lane configuration as new preset" button when you query the modified avenue?). Other things I considered adding include bike lanes, bus lanes, tram lanes, turn lane medians, parking zones (and I'm once again referring to that 6-lane road that got converted into a 4-lane road with bike lanes and parking spaces), variable sized medians and buffer spaces (and you can use buffer spaces to partition sections of road for future expansion, such as turn lanes), reversible lanes (but unless there's a time system, I'm not sure how the benefits can be readily apparent other than having an invisible benefit), sound walls for highways, etc...

By the way, you could also share presets with others; the preset could be a list of numbers denoting the road size, lane/marking types, lane size, and lane positions that gets pasted into a text box. (Or you could import a list of presets in, say, a text file.)

Here's the scenario I kept playing in my head prior to KC ever being announced: for the very first prototype of the game I would make (yes, I considered trying to make a city-builder that far back), I would implement 3 or 4 different roads of varying widths, but when the game is ready to receive CuRB, I would displace those roads with CuRB equivalents and additional CuRB presets based on popular demand, but keep the old ones for legacy support and convenience. "It's only a handful of roads, so it wouldn't hurt" is my reasoning.

9 hours ago, kotcity said:

Very cool! I hadn't heard of this.

I've always seen marching cubes/squares in all sorts of places (even Creeper World 3 uses a modified version of marching squares); I've just never known the name until about a month ago. The name "marching cubes/squares" is for a graphics algorithm, but using that for terrain generation turns it into "marching cubes terrain".

----------------------------

It may be too early to consider adding Easter eggs into the game, but I considered a scenario where someone named "Scott Lin" would visit the city as a play on words on the Kotlin programming language.

[kotcity 110]

KotCity 0.49.1 ( Easter Edition )

Download me at https://github.com/kotcity/kotcity/releases/tag/0.49.1

What's up everyone! Been busy on KotCity! We now have a notion of land value that ties into desirability.

A lot of tiny fixes and tweaks to make sure cities develop as they should. I'm feeling more confident about the simulated economy now.

Next step is incorporating education and crime into desirability, which will be a huge step.

I'm actively looking for people to create lots for the game and testers, so let me know if you are interested!

[LivingInThePast 364]

48 minutes ago, kotcity said:

KotCity 0.49.1 ( Easter Edition )

Download me at https://github.com/kotcity/kotcity/releases/tag/0.49.1

What's up everyone! Been busy on KotCity! We now have a notion of land value that ties into desirability.

A lot of tiny fixes and tweaks to make sure cities develop as they should. I'm feeling more confident about the simulated economy now.

Next step is incorporating education and crime into desirability, which will be a huge step.

I'm actively looking for people to create lots for the game and testers, so let me know if you are interested!

Neat! Does it have the resolution fix? To be honest, I'm a bit less keen on the education and desirability aspect. While that works in developed areas (great neighborhood with schools, etc.) it doesn't work in developing areas. A desirable area (maybe near a lake or forest, or at least wide open spaces near freeways for developers to sell lots) doesn't initially HAVE schools, just a few houses. Then again, Cy-Fair High School in Houston was built in the 1940s as a rural school (serving Cypress and Fairbanks communities), long before suburbs grew up in the area and it was swallowed up by enclaves (even by 2000, it still seemed on the "edge" of town, but today not so much). For "urban" areas, it's usually built on the grounds that the urban fringe and yuppies have laid before schools start getting better. This why I think that desirability should depend what the kot actually is (basically their status in life, and not necessarily wealth level either). Due to me just getting my notes on the matter (got them from my old apartment and loaded them in my car), it might be a while until I can explain further. I'm gonna try to write out another document of ideas and other things.

[kotcity 110]

4 hours ago, LivingInThePast said:

Neat! Does it have the resolution fix?

Yes it does. Let me know if it doesn't work... I tried to ensure anything > 1300x700 would be fine.

4 hours ago, LivingInThePast said:

A desirable area (maybe near a lake or forest, or at least wide open spaces near freeways for developers to sell lots) doesn't initially HAVE schools, just a few houses. Then again, Cy-Fair High School in Houston was built in the 1940s as a rural school (serving Cypress and Fairbanks communities), long before suburbs grew up in the area and it was swallowed up by enclaves (even by 2000, it still seemed on the "edge" of town, but today not so much). For "urban" areas, it's usually built on the grounds that the urban fringe and yuppies have laid before schools start getting better. This why I think that desirability should depend what the kot actually is (basically their status in life, and not necessarily wealth level either). Due to me just getting my notes on the matter (got them from my old apartment and loaded them in my car), it might be a while until I can explain further. I'm gonna try to write out another document of ideas and other things.

I know I need some kind of education model but haven't totally settled on an approach. If you can provide your notes, please do.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

I see myself leaning towards talking about the transportation aspect and some modelling, so in celebration of March 32th, I have this:

Part 1 of the Custom Road Builder: building the roads. Let me know if there's anything missing that I also need to account for.

The road presets should be self-explanatory, but they include every basic road (IE, no parking zones, no bike lanes, no special shoulders, no widened sidewalks, etc...) possible within the given road base widths. Each road base has 2m sidewalks along each side (by default), all lanes are 3 meters wide (except in special cases where they are 4m wide instead; I would like some help figuring out what to do to with those), and medians are also 4m wide. Tiny shoulder areas may be absent on some roads, present on others.

Road bases start at 4m wide and go up from there by multiples of 4, possibly up to 64m. For the sake of demonstration, I only went up to 32m. Also, the visual representations for the presets look so good, I'm tempted to suggest having these as the icons for each preset.

As of the road components, here they are. Note that the nonzero widths are default widths; the widths can be adjusted.

• Curb
  • No curb (asphalt fades into dirt; 0m)
  • Curb but no sidewalk (0m)
  • Curb and sidewalk (2m)
• Shoulder and parking
  • None (0m)
  • Mini shoulder (1m)
  • Parallel parking (2m)
  • Angled parking (4m)
  • Perp. parking (5m)
• Medians
  • Raised (4m)
  • Barrier (4m)
  • Decorated (4m)
  • Turn lane (4m)
• Lanes
  • Standard (3m)
  • Bidirectional or reversible (3m)
  • Bike (2m)
  • Bus (3m)
  • Tram (3m)
• The lane separators should be self-explanatory. (Double yellow lines should also be included, but those aren't represented properly in the illustration.)

Implementing CuRB to its fullest extent is still far off, but it wouldn't hurt to share this. Also, this is what I mean by "some lanes will be slightly wider in weird cases". I haven't been able to work on the icons as of late due to spring break ending.