A Build It Ourselves City Building Game Needs To Be Created

[Badfish301 60]

Hi everybody, and sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, I just don't see a better forum to do so:

I have been watching the Cities Skylines 2 stuff unfold, and I really feel like they have left the door wide open for the truly next-gen city building game-  only I think it could be approached much differently. It would be mostly content created by the player base:

Cities Skylines 2 is very good with road and rail networks, but pretty much everything else leaves a lot to be desired. There is no map editor right now, and no building editor, which are two of the main reasons the release hasn't gone well besides the performance problems.

What I am hoping to see is a game where the content is mostly created by the player base.

This would be almost an open-source city building game, which has the very nice road and rail fundamentals that we saw in Cities Skylines 2, but would have a map editor and building editor that would be the main focus of the game.

This way, the creation of the building models and maps is farmed out to the player base who does it for free. The game is less expensive, but would grow explosively.

 

The map creation tool should allow for the creation of the usual "flat" and squarish type maps we are used to, but also creation on a globe- where you can scale up and down the globe size. 

A globe type map where specific areas could be zoomed in on on a much, much larger scale world map would have many advantages:

1. Trade distances could be much larger scale and more accurate and have more of a purpose.
2. Travel infrastructure between disparate cities on the map would feel more important. Building a very long rail line to a far-away city for example would add a lot.
3. Potentially multi-player maps where other players are involved on a much larger scale could be implemented.
4. Different world biomes relating to the given settings and latitudes could become a thing.

Basically, the game ships with the road and rail tools, map and building editor, but there is nothing else- Not one building from the beginning until someone uploads it. There would be a base-game city building simulation model, where services such as fire stations and police stations, schools and hospitals are needed for population growth, but the actual building models and statistics for those buildings (number of workers, building coverage, building influence etc.) everything else is created by the players in models they upload.

 

The building editor:

The building editor would be an in-house maybe block based building tool - or buildings could be imported using other 3d design software and that is the content that populates the game.  It would be like the steam workshop, but you get to subscribe only to the building models you find interesting- low Poly, or just well thought out and compelling.

This way, you populate the game only with user-created content (maybe some of your own) that you actually like, and don't have any of the bloat that you don't want and bad building models you don't want.

People would have just as much fun designing buildings in the game editor to fit their particular city as they would playing the game.  Imagine the diversity of building design that people would come up with.

There is a person on this forum who has made some amazing models (well, there are a lot of people actually), but the models are just more architecturally interesting than what CO developed.

Even the musical score could be created by the players, and it would be triggered by certain city-growth benchmarks, such as population growth, cultural growth, education, or industrial triggers.

Think the music in the SNES version of SimCity- only more potential triggers for different musical styles.

 

The City Growth Models- the underlying city simulation could also be altered and tailored by players to create more realistic city growth patterns and city growth simulations-  There would be a base city-simulation, but it could be replaced with other models created by the playerbase to help simulate different countries and cities growth patterns. - European cities grow differently than American Cities- Asian Cities grow differently as well.

There really isn't a city-building game like this that exists right now. Perhaps a decent comparison would be something like Minecraft almost (but not really), where the players create the content and you are just kind of provided with the UI and also the road, rail, sea, and air framework to populate your game the way you want.  You can of course download mods as well to alter the game. Almost everything is user created though.

The building and map upload areas would also have the option to tip the person who made the model or map, which would encourage people to try and do a really good job, and would incentivize people further to create content. Everything would be free to download as a rule, but with a tip optional.  A percentage of the tip might go to whoever develops the underlying game infrastructure, with the content creator keeping most of it, or maybe the entire thing is open sourced.

You could even download different water type brushes, water behavior models, trees, props.. basically anything and everything, and the sizes would be decided by the content creator.

This probably should be built in Unreal Engine 5.

The game just ships with the 3 basic things though - 1. The building editor, 2. the map editor, and 3. the basic city simulation model, road, rail and the UI.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Badfish301 60]

One final thing:

This user-content created City Building game should go back to when everything was actually physically downloaded to the computer and stored. Steam Workshop is great and all for acquiring assets, but I just want to download the building model, or map like we did before the online-always stuff.  There would file sharing sites that would be where the content is uploaded and downloaded, but it wouldn't be like the "subscription" model we have with Steam now, it would be more like how assets were handled in SimCity 4- Different folders that are physically stored on the computer.

This would make the game run faster, but would also make organization easier.  Having a physical copy of the game on your computer instead of subscription would also help with automatic updates breaking the game, or conflicting mods breaking your settings, as you could just load the last stable version of the game.

[catty-cb 4,411]

14 hours ago, Badfish301 said:

What are your thoughts on this?

Its a great idea, but and I really don't want to say but .... but the problem is for this to be feasible you have to build a core game and for that you need programmers, and take it from a banished player there aren't that many around who are even interested in doing this kind of thing.

Back in 2014 shortly after the core Banished game was released, its creator released something called the modkit, which basically means the banished community can literally alter everything you see in-game from the way the ground looks, up to what colour you want the sky to be and everything in between, and the biggest stumbling block to have the game of our dreams is there simply isn't enough people with the kind of programming skills needed to add buildings, or change the landscape, or ....., we have had a few people over the years, but over at the World of Banished website that has added up to 32 people since 2014 and most of them have now left the community or are no longer interested in modding.

-catty

[Badfish301 60]

8 hours ago, catty-cb said:

Its a great idea, but and I really don't want to say but .... but the problem is for this to be feasible you have to build a core game and for that you need programmers, and take it from a banished player there aren't that many around who are even interested in doing this kind of thing.

Back in 2014 shortly after the core Banished game was released, its creator released something called the modkit, which basically means the banished community can literally alter everything you see in-game from the way the ground looks, up to what colour you want the sky to be and everything in between, and the biggest stumbling block to have the game of our dreams is there simply isn't enough people with the kind of programming skills needed to add buildings, or change the landscape, or ....., we have had a few people over the years, but over at the World of Banished website that has added up to 32 people since 2014 and most of them have now left the community or are no longer interested in modding.

-catty

Thanks for the reply.

I guess, what I am just hoping happens is they release a game that is essentially Cities Skylines 2, but super bare-bones with the road and rail tools, but that's all.

They could release the building editor tool for free to the world to create a huge inventory of people that just have fun designing buildings, and the map editor also.

It seems like farming out the building creation to people all over the world would be much easier than building all that content yourself, and once there were some pretty good models I think the game would take off.

Make the building editor sleek and fun, but also the ability to upload from 3d model software into the game.

The hardest thing, like you said is you really need a solid core to the game- which would be very hard to make.  Colossal Order has been building theirs since Cities In Motion, which is why they are good at that- they aren't good at the city simulation, look of water, maps, textures and building designs.  I think an almost open-sourced game using creators from all over the world would be wildly popular.

Anyway, thanks for the reply.  It looks like everyone likes Banished around here. I haven't played it since it was just the base game, maybe should try it again.

[catty-cb 4,411]

1 hour ago, Badfish301 said:

guess, what I am just hoping happens is they release a game that is essentially Cities Skylines 2, but super bare-bones with the road and rail tools, but that's all

A nice idea, but given they are still selling the original Cities Skylines for $64 (NZ) and its a whopping $394 (NZ) if I want to add in all the bundles that go with it, I can't see them doing that, heck they are still selling the 1st Cities in Motion plus bundles for $55 (NZ) so while they continue to make a nice steady profit doing anything that's going to stop people buying their games bundles when they come out and an assuming we will eventually see add-ons for Cities Skylines 2 just isn't going to happen.

1 hour ago, Badfish301 said:

It looks like everyone likes Banished around here. I haven't played it since it was just the base game, maybe should try it again.

The mods make all the difference, I've been playing a vanilla game to get the achievements and I've got to be honest once you reach a point that you can go all winter without everyone dying it starts getting pretty boring 

[Badfish301 60]

I can't believe they're selling it for that much in NZ. Just did the conversion, and that's 40 USD.. I think it's $15 USD here in the US right now.

I think Cities Skylines 2 is an equivalent failure to SimCity 2013.    They failed for different reasons - 2013 being online only with small maps- Bad Launch with servers overwhelmed and game not working -

and Cities Skylines 2: Too close to the original design wise, poor performance, Terrible Launch with bad maps, no building editor or map editor and buggy game.

 

Either way, such massive failures always open up opportunities for other game developers to step up and fill the City Builder "Niche" (I actually think it's a very large market). 

The next great City Building game I think will be built in Unreal Engine 5 using some sort of open-source street and rail placing mechanic.

 

The City growth and simulation will be more macro than micro to help save resources, but will still be more realistic with a more realistic city growth mechanic and much larger populations, not to mention way better detail in the graphics and an almost immersive look.   Skylines tried to calculate too much, and it doesn't translate into a better game or fun really.   SimCity 4 used a great city simulation, based on some underlying growth mechanic that that worked great.

 

[Badfish301 60]

23 hours ago, catty-cb said:

The mods make all the difference, I've been playing a vanilla game to get the achievements and I've got to be honest once you reach a point that you can go all winter without everyone dying it starts getting pretty boring 

I think that's why I fundamentally didn't enjoy playing Banished.

I don't like having to constantly micro-manage previously made decisions and it just felt stressful to go and change stuff in the game all the time and tedious rather than fun for me.

I like a much more macro city building game.. If everything is fine, I like to just watch the city grow, not to a bunch of errands almost like Farmville.

In fact, the huge mistake CS1 made was the constant tedium of emptying garbage dumps, cemeteries, or replacing any building in a game.  That is not fun- especially in a city building game.   Annoying casino-like chimes and sounds all the time.

Just have a cost to replace buildings,and have it done automatically, have a setting in the menu that's designates the level to replace the next high school or whatever, and have 3 levels- Shitty high school, Decent/Good One, Or Academy wtc, but have that automatically done and debited, don't make the player actually do that. That's not the mayor's job.

Or Better yet-  Have the mayor replace infrastructure and buildings etc. in the beginning.. do it all, but it's a village or small town that is easy to focus on, but then as the budget grows- you can add people to the payroll such as City Managers who do that stuff for you (replacing buildings, empty trash dumps, environment inproval dept. (that has a small hit on business), for a cost of course so it becomes more macro city builder as the city and budget grow than when you were focused on the smaller town. 

[catty-cb 4,411]

14 hours ago, Badfish301 said:

I think that's why I fundamentally didn't enjoy playing Banished.

I've taken to reading a book while playing and can now see why the recommendation over on steam is to run it overnight if you want to get all the achievements, if the modkit hadn't been released I doubt anyone would be playing Banished these days, and oh boy what I wouldn't give to activate the debug menu

The debug menu is pretty much the first thing the modders switched on as it turns out the developer Luke had build into the game a cheat menu, which he switched off before releasing the game publicly, once that had been switched back on .... it changed from a survival game to town builder, as you can see from the old menu

Run out of firewood just click a button, fed up with people freezing to death no worries just switch that off, the last release of Banished that Luke put out, the debug menu had been expanded to include a few more buttons ... sorry I don't have a better picture, but you probably get the general idea

 

14 hours ago, Badfish301 said:

Or Better yet-  Have the mayor replace infrastructure and buildings etc. in the beginning.. do it all, but it's a village or small town that is easy to focus on, but then as the budget grows- you can add people to the payroll such as City Managers who do that stuff for you (replacing buildings, empty trash dumps, environment inproval dept. (that has a small hit on business), for a cost of course so it becomes more macro city builder as the city and budget grow than when you were focused on the smaller town. 

I think the way AI is going that's going to be more than possible and would make a lot of sense as you could set the 'city manager" at the beginning of the game to do certain things in the city, you could if you still liked micro managing still be doing most things, but equally if you didn't then the AI could be doing all the background stuff for you.

[Badfish301 60]

No offense to Banished, but the scale, and the road laying tools and rigidity of the maps holds it back as a city-builder.

I would be playing SimCity 4 still if I could get it to run on my computer. I even own the CDs, but it won't run.

 

I am looking for a game with a really realistic city-building model and mechanic, where you have to build a very large city before the skyline starts growing.

The tools CO gave us for roads and rails are great, but the rest of the game- the city simulation, the building models, the maps (very exaggerated heights) etc.. aren't very good.

I have been following banished recently, mostly because of the threads here.

Very impressed with a lot of the building models- the Rowhouses I saw recently looked great.

Banished I don't think is a large enough scale city builder. It does look very cozy and fun though, which sometimes is a lot of fun.

Will keep following it for sure, apparently a lot of people like it a lot.

 

There was never much love for the very fun Indie City Builder: "New City" here ever, which was strange to me.  That was a true city building game before the developer disappeared.

 

[catty-cb 4,411]

4 hours ago, Badfish301 said:

No offense to Banished, but the scale, and the road laying tools and rigidity of the maps holds it back as a city-builder

None taken, at its core Banished was a survival game and its developer never intended it as a city builder, roads can be changed as can the maps, but at the end of the day everyone walks and while that doesn't stop you building big cities with it (thru you would need a powerful computer to do it) .... Rome at its height as part of the Roman Empire had approximately million residents, in Londinium in England it was about sixty thousand people and they were all walking or riding horses.

As to why you don't see those kind of cities in Banished, the two mod packs we have are the Colonial Charter Mod which is very early American settlements and "The North" Mod which is a vikings plus lots of miscellaneous stuff that people have build for the game .... it needs another couple of mod packs unfortunately there just aren't the modders, thru the CC people were doing it as a team and you could and I did donate money to buy appropriate models which were then turned into assets for the game .... but again a combination of losing members of the team and their website crashing has meant the last CC release was back in 2019

4 hours ago, Badfish301 said:

I would be playing SimCity 4 still if I could get it to run on my computer. I even own the CDs, but it won't run

There are some topics on the site re this problem, basically Microsoft changed something in Windows and pretty much the only way to play SC4 these days is to buy the Steam or GoG versions of it .... and it looks like the sales are still on

https://www.gog.com/en/game/simcity_4_deluxe_edition

4 hours ago, Badfish301 said:

There was never much love for the very fun Indie City Builder: "New City" here ever, which was strange to me.  That was a true city building game before the developer disappeared.

The internet is littered with games or programs that had great potential, but for whatever reason just never got there, mine is CityScape 1.8 and to this day I don't understand why when the company that was making it got sold the new owners just ditched it.

If you want to download the program its over in my club

[Rachelkin 2]

This idea is quite visionary, imagining a city-building game that leans heavily on community-driven content creation. It strikes a balance between the complexity and flexibility of Cities Skylines 2 with an even more ambitious, open-source-like model. The potential for a game where almost every element is user-generated, from buildings to music, could indeed revolutionize how city-building games are played and developed. The globe-based map system and the diverse building editor concepts are particularly exciting, offering a level of depth and realism not seen in current titles, I've researched how to design a city so perhaps you gonna need with this idea?

The suggestion to use Unreal Engine 5 hints at aiming for high-quality visuals and performance. It would be interesting to see how such a game would manage quality control and user engagement over time. Do you think a strong community management system would be necessary to curate and highlight the best content?

[Badfish301 60]

On 4/1/2024 at 7:43 AM, Rachelkin said:

This idea is quite visionary, imagining a city-building game that leans heavily on community-driven content creation. It strikes a balance between the complexity and flexibility of Cities Skylines 2 with an even more ambitious, open-source-like model. ....

The suggestion to use Unreal Engine 5 hints at aiming for high-quality visuals and performance. It would be interesting to see how such a game would manage quality control and user engagement over time. Do you think a strong community management system would be necessary to curate and highlight the best content?

There would be websites that are set up to host the files for the building models, tree models, water textures, mods etc. - Simtropolis would be a great place to do it. It would be just like the Simtropolis Exchange is set up. This website would get super popular.

Basically this would be just like what Simtropolis Exchange is doing already- only a much newer base game graphics engine- Unreal Engine 5 being the obvious option.

The game is basically just the basics- a map editor, building editor, road, rail, and general infrastructure - power lines, water pipes.

There might be zero buildings in the game to start, just categories of buildings that the player base populates..  Government buildings (with sub-categories such as police, fire, education, Capital buildings, monuments).. But the players would upload their own models and the best models would be used.

Textures such as grass textures (well mowed grass, dead grass etc.) would be made by the players.

There would be a main website run by whoever creates the game to host models, but the fundamental aspect of this game would be that it is open-sourced, so anyone could host files, you could even just host them on a server.

There would also be different city simulation models you could download that simulated different types of growth- like American growth model, South American or European growth model, or Hong Kong or Tokyo type growth model, where the different economic factors that cause building growth are different. 

There would be the base-game city simulation model that would be something like SimCity4''s growth model, which is very good, but also custom growth models.

 

Some sort of building rating system would be used to sort the building models (kind of like they have on Simtropolis Exchange right now) with sub-categories- such as building type, or region type could be selected.. So you could search for say: "Skyscraper between 50-100 stories, South East Asia."or "Chicago" or different government buildings, or even different architecture styles such as gothic etc. so you could easily populate a city with the building types you wanted, and only those using tags the building uploader added.

Polygon counts would be listed for buildings of course, but there would be many different classifications and tags for easy searching.

Because Unreal Engine 5 already has a number of building models, this could be done quite quickly.

A way to upload real-world buildings into the game also might be looked into- using street view, or "slurping" buildings from Google Earth somehow..

 

Buildings could get "slurped" from Google Earth, and then kind of just made to look better using better textures for maximum realism.

 

Using the Unreal Engine 5 building model base that is already out there and is growing quickly, a city building game could be made very quickly:

 

Custom assets- like in the video above, for example the tables with the umbrellas could be downloaded and added.

Then, also, if procedural generated buildings (variable stories in buildings and other attributes) could be figured out- adding a huge variety of different heights to skyscrapers this would be the best city building game ever.

We just need the city simulation model, roads, rail and infrastructure, but everything else is built by the player base.  The game is centered around moddability, and editors. There is a base infrastructure to the game, but it doesn't include buildings or most textures- those are all uploaded by the players.. Even cars, airplanes, trains etc. all player made with their own custom attributes.

[Badfish301 60]

This is pretty interesting:

 

There could be a sub-building type: "Procedurally generated" which would be a building type that would grow according to an algorithm procedurally.. constraints in the city-simulation model would make the building have different stories etc. according to where it was spawned to grow.. 

Buildings in better areas might have nice outdoor tables with umbrellas, and flowers planted in boxes etc.. but the same building model that is in a more crime-ridden or poor area might have a lot of overflowing trash cans, graffiti, and even broken or boarded up windows and grime on the outside. It would just be different assets and textures that generate based on the city simulation model's input.

The building model- if grown outside the downtown might be 1-3 stories, but the closer it got to the CBD, the taller it would grow procedurally.

Now we are getting somewhere interesting..   No more "Flat top" cities like in skylines, but just pure variety.

[Badfish301 60]

Here is another video on the benefits of Unreal Engine.. In this case Unreal Engine 5.3

Unlimited Polygons..

Nanites create a revolution in graphics and very detailed modeling.

 

[catty-cb 4,411]

Interesting video

[Badfish301 60]

It seems like they completely fixed the problem with many polygons being visible on screen with Nanites. We can now have enormous environments and millions of objects in view without things slowing down the way they do in say Cities Skylines when a lot of polygons are on screen.

I am not sure people realize how huge this is for landscape-intensive and polygon intensive games such as a next generation city building game would be.

 

It also adds infinite geometry- volumetric fog and smoke (nice for industries and steam coming out of the top of skyscrapers, even pollution and fog in general).  Volumetric water should also be possible with this upgrade.

 

This allows for infinite Polygons now with basically no difference in rendering time between a new empty map and an enormous city map- except maybe the original load time for the city.

We don't have to deal with Blender or Maya anymore- both which were awful for building and asset creation and extremely hard to learn.

 

The problem they had using Nanite technology before was the Nanites had to be static (couldn't move), but they have solved that in UE 5.3 and they can now move- which was the main problem making a city builder before for non-static objects before.  This could be what we have always dreamed of having for a city builder.

Once they figure out dynamic Lumen rendering better it will be completely immersive and real looking, they still need to fudge lighting for performance.

This combined with procedural generation and the sky is the limit for a city builder.