Yelmond

Thanks for the offer. I'll keep it in mind. I actually use Unity3D a lot at my day job. It's nice but it's a bit too late to make Synekism run on Unity. That ship has sailed. Synekism has always been pure C++.

Currently, the planned completion of the game is Q4 of 2102, so you were pretty close. But your observation of and reaction to the lack of progress in the past 3 years is both accurate and fair. I hope I never gave anyone false hope for massive progress. Synekism has always been a hobby first and product second. However, despite the slow crawl forward, I don't see an actual end in sight.

That's awesome. I have no idea why this would happen. Can you try one or two older versions of Synekism? Also, you can use 7zip to extract SynekismSetup.x.x.x.exe to a folder. One of the generated folders will contain Synekism.exe. Can you run Norton on Synekism.exe? Does it also get flagged? I don't have Norton but I'll try to research this a bit and see if there's something I can change on my end. I can give you the source for the installer if you'd like.

That looks like an impressive city. Regarding the crashing, can you send the city save file along with any information on what you were doing when it crashed to support@synekism.com so I can attempt a fix? I'm assuming that's the latest version?

Thanks for the tune. I like it. I tried playing the game while listening to it and your song seemed appropriate enough. Music that ships with Synekism is not very high on my priority list but I might add a page that lists some "recommended" music for the game in the interim. We'll see.

I appreciate the encouragments. Thanks! I'll keep at it.

Accurate observations but you've missed the best part. See, Synekism struggles so much to draw those simple boxes right now that it uses way more resources (RAM, CPU, GPU) than a realistic refined designer like SC4. Good luck running it on a tablet.

Thanks!

As always, your support is very encouraging! Thank you.

I'll say, I really like the abstract aesthetic of the current prototype. It gives it a very cool, minimalist feel - the board pieces are abstract, and don't get in the way of game rules... Could there be an option to play in the current state, with just boxes? All in all, very cool! Apologies for the delay. I assure you that solid colored boxes will always play an important role in Synekism. Exactly how they will be used in the future I still need to figure out but I've started liking them as well.

As always, the support is very much appricited. Thank you. Though mentions of other games, especially links, on that forum seem to have a really short life span...

What you suggest will most certainly come in some form once modding in Synekism becomes relevant. Unfortunately, the game's architecture is not yet in a state in which it can accept and use external models. Creating and importing models are only the first steps with additional work being required to properly populate the city with them. Given my current development priorities, such functionality will not come for some time. I'm afraid you're stuck with boxes for a little while longer. Additionally, keep in mind that Synekism is meant to be procedural in nature so the first step will be to create buildings procedurally at runtime instead of static model plopping.

Sweet. Thank you! You've pretty much touched on all the major bugs currently plaguing the game and I agree that I probably massaged the residential ratio a bit too much. I'll see if I can release a patch to return that ratio back to sanity.

That shouldn't be. Please email support@synekism.com, including the version of Windows you're running on, and we'll try to figure out what happened.

Yep, that's not really a bug - it's more the result of my validation code being less than optimal leading me to disable it by default. Basically, the validation code that's supposed to not let you build things on top of each other is very inefficient and slows down the game too much - so I disabled it by default. You can enable it if you wish by pressing F3 + V and then the game won't let overlap things anymore. This will be "fixed" when I re-write the validation code. Until then, overlap all you want.

I don't do anything fancy. I just check for intersections and lock the new road onto the intersecting existing road - so rectangle (road segment) and circle (road endpoint) intersection checks. I use a grid data structure to check possible intersecting existing roads by proximity without checking ALL existing roads in the city. That's about it. I have nothing against you posting your link.

Ya, got it now. I will fix this and release a patch in a few weeks. Might give those fat buildings yet another go as well by then. Thanks for finding this!

This is one of those bugs that makes me regret choosing gridless. Very frustrating. I might give a fix another go with a patch. That said, I'm not sure what you mean by multi-corner buildings. All buildings in Synekism have 4 corners right now. This is a new one. I can't seem to reproduce it. Can you send me your city (support@synekism.com)? I'll look into it nevertheless. Thanks. Another well known problem. The actual problem is that demand calculations never cared they were actually displayed so the demand values go way beyond -100 to 100. The internal demand values are actually population numbers (number of people that wish to come to or leave the city). The displayed bars do cap between -100 and 100. That's why the demand bar seems so crazy for larger cities. This will be fixed. Seems this way for me as well. The problem is that Synekism currently lacks deletion or conversion tools. You can easily create huge areas of houses and factories but good luck removing them or converting them to a different lot type/density. In other words, this observation is true but it was not intentional as a game design decision. Are these numbers with the most recent update? I found it way to easy to make too much money but didn't have a chance to fully balance the new economic model introduced. I'm going to guess you build a lot of government (gray) buildings as that's the only thing you can build to reduce your income so much. Note that you only need them for high density buildings and you can see government area of affect if you go to options and turn on the Land Value data map.

Please email support@synekism.com and we'll try to figure this out. Also include which version of Windows you're using (XP, Vista, 7?).

Remember, we're just going to work on a more significant release. Nobody got in our way, they just influenced it (could even say they accelerated it). We needed a kick in the behinds anyway. An no need to wait until 2013. We'll be back this September.

Yes, we're designing the game to generate the majority of buildings procedurally (similar to City Engine). We also plan to support ploppable landmark buildings on the side.

We should have an updated at least once a month (always on the 1st of every month). Sometimes we have updates mid-month. Right now, nothing to report. Work is moving along.

Oh my, we REALLY need to fix those crazy highrises. Anti-aliasing would also be nice. Except for the highrises, which are our fault, the city looks amazing so far. As a note, government buildings are required for high density buildings to develop at all (but med or low density buildings will still develop on high density lots). Furthermore, you can see the affect of the government buildings by turning on the "Land Value" data view under options (the gear button at the top-right corner). High density gov buildings have a larger area of effect than lower density. I would actually be curious to see the "Density" data view of your city. Some questions: 1. How come you didn't use a finer detail map of Montreal with all the smaller streets? 2. Besides the bad-road-angle-false-alarms were there other annoyances? 3. We're about to change our save file format drastically. Would you say backwards compatibility is important to you? (this is more of a confirmation than a question) 4. Did you find the new (road-perpendicular-lots) zoning layout more or less realistic or natural than the old one. If you never played Synekism pre-0.4.5 the old layout looked like this: PS: Thanks for putting the "" around "alpha" testing.

Ya, this is a pretty common problem we started seeing more of (for some reason...not sure why actually). The problem is Visual C++ Redistributable failed to install during Synekism's installation. I created a wiki page for this problem here: http://wiki.synekism.com/wiki/System_Errors#MSVCP100.dll Let us know if you still have problems.

That is an impressive list. I'm definitely bookmarking this thread. It's also nice (and surprising) to see Synekism on there. Thanks!