Ganaram Inukshuk

I suggest we stop belittling one another for no good reason and start bringing the topic back on track; no one wants to see senseless arguing and no one wants to care about it. It doesn't matter who's more right than the other and mindless pedantry doesn't help at all.

Let me throw in my own thoughts into this: Having a commonly used programming language isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's extremely useful. Even though I've never used Python (even though I want to), there are plenty of uses for it: science, games, apparently finance, the list goes on. The same can be said about other commonly used languages, like Java. That said, one of the things you learn later on with programming languages, especially if you end up studying computer science, is that languages are often made for a specific purpose and field. Yes, you probably wouldn't use Python for mobile development, but you wouldn't use Kotlin for neural networks. C++ is usually touted as the gold standard for AAA game development, but C# seems to do just fine for Cities: Skylines, and Java for Minecraft (at least unmodded or lightly modded). (And don't get me started on Roller Coaster Tycoon; even though I've never played it, all I know is that it was programmed by ONE person using 99% assembly language and 1% C. You won't understand what I'm saying unless you're that devoted to computer science, but I personally can't live without the abstractions all the other high-level programming languages provide.) Every language has its place, so pick something you feel is the easiest to start with. And you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars on online courses, either; all you need is a good Internet connection and a quick Youtube search, or if your connection speed isn't good for transmitting video, you can still find text-based tutorials. (Videos help out a lot, so it's recommended to watch tutorial vids if you can.) I'm personally most comfortable with C++ and developing for desktop PC's, not so much mobile development (Java kinda left a bad taste in my mouth). Pick whatever platform you're most comfortable with and don't feel pressured to use the most popular one, either; this is all a learning experience, so whatever you learn developing on one platform could be used to develop on another. Or if you're uncomfortable with switching platforms, you don't have to, and that's perfectly fine, too.

Transit network modding is basically a subset of coding, and to be honest, RUL code has an extremely high learning curve, so I'd start off with texturing if you can. (I mean, that's how I started.) If, somewhere along the line and step by step, you manage to understand RUL0, then RUL2, then INRUL and RUL1, you'd know how to make anything in the NAM that doesn't require 3D models (and modeling, particularly with Blender, has a really high learning curve). Failing that, you can try modifying a station's capacity and other similar stats. I don't know the policy for re-lots, but the NAM already has a bunch of pre-relotted stations. Conveniently, there's a list of standards for NAM transit stations, catered specifically for gameplay with the NAM (I don't know where they are, though). I will say this: NAMdev, as a whole, will inevitably involve 2D graphics art, 3D modeling, and an insane amount of programming knowledge and knowing how to use Github, roughly on par with game development and software development, and given that SC4 has never received any updates (and probably never will), it may as well be game development. No matter what you do, you will have to do debugging in the form of constantly stopping and restarting SC4. If that's too daunting, I don't blame you, but I don't wanna scare you, either; I mean, this stuff is really tricky to learn and will get you to pull your hair out, but you can ask 16-year-old me about how satisfying it is to have a single tile be textured when there was previously no texture for that tile. If you just wanna program, I recommend finding a programming tutorial somewhere online and installing an IDE (integrated development environment) such as Visual Studio or IntelliJ or Eclipse or Codeblocks. There are plenty of tutorials for all sorts of languages and IDEs for specific languages. Since I learned all my programming from formal classes (Visual Basic and C++ are the two languages I currently know so far), I can't think of any YT channels that can you lead you to a programming resource, but it should be easy to find through a quick search on Youtube or Google. Unless you like C++, I probably wouldn't recommend it; there are high-level programming languages that make for great entry-level programming languages. If you somehow start with C++, supposedly that will put you in a unique position where, if you then learn a high-level programming language, it's supposedly easier to learn because there's less code to type out, but having barely tried Kotlin and C#, I can't attest to that claim just yet.

I'll add on to the discussion by adding something that's short and sweet. Don't be too clouded by the end goal; life's a journey, not a destination. I say this being someone who's always overly concerned about my own future and existence. Don't be afraid of failure; there's no one single path to success. See above sentiment. RELAX. Life's not a competition to see who's best at whatever. Stray away from those who keep you down, and if they do want to drag you down, don't listen; you're your own worst enemy and your biggest critiques will be from yourself. I say this having failed at writing so many times and was concerned that no one in the world would ever understand what I say, even after so many people said that I was already good. Of course, there's art and a whole slew of abandoned talents that I've left behind over the years that I'm just starting to resurrect. Whatever it is you're interested in, stick with it because you find it cool, not because you wanna impress someone. SC4 was the biggest influencer on my studies thus far, and I can go as far as to say that the experiences from getting involved predate every formal course on computer science; for example: I wrote a program in Visual Basic that would take in condensed RUL1 code and spit out a proper RUL1 code statement, not knowing it was a few steps away from being a full-fledged compiler. I've drawn diagrams on how every network in SC4 should interact with each other, not knowing that those are called "state diagrams". Github before I ever had a class that involved Github. Trying to count the number of possible RHW-RHW overpasses is something combinatorics covers. Minecraft was the other influence, and that's how I knew about logic gates before I ever had a proper lesson on logic gates and digital logic. And finally, there's a place for your hobbies. Video games, for example, are the biggest reason why computer technology has advanced so much over the past decade or so; you can ask my professors about it, too. Every person is different, but if you start out with gaming, you could end up in computer architecture or game dev or software engineering. That said, saying you're good at video games ain't something you want on a résumé, but developing or modding a video game could be.

First, I said sometime before that I would further illustrate CuRB, but unfortunately the video card I had in my computer (which I used to replace a dying video card) died, so I’ve resorted to using my laptop. I still want to explain CuRB later on, but showing those customised setups may already give you a general idea how CuRB can go. By the way, that last setup I showed was for an angled parking lot; that one was optimised to have as much parking as possible; a more basic version would be exactly like how the NAM’s SAM-1 works except it’s functional and not eyecandy. Now on to the rest of the comment. I recently pitched the idea about unlocking a steam locomotive by restoring it and getting a historical boost to your city as a result. Well, based off of feedback (IE, what other boost having a steam loco could have), I’ve refined the idea: A nearby city has offered you one of its last remaining steam locomotives to your city. You can choose to: Scrap it - You get a large chunk of cash for doing so but at the expense of historical value. Put it on outside display - You get a small boost in historical value but a small vandalism risk. There is a small fee for building the park, which has an upkeep cost. Build a railway museum - You get a large boost in historical value and a small boost in education. There is a large fee for building the museum, which has an upkeep cost. Restore the locomotive to its former glory. You get a large boost in historical value and tourism. There is a very large fee for restoring the locomotive and constructing a new shed for it, both of which have upkeep costs. I do have a simpler example, which could look like this: One of your city’s oldest school buildings is now recognized as a historical building and your local historical society wants to convert it into a museum. Completing this task will grant a permanent historical and education boost to your city. You can choose to: Convert the building. Leave building as is. Note: Only one school in your city will ever be made into a museum, or an advanced version of this task can pick a random building, like a fire station (which would give a fire safety bonus instead of an education bonus). These special tasks aren't actually the topic I wanna discuss; it's the fact that we have vehicles and buildings that serve more than one purpose, or rather, have a primary and one or more secondary purposes. This gets into my next topic, which I'll show like this: Residential + Commercial = RC Mix Industry + Education = Trade school? University + Health = Disease research Industry + Health = KC's equivalent to OSHA Residential + College + Other stuff...? = University Education + Law enforcement = Police academy? University + Transportation = Traffic engineering (Unlocks road micromanagement?) University + City administration = Civil engineering (Unlocks more micromanagement?) Instead of features being unlocked that have multiple purposes, I propose something like this for unlocking progressively more advanced city features: having a certain amount of whatever you needed unlocks the building or feature. (Fun fact: I commented in my notes that this presentation of combinations was basically a city-builder based off of Doodle God, Little Alchemy, and Elemental 3; if you know what the last one is, half of the game is combining elements with themselves and suddenly realising you have 9223372036854775808 ceramic vessels. The concept is tempting, I will say.) Obviously, this method of unlocking things is self-explanatory; In SC4, I believe you needed a certain population threshold to be able to use medium and high-density zoning effectively; ideally, those zone levels would be locked behind a population threshold, but they're never locked so you can just zone using whatever and potentially make a costly mistake. C:S locks most things behind population thresholds, but some other things are locked behind having X amount of something. I just want to elaborate on a few examples. Education, for example, would unlock buildings of progressively higher education levels; elementary school unlocks high school, which unlocks community college, which unlocks university, which unlocks even more options such as disease research (though this requires health buildings). University, in particular, is an insanely complex piece of machinery, and I say this being a university student already. You need apartment complexes for students to live in if they don't go for on-campus housing, you need stores for them to buy groceries from, restaurants for them to eat from, sufficiently large roads to handle all the traffic, some form of transportation system for those who don't have cars, and so on, and that's on top of having all the other levels of education already. I know there's nothing that would simulate individual citizens coming and going (and yes, I know that education systems are different all over the world), but a simplified requirement list could go something like this: X amount of high-density residential X amount of stores A bus line All previous levels of education Power generation would start off with simple methods, such as coal and natural gas. Green energy such as wind and solar doesn't come in until later; green energy should also be weak at first but can be made better with progressively better generations and energy storage; these methods will require high-tech manufacturing (which, of course, requires higher education) and solar panels in particular can also be installed on top of almost anything (so that's electricity plus everything that's a building or house). Here's a case where you don't upgrade almost anything at all: if you luck out with having a really big river, you can power your city with hydroelectricity and have no need to upgrade your power gen beyond unlocking hydroelectricity, and if your generators are that good or you're really energy efficient, you can even sell the excess electricity to the rest of the universe (or Kotiverse in this case). The biggest takeaway is that any one building type is not isolated from all the other building types. I hope I've explained enough.

Judging by the video's thumbnail, I see giraffes and roller coasters? What is this, Roller Coaster Tycoon or Zoo Tycoon? Watching the trailer confirms my suspicions: it's a tiny Roller Coaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon bundled into one package. Weirdly enough, this could make perfect sense if anyone's also played ZT or RCT (I've personally played Zoo Tycoon 2 during my early teens); I honestly didn't expect game within a game (gameception)...

3D's a long way's off, but I can't help but share this: And on the topic of trees, forests. Would it be reasonable to have forests be procedurally generated, apart from also having the SC2K-like implementation of planting trees? (There aren't any trees in the game, aren't there?) Also, I tried out the game for about 5 minutes and I'm already impressed by the building variety, and it's an interesting coincidence that I brought up trees because as I was typing this, this happened: Quick note about how I textured the trees: yes, that's how they're supposed to look: featureless and flat. I'm in love with the low-poly art style, perhaps a little too much...

Simple. Create the hole as a separate object, put it on top of the object you want to put a hole in, then do Path -> Difference.