Ganaram Inukshuk

Well, here's the icon set. There should be enough icons for a menu system plus a few extra icons for other things such as graphs, charts, counters for population and money, some random things, and so on. Other icons may be added as needed (such as the hamburger stack icon, which is trivial to do). (I don't expect all of the extra icons on the right to be used; some of those are just completely random things I wanted to try to make.) I've not separated them into individual .SVG files just yet and the red is on a separate layer; the red (which was originally blue) is to make the icons stand out from the otherwise white background and that layer can be hidden or changed. Think it's time for me to break out the blender... kotcity_icons_2.svg

Hmm... I'm letting the screenshot do the talking for me, but keep in mind that since I don't have a 1440p or 2160p monitor, I can only show a small part of the icon set at 100% size.

Wait, what?! I'd like to know this process.

Hmm, the hard part now is cutting up one .SVG file into individual .SVGs; there's an online tool that supposedly does that, but I've yet to try it.

I've been wondering how SVG support worked; does that include cutting up a .SVG image like a sprite sheet, and if so, do I have to fix the icons in place and in a certain order? Sigh... That's gonna be hard to do if I have to scrap everything and start over...

Apologies for putting off the icons for too long (spring break came and went and then classes started up), but I figured I have enough icons worth sharing. I also have the .SVG file for the icons as well. I've still yet to explain how roads in general are laid down; since I have in mind a grid-dependent implementation (and chunk-loading), I would also have to include UML class diagrams to explain what I'm talking about (if anyone knows what that is, it's something you learn if you ever become a software engineer). kotcity_icons.svg

Oh jeez, I forgot to explain: those buffer spaces (I made them their own categories now) are also variable width; they're just shown at their smallest size. I made a few changes to the CuRB proposal by rearranging the marking types a little bit. As of the yellow lines alongside the physical median, some places have the line, some places don't even bother; SoCal seems to do both; I'd rather have it there, but I took it out to make the median sizes clearer and sometimes the line's hard to spot. I want to explain this more in-depth with the next part of the CuRB proposal, but here's an example of customisation. Medians are 4m by default, but they're also variable size, so things like this can happen with the appropriate transition nodes and presets: Here's a prime example of a mini-median and a mini-buffer on opposing sides of the same intersection; the upper two examples represent those median setups. The bottom two examples represent a jumbo-sized median narrowing down to make way for two turn lanes, but the bottom-most example represents a mini-median and a mini-buffer close to each other. I'll explain more when I can draw up the graphic, but here's something to consider. Hint: this is the 32m road base.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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...

I've never played SC2k before.

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 (?)

Sorry about the delay; dentist... 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? 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.

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

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.

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.)

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.) 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.)

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.

Update with the icons: Lots of icons are piling up now, though that's not necessarily a bad thing so long as they're usable in some form. I want to include an icon for reward buildings (the gift box), and I currently have an icon that's just a star with radiating triangles. That's my stand-in icon for landmarks/tourism. I have lots of past art to go off of, by the way. Let my try to list off the icons that aren't bound to the grid lines: shovel with mountain (terraforming icon), tree, roads, RCI icon based of the three individual icons, RCI building blocks icon, camera (originally to be used as the tourism icon but will be used for the screenshot button instead), US interstate sign (I made this for fun), water that looks like either bacon or wind, broken building (disasters), fire, star, farm, unbroken high-rise, railroad, taxi, beach, picnic table (park symbol), beach (I considered using this for the tourism icon), oil derrick, my avatar's pony's cutie mark, my other pony's cutie mark, toilet (sewage), another alternative RCI icon based on grid cells, wheat (agriculture specialization), siren (dispatch emergency vehicles), pickaxe (mining specialization), axe (forestry specialization), oil barrel (petroleum specialization), computer chip (high-tech specialization). The ones that are bound to the grid/guide lines are as follows: Zoning: residential, commercial, industrial, mixed Civic/admin: health, fire, police, education Transportation: roads/paths, highways, rail, bus/taxi, tram and other mass transit, air, water Utilities: water, electricity gas/heating, waste management Parks and rec: nothing so far Landmarks and tourism: nothing so far; will most likely include landmarks, tourism, and possibly rewards Terraforming: nothing so far Search: this would open up a search window Favourites: this would open up a list of favourites (or frequently used items); custom organisation could be done by the user. Query icon (will probably change this icon since the current icon is more like a point-of-interest icon; maybe that could be my tourism/landmarks icon?) Oh yeah, I almost forgot: I managed to try out the latest version, and ooh boy, I definitely need to devote some time and hard drive space for this...

I got some input on some of the ed buildings: School year is usually August of one year to June of the following year (in this part of the world), so if a time system has been well implemented, a summer camp would make some sense. The private school in SC4 is a reward building, so should KotCity's private school also be a reward building? A museum? Cultural/historical boost would be the primary side effect, education boost would be the secondary side effect? If there are buildings/lots that have more than one effect (for example, a beach would be leisure first, tourism second), sort by the most profound effect. A restored steam locomotive would have multiple effects, depending on the implementation: historical, transportation, and education. I'd put historical high on the list and transportation and education lower down, though this would be a program that would fall under the rail transportation category. A restored trolley would have similar effects, but transportation could be higher up on the list and it may also include tourism, though that would be lower on the list. An old school converted into a museum (I have one of those in my area)? Its old purpose is education, but after it gets repurposed, its primary effect is now historical and its secondary effect is education and possibly tourism. These are really specific examples, by the way; it doesn't have to be this specific, unless you want really in-depth scenarios or random events. I'm honestly not sure how daycare would work unless there's a really fine-grained age system, but then there's the other end: adults who never had proper schooling when they were young who are getting back into school to better their lives (I know there's a term for this). If these can't be implemented as separate buildings, why not implement them as separate programs? (One of these definitely sounds like Prison Architect.)

All I'm doing right now is drawing up some icons and sifting through ideas and spitballing suggestions; I'm (unfortunately) not at the point where I can contribute code just yet. (Too many things to do, even during spring break...) Regarding the hierarchy: I'd personally consider the two-click rule not to be an absolute rule, but rather a rule-of-thumb (and I'm pretty sure web design has a similar rule as well). That said, consider SC4. The landscaping tools deviates from the two-click rule to make way for the signs and labels tools. (Maybe it doesn't, but the menu style feels like it does to me.) Then there's the transportation tools: doesn't SC4 lump together all the mass transit stuff together into one single category (bus, subway, parking garage, tollbooth, etc) together? If anything, if misc transportation can't be subdivided, it would have its own subcategories when misc transportation is already its own subcategory. I can draw up an illustration on how transportation should be divided up with all the alternative divisions onto a spectrum from the least amount of division to the highest amount of division, but I'll just list it out like this instead: Transportation with no division Lump everything into one category Transportation with least amount of division Paths, roads, and highways Rail Mass transit Miscellaneous transportation (air, water, other stations) The division I would recommend (plus subcategories; the subcategories may not need their own icons since it would become at that point) Paths and roads Ped paths and bike paths Roads Highways Highways Interchanges Rail Railroads Stations Bus, taxi, and tram Bus depot or bus stop Taxi depot Tram depot or tram stop Elevated rail, subway, and monorail Rail networks... Stations... Airports Airports... Seaports Marina Canal Etc... A slightly more divided version of what I have Paths and roads Highways Rail Bus and taxi Trams Elevated rail and subway Monorail Airports Seaports ww2commander's recommendation Paths Roads Highways Bus and taxi Rail Elevated rail Subway Transition pieces (special stations that switch you between modes of transport) Aviation (air) Maritime (water) The only thing I had in mind for adding to education buildings was a private school, but I never considered summer camp and daycare...