Xtidia Games

Build 82 Added bridges! (only two for now)

Thanks! I hope it actually gets somewhere, I hope I don't end up like Project Avalon, that game seemed promising.

Formerly known as AtoCity, created by Mark_Kochan, VirtuCity is an old fashioned grid-based city builder that takes some elements from Transport Tycoon and doesn't require 8Gb of ram to run properly cough *Cities skylines*cough or limits your borders to neighborhood size and calls it a "city-builder" cough*Simcity 2013*cough. This is the fifth rebuild of the engine, possibly the last, rebuilded around 2 weeks ago and I can say I'm quite happy with the result. It currently features: Modifiable terrain consisting of 2 layers, the bottom layer being water and the top - grassRudimentary Night/Day systemUh, that's it for now What I have planned to work on next couple of weeks: Basic city simulationMore than 2 layers terrainOptimising some more the terrain generationOptimise the day and night cycleImplement underground building (water pipes, electricity, etc)Possible implementation of Perlin Noise for terrain gen? I don't know how that would work with the slopes so I might go with erosion-based terrain gen, however this will come at a later stageThe reason it has so little features at the moment is because as I said I just started work 2 weeks ago so be patient people! I'm currently working on the road building system, any ideas how it can be done, other than fully automatic? Suggestion are welcome, the earlier mentioned - the better!

Exactly. a.k.a. Dat Pham. Beware of game engines. If they are useful for FPS games they won't be much use for simulations. I think AE decided to go with his own code rather than use a given engine. As EA/Maxis found out, cutesy engines are not always suitable for a task like a big simulation. Trying to fit an elephant into a bread box often doesn't pay. Don't worry, I'm building my own engine, I'm just using an interpreter.

Who exactly? I'm kinda new to this forum. Is he Dirktator (webmaster)?

Are you guys interested in the development of this game? I could post a topic for devlogs if you are.

Uhh, no. Just because I'm not sharing the progress with GMC doesn't mean I'm not developing it. I have to disagree. It isn't the software that's bad, it's the coder (me and you included), however I can say I have improved a lot in terms of optimisation. The current engine can hold up to 4096x4096 tiles up to 2 layers with 1Gb ram usage, the fps is the same, since the engine is chunk based. Did I mention it uses only 3 objects(the other two don't do anything)? Everything is in arrays, and not a separate object for each tile like the earlier builds of VirtuCity. I'm currently uploading a video to youtube, it's at 25% at the time of writing, I'll update this comment when it's ready. This was the fps during the recording of the video, without the use of YYC. Link to video once it has processed https://youtu.be/-zfn0787NLk

For VirtuCity I have planned the following system: You cannot use money as a "building material" (like counting said). The cost of a building is calculated by the resources required for it and if those resources are produced locally or not. You have a steel industry in your area, the price is significantly lower than if you didn't, because then, you have to import from one of the "npc" cities which would cost you more.

It's only in the early stage until we got the "simple" engine going. And what name would you suggest to name it ? CrystalBox engine?

Next update for VirtuCity is going to include GlassBox engine! But not like sc2013, not even close. Here is how it works: When a residence is built, a random amount of citizens spawn in it depending on house type. 2 of the citizens are atleast 18, the other are random age. If it's day, the citizens will go to nearest job location and take the job. Every citizen has money. The money is generated every week and is calculated by the time the citizen has worked. This is good because, if you don't have good traffic, your citizens will be poorer. The industries will produce their goods depending on the amount of workers working there, and if they have the resources to do it. For example, a bread industry requires wheat, which can be produced locally in the city (which will lead to cheaper prices, and more profit for the industry) or it can be shipped in from other place(which in singleplayer there will always be one, but in multiplayer you can ship resources and goods from other user controlled cities). This will lead to higher prices and less profit for the industry, thus less profit for you. Then the goods go into shops and citizen buys food and stock from there, if they need it. How are the expenses and income going to work? Well, in simcity 2013, residences, industries and commercial zones never had expenses. Here, they have. In simcity 2013, residences didn't pay water or power bills.(or did they?) Here they do, and their expenses are your profit. A citizen uses 150 liters of water per day with your default cost of water( it can be changed ) 0.1 cents per litre. So that is 0.15$ for every citizen every day. A low wealthy citizen uses 10 kWh(15 for medium wealth and 25 for high wealth) of electricity per day with your default cost of electricity ( it can be changed ) 15 cents. So that is 1,50$ for low wealth, 2,25$ for medium wealth and 3,75$ for high wealth every day. These numbers may sound small, but with a population of 10000 low wealth only population 150000$ for electricity and 225000$ for water .That's 375000$ income for the city. Each day. If you have all your power coming out of wind turbines, the cost of one commercial turbine is 2,000,000$(and costs 150$ to maintain per day) and it produces 13700 kWh of energy per day. That means that you will need approx 7 turbines costing you 14,000,000$ to install and cost 1050$ per day. Which doesn't sound much but it's the actual maintain cost. The biggest challenge is the traffic, it has always been. Now you ask, how would the PC handle 10,000 or even 100,000 citizens . Well, I'm not sure. The citizen data is stored in 1 object instead of every citizen. This increases the speed a lot! The most speed reducing factor is path finding. We don't know how well the game will perform until we test it. I haven't covered all of the GB engine features but I hope you understand where I am going.

For anyone wondering, this project is not dead. I have some updates which you can see in the gmc forum http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=439155&page=8.