Badfish301

People are already using the tools and building things that the game kind of wasn't intended for- can you imagine if there was even more modern textures and architectural elements? This person made a pretty good Flatiron Building just using what they have right now - imagine a huge player base making buildings like this and populating the game- only with better tools more focused on not only traditional but modern building materials.

Imagine having these tools to design your own buildings and incorporate them into a city building game! - This is the future of city building games- might have to write Pounce Light the developer of Tiny Glade and see if they have ever thought about it.

Just imagine a lot of textures like glass cladding and the skyscrapers and other building that could easily be built. Half the fun would be designing the buildings, the other half having them grow because of the city simulation.. Use the Manor Lords Vector based plot layout system, and have the players populate all the buildings. The players could also make custom grasses, trees, etc. etc. Even custom roads could be built.. I think this is the future of city building games- using this type of procedural programing to either build buildings in an editor, or also have them procedurally generate in game. Can you imagine the creativity and range of buildings that would quickly populate the game? This would be the most fun game ever created.. The building and map editor would be almost as fun as the city building game itself.

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: Trade distances could be much larger scale and more accurate and have more of a purpose. 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. Potentially multi-player maps where other players are involved on a much larger scale could be implemented. 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

New City really was/is a great game. If the right people can pick it up- it's a fun Regional city builder that you can build very large cities with. It avoided a lot of the pitfalls of Cities Skylines 2- and can run on most computers. It still has a very "big city" Macro feel to it, and a better actual downtown city growth model.

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.

Looks great, hope you are involved in the real new best city building game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great city, curious where you got the canal pieces shown in the image of your downtown: "Downtown Texas, home to the Texas River, Texas Waterway (shown above)" "

To me, the transportation of Goods is almost as important as the transportation of people in SimCity- and it has been overlooked in past editions, wich is too bad, because it adds a lot ot gameplay. Basically, I am asking for nothing more sophisticated than an A-train level of goods- The type of goods transportation where a generic "cargo container" symbolizes everything (but instead of white like in A-train, make them multicolored like containers in real life). If the designers really wanted to make things interesting, perhaps have several types of consumer goods, oil, food, cars, etc. (Transport Tycoon style) that would all be moving around the map, maybe in a multi-player aspect, where prices are set for goods, which are traded (like water/power deals in SimCity4), and ships head off to distant players' cities at the interval and rate set by the deal. Having a very good port/ rail infrastructure should be paramount before acheiving any skyscraper city in SimCity, and efficiently moving goods in and out of the city, using an unclogged rail network, shipping routes, and trucks would add a lot to the game. Perhaps goods (such as refined steel) would be necessary before building some of the larger skyscrapers downtown. Players could watch as the ore travels to the steelyard to be turned into steel, and then is transportated on trains/trucks to a depot somewhere near downtown. That material would then be used to add stories to the skycsraper being built. Regarding Airports- a system of buying slots from other players airports and selling slots to your airport would be a good way for regional trade to develop- You could introduce routes to other cities, and see their airline land and taxi up to your airport gate. Different airlines could be owned by different players who could financially battle (or cooperate) in an Aerobiz kind of manner to increase their percentage of the overall market- This might make a good expansion pack- but that would isolate players, so it would be good to just have as part of the game (not to mention, now we are talking a seriously awesome game that is going to sell like hot cakes). With these additions to goods distribution- Gameplay would be increased significantly, I hope it happens. It seems like the glassbox engine can handle it.

So, you'r a fighting Sioux fan huh? Watch out.. Cal Poly is coming your way soon... ------------ Regarding multi-player, I hope it has a lot to do with trade/industry and transportation connections. The direction Cities XL was heading with the globe would really add another element to the Sim City multiplayer experience- Trading with far-off reaches, and establishing new cities. This could play into a regional/national gameplay element, where small nations developed by players would compete/interact (peacefully). Buying slots at a competitor's airport or train stations and selling slots at your own stations to other players- Importing goods at a certain rate from other players, exporting goods and connecting transportation infrastructure in the most elegant manner possible to reduce costs would add volumes to gameplay. That kind of stuff is a lot more fun than replacing power stations/water pumps, and constantly micro-managing hospitals that always seem to fill up.

If they are going with a tilt-shift look, check out this video of a real city shown from birds-eye view using tilt-shift: That's what a real city looks like- notice how there are not towers / high rise buildings everywhere. Houses are close together, and blocks have many houses per block, not enormous buildings. What has ruined most recent "city building" games is that they are too full of tall buildings. Cities XL, SimCity4, A-Train9.. Look at any City's skyline- Chicago, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Toronto, Calgary, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne, Harare etc.. They all have one thing in common- they have skyscrapers that are clustered in a rather small area for their city size, and the tallest ones are generally found near the center of the cluster. Look at the screens we are shown of the next Sim City- First off- there are a ton of very tall skyscrapers that look pretty much the same, and top out around the same height. It looks like skyscrapers are being plopped right next to the edge of the city, with a whole bunch of green grass and nothing right next to them (@ 5:08 in the video).. How fake does that look? The city isn't nearly large enough to support skyscrapers of that size, and they are developing in a manner that would never happen organically due to economics. Where have you ever seen a city develop like that? It doesn't happen. This is a general rule that has always been broken by the people designing these simulations- I guess they think "hey, skyscrapers are fun, and people are dumb, so let's just make a lot of skyscrapers.. they'll love it".. Wrong, it's not realistic, people want a CBD to develop organically.

The good: The Glassbox Engine What I'm worried about: Skyscrapers showing up too soon / Too many skyscrapers for a city that is too small to have them. I would like to see a greater level of realism regarding how large a city has to be before high-rise buildings appear. You should have to work to get tall buildings. Zones, growing naturally, not plopping- Plopping is so lame (besides municipal buildings and landmarks)- it takes away the fun that was SimCity in the beginning, which is creating an area which is desireable to make the land valuable and get skyscrapers/ nice buildings. Instead of plopping- players should have to work to get the cool/tall buildings, by providing good education/parks/transportation, instead of simply plopping a building. Waterfront property should have increased value. Larger Train Stations and a better goods transportation system - Trains take goods from industry and bring them to depots in the city kind of like A-train. Airports are more efficient when connected to trains- same thing with seaports. Delivering goods actually serves a purpose, as buildings demand a certain amount of goods per day. Buildings should not grow like plants! Buildings grow on a story-by story basis- SimCity 4 was embarrasing, with buildings growing out of the ground, and it looks like the next SimCity is doing almost the same thing- with the building stretching as it comes out of the ground- not good. Building Repetition- Try and eliminate it- Allow players to upload their own buildings like the BAT here. "City Center Effect" Where most commercial activity and high wealth commercial /residential tower activity tends to grow and supertalls are expected- could be multiple epicenters such are exhibited in New York's Midtown and Financial District areas- Items such as Large Train Stations/ Transit hubs/ Large Parks / Fountains and pre-existing high wealth residential/commercial would decide where the city center effect was greatest. Cities XL's (and Sim Citys) main downfall is the "sea of skyscrapers" which is a very unrealistic look-outside of maybe China or Russia. Cities typically do not have a lot of similar height buildings (which are all very tall) they have a slowly building skyline that generally is tallest toward the center. A real city has maybe 50 times more suburbs than it does high-rise financial district. Making the game as realistic as possible is what players are looking for, not some Sim City Societies junk.

what is it? th@ guy?

yeah.. spam folder, bingo. that was a great video on building creation, lets us know what level of detail we're looking at (real detail). It makes sense to do it this way, because you don't have to draw the buildings yourself.. very exciting.. Just a little disappointed there wasn't an overview city shot yet

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I also feel that height caps would be very valuable in the game.. they are used widely in real cities after all. Hope to see them implemented, maybe moded in.

The problem I have with having tall skyscrapers just by zoning is that this woulud usually never occur in real life. In reality tall buildings show up when and where the market forces exist. Perhaps we could have a 3rd category of zone, not commercial or residential, but a resort/hotel driven option (may have been mentioned before). In Hawaii for example, this is the type of zone you would use to get hotel guests, and timeshare people to visit. This type of high-rise would be completely dependent on the tourism draw of your city (geography could have a lot to do with this, as could entertainment options you added). That way, we would have 3 'unique' sets of skyscrapers growing, all relying on different types of demand. This way you could have the Honolulus (mostly resort/hotel), Vancouvers (mostly residential condos), and Detroits (mostly commercial buildings) of the world. Or just a happy medium of them all (Chicago, New York). Edit: or better yet, have a 'zone editor' as was mentioned earlier, and have the ability to zone a plot a mixture of commercial office/hotel/residential.