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Showing results for tags 'simtower'.
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I know CSL and SC13 made a big deal about "agent-based" gameplay, but wasn't SimTower also agent-based? I seem to remember how you could query anyone and find their stress, where they were going, etc. If it was agent-based, that would be impressive for thousands of little "people" inside computers from the early to mid 1990s (and give CSL and SC13 the question of why they can't manage it), but if it wasn't, then why did SC13 and CSL switch to that model even though it's obvious that neither of them can do effectively?
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There are no fewer than 5 indie games under development designed to let the player build skyscrapers: Project Highrise, Block'hood, IsoTower, Skylimit Tycoon, and Cloud City, and they inspired me to start back up on OcramTower in a way with minimal overlap with them. Here is a breakdown of the games (listed in approximated chronological order until release): Block'hood is an arcology builder/simulator with a Minecraft-esque appearance and strong ecological focus. It released on March 10. I describe it as a puzzle game where resource supplies are supposed to be balanced. Project Highrise has its own thread. Long story short, a high quality SimTower clone with a 1960s Chicago style/theme and campaigns/events was found to be so promising that Kalypso picked up the title. IsoTower is the labour of love of a lone developer (Todd B). It used HD isometric graphics before being rebuilt but has a better simulation now, an Art Deco themed UI, and the next major release will be available soon enough. The developer is diligent and hard-working and posts updates seemingly daily on facebook. Skylimit Tycoon is a full 3D tower simulator with modding tools completed already (to make content creation easier for the developers) with a ton of fun new features but still in the early Alpha stage. Cloud City is sort of like a dystopian SimTower with full 3D graphics (but only 1 layer like classic SimTower). OcramTower's environment is similar to that of Project Highrise because it is vector based and it will feature a classic view. Its construction is done slice by slice, however, OcramTower will have depth, making it functionally similar to multiple highrises in a row if played in Classic View. The most useful (besides multi-floor problems like checking of which floors have utilities and how well elevators work) view will be Top-Down View, which will look similar to architectural drafts of floor plans (in color, with changes from people in real time). Top-down view will be freely rotatable because of the ease of such transformations on SVG. Classic View and Isometric View will only have zoom (which stay sharp at all resolutions and levels of zoom) and will need different graphics for every angle (4 isometric angles) and slice (most rooms are 2 slices deep, hallways are 1 slice deep, the biggest room will be 10 slices). One slice is 4 meters deep, one tile is 1 meter wide, one storey is 3.9 meters tall (including space between floors). OhTees cannot move through rooms besides rare exceptions (like public amenities), which means you must either build hallways or leave unfinished floor space between rooms. Better elevators will unlock with higher star levels and eventually time. My goal is to make--at first--a functionally 3D Yoot Tower clone with 2D SVG graphics (rendered as PNG below) and evolve it into a campaign to become the most powerful real estate magnate in the world by manipulating markets and politics using your vast wealth, influence, and business skills. So far, I have a dead-end prealpha 3, new art, and handwritten code snippets and flowcharts for prealpha 4. 1 Bedroom Apartment top-down view 1 Bedroom Apartment classic view 2 Bedroom family condo top-down view Fast Coffee Shop (this unlocks from the get-go, luxury cafes unlock at 3 stars) Office Reception Room top-down (low-rent occupants)
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Hello everyone! I have been working on making a graphics pack based off SimTower with double resolution and full 32-bit color space (partial transparency for windows). Some of my early work was obvious "derivative work" of the original SimTower but I replaced most of those with better-looking, more unique art assets. However, I am working on the penultimate round of art assets before completion of the graphics pack and I have not done much art work this year (I was busy up until mid-August). Offices, Condos, and Apartments are easy. The insides of restaurants (fast food franchises and 3-star restaurants) are harder. I will edit this post to show you what I have done that looks good and what I have recently done that looks very much like the original (with one screenshot of SimTower for comparison). I would like your feedback in making my artwork more original so I don't get in trouble. I know that Yoot Saito is still around and making games (he made SimTower AKA The Tower and Yoot Tower AKA The Tower II) and that EA owns the rights to the name SimTower. I have been making such artwork since 2008, back when the first OpenTower project had its first working prototype. That prototype did not work very well with the right software on the right type of computer but is completely unusable with the updated software libraries and is most-likely nowhere to be found. However, there have been a handful of projects that stemmed off from that project (Highrise Developer and OpenSkyscraper being the projects that progressed the furthest) and I used to work with the developers of Highrise Developer to give them almost all of the art assets they used (they made some of their own as well). However, recently HTML5 has become a popular platform for games so I decided in Spring to make my own open-source tower game that can run in a browser. I call it OcramTower. Here is the GitHub directory: https://github.com/AzemOcram/OcramTower Here is the GitHub page (with a link to a video and a semi-playable version): http://azemocram.github.io/OcramTower/ Here is the majority of my graphics pack: http://www.majhost.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=284130 --Ocram EDIT: Here is an old screenshot from SimTower (I played SimTower up until 2012) Here is my new burger joint:
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OK. I have created all the necessary artwork (and some artwork that won't be needed until later stages, though not all the artwork that will ever be needed for the finished product) for creating a video game. I want to be able to scroll through scenes of a tile-based game for the first version. The problem is that I barely understand how to do this in the old version of SFML and the game I was doing art for halted production years ago and I cannot get it to run on my new computer (it only runs on 32 bit computers with the correct (now outdated) version of SFML and OpenGL). I decided to start a new project and I want it to be able to run in a browser so I chose to make my game in HTML5 using the canvas element. FYI, this is supposed to be a mixed-use tower simulator in 2D. I have the art, I have the plans, I have some mockups, but I don't know how to program. My plan is to have a gradient for the sky background and have everything else be sprites (eventually using animations and pedestrian agents). For the first version, I want to be able to be able to render (is that the right word?) an 800x600 pixel scene that can be expanded to full screen (which would be a variable resolution, obviously), with the end user being able to scroll through a large mixed-use skyscraper that cannot be edited by the end user (in the first version) but is loaded from file (made by stitching together many smaller pictures but only using the ones that should be visible in the scene at any given time). So here is my idea for what would be used: bottom layer: background gradients (sky and soil) 2nd layer: background sprites (skyline, HD soil, and eventually clouds) 3rd layer: rooms 4th layer transport (stairs, elevators, etc) eventually... 5th layer: elevator cars and pedestrians/agents (with room animations and elevator shafts being on the 4th layer) Obviously, stitching together all the small components into one large picture is not possible, since the rooms are rather high resolution and the skyscrapers in SimTower had 110 buildable levels. Therefore, I would need to bring up only some of the sprites (and have all the sprites, except for the agents, which all fit in a small sprite sheet) as different files. So, who can help me; you could either offer advice here or give me a link to a tutorial site that can teach me how to use canvas for what I want it to do. Also, the grid is 16x72 pixels (approximating 1 meter wide and 1 story tall) and besides the blank floor areas, there are no images that are that small and the images vary in size (so some are 3 tiles wide, some 4 tiles, some 9 tiles, and others 10, 12, 15, 16, and 24 tiles wide). That means that I cannot just have the rooms in neat little columns (though they must be in neat little rows for the stories) but they have to snap (is that the right term?) to the 16x72 pixel grid. This means simple HTML using div would be far more difficult. It would also be nice to be able to zoom in and out. --Ocram
