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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

I would love to see class/income issues presented in the game (if done right and is led to better gameplay) as well as simulating the fact that different people have different tastes. You don't need to assign goofy cultural stereotypes, just semi-randomly assign tastes to people in some general groups and have that influence their housing, workplace, leisure, and transport choices. So if you make a city that's 100% high density towers, people who want a house and yard are going to be sad or not move to your city. Flesh out "commercial" a bit more into a few sub-classes so you actually have grocery stores of different classes and retail of various classes. You won't get working class factory workers that interested in the high-end shopping street, but they'll appreciate that cheap grocery store in their neighbourhood.

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Peanut Butler
Jul 25, 2003



I've been holding off playing this again until I can afford a new computer upgrade- running a Core2Duo @ 2.66 GHz, 16GB RAM, and a video card old enough to be in Kindergarten- but is there an easy way to unsubscribe from all assets in the Workshop? I went a little nuts on those for a guy without a Solid State Drive or current-gen hardware.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Christmas Present posted:

I've been holding off playing this again until I can afford a new computer upgrade- running a Core2Duo @ 2.66 GHz, 16GB RAM, and a video card old enough to be in Kindergarten- but is there an easy way to unsubscribe from all assets in the Workshop? I went a little nuts on those for a guy without a Solid State Drive or current-gen hardware.

Do it via steam via a web browser, don't do it in-game. I don't know if it's like this for everyone but any time I delete an asset from the in-game browser it hangs for a good 15-20 seconds.

xzzy
Mar 5, 2009

Poil posted:

Yeah, I've tried to build high value areas but it doesn't work as expected at all. Instead you need a lot of flat land to hide everything behind service buildings.

I eventually fixed this by crafting mega efficient services in the asset editor. You just bump the radius up to whatever makes you happy.

(spoiler: a range of 10,000 will cover the whole map :buddy:)

I feel no guilt for this for some buildings, like the University where it will never, ever reach max capacity but you still gotta plaster them everywhere for people to get happy.

RagnarokZ
May 14, 2004

Emperor of the Internet

Baronjutter posted:

Yeah this was the main focus of "City Life" the game that came before Cities XL. It entirely focused around a few types of cultures with different needs but they also HATE each other.


The red lines show groups who do not want to be near each other and will actually erupt into violence if in the same neighbourhood. It was all stupid stereotypes and turned the game into a silly geographic puzzle game where you'd build a city that had all the classes of people but had them nicely segregated. You couldn't just build one class of people because you'd need blue collars to be police and fire and run garbage trucks and you'd need fringes to work retail and coffee shops and all that. This just meant that the already limited selection of buildings was made worse by them never mixing, you'd have all the suburban-house blue collar buildings in one zone, all the low-density fringe row-houses in another zone, all the stark business like Suit towers in one spot, and so on.

I really really hope they don't try to do anything close to what City Life tried to do.

It was the same company who did the Cities XL game, the one that tried to be an MMO, and failed.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

RagnarokZ posted:

the one that tried to be an MMO, and failed.

That doesn't exactly narrow things down when it comes to recent failed city building games!

Plek
Jul 30, 2009

Poil posted:

:psyduck:

Whoever thought a game that promotes segregation to such a degree would be a good idea?

Someone trying to simulate actual cities?

Really though, adding class and subculture clashes in a city sim could be pretty neat if it was done alright.

Eiba
Jul 26, 2007


Plek posted:

Someone trying to simulate actual cities?

Really though, adding class and subculture clashes in a city sim could be pretty neat if it was done alright.
Cities often are highly segregated. Cities also often have horrific traffic issues. Games don't encourage terrible traffic though, and it's kind of hosed up to simplistically encourage segregation.

Actually, it might be kind of interesting if cities tended to segregate themselves, and the gameplay encouraged you to take steps to integrate your citizens to reduce strife make things run more smoothly.

Westminster System
Jul 4, 2009


All of the shafts.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Economic forces (and sometimes even overt or subtle government/city policy) totally segregate cities to extents, the chief factor is of course economic. The rich live here, the poor live there. The way land value works (or doesn't) in Skylines means that unless a lot is at the edge of a developed area it will basically be a fairly even shade of "high", there are no poor or rich area. Supply the basic services and every building will reach max level over time. CiM's don't need economic opportunities to better them selves, they just automatically level up with education. There isn't even class in Skylines, just education. Buildings earn tax income based strictly on their level, which is then multiplied by the number of people living in it. It doesn't matter if all those people work in level 3 offices or a farm.

What would be nice is if CiM's earned money via the education level of their job which they'd use to compete for choice housing in the city (along with a proper land value system that actually separated the nice areas from the poo poo areas) that would result in the poor being pushed out into the poo poo areas. And the mix/balance of jobs in the city would mean that you can't have a city where everyone is upper middle class or rich. If you have a ton of factories or lumber mills you're going to need a ton of working class folk, and they're going to need housing. At the same time you can throw all the parks and services at a neighbourhood and it won't turn upper class if there's no upper class work opportunities in your city. But build that new big office district and the flood of rich tech workers will descend on that nice working class neighbourhood and displace the gently caress out of them. Do those displaced people have a new neighbourhood to live in? If not they'll move out, and your factories will have worker issues. Or maybe they'll have to move further and further away. As mayor you'll have to balance sprawling out on cheap land with the increased traffic stresses.

These are the sort of interesting issues that a proper class and land value system could create. But god please don't make "If Blue Collar and Fringe citizens live within a block of each other they start a violence class war". Or "plop this working class bar to make this district a blue collar area, or plop this organic bistro to make it a hipster area, but don't let the sides touch!"

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
Yeah I think they were just trying to model realistic city poo poo, not trying to be evil segregators on purpose or whatever. It was a good idea that didn't really work out so well once it came time to think of a concrete mechanic and implement, it doesn't need to be anything more than that.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

I don't build offices, they seem to always gently caress over my industry when I do.

xzzy
Mar 5, 2009

Baronjutter posted:

Economic forces (and sometimes even overt or subtle government/city policy) totally segregate cities to extents, the chief factor is of course economic. The rich live here, the poor live there.

People wanting to read up on this should look up the history of Chicago's restrictive covenants. It's terrible what land owners did in the first half of the 1900's, and the segregation they accomplished is still in effect today. The boundaries that african-americans were allowed to live within are almost identical today to the ones that were set a hundred years ago.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Poil posted:

I don't build offices, they seem to always gently caress over my industry when I do.

You must have a poo poo ton of trucks. I try to build the minimal amount of industry needed to locally supply my commercial zones (which I only build for realism's sake at the bare minimum). Industry produces silly amounts of truck traffic, and commercial floods your city with clown vans. You can build a city exclusively on office and residential. If you're getting unemployment anywhere it's because better jobs are opening up. Cims will look for the highest educated job they can find. So when you build offices your over-educated factory workers are all going to work at the new offices, leaving them short on workers. But if you have enough people, it will all sort its self up. Don't worry if industry buildings even abandon from time to time, just chalk it up to the business cycle. RCI is a lie, only look at your unemployment stat. If unemployment is over 10-20% build more jobs (any jobs, industry, commercial, office, services/landmarks, it's all the same). If unemployment is under 5% or so, pile on the residential. The game likes a high level of unemployment otherwise you get worker-shortage related abandonment as the game can sometimes take too long to fill jobs and stats can be reported strangely.

But as long as you're always over-building residential you won't get employment issues.

Eiba
Jul 26, 2007


Moridin920 posted:

Yeah I think they were just trying to model realistic city poo poo, not trying to be evil segregators on purpose or whatever. It was a good idea that didn't really work out so well once it came time to think of a concrete mechanic and implement, it doesn't need to be anything more than that.
Clearly not. It's obviously an instance of someone trying to think up a fun mechanic to model something without actually thinking or caring about the implications. Doesn't stop the implications from being what they are.

It's not too much different than accidentally drawing swastikas with your road layout. I know it wasn't intentional, but those are clearly swastikas plastered all over your city, and it's kind of uncomfortable.

The segregation thing is more conceptional and less purely aesthetic, so there's other issues, but it's about on that level.


Actually, to relate it back to Cities: Skylines, back when the game was new me and a bunch of friends kept swapping notes on how our cities were going, I kept trying to build uneducated slums to provide uneducated workers to fill my farms and forests. This was before I realized that that was both pointless and impossible. My friends kept making fun of me calling me a horrible capitalist monster, deliberately keeping people destitute and uneducated to grease the gears of commerce with the tears of the working class.

I'm kind of glad there's no mechanic that encourages slums, and I would hope any population/class addition would not add such an incentive. Slums are realistic and it would be neat if there was some way they were modeled, but if they did crop up in the game, it would be more satisfying if your goal was to deal with them and rehabilitate them, than if the goal was to make them.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

A large portion of my commercial buildings in my city is now reporting no goods to sell and abandoning, factories are now showing no raw materials. It's as if I severed all outside connections. I have no traffic problems, industries are well served by trains, very under-used highway tunnels link the city together. Everything WAS working fine. All I did was buy a new plot along the highway and suddenly this.

In a desperate move I built a freight station in the centre of my city. It goes totally unused, no delivery vans coming or going.

Anyone have any ideas?

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

Eiba posted:

I'm kind of glad there's no mechanic that encourages slums, and I would hope any population/class addition would not add such an incentive. Slums are realistic and it would be neat if there was some way they were modeled, but if they did crop up in the game, it would be more satisfying if your goal was to deal with them and rehabilitate them, than if the goal was to make them.

This is roughly how I feel about it too. I think there's something to be said for incentivizing affordable housing (or put another way, penalizing players for developing nothing but L5 residential), but nobody wants to live in a crime-ridden polluted shithole with no services and it would be fairly stupid to make that somehow the desired habitat of a "subculture."

Baronjutter posted:

A large portion of my commercial buildings in my city is now reporting no goods to sell and abandoning, factories are now showing no raw materials. It's as if I severed all outside connections. I have no traffic problems, industries are well served by trains, very under-used highway tunnels link the city together. Everything WAS working fine. All I did was buy a new plot along the highway and suddenly this.

In a desperate move I built a freight station in the centre of my city. It goes totally unused, no delivery vans coming or going.

Anyone have any ideas?

You're using Traffic++, right? I saw a couple of reports that the latest update broke all freight/cargo traffic. Are you seeing any trucks or vans on your roads?

I haven't had a chance to check on this myself, though, so it could be an unfounded rumor.

Supraluminal fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Jun 2, 2015

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Supraluminal posted:

This is roughly how I feel about it too. I think there's something to be said for incentivizing affordable housing (or put another way, penalizing players for developing nothing but L5 residential), but nobody wants to live in a crime-ridden polluted shithole with no services and it would be fairly stupid to make that somehow the desired habitat of a "subculture."


You're using Traffic++, right? I saw a couple of reports that the latest update broke all freight/cargo traffic. Are you seeing any trucks or vans on your roads?

I haven't had a chance to check on this myself, though, so it could be an unfounded rumor.

Was doing fine. I was messing about building a fancy town square for a long time while on fast speed and all during that time, no problem. I buy a new tile and moments later the city is crippled. I have a hard named-save I made earlier (I usually rely entirely on F1 quicksaves) so I could always go back.

*edit*
Traffic++ forum is full of people reporting their trucks and vans vanishing. Something hosed up with a minor update and now all roads are set default to not allow trucks, nice. Going to wait for a fix.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jun 2, 2015

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

Was doing fine. I was messing about building a fancy town square for a long time while on fast speed and all during that time, no problem. I buy a new tile and moments later the city is crippled. I have a hard named-save I made earlier (I usually rely entirely on F1 quicksaves) so I could always go back.

*edit*
Traffic++ forum is full of people reporting their trucks and vans vanishing. Something hosed up with a minor update and now all roads are set default to not allow trucks, nice. Going to wait for a fix.

Those guys need to step up their testing game. They've been talking it up, but both of the updates they've put out since I subscribed have had major, obvious bugs that I can't believe someone would miss with even a quick test pass.

In other news, I just made my first color correction LUT:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=453684020

Designed on a temperate map. Nothing super-fancy, it's meant to reign in the stock pastel palette and reduce the blown-out brightness of so many of their white-rear end buildings. Not desaturated, though, it's still pretty vibrant. It's also a bit warmer than the default temperate LUT - possibly too warm for use with Moving Sun, in fact. I may keep experimenting with it.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Supraluminal posted:

Those guys need to step up their testing game. They've been talking it up, but both of the updates they've put out since I subscribed have had major, obvious bugs that I can't believe someone would miss with even a quick test pass.

In other news, I just made my first color correction LUT:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=453684020

Designed on a temperate map. Nothing super-fancy, it's meant to reign in the stock pastel palette and reduce the blown-out brightness of so many of their white-rear end buildings. Not desaturated, though, it's still pretty vibrant. It's also a bit warmer than the default temperate LUT - possibly too warm for use with Moving Sun, in fact. I may keep experimenting with it.

Yeah, I wish we could optionally subscribe to mods with auto-update or not. Like pick which mods we allow to auto-update. Actually is there a way to do this? Or a way to have steam prompt you? Like "hey traffic++ wants to foist their lovely alpha code on you, yes/no?"

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

Baronjutter posted:

You must have a poo poo ton of trucks.
Oh yes. I like trucking.

It could just be me but it feels like it takes a while before educated cims actually get jobs raising chickens or whatever.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Poil posted:

Oh yes. I like trucking.

It could just be me but it feels like it takes a while before educated cims actually get jobs raising chickens or whatever.

Yeah I'd like to know exactly how jobs are assigned. It clearly favours workplaces closer to the centre as it's always the industry on your fringes that abandons first. But does it take into account distance from individual unemployed or does it pool everyone together city-wide? Why can your city sit there there tons of worker-less buildings while you have 25%+ unemployment? Does it take a long time for the workers to "path" or find those jobs? Is the unemployment stat in fact a lie that isn't the full picture?

What I do know is that over time it all works out and not to be scared of some fringe industry abandoning, if there's a genuine demand it will re-grow very quickly. If your city says it has high unemployment it can handle some jobs, even if those new jobs cry about workers, it just takes some time for the system to re-balance.

Subyng
May 4, 2013

Baronjutter posted:

Yeah I'd like to know exactly how jobs are assigned. It clearly favours workplaces closer to the centre as it's always the industry on your fringes that abandons first.

I don't think that's actually the case. Probably what's happening is that the industry on your fringes are the most recent buildings to be zoned. Industry near the centre of your city was zoned earlier and already has jobs filled.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Subyng posted:

I don't think that's actually the case. Probably what's happening is that the industry on your fringes are the most recent buildings to be zoned. Industry near the centre of your city was zoned earlier and already has jobs filled.

Nah, I'll have buildings on my fringes fully staffed for generations, then I'll add some new big office area dead in the centre of town and suddenly all my farms and outer-edge industry complains about jobs. Often I don't even know I'm short on workers until I notice all my farms have abandoned. I think it's a combo of the distance, and the education level of the jobs. In the end, almost all your population is max-educated so almost every job is someone "slumming it" and they jump at any well-educated job that comes along.

At the same time I notice that once a city gets big, ANY new workplaces will complain about lack of workers after its first build, as if the worker assignment system hasn't had time to process the new jobs. Sometimes it can lead to them abandoning, even with 20% unemployment. Yet without touching anything else, eventually it all sorts its self out, the unemployed find the jobs.

captain innocuous
Apr 7, 2009
Part of the issue is zoning too much too fast. Don't zone 14 square blocks you just designed into offices all at the same time. You'll have a massive shift in jobs as people move to higher paying work. Do it a few buildings at once, and allow people to shift slowly.

Proximity also seems somehow linked to worker shortages. If you have a giant industrial district, it seems like having residential nearby with some walking paths, subways, etc. really helps them attract workers faster.

One thing I would like to see the game go into is water treatment. Maybe a policy that adds industrial waste water treatment. Most new factories give a minor cleaning to the water that leaves their facility. I just don't like it that the best you can do for water still leaves a stain in your rivers that ends up pooling on the coastline. Trash, however, can be completely incinerated.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

captain innocuous posted:

Part of the issue is zoning too much too fast. Don't zone 14 square blocks you just designed into offices all at the same time. You'll have a massive shift in jobs as people move to higher paying work. Do it a few buildings at once, and allow people to shift slowly.

Proximity also seems somehow linked to worker shortages. If you have a giant industrial district, it seems like having residential nearby with some walking paths, subways, etc. really helps them attract workers faster.

One thing I would like to see the game go into is water treatment. Maybe a policy that adds industrial waste water treatment. Most new factories give a minor cleaning to the water that leaves their facility. I just don't like it that the best you can do for water still leaves a stain in your rivers that ends up pooling on the coastline. Trash, however, can be completely incinerated.

There's some water related things on the workshop. Some of those huge circular filter/treatment thingies. They take in waste water and money and give back a portion of clean water.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=435397041&searchtext=
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=431971893&searchtext=

I really hate cluttering up my shore with sewage treatment after sewage treatment. Generally these things are large facilities like the assets above that then lead to some sort of outflow pipe leading out to the ocean or where ever, but they often have minimal shore presence and you don't ever have a hundreds of meters of the same huge waste water pumping station lining your river bank.

I have similar feelings about the pumps, a huge row of them along the shore looks ridiculous. This is why I love this asset http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=431229239&searchtext= one or two of them will easily water a large city.

socialsecurity
Aug 30, 2003

They should have a policy to pay nearby towns to take your sewage for you.

Supraluminal
Feb 17, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

Nah, I'll have buildings on my fringes fully staffed for generations, then I'll add some new big office area dead in the centre of town and suddenly all my farms and outer-edge industry complains about jobs. Often I don't even know I'm short on workers until I notice all my farms have abandoned. I think it's a combo of the distance, and the education level of the jobs. In the end, almost all your population is max-educated so almost every job is someone "slumming it" and they jump at any well-educated job that comes along.

At the same time I notice that once a city gets big, ANY new workplaces will complain about lack of workers after its first build, as if the worker assignment system hasn't had time to process the new jobs. Sometimes it can lead to them abandoning, even with 20% unemployment. Yet without touching anything else, eventually it all sorts its self out, the unemployed find the jobs.

Yeah, I've noticed that it seems to take longer to settle down as my city grows. I vaguely suspect it's something to do with how frequently each agent gets to act in the world - since only 64K agents can be "live" at once, each agent has to idle for longer as your city gets bigger. Not that that would necessarily preclude assigning idle agents to jobs, but I could imagine there being a connection.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Supraluminal posted:

Yeah, I've noticed that it seems to take longer to settle down as my city grows. I vaguely suspect it's something to do with how frequently each agent gets to act in the world - since only 64K agents can be "live" at once, each agent has to idle for longer as your city gets bigger. Not that that would necessarily preclude assigning idle agents to jobs, but I could imagine there being a connection.

This is why I'd love to know more about how the economy works under the hood, because CO says it's all statistical. Agents/cims don't have to physically travel to find a job, they are assigned one in a sc4 style abstracted/statistical model. We've also proven that cims don't actually need a way to get to their work to be employed. If there are 500 unemployed people in a 100% isolated chunk of the city and 500 jobs in a totally isolated industrial area, the game will match the workers and jobs together. They will never physically travel to their work, but the workplaces will count as satisfied. When a worker actually does successfully make it to work all it does is add an extremely minor bonus to the building's profits. This fact made a lot of people upset, but of course the alternative would be mass abandonment any time there's a traffic jam.

What I'm curious about is how this agentless statistical system matches cims with jobs. Does it actually take into account distance? Does it take anything into account or is it totally random first come first serve sorted by education? Large buildings also get job priority. If you have a 4x4 office and a 2x2 office, that 4x4 office seems to have first 'dibs' on workers. It almost seems like every X amount of time every workplace in the city "bids" on workers, with priority going by education, level, size, and distance (distance from what though I don't know, city centre, the cim in question?)

I wish it was easier to tell where people worked and shopped. Any time I try to click on people and figure it out it seems random, people's jobs don't seem to have much to do with where they live. But do they over time re-sort them selves or re-home them selves? If so how often? Or do they work the same job forever unless the job goes away or a job closer to their education level opens up? They clearly immediately jump ship the moment a higher education job opens up. But do they ever switch jobs to find a closer job, or switch housing to find a closer house?

There's a lot of spergy simulation questions that are still pretty hidden.

socialsecurity
Aug 30, 2003

Traffic can't ever work in real time due to the scale I mean weeks go by at a time so unless they scale things down to daily traffic will always be some abstraction. Not that I wouldn't mind a closer slower day/night cycle style sim game.

Moridin920
Nov 15, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

socialsecurity posted:

Traffic can't ever work in real time due to the scale I mean weeks go by at a time so unless they scale things down to daily traffic will always be some abstraction. Not that I wouldn't mind a closer slower day/night cycle style sim game.

Yeah but that's just numbers that can change; if the unit of time was hours instead of days it wouldn't actually change anything and it would work better with a day/night cycle and a traffic cycle.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Wow, so this guy released some terraced houses to use with European tile sets.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/rik4000/myworkshopfiles/?appid=255710

I thought they looked a bit poo poo and unrealistic at first, and then I street view'd some cities in the UK and



:stare:

Bel Monte
Oct 9, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

That doesn't exactly narrow things down when it comes to recent failed city building games!

In fact, failed city builders is a rich and vibrant history to plunge oneself into! :eng101:
For the sake of this timeline, we will be starting with SC4 to give some perspective and focusing on city builders geared to be as successors since. This ignores Tropico and the Rome games for example.

2003 - SC4 is released, later that year Rush Hour Expansion as well.
2006 - City Life is released with public reactions similar to this thread.
2007 - SimCity Societies is released taking the classism of City Life city wide. Your city is influenced by six societal values: productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge. Each of these determined the look of your city by unlocking buildings and altering the streets and sims. Too much creativity would give you candy cane street lamps, where authority in the extreme is an Orwellian hell scape. It sounds kind of cool, but the implementation was bad, you plopped down each building manually, and it was really kind of boring and slow. Also all of the "green" power plant options were plastered with British Petroleum logos, but none of the dirty. The UI looks sims 1 era too. This wasn't an in house development by EA, and it shows. They released a game no one wanted.
2007 - Simtropolis is pissed, attempts to make their own city builder. Fails.
2008 - SimCity Societies Destinations expansion released. No one cares.
2009 - Cities XL announced and later released, but this one's best summarized this way.

quote:

Devs: Hey guys, we're making a true successor to simcity and it's 3D! Look, screenies! :buddy:
Public: :aaa:
Devs: And you can select locations on a virtual earth and play on maps of those locals! We're open to suggestions, so feel free to make them on the forums! We love our community! :keke:
Public: :circlefap:
Devs: Also, multiplayer! Visit people's cities and walk around in them!
Public: :shobon: That's kinda cool but I hope those models of people are improved. Keep up the good work! We love you!
Devs: Okay, when we said multiplayer we meant MMO. Our city game is an MMO now.
Public: :what:
Devs: And that globe you can pick places from? Well, only preset locations. There will be like ten, but three will be awful. We're going to have ski resorts and vacation stuff and resources, everyone!
Public: :rant:
Devs: Oh poo poo, ban everyone! Shut down the forums!
Devs: Oh poo poo, oh poo poo, our poorly received last minute announcement of an entirely different game isn't being taken well after all our hype building!
Devs: No one's subscribing! Abandon ship! :stonk: (Releases Single Player version)
2009 - Simtropolis is pissed, attempts to make their own city builder. Fails.
2010 - Cities XL 2011 is released. Barely much improvement but it focuses on single player experience this time. Somehow everyone forgot what had happened last year with these devs and buys it anyway. UI is poo poo.
2011 - Cities XL 2012 is released, now with tutorial, some modding capabilities, and lovely(er?) buildings. Fewer people buy it, UI still poo poo.
2013 - SimCity (5?) is released. It's well documented but people went from "That's cool I guess" to "OMG BEST THING EVER" to "This is the worst thing ever" in a shorter span than I've ever seen. That it reached international news for being so broken is telling. Interestingly, it was also an MMO. EA didn't learn from the cities xl people.
2013 - Simtropolis is pissed, attempts to make their own city builder. Fails even faster than before.
2015 - Cities XXL is released! Now supports mulitple CPU cores! Runs shittier somehow. Nothing fixed. UI somehow even worse. Everyone laughs at how awful it is.
2015 - Cities Skylines is released! :buddy:

It took us more than a decade to get a decent city builder.

Bel Monte fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Jun 4, 2015

Blimpkin
Dec 28, 2003
Is there a decent concrete brush I'm not finding for some reason? That water view area filler is just not at all helpful.

Also Arcadia is the dopest map, I'll post my near 20k city tomorrow. It's the first time I've seriously attempted to eclipse the 10k mark.

Curvature of Earth
Sep 9, 2011

Projected cost of
invading Canada:
$900

Bel Monte posted:

In fact, failed city builders is a rich and vibrant history to plunge oneself into! :eng101:
2007 - Simtropolis is pissed, attempts to make their own city builder. Fails.
2009 - Simtropolis is pissed, attempts to make their own city builder. Fails.
2013 - Simtropolis is pissed, attempts to make their own city builder. Fails even faster than before.
It took us more than a decade to get a decent city builder.

The funniest part is how stuck up their own asses Simtropolis had to be to fail at making a game three times.

Contrast this with Transit Tycoon Deluxe, which spawned two community-designed clones: OpenTTD, and the impossibly over-detailed* Simutrans. I really want to know where Simtropolis hosed up that the Transit Tycoon fanbase didn't.

*Watch as each individual tree has its age tracked for no drat reason! Accurately model the weight limits and deterioration of bridges! Now featuring an expanded version that adds EVEN MORE DETAILS that you have to account for when playing the game.

cthulhoo
Jun 18, 2012

Whats with simtropolis guys building games? Can I read about this somewhere? Also you forgot that one game a goon is making, Citybound. I guess it's not released so it doesn't count.

Digital Flower
Sep 5, 2011

Fish Fry Andy posted:

I thought they looked a bit poo poo and unrealistic at first, and then I street view'd some cities in the UK and

Needs more fish and chips shops.

The Deadly Hume
May 26, 2004

Let's get a little crazy. Let's have some fun.

cthulhoo posted:

Whats with simtropolis guys building games? Can I read about this somewhere? Also you forgot that one game a goon is making, Citybound. I guess it's not released so it doesn't count.
Yeah, I'm expecting that to take a while, but he has taken on another guy to help out. I'm not expecting it for a while because frankly it's a massive undertaking, but his dev diaries are usually pretty interesting.

Metrication
Dec 12, 2010

Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs's own more precise terminology, "a shithead who sucks".

Curvature of Earth posted:

I really want to know where Simtropolis hosed up that the Transit Tycoon fanbase didn't.

Basically because no one there has the technical ability to deliver anything remotely close to a working game, let along something as complex as a city builder. This is a community that has spent the best part of a decade creating highly complex 3d models in MAX that are rendered to 2d sprites. They don't really know how to do anything else.

cthulhoo posted:

Whats with simtropolis guys building games? Can I read about this somewhere?

The most recent fantasy effort called 'Boom Town' had its own forum but that seems to have been deleted now. It was very funny to read.

This was the (ideas) guy's post looking for developers:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/experienced-unity-developers-needed-for-boomtown.184665/

They created a huge 'design document'. The whole thing was going for three years and they only managed to write a long PDF and create a website (spent several weeks trying to decide on the logo for it as well). The guy in charge managed to also make an executable that had a spline appear when you opened it or something (I forget exactly but it really was as basic as that).

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turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

Blimpkin posted:

Is there a decent concrete brush I'm not finding for some reason? That water view area filler is just not at all helpful.

Also Arcadia is the dopest map, I'll post my near 20k city tomorrow. It's the first time I've seriously attempted to eclipse the 10k mark.

I don't think there is, but if it helps you can get the circular brushes into smaller spaces. Still a pretty huge pain in the rear end.

I've also been having a pretty good time with the map, it's amazing how much larger a city can feel if you actually design distinctish little areas for it.



This is about 1/3 the size of my test city, but already feels larger.

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