Romaq
06-17-2007, 12:33 AM
Based upon the encouraging E3 footage I’ve seen, I’m thinking in terms of getting the most out of multiple ‘big cities’ placed within the same region area. I really have no clue of how the game engine works beyond a sketchy outline of ‘Societal Energies’. It’s possible calculation on plopping a single building is so cheap on calculations that it really little impact, even on huge city scales. That *might* be a reason for the six ‘societal energies.’ Plotting production and consumption of those six values on a 2D grid might be very cheap indeed. But what if certain aspects develop over time, and those aspects need high calculation? With SC4 it was population growth within specific zones, the growth in one having a direct effect on other zones within the same given 1, 4 or 16 square km city. What if ‘city/ neighborhoods’ have the same sort of intensive calculation over time, and the same issues of ‘interplay’ between them? What could mitigate the calculation hit somewhat while providing the desired effect?
In my vision for SC5, based upon SC4 issues, there were no ‘city grids’, but one started with an entire *unincorporated region.* Lots and lots of absolutely nothing very much. Within any unincorporated area you may have access to the regional power grid, but you had to provide your own well water and sewage treatment. That would work fine for small residential, small commercial shops along a State Road or small street. To have *more*, you need to ‘incorporate’. You would use a selector tool to pick out an area. The larger the area, the more expensive it is to incorporate, so it’s better to start somewhat small at an off-ramp along a ‘federally funded interstate,’ the money for which comes out of a ‘regional’ pool of money.
Anyway, so I paint an appropriate sized area to become an incorporated city. Incorporation allows me to place drinking water and sewage treatment. It allows me to have ports, airports and the means to provide high capacity power lines for industry. I have the option of gearing the region more for rules favoring industry, commercial venues or towards residential needs. Applying this to SC5, I get ‘some’ starter buildings that I wouldn’t be able to place in others, based upon the ‘Charter’ I pick for incorporating an area. For a fee (and possibly annoying my sims), I can change the charter. I have the option of combining two incorporated cities into a new, bigger city under a new charter. I may need to break a large city into two smaller cities, each with their own charter.
The point of incorporating cities with charters is not just to play politics, but it may help resolve certain technical issues. City incorporation would facilitate allowing one user to ‘claim’ privileges to edit a city on the region while excluding another user, allowing for competitive/ cooperative game play over a network. Incorporation would also allow processing development of the city currently under focus exclusive from other cities *not* being focused on. In other words, the city that I’m actually looking at closely and doing stuff in gets the CPU. The other cities within the region might get their update at the end of the calendar month, all at one time. This would be an ‘end of the month budget reconciliation’ that is noticeable, but the client doesn’t have to explain what cities’ budget is being reconciled. Allow the person using the client to misconstrue the processing is of the ‘budget’ of the city they are focusing on. But you keep the response time of the city you are focusing on *up* and the CPU hit *down*. If the security is well handled (a big if) then you have the makings of multi-user gameplay as well.
Another point of ‘city incorporation’ is having ‘incorporated cities’ live in a file *other* than the file covering data for the entire region. CVS and SVN ‘Open Source Development (OSD) tools are based on the notion of discrete objects encapsulated in files. If a ‘city’ were a file, particularly an XML file, OSD tools would have a far easier time of managing multi-user concurrent development of a region, even if none of the issues of OSD tools were mentioned ‘on the box’ for the average SC5 player. Just as I found SimTropolis more by accident. There’s nothing on the box or in SC4’s software that points out fan sites or fan content. If an entire region is one giant, inscrutable binary file, that pretty much reduces OSD tools to ‘infinite undo save point’ machines.
There is still much we do not know of the internal game mechanics of SC5. There is likely much the Dev team hasn’t settled on yet concerning storage formats and issues. So here’s a way to solicit comment from those interested in and hopefully jar some thinking by those involved in file formats. The option to isolate neighborhood/ cities by focus might be a necessary for a project such as LA or NY.
--Romaq, throwing noodles against the wall to see which ones stick
In my vision for SC5, based upon SC4 issues, there were no ‘city grids’, but one started with an entire *unincorporated region.* Lots and lots of absolutely nothing very much. Within any unincorporated area you may have access to the regional power grid, but you had to provide your own well water and sewage treatment. That would work fine for small residential, small commercial shops along a State Road or small street. To have *more*, you need to ‘incorporate’. You would use a selector tool to pick out an area. The larger the area, the more expensive it is to incorporate, so it’s better to start somewhat small at an off-ramp along a ‘federally funded interstate,’ the money for which comes out of a ‘regional’ pool of money.
Anyway, so I paint an appropriate sized area to become an incorporated city. Incorporation allows me to place drinking water and sewage treatment. It allows me to have ports, airports and the means to provide high capacity power lines for industry. I have the option of gearing the region more for rules favoring industry, commercial venues or towards residential needs. Applying this to SC5, I get ‘some’ starter buildings that I wouldn’t be able to place in others, based upon the ‘Charter’ I pick for incorporating an area. For a fee (and possibly annoying my sims), I can change the charter. I have the option of combining two incorporated cities into a new, bigger city under a new charter. I may need to break a large city into two smaller cities, each with their own charter.
The point of incorporating cities with charters is not just to play politics, but it may help resolve certain technical issues. City incorporation would facilitate allowing one user to ‘claim’ privileges to edit a city on the region while excluding another user, allowing for competitive/ cooperative game play over a network. Incorporation would also allow processing development of the city currently under focus exclusive from other cities *not* being focused on. In other words, the city that I’m actually looking at closely and doing stuff in gets the CPU. The other cities within the region might get their update at the end of the calendar month, all at one time. This would be an ‘end of the month budget reconciliation’ that is noticeable, but the client doesn’t have to explain what cities’ budget is being reconciled. Allow the person using the client to misconstrue the processing is of the ‘budget’ of the city they are focusing on. But you keep the response time of the city you are focusing on *up* and the CPU hit *down*. If the security is well handled (a big if) then you have the makings of multi-user gameplay as well.
Another point of ‘city incorporation’ is having ‘incorporated cities’ live in a file *other* than the file covering data for the entire region. CVS and SVN ‘Open Source Development (OSD) tools are based on the notion of discrete objects encapsulated in files. If a ‘city’ were a file, particularly an XML file, OSD tools would have a far easier time of managing multi-user concurrent development of a region, even if none of the issues of OSD tools were mentioned ‘on the box’ for the average SC5 player. Just as I found SimTropolis more by accident. There’s nothing on the box or in SC4’s software that points out fan sites or fan content. If an entire region is one giant, inscrutable binary file, that pretty much reduces OSD tools to ‘infinite undo save point’ machines.
There is still much we do not know of the internal game mechanics of SC5. There is likely much the Dev team hasn’t settled on yet concerning storage formats and issues. So here’s a way to solicit comment from those interested in and hopefully jar some thinking by those involved in file formats. The option to isolate neighborhood/ cities by focus might be a necessary for a project such as LA or NY.
--Romaq, throwing noodles against the wall to see which ones stick