[Programming] Core Design

[Nique]

Yes. Player will be presented with low poly 3D model with low-res textures. As soon as he plops it, GUI will remove 3D model and put nice construction animation instead. Preview only serves player for placement estimation. Nothing else.

Ok, i understand. I think this idea is fair enough.

[Atomius]

separating GUI/simulator

GREAT idea.

That is smart thinking.

[Djohaal]

There is a solution for this. He came with that also. He was thinking about rendering the objects realtime, at a specific static angle that depends on the road that it is align. Big buildings need a lot of construction time. We can use the construction time for rendering the building. The object will become a sprite 'after' the player decided to put it over there. So the buildings actualy ARE full 3d models, but are rendered in realtime.

In this case, it doesn't matter on what angle the zones had been placed. The only problem i could think of here is that preview of 'plopable' buildings will be imposible because the game should render it instantly then. By the way, plopable's will still be plopable's by placing the object, but as soon put the building there, there will still be a grow process.

Multiplayer
Your multiplayer idea is fantastic and i think it shouldn't be that hard to implant such feature.

OH SNAP! That is a genius idea! Copyright it before someone else does! 
But well, back to the point, depending on the implementation of this progressive rendering, we could do buildings with excellent quality. Considering that when this program is out quad cores will probably be the norm, we could dedicate one whole core just to doing the adaptative rendering. Another aspect would be load and save times. It'd need to keep a certain cache of rendered buildings to ease stuff. Perhaps renders for the four cardinal angles and perhaps the four colaterals could be stored with the model to try and cover the greater spectrum of buildings and optimizing stuff?

[tomkeus]

OH SNAP! That is a genius idea! Copyright it before someone else does! 

Well, as I've said on another topic, when I came up with background rendering of buildings, I made one colossal oversight which is video memory, 2-5 TB of it to be precise. Storing such huge number of sprites for each building in a 10x10km town would eat video memory in no time. Also, saving would require lot of HDD space per city.