CityMania

[Nique]

I aint a skilled programmer either, i'm just doing it 

[Nique]

By the way, (soory),

If you are interested in learning programming (even games)..
Google for "XNA 3.0 Game Programming torrent".

Read that book online while doing the practices, and you'll be able to learn very fast. It's just the beginning. Code in C#.

I never let myself down or walk away just because i don't understand it. I 'm a digger.. i want to learn. I learned all the HTML basics on the age of 11 in just 1 night . When i want to learn.. i learn very fast. So this is my advice. If you are exited to do something in this world of game programming, just go for it!

For this project i keep using the XNA framework because it's easy to learn (in compare with other ways of learning) and it is very very object based programming. XNA is only for xBox, Zune and Windows.. but maybe in a later stage it will be possible to port it also to Linux. First things first.

[JoeST]

You should consider getting a project thing somewhere, like <http://github.com/> or <http://code.google.com/>. They usually come with a wiki and bug-tracking.

Joe

[Jonathan]

Does that book assume you know anything about C# in general?
If not then that's exactly what i'm looking for.

Jonathan

[Nique]

You should consider getting a project thing somewhere, like <http://github.com/> or <http://code.google.com/>. They usually come with a wiki and bug-tracking.

Joe

I'll think about it

Does that book assume you know anything about C# in general?
If not then that's exactly what i'm looking for.

Jonathan

It does not

[riiga]

I've been thinking about the GUI design, and came up with this mock-up (sorry I used Paint, however I'm fully capable of using PS):

I really liked the SC4 GUI, so my suggestion is that we try to mimic the SC4 GUI, but with some modifications.
The three buttons are: Building mode, Planning mode, and Query.


Also, after seeing the IMO failed attempt with free zoning in Cities XL, I drew this concept:

Basically, you can either zone SC4 style, or you can draw a zone in which the best fitting building is placed, and the rest is filled with e.g. grass or asphalt.

Please feel free to comment and criticise the ideas.

- riiga

[JoeST]

Nice GUI riiga. Also a rather novel way of LOTing. I was actually considering semi-procedural lot creation, with an in-game LOT-editor. Though that does cut out a large percentage of the great talent we have here at SC4D ...

Semi-Procedural LOT Creation:

A 'BAT' consists of many components, like a facade, walls, roof, balconies. Each component can be generic (A building-front has no brick texture, an unpainted door). Each component is modeled in a modeling program and 'BAT's are merely collections of these components assembled into a building in a programmatic manner (at run time).

A 'LOT' takes up all the space you allocate it. It pseudo-randomly generates a position for the building, and fills the rest of the space with 'prop's and could in theory draw a textured path from an entrance to the building and a lot face.

Joe

[Nique]

What about clicking on the zone you have just created and then specify more options. If you lay down some Medium Commercial Zones.. you can specify in a zone options window what type of commercial should grow there (retail, services, offices ?) by just checking a checkbox.

Or even better; you can go in 'zone select' modus and select more zones at the same time to edit their zone options.

It is also a good idea to use that 'zone select' tool to select more zones at the same time and add them to a  (virtual) neighborhood (eg. Downtown).  With this 'neighborhood' you will be able to set global options.

[riiga]

What about clicking on the zone you have just created and then specify more options. If you lay down some Medium Commercial Zones.. you can specify in a zone options window what type of commercial should grow there (retail, services, offices ?) by just checking a checkbox.

Or even better; you can go in 'zone select' modus and select more zones at the same time to edit their zone options.

It is also a good idea to use that 'zone select' tool to select more zones at the same time and add them to a  (virtual) neighborhood (eg. Downtown).

Exactly my ideas! I guess we will be using boolean values on a per tile/zone basis to determine this?

- riiga

[Nique]

I don't know (yet) how to implement this inside the game using math, brainstorming first . Everything is possible



But i still think the best way to go is, just make the gameplay features identical to Simcity 4.. then after that we can modify this and/or add new functions to expand.

[Nique]

I don't know why... this



is changing into this:


weird ugly white 'arrow like' shapes.. and darker colors..
this is a hell of a job

[JoeST]

Well the wiki is back up.

Joe

[Nique]

Thank you mate,

I'm currently busy with the GameScene part. To organize the project this is fatal. Let's make this clear for you guys. Someone needs to cut the knot here .

First of all, i want to go as close to the Simcity 4 game(play) as much as possible. When that's done, we start improve the game from there!. So first i want to clone the game. That said, i can tell the fallowing.

The region idea isn't that bad at all. I've played Cities XL BETA.. (cant talk about the game itself) but i prefer regions above that planet mode. CitiesXL is using pre-rendered almost static terrains. In SC4, we had regions, and the regions where very very customizable. So i will clone that 'game scene' also. Why do i say 'game scene', well because it is one. A game has several scenes. Like: Region, City (God Mode) and City (Mayor Mode). These are 3 different play scenes.

This is like the most boring part of creating a game (in my opinion) because you see only a little or even no build results after coding.

When you start the game you get these scenes:

CREDITS / LOGO SCREEN
Game Loading screen
Region Mode
City Loading screen
City God Mode*
City Mayor Mode*

Legend
Green Automatic after starting up the game or before loading a scene
Orange On command

* You can switch between these mode's inside the city mode

[Nique]

Now, in the future (the infrastructure is ready) language packages can be modified or created by just a XML file. This XML file has lot's of tags (and later categorized). We can even release a translation tool (very simple) by programming a windows application that reads / modifies the XML file without ruining the structure.

Now that's for translation. This far, i haven't be able to implant the language thing for 100% but in the debug window i can already translate several words from English to Dutch. I will not create the dutch language file before the game is finished, i just created it to test with. Next thing to do is creating a languageManager that will handle changes that where made by the user.

I have downloaded a template (i'm not going to invent the wheel twice) for GameScene creation and modified it. When you start the game, the first screen is the Region screen. Later, in that region screen, you can see the current loaded Region on a terrain. When clicking on a city you will go to that city. I have simulated the city in the form of the text "play game".. so this is it this far:

http://i5.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vid5.photobucket.com/albums/y199/Ne0que/OpenCity/GameScenes.flv

[Jonathan]

The texture is doing that because it is flipping every tile and the texture is darker round the edges and has half a triangle on it.
Is there some way of creating a texture programmaticly so there is no texture which you use, it creates the texture itself. That way there will be no repitition anywhere on the map?

Jonathan

[JoeST]

Oh ok, I thought it would have been better to start afresh, taking some of the ideas from SC4 and making a fresh game, rather than cloning it and then improving. Its much easier to start again than to edit old code .

On the texturing issue, you could have a larger grass texture, and select just part of it.

When you talk about regions, are you talking about square ones? With square sub-areas for cities.... gah. Would it not be nicer to have fluid worlds that are as (if not more) customisable as SC4 terrains? The fact that you have to unload to swap cities is an archaic problem...and the discontinuation of cities at edges...ewww.

XML is all good and shiny, but plaintext has plus sides too, things like their footprint and loading times are much smaller. I have a C# INI file reader, you could make use of that for .lang files (and of course for the actual settings ).

Joe

[Nique]

Well, fluid rounded regions & cities are much harder to code. SC4 is really a good game but it could be so much more. With improving the clone, i mean.. allow curved roads and stuff like that. I think it's good to take a lot of examples from SC4.. because we have no team to plan and organize, how to - implant  ideas. While when we use the ideas from SC4 (at the beginning) there will be no time wasting on 'where to begin' but 'how do we do that'.

I've deleted the terrain again, because it was organized like crap. A new terrainEngine can be written quiet fast (with XNA). About the INI reader, well i've implant the XML feature for now because i did a tutorial on that. If you (or a tutorial) can explain me how to import, read and write INI files.. well stuff like that is always welcome here!

Graphical User Interface
Because i have had some headaches from coding i created some graphics we can use. In general, these are form elements:

Forms:
RadioButton
CheckBox:

Manipulators
SlideBar:

ScrollBar
Scrollbar Arrows

*Note that these are PNG files with an Alpha channel (transparent), if you are running Internet Explorer older then version 8 you will see a blue background what is actually not there

[JoeST]

I can pass you the code file I used, its pretty simple. It has a Read function that takes in the Section (bit in [] brakets) and the key and returns a string of the value. and a write function that takes the section the key and the value. You can make a wrapper class that has a nice front end (as in, all the settings are Properties with set and get parts that convert the value from the ini file to what it actually represents.

And it would be much easier to code the fluid-rounded regions/cities at the start than converting a clone to that.  I agree its good to take examples from sc4.

Joe

[Nique]

I want to categorize parts of the translation (game menu's etc).. and also for objects in the game. I think XML fits fine here. But the INI becomes very interesting to put inside the game folder to import/save advanced settings like fullscreen running, screen resolution and so on.

[Nique]

Hi there,

I want to use 'ambient' music for standard ingame music. So if somebody comes across some great (and free usable) ambient songs please post it.