I love SimCity 2000 and these roads look really cool but I'd really like to see a city-builder go in a different direction.
One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.
New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses. Many of these are older and more traditional techniques to yield higher density neighbourhoods without building up to large apartment buildings.
It would be really cool to see a game that focused more on creating these kinds of realistic and aspirational living spaces instead of the usual cookie-cutter suburbs linked up by huge roads and a large downtown core.
There are plenty of “chill and peaceful” city and town builders that trade realism for prettier, more idealized places.
In more simulation-focused games, cycling and walking paths are often available, and you can use them, but they come with many of the same constraints they face in the real world. In practice, that means they are usually not efficient as the primary way to move large numbers of people across a large city.
Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently, in a way that makes your preferred options the optimal strategy. That is going to be hard to find, since transportation is a core part of city-building sims, and developers tend to pick either realism or a more utopian/fantasy model rather than mixing both in a single game.
> SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.
That's because SimCity is not a tool for preaching your personal opinions of what makes "more livable cities" to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game.
If you want to make your perfect city builder, go ahead, it's easier than ever now for somebody to create a game. Just don't expect everybody else to share your view of "aspirational", more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.
My sleep schedule varies from week to week depending on whatever miscellaneous project is sucking up all my attention (with some constants). It's hard to stay on a strict schedule once I've gotten into "the flow".
No, but SimCity (and most games) are designed for a primarily American audience by American developers. I feel a game for designing UK cities would be much harder to design, especially because most cities in the UK are the way they are because of historical restrictions while the United States and Canada were unburdened by this.
I was fascinated by them since reading a guide for Cities: Skylines that said that roads were like trees. There's a trunk that moves large amounts of nutrients and little branches that distribute the nutrients to the leaves. Such simple rules, but such complex and deterministic results.
Be like the Romans - make them all straight lines :-)
Of course the Romans didn't give a shit who's property rights they might be violating. I live in Lincolnshire UK, where Roman roads are still used. The last one that got changed was years ago when they had to put a kink in Ermine Street (now the A15) at RAF Scampton when they extended the runway to accommodate Vulcan bombers.
Another aspect of these games is the subtle scale issues that aren’t readily apparent - even the newest biggest city simulators are fractions of the size of a real city.
Road and rail curves are massive and it’s hard to understand just how big they are without having to actually walking them.
You can find in developer notes for city sims that sometimes they've tried to keep sizes of roads and parking lots to scale, and then they realize it's all low density and uninteresting, kind of like real aerial photography of a typical US city.
So the difference in scale between real life and the sims is 100% on purpose, as more realism makes the game worse. Just like they don't ask for a long permitting system for anything to get built, or demand a decade of discussion and probable lawsuits before you can move move a road, or rebuild an intersection.
Having played many city building games though I’ve always desired more depth and realism. Like the more I play them the more I want out of them. I wish power lines were limited in capacity and had to be stepped up and down via transformers (Workers & Resources does this) I wish I could make decisions about every intersection and every lane (cities skyline mods allow this) etc. Anyway I think there’s an audience for more realistic games in general, even if most people would find them less fun.
I regularly drive what I thought of as a quite winding road. Visitors drive it cautiously. It was funny one time looking at the satellite view and thinking "Wait, where is the tight bendy section?" Everything looked like very gentle curves; probably closer to straight lines.
I love SimCity 2000 and these roads look really cool but I'd really like to see a city-builder go in a different direction.
One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl. SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.
New Urbanism, traditional neighbourhood design, streetcar suburbs, one-way streets, bike paths, walking paths, mixed-zone walkable villages (light commercial with residential), smaller single-family houses and duplexes, triplexes, houses behind houses. Many of these are older and more traditional techniques to yield higher density neighbourhoods without building up to large apartment buildings.
It would be really cool to see a game that focused more on creating these kinds of realistic and aspirational living spaces instead of the usual cookie-cutter suburbs linked up by huge roads and a large downtown core.
There are plenty of “chill and peaceful” city and town builders that trade realism for prettier, more idealized places.
In more simulation-focused games, cycling and walking paths are often available, and you can use them, but they come with many of the same constraints they face in the real world. In practice, that means they are usually not efficient as the primary way to move large numbers of people across a large city.
Reading your comment, it sounds like you want a game that is realistic in most respects, but treats transportation differently, in a way that makes your preferred options the optimal strategy. That is going to be hard to find, since transportation is a core part of city-building sims, and developers tend to pick either realism or a more utopian/fantasy model rather than mixing both in a single game.
> One of the biggest problems with North American cities is their endless, car-centric suburban sprawl.
Most people consider that a benefit. It's just as livable as anywhere else. Just different.
this is definitely doable in CS (+mods), search YouTube for "cities skylines European" or something like that.
you need "plop the growables" and "move it" mods at minimum to nudge all the buildings close together.
> higher density
Why is this good for the individual?
I personally don't want to be cramped.
Heck, if we are having population crisis, I'm not even convinced this is good for society.
High density is great for establishment land owners who can charge rent, I'm not sure its great for the actual people.
> SimCity games may be really fun to play but they seem to reinforce this problem and anyone who grows up playing them will not learn about alternatives for more livable cities.
That's because SimCity is not a tool for preaching your personal opinions of what makes "more livable cities" to people who more often than not want to design semi-realistic, typical cities in an entertaining strategy game.
If you want to make your perfect city builder, go ahead, it's easier than ever now for somebody to create a game. Just don't expect everybody else to share your view of "aspirational", more so if you actively punish traditional city structures.
“semi-realistic, typical cities”
Tell me you’ve never lived outside North America without telling me you’ve never lived outside North America.
I live in the United Kingdom. I have never once stepped foot in North America.
You say it’s 3:42am where you are right now? Pardon my skepticism.
My sleep schedule varies from week to week depending on whatever miscellaneous project is sucking up all my attention (with some constants). It's hard to stay on a strict schedule once I've gotten into "the flow".
Ok so do you feel strongly then that simcity is representative of civil engineering in the UK?
No, but SimCity (and most games) are designed for a primarily American audience by American developers. I feel a game for designing UK cities would be much harder to design, especially because most cities in the UK are the way they are because of historical restrictions while the United States and Canada were unburdened by this.
https://www.redblobgames.com/articles/curved-paths/
Thank you very much... Ineffably magnificent, as always...
Related: https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2014/04/04/the-craft-of-scree... (The craft of screen graphics and movie user interfaces - interview with Jorge Almeida...)
One game that had a different perspective (first person mmo), but a fun network of road building in a simulated wilderness .. Wurm Online
I was fascinated by them since reading a guide for Cities: Skylines that said that roads were like trees. There's a trunk that moves large amounts of nutrients and little branches that distribute the nutrients to the leaves. Such simple rules, but such complex and deterministic results.
Be like the Romans - make them all straight lines :-)
Of course the Romans didn't give a shit who's property rights they might be violating. I live in Lincolnshire UK, where Roman roads are still used. The last one that got changed was years ago when they had to put a kink in Ermine Street (now the A15) at RAF Scampton when they extended the runway to accommodate Vulcan bombers.
Cool shit!
> Do 99% of city-builder players care what shape the corner radius of the intersection has? Most likely, no.
Maybe not... but out of all the players who care corner radius of roads in games, 99% of them probably are into city-builder!
Another aspect of these games is the subtle scale issues that aren’t readily apparent - even the newest biggest city simulators are fractions of the size of a real city.
Road and rail curves are massive and it’s hard to understand just how big they are without having to actually walking them.
You can find in developer notes for city sims that sometimes they've tried to keep sizes of roads and parking lots to scale, and then they realize it's all low density and uninteresting, kind of like real aerial photography of a typical US city.
So the difference in scale between real life and the sims is 100% on purpose, as more realism makes the game worse. Just like they don't ask for a long permitting system for anything to get built, or demand a decade of discussion and probable lawsuits before you can move move a road, or rebuild an intersection.
Having played many city building games though I’ve always desired more depth and realism. Like the more I play them the more I want out of them. I wish power lines were limited in capacity and had to be stepped up and down via transformers (Workers & Resources does this) I wish I could make decisions about every intersection and every lane (cities skyline mods allow this) etc. Anyway I think there’s an audience for more realistic games in general, even if most people would find them less fun.
I regularly drive what I thought of as a quite winding road. Visitors drive it cautiously. It was funny one time looking at the satellite view and thinking "Wait, where is the tight bendy section?" Everything looked like very gentle curves; probably closer to straight lines.
The tech seems really cool, but the road showed in the examples is not any less insane, like, why?
Their animated gif at the very end of their own tech seems very sane?
I wish they'd actually shown more/talked about it though.
That's the point? Even though they are complex, the improved roads all use circular arcs which guarantee a baseline of good drivability.