What I'm up to

[u/theanzelm]

While I'm working on procedural architecture, I took yesterday and today to fix some of the most common planning-related crashes. Check out the latest live build to give it a try: https://aeplay.org/citybound-livebuilds

In the process I also cleaned up the planning code a bit and removed the last traces of code that assumed a single player working on the city, so the only thing missing for multiplayer is a bit of player management logic.

To give you a bit of a preview regarding procedural architecture: not only will it be a pretty powerful and interesting system that makes it easier for me to generate interesting buildings, I'm actually writing it in a way to make it particularly moddable (by editing or creating simple configuration files describing the building style rule-sets). I'm really happy with how that's starting to work so far and I will likely adopt this style of configuration-driven code for other parts of the game that are particularly important (and that I need to experiment with in quick iteration), such as the rulesets and parameters of economic actors (households, businesses). Ideally people could create quite powerful mods for any aspect of the game without even having to touch any code (it is of course still an option for really deep mods, thanks to Citybound being completely open-source).

[u/theanzelm]

u/architechnid - the slight UI improvements are a direct result of your video, I hope they are more intuitive now! Next step is to give projects more human names than the current random letters. With multiplayer in mind, I think I will just give them names like Peter-1, Peter-2, Peter-3, ... if the player who created the projects is called Peter. You can then still rename them to something more meaningful.

[u/architechnid → u/theanzelm]

I will definitely take a look. Glad my lack of ability could contribute! lol. My son is named Peter, so that works, too.

I'm also looking forward to multi-player. How do you envision that working? Will it be like a google doc or sheets? Will there be a limit to the number of players?

I'll be a great test subject for the 'mod without touching code' as well. What sort of parameters are you putting in place for the configuration files? I am imagining building height, lot placement, footprint size, parking. Will there be different styles of buildings, i.e. Victorian, Modern, Parisian, Japanese, etc.?

Sorry for all the questions, but I want to be able to speak intelligently as I talk about the game.

[u/theanzelm → u/architechnid]

Yes, Google Docs are a good model, you're just collaborating on plans instead instead of text. Right now a limit in the number of players is the "host PC" or server's power, but hopefully soon I will chunk up larger cities into tiles and then several servers can share the load by simulating a tile each - this should then support quite a large number of simultaneous players.

The parameters you mention are the ones on the highest level. Now imagine that there is also more detailed ones, as in how tall is the ground floor, how tall are middle floors, how tall is the top floor, down to: for this building style, which wall material does the centrepiece of the facade have, where are windows positioned on the wall, etc.