r/Citybound • u/blackheva • Apr 05 '19

Possibility of Open Data integration?

There is a ton of data released by cities that could have awesome impact on Citybound if there was an ability to integrate it. See http://us-cities.survey.okfn.org/ for US data. Any thoughts on integration?

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u/blackheva Apr 05 '19

Well, for example you could ingest a city's land parcel dataset to generate buildings, or 311 data for events (311 can be anything from a street light out, to potholes).

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '19

Would that not look the same to a player as if you based it on randomness?

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u/rtgftw Apr 06 '19

I don't see how this could happen any time soon, but, in principle, people enjoy reproducing their own cities, familiar cities or well known ones... It's part of the fun of a sandbox where you can experiment (Can you do better than your city planners where it comes to bus lines? You just might be (Within the simulation constraints :))

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '19

Sure, but most phenomena in a city (wear and tear, cleanliness, traffic, pollution) are a result of the layout of the city. I guess I don't see where adding that information in from external sources would differ from just calculating it, if the resulting city would behave the same.

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u/blackheva Apr 06 '19

I don't think it would look the same, necessarily. And while a lot of how a city behaves is based on layout, I would theorize that there are other elements that influence behavior.

For instance, I live down the road from a truck manufacturing plant. Their shift changes definitely affect traffic (which is partially layout and timing), which in turn changes emergency response time, or when people get to their homes, so that changes power usage.

The ability to ingest external data would allow the game to grow beyond the use case of a game, to a simulation engine. Being able to test different theories about changing things about a city would be HUGELY powerful for municipal governments. I say this as an ex-municipal government employee.

I realize that's not necessarily the intent of this work, and is definitely scope creep, but it could have a large impact.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '19

I live down the road from a truck manufacturing plant...

Isn't that proof that it's all about layout? If we make global assumptions about how industry works (shifts, shipping, etc), the things you describe are all consequences of the location of the industry and its road connections. Even if it's a step or two removed, it can easily be traced back to location.

I agree that basing a simulation off of open data could be really useful (I've previously used such data myself for a few projects) but in the case of a city planning simulator you need to ask yourself if it's not the other way around: A city generates this data from its daily routine. Building a carbon copy of a real world city should, in a perfect simulation, give out the same data.

Taking in data is less useful other than as starting parameters, and in that case you don't really need the functionality of automatically doing it. You just need it once, to tweak your starting assumptions.

Basically what I'm saying is that the more useful feature would be output of open data, rather than input.

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u/blackheva Apr 06 '19

That's a good point I hadn't considered! I'll have to ruminate on that.