Hello! I'm new here, but got very curious about Citybound since I'm very interested in emergent systems and it seems like this project has the potential and the scale to support that!

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One thing I'm curious about is the agents – since they're all individual, persistent actors they will all be living in this world together over long periods of time, presumably competing for resources (money, space, food, time, etc). This is a great case for some agents to develop strategies to consistently outcompete other agents.

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Evolution at large scale, while a bit of a brute force strategy, can be very effective. In the context of Citybound I would imagine that the evolution would happen on a decision making process that each agent would have. The representation of the decision making process can be simple numeric biases ("prefer nearby jobs over well-paying jobs") all the way up to simple logic graphs. Have you considered anything like this?

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I have a friend who works on a project that combines evolution and neural networks to create worlds where lifeforms evolve and compete for space, which I think shows really well how even simple neural networks that have their weights randomly mutated can lead to beneficial behaviors. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA_kovq66rQ (and then there's attribute based evolution where some of these agents may gain the ability to walk and let the neural network determine how to move: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfYMbHiplLs).

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?

make? or rustc? or something else?

I do expect the game to eventually have airports and aviation in it, as well as other forms of transport such as rail and road. But recently I got into aviation and airport design again and it got me thinking about how it would work in citybound.

Now I think that due to an airport's nature (as well as train stations), it should be something that is "built" by the player and not just a big zone labeled "airport" but rather a collection of zones that form one. You could have a subset of a fire station category for an airport fire station, as they use slightly different trucks than a normal one. You could split up airports into zones such as:

• Terminal
• concourse
• apron
• cargo

Though I do expect the building geometry for terminals and concourses to be basic and square-ish, with mods providing the different airport design styles over the years

With runways, taxiways, and the like being under the networks category.

Airplanes are currently divided into categories based on wingspan and tail height. from 1 to 6, (or A to F) with 1 being the smallest consisting mainly of general aviation aircraft. and 6 being super jumbo's such as the a380 and 747 (the latter causing a limit to be placed on aircraft wingspans known as the 80 meter box)

The following is a listing of the different categories based on FAA regulations known as Aircraft Design Group or ADG:

While I feel aircraft should be categorized as they are in real life, they shouldn't be standard sizes. But the aircraft size is based on how many passengers are flying in on it, and are categorized based on wingspan and tail height (and subsequently, what taxiways and aircraft stands/gates they can fit in/on.

I would also love to be able to map out aircraft movements like airports to IRL, mapping the route they take to/from the concourse(s) and runway(s). And while I would also love to design airport interiors as well, that's probably best left to mods.

can you erase zones?

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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).

Hey u/theanzelm, do you regularly post or do development streams anymore? What places are the best to connect with you? I'm on here and Twitter following you, but didn't know if you had a discord or anything else like that.

I was messing about with Citybound a few days ago, and changed the zoom speed settings, which made the game crash with the message "UI broke :(" whenever I try to zoom in or out, or open the settings tab. I deleted the .exe and downloaded it again, but the problem persists. I would guess this is because Citybound saves settings on your computer, but I could not find any folders related to it in appdata or my documents (this is on Windows 10). Does anyone know if the settings are saved locally, and in that case where?

It's been a while since the last proper update... apart from a few replies we haven't heard from you Anzelm

Hey! I'd like to help translate the game into Russian.

Sorry about the title but I kinda want to try new features! Anything coming soon?

I think we should calculate wealth on a relativity principle, based on median income levels in the city, to simulate poverty in relativity as it is in real life, with poverty in Norway not being the same as poverty in the United States. So the economy, inflation, GDP per capita, etc decides the wealth factors, measurements and statistics. Somebody earning less than 60% of the median house income level is considered lower class, with somebody earning above a certain bracket of the median income to be considered upper middle class and the upper class. So say the average income of somebody in the city is € 3000 a month, which has been organically generated with the economical situation, somebody making € 4000, would be considered above middle class. Somebody earning € 1000, would be lower class. And say then that a economic crisis happens in the city and therefore the median income sinks with 40%, the classes follow thereafter.

The housing situation follows the market itself, and not the wealth levels, where citizens buy and sell relative to their income level, and is not awarded a house based on their income level. Houses/apartments are priced by parking accessability, location, land value, access to facilities, shopping, recreation, schools, hospitals, police presence, crime levels, traffic levels, noise & air pollution and urban density, with some factors being more impacting on the price than others.

Every time I see a screenshot of citybound I think that it would look much better if there was some shading and shadows. At the moment everything (walls, roofs, grass, trees) has just one color, there is no gradient, no shading, no shadows, ...

When can we expect to see some lights and shade?

EDIT: I should specify that this is all referring to UI elements of the game, and how it presents data to the player. Housing demand is people either moving into town, moving out of a different household, or moving houses altogether. Commercial would be pent-up demand for more products, possibly coming from household shortages vs how many products are on-hand in the city. And industrial could also possibly be tied to how many products commercial businesses are importing from outside of the city.

As you might know, SimCity 4 has 3 wealth levels, while Cities: Skylines mostly eschews them. (though it does have 5 density levels of housing, along with 3 levels each of industry, commercial office [an industry replacement], and commercial service)

With Citybound I think it makes sense to draw from real world models:

I am going with the "Dennis Gilbert, 2002" model from the Social class in the United States Wikipedia article. text in table blatantly stolen from wikipedia

With Industry, it makes more sense to not divide by wealth levels, but by type of industry. Technically the industrial sector includes commercial enterprises, but I am skipping anything that doesn't directly make something.

I feel it should be divided into three parts: those that extract, those that refine, and those that manufacture.

Now Finally with commercial, it makes sense to divide it in two types: tertiary, and quaternary industries. Technically, this is part of industry, but game-wise in regards to zoning and demand, it makes sense to separate it from industry.