Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, while HN is about the code-wonkery, I had to jump over to your main site to see it at work...

It's beautiful. Totally agree on the flat-shaded aesthetic. A nice stylized low-fi without giving into pixel-art.

I'm always suspicious about simulation-driven games because they can get lost in the wonkery of it in ways that don't actually provide gameplay to players - my understanding was that Master of Orion 3 was ruined by this kind of design. But it looks like your "simulation driven" thing is about the citizens, which is wonderful.

Your current vids are very rural. Are you planning on getting into transit and bike-lanes and the like, or is this primarily going to be about roadways?

View on HN

Transit, pedestrians and later bikes will be the next features I want to work on regarding transportation, after I make all aspects of the simulation scale to larger-than-rural settings with car traffic.

If you do add those things, please don't give them magical benefits.

Transit should be outrageously expensive to add. (see the recent subway expansion in New York and in San Francisco) It should be outrageously expensive to operate.

Transit should shut down often for floods, strikes, the "wrong type of snow", "leaves on the tracks", crowds of people (good job San Francisco, LOL), maintenance, terrorist attacks, and many other random reasons.

Transit should increase crime.

Transit should go to the wrong places. You ask for it to be installed where it is needed, but instead it ends up a mile away because that was where it is possible to build.

You need to live outside the US for a while

Games are mostly about fun, not realism.

Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable to set this game in a magical fantasy world where underground rail is an order of magnitude cheaper than the US. This fantasy world is commonly referred to as "France" (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...).

It's a spectrum. My goal is to "teach the right things" that you would need in a realistic setting and have the simulation try it's honest best to simulate everything in realistic scope, detail and behaviour, but I might cut some corners with bureaucracy that is involved in real-world city planning to not compromise on fun.

Now I'm fantasizing about players levying a carbon-tax to collect revenue and force modal shift to transit/cycling.

I would love and very much want such things to be possible - and to still make it an obvious reaction to your player decision.

this is possible in base game of cities skylines.

It would force a revolt, after the economy collapses and unemployment shoots up over 90%.

Oh, yeah, the great British carbon revolt of 1993.

I would play this game

One of the truly awful things about SimCity was that transit was unrealistically beneficial. It was some sort of awful joke, the sort you might roll your eyes at and say "oh brother, this is idiotic". It felt like somebody was pushing a transit agenda hard.

Similarly, pollution was unreasonable. Coal power may be dirty, but SimCity made it absurd. There was also the nuclear plant explosions that pretty much never happen in the real world. Both the failure rate and the failure consequences were way above normal.

Here's transit planner Jarrett Walker making the exact opposite argument: https://humantransit.org/2019/03/notes-on-simcity-at-30.html

Not sure you know what “exact opposite” means, but I read that link expecting to see an argument that nuclear power plants blow up much more frequently in real life.

I thought "transit planner" would be a hint that I was referring to the first part of the parent's comment, that "somebody was pushing a transit agenda hard".

Thanks for the link to the main site and (upstream) for mentioning "patron" - I didn't notice any of them on the github page... :P

I will think about becoming a patron... .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com