Cities feel too much like grid paper
-
When building a city, the builds and plots are all disconnected. It feels like you are walking through a concept art test world where everything is evenly spaced to look at the models. They don't feel connected enough.
I think the cities need to be able to have the buildings jammed together. Instead of plots, you should get a building deed right and be able to place it anywhere within the city. With the only limitation is you can't build it to completely close off the entrance of another build. Think maze tower D rules, you can't block the flow.
If we can do this, then we can create more vibrant feeling cities that feel more alive. We can make alleys that people shouldn't go down. A maze of merchant and crafting buildings. A place where houses a jammed together along a path there resembles an actual town's housing district.
-
Believe it or not, that would be a coding nightmare. Games code on grids for a reason. Yes, when rendering a scene, every pixel gets rendered, but to save memory, processing, and resource space, standardized polygons, presets and skins are used, and then placed upon a grid anchor system in order to make the game world both visually acceptable within the medium, and possible within the current computing limitations of the servers.
I see totally where your going with this, and I do love the concept, but from the standpoint of a coder, I know it just won't happen anytime soon. Maybe in another 10-20 years.
-
On a related note certain buildings take up different amounts of space depending on their orientation. and roads cannot be offset which further breaks down the grid into larger blocks. so the 169 x 169 becomes effectively a 30x30 area with large buildings taking up 6x6 blocks, small buildings taking up 3x3, and roads fixed in a grid and taking up 2x2 with little to no option to offset.
-
There are grids out there that don't feel like paper. Just change the build area to the entire city instead of a plot. Then instead of having a buffer of 1 to 2 blocks, buildings can be right up against each other. No changes needed to the coding and merging of the assets.
Don't use tech talk as an excuse to not do something as your first reaction. As for the 10-20 years, voxel games do way more than what I am asking for already. Just see Dual Universe. https://www.dualuniverse.game
There are other games where the individual pieces snap to each other and people do amazing things with. Also, City of Heroes, R.I.P., had some amazing player bases designed with some pretty limited building blocks. And CoH is closing on 2 decades old.
-
This probably will be somehow upgrafed to avoid smilar look on every city, but this kind od stuff will be probably done after core mechanics
-
I like straight lines lol. Plus it maximizes space
-
@Brueson said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:
(...)No changes needed to the coding(...)
You mean other than having to check and ensure that there's always a viable path from any entrance to every exit (a non trivial task). And other than having to reevaluate and communicate building privileges, since you need to know who is allowed to place something at that position (or destroy/use...). And other than having to reevaluate space per city, since you can 'mess up' or 'optimize' more with such a solution.
There's more, but I guess you can see that this is not a trivial click of a button implementation as you might be thinking.
-
@Logain said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:
@Brueson said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:
(...)No changes needed to the coding(...)
You mean other than having to check and ensure that there's always a viable path from any entrance to every exit (a non trivial task). And other than having to reevaluate and communicate building privileges, since you need to know who is allowed to place something at that position (or destroy/use...). And other than having to reevaluate space per city, since you can 'mess up' or 'optimize' more with such a solution.
There's more, but I guess you can see that this is not a trivial click of a button implementation as you might be thinking.
No coding changes to the assets. Meaning no logic needed to merge them if they are touching. Same assets placement.
As for pathing, maybe non-trivial, but it has been done thousands of times now and pathing has to already exist for mobs to get around those buildings. One extra algorithm to check if building would end up with no valid paths to the front doors.
I'm confused why players expect the world from developers, but also defend them with weak tech excuses. They are professional developers making games for a living. Many probably have done some of this from scratch multiple times.
-
@Brueson said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:
(...)Same assets placement(...)
Not at all, you have to consider individual privileges. Who can place/destroy what where? You haven't talked about that.
@Brueson said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:
(...)one extra algorithm to check if building would end up with no valid paths to the front doors(...)
The situation is not as easy as you think it is. Have you ever worked with a navmesh? And we aren't talking 'front door' here. People are going to do their very best to abuse such functionality. They would block other players by building around them (or their spawn position). They would cut off players from reaching certain points through building in circles around key areas. All of these nasty edge cases have to be considered and PREVENTED. As the saying goes... the devil's in the detail.
@Brueson said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:
(...)I'm confused why players expect the world from developers, but also defend them with weak tech excuses(...)
Three reasons.
First, I don't expect the world from them.
Second, I know the technical perspective of a programmer and the financial restrictions.
Third, I know they are already struggling to implement the core game as promised in a reasonable time-frame. I'm in good hope that they can manage and finish developing this game with the funding they have, but I am aware that feature creep has killed more software projects than I could count.In other words, would I think it's a great feature to have? Certainly!
Would I want them to take the month or three required to implement it? No, I'd rather have them try and finish the core features of the game.
