Citybound / DevBlog

I'm now living for one month in one of the most beautiful cities I know (and that's very tough with St. Petersburg in the race), can you guess which?

Otherwise, I'm still gnawing on some tough problems with the economy design, but my strategy for solving them becomes more and more clear.

• I wrote down the rural-town scenario which we implicitly converged on in our discussions, as a minimal, but all-edge-case-covering proof of concept for the economy prototype.

• I decided to not continue to blindly try to invent all the abstract algorithms around economy without any examples

• So I started writing down everything that I need in the rural-town scenario, starting with resource types today, and continuing tomorrow with activities and household types

• I also decided to put all of this kind of data into simple text files that are loaded by the game, instead of directly into the code

• This should make it possible in the ideal case to add new resource types, business types, new activities and even whole new professions including their interactions without having to compile any code! This will hopefully be the first example of really straightforward and easily discoverable moddability!

I'm still a bit in isolation/meditation mode because I would really like to get my attempt at implementing economy as right as possible from the beginning.

I am starting to have the full picture and there are only a couple open questions left that I'm gnawing at, mostly concerning the mechanisms of scheduling people's days, interaction of schedules between family members and how to do long term planning (rescheduling) in a performant way.

Thank's for bearing with me - next week I'll already be in another city and country and I hope to update you again then with something more concrete!

Pretty chaotic couple of days, but I had time to think through all the economy goals we came up with in the planning livestream, to review all the great discussion around that and to start sketching some solutions.

Here's a rough first gist:

• Central concepts:
  • Resources
    • raw materials (wood, grain, milk, iron, ...)
    • processed materials (food, gasoline, paper, ...)
    • processed items (TV, car, printer, machine, ...)
    • money
    • intangible/needs (hunger, health, social life, leisure, education)
    • can be subcategories of each other
  • Activities
    • are conversion recipies / "chemical reactions"
    • have specific resource consumption rates on one side of the reaction, and specific resource production rates on the other side
    • can have "catalysts" that make the reaction faster, or can even be stirctly required to do an activity
    • e.g. "Eating" 0.5 food => -1.0 hunger + 0.1 garbage
    • e.g. "Milking Cow Manually" nothing => 1.0 milk + 0.3 hunger; requires: 1.0 cow
    • e.g. "Milking Cow with Machine" nothing => 5.0 milk + 0.3 hunger; requires: 1.0 cow + 1.0 milking machine
    • e.g. "Walking through park" nothing => 0.2 hunger + 1.0 leisure + 2.0 environment
  • People
    • have private resources & needs
    • travel to participate in activities
  • Households
    • e.g. family or business
    • have shared resources, needs & items
    • offer activities based on available resources
    • do short-term planning for emergencies (always) & spontaneous nice-to-haves (if free time is available)
    • do long-term planning: try to achieve some kind of preferred resource rate equilibrium through scheduling recurring routine tasks (work, buy groceries, ...)
  • Buildings
    • house households

I will try to work this out in more detail over the next couple days, probably already capturing some of that in code, which can then be discussed by everyone interested!

Text Summary:

Patreon

• earning as of now $466 per month
• got my first payment, real money from real people for doing something I love!!
• obviously not enough to survive yet
• but looks feasible to reach that soon if more people become Patrons!
• THANK YOU
  • small and big contributions: not only support but imply trust!

The Roads & Traffic Prototype

Well, it's just roads...

• Really liked your reactions
• Amazing to see what people already managed to build
• BSOleader’s hilarious & just slightly tipsy first release review captures really well how experimental this release is and actually contains a couple implicit bug reports
• People reported bugs really diligently, with helpful screenshots or even videos/GIFs
• Made it possible to address some of the most annoying bugs in the 0.1.1 and 0.1.2 releases
• If you had problems with the first release, I encourage you to check those out

Open Source

• Scary decision, but blew my mind how much it already paid off in just January
• Contributions both on
  • very concrete things like better camera controls (kingoflolz & Herbstein)
  • background architectural things like switching to the newest version of Rust and cleaning up rendering code (kingoflolz & martinrlilja)
  • getting a head-start on long-term strategical issues like: modding
    • based on some very active discussions in our new developer chat
    • martinrlilja took the initiative and started prototyping a mod architecture and programming its parts
• Contributions prove that people already understand my code and are able to provide helpful work, which I didn't expect at this early stage at all

Working in Phases

• I decided to work in two alternating phases:
  • one month new features
  • one month fixing, cleanup & improvements
• Decided to use January as the first “cleanup” month
  • highly simplified the inner simulation core, it ended up more robust, understandable & even faster!
  • heavily cleaned up the hacked-together mess of road-planning code
    • fixed a couple bugs in the process
    • made it much easier to fix further bugs and add new features
  • documented in detail a lot of “building-block” code of Citybound
  • setup automatic release building, allowing me to quickly and frequently create new releases from the newest code for all three platforms
    • will hopefully give you fast access to bugfixes and the latest features
    • giving us quick development iteration & a quite large group of testers!

Feature Phase February

• Will be about getting rudimentary economy and agents beyond cars going
• Dubbed it the “Homes & Businesses Prototype”
• Not much more than a Milestone
• Actually want to do the initial planning for this Milestone with you
• One of the next days I’ll do a planning livestream!
  • I actually want to try out YouTube Livestreaming for that
    • even though it has a slightly higher chat-to-stream delay
    • All existing subscribers get notified
    • quality options for everyone
    • automatically ends up as a video on YouTube for watching it later
  • I will announce the livestream on YouTube, Reddit, Email and Twitter

Thank you for the wild ride and let me know what you think!

Support Citybound on:

a.k.a. Road and Traffic Prototype 1.1 1.2
a.k.a. the result of one month of clean-up work
a.k.a. the first release made with automatic build tools, coincidentally on the day the build tools suffered a major outage

What Changed

• Fixed: Self-intersecting roads not workng
• Fixed: Game only launching the first time on MacOS
• Fixed: Game not launching on older versions of MacOS
• Fixed: Panic when spawning cars without built roads (by kingoflolz!)
• Fixed: Panic when clicking/selecting built road
• Fixed: Plan result lost after mouse move
• Workarounded: Huge intersections hang the game
• Workarounded: Super-long roads hang the game
• Improved:
  • More traditional camera controls & key bindings (by kingoflolz)
  • Support for pitching the camera (by Herbstein)
  • See the new control scheme in the wiki!
• Improved: Better overall performance
• Improved: UI for adding lanes

After the hotfix/version 0.1.2:

• Workaround-around: Grids and long roads not creating intersections
• Fixed: Weird behaviour when building a plan while still drawing a stroke

Try it!

Instructions and downloads (NEW: v0.1.2)

What else happened & what's next

• Maybe even more than what you can see in the release today happened behind the scenes in January!
• I want to announce how we're going to proceed with feature development in February.
• I'm planning to create a video update about both tomorrow very soon, stay tuned!

So...

• automatic release builds turned out to be quite the bitch to get working
  • Imagine creating instructions for building a car, giving them to your friend in the next town, waiting for him to try it out, he giving it back to you with a terse "motor doesn't start if I build it like this", you having to guess why, changing something, giving it to your neighbor again, getting it back with "motor started, couldn't put in the gear", rinse and repeat...

• especially for all three platforms

  • Imagine you having to create a special customized copy of your car building instructions for your other friend who only knows how to drive automatic
• they almost do work though

But...

• I didn't have time to do the two bugfixes I wanted
• I didn't have time to test the current state more thoroughly
• There is one small annoyance that I would like to polish away

...so the release will be tomorrow, sorry!