tzoli wrote: I will improve it and I hope I can release a new version in 2 weeks.
There's no rush for you to do this just take your time. I appreciate how complicated this can be. It's more than likely that you will end up scrapping this and start from scratch over & over again at some point. Don't be afrraid to do that if you feel it's for the best. I end up doing several versions of a project that I've had to scrap & re-start again but each version has given me new insight and better way to do things.
tzoli wrote: 2) As I understood what is an "emergency service building". There will be at a new tab I think.
Stuff like Fire stations, Police station. Ambulance station (All though this would probably overlap with health = hospital/clinic stuff).
tzoli wrote: The goverment zoning will be done. Not sure when.
3)This is a good question. I want to but I'm not sure how to make it. Altough I have an idea."
mmmm? I don't where to start. Haven't really given any of this any thought yet. The difficulty here is that all these types of buildings (leisure, emergency, education & health) are really sub-zones of larger goverment zoning. So really, they are all zone type government but different versions of it. One possibility might be to have zones attached to the buildings. Say the city hall is really a government building. In city bulding type of genre you usually can't specify zones for goverment, emergency and leisure facility. You just have to plonk the building where you want and it replaces the zone underneath making it a government zone.
Whats stopping you from allowing a reservable zone block which is reserved only for government buildings. The player can put his own choices on it rather than your simulation doing it, like for the residential, commericial and industrial versions.
Example: I will eventually need to build a police station but might not want to do it straight way at the begining of my city build. Having the ability to reserve a tile (say: Government=> Emergency zone block) will mean your simulation won't build anything on it, only the player can do it when ready or wants it from the appropriate tab. Once its placed your simulation takes over treating it as another government zone. To simplify things make just one government zone tile (one color but different hues for each subtype:emergency, education, health, etc...) that a player can reserve and don't allow your simulation to build automatically on it, only the player can when ready. This way you can have several sub-levels of goverment stuff( leisure=parks, baseball courts. Emergency=Fire station, Police station. Education: library, school, college, university. Health: Health clinic, Hospital ).
It's a big project your doing. You can see why I put it off. The biggest challenge is doing the A.I. for all the simulated bits. It's going to requirre you to do a lot thinking & preparation on paper. I'd say it's a typical group project.
GEuser wrote: Are you going to include transports, simple bus & car stuff?
You'd have to develop a separarte A.I. simulation to handle transporation. I don't know. You would have to do a lot of research work and build up your programming skills. One way would be to have animations that are just for show (they don't actually simulate anything).
CITY STATISTICS (City Stats)For example I would need to know where the crime areas are (colored areas on a map view of city) in order to place the police station at the best position in the city to handle crime. Same for health, power, water, education, so on... It all depends on how far you want to take it.
Zooming In/OutMy radar function could be redone from scratch to display the city map but doing for a city simulation is another level of difficulty.
Handling ProgrammingOne way to do it is to treat each feature like a separate game demo. Perfect it and them move to working on the next feature as another game demo and eventually stick them togather like lego (coding and all). Of course you'd have to set up things so things compatible when you link them up (graphcs, coding. bah, blah). This way you can get people to test a feature before you move on.
Another, thing would be to reduced it down to something really simple don't have so many features. Stick to a minimal set of of buildings. you could use layers for the different types of detail level (Layer 1: power lines, water pipes. Layer 2: Zones. Layer 3: Buildings. Layer 4: transportation and so on). And you can always use the "Visibility" settings of things to control what is display or not, if you want.
A lot of thought will have to go into this. You may have to decide to sacrifice alot of the ambitious stuff for the sack of coding simplicity and what gE can handle. It's gonna be a balancing act. What can I practically do, realistically considering your knowledge, time, coding skills and limitations of gE game engine. You can see why I wanted to leave this alone until I'm good enough. No harm in being ambitions and learning as much as you can. It's not always about completing a project but learning what you can while your doing it. You might decide you want just a simple game with the same order of complexity as a farmville type game (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FarmVille )?
Graphics donations.Would love to donate graphics.
The of size of 1 tile. This is another thing would some buildings span across several tiles? (perhaps best to leave them at 1 tile size at this stage, for simplicity?). Oh, and tzoli, don't feel pressured to use anything that I donate. Let me know if you don't like the graphics and how you would like them. After all its your project. based on the graphic style you want.
I haven't had the time to look at the code. Anyways, keep us updated