Cities: Skylines

[HiFlyer 9,345]

Just something I bumped into that was interesting. Imagine if it was this easy to place cities in your favorite sim. Well, you kind of can. There is already a flight mod for this game. 

 

(Flight fans are incorrigible.)

 

And (SOB!!) why can modern games create these huge detailed cities that run like greased lightning while one detailed airport can bring our sims to their knees? 

 

Time to visit the nextgensim website?

 

[srborick 0]

Yep... totally in agreement... in fact your concept of incorporating a feature such as this has already been mentioned over on the NGFS SIM-Posium. 

 

 

We're just a few hours out from having the NGFS SIM-Posium moved over to the new server... couldn't come to soon... looking forward to seeing you there.

 

Stephen B.

[HiFlyer 9,345]

LOL pretty bad right now, but I still like the detailed cities. Its kind of like a next-gen "Plausible" world. This person managed to recreate GTA5's Los Santos!

 

[n4gix 4,947]

Trees at an airport and between the runway and taxiways?

[HiFlyer 9,345]

Trees at an airport and between the runway and taxiways?

 

 

Yup, there are........ anomalies. Still, I like that a small team managed to build a city construction game so detailed that it holds together well even at street level. It was even more striking to me because I had just taken one of my occasional visits to the world of X-plane, and was noticing the improvements in their OSM, as contrasted to the detail of  something like this.

 

Not the thing maybe for somebody who is all planes, all the time: but I'm more and more convinced that the way forward for sims will eventually be some sort of combo "Multi-sim"

 

The tech is out there.

 

 

[codechris 9]

Not the thing maybe for somebody who is all planes, all the time: but I'm more and more convinced that the way forward for sims will eventually be some sort of combo "Multi-sim"

 

The tech is out there.

 

 

Personally, I'm not. The amount of work to get FSX to be good, and it's not even that brilliant with flight modelling, was big. Then add in everything to do with trains (and they are country specific as well) to then have realistic boat physics, car physics. The size of the game would be incredibly huge.

 

Do one thing and do it well. Cities, while is a good game, doesn't have to worry about 99% of everything to do with flying, weather it's GA or tubeliners. You then have driving games. The 3 big, sim-like driving games in existence today are Project Cars, Asseto Corsa and rFactor2. I will add that Game Stock Car is a heavily modified, improved version of rFactor, and GSC is touted as the best driving sim out there.These 3 have their pluses and missus, but still a huge amount of work has gone in to all 4. That, plus everything to do with flight, plus trains? Maybe boats as well? Even two of them together would require a incredibly huge team, plus financial backing and how many people would buy? Less then GTA5 we can stay that much. Nobody is going to drop Train Sim, Flight Sim or any driving sim, and move over to Cities to replace it. I'm not suggesting that's what you meant. Cities is about building Cities, so that's what they have to do well, that's the main focus. I doubt their physics engine is anything more then basic to make the game work and stick to basic principles (gravity etc)

 

The FSX engine is old, that's why modern games work better, and it would be easier now to write code that takes advantage of modern hardware. Many lessons have been learnt over the years of common pitfalls from multi-threaded development so there isn't a lot of the issues that where around in the early days

[HiFlyer 9,345]

Personally, I'm not. The amount of work to get FSX to be good, and it's not even that brilliant with flight modelling, was big. Then add in everything to do with trains (and they are country specific as well) to then have realistic boat physics, car physics. The size of the game would be incredibly huge.

 

And what's wrong with that? Open sandbox worlds are becoming more and more popular, and users are demanding greater and greater functionality. If the original designers don't add it, then the modders will set to work and do it. Thats what steam workshop is for, isn't it? As long as the basic functionality is there, people will dig in and expand on it, and it's those games that let people grow beyond the original borders that are the games people are still playing years and years later.

 

FSX in its own way is an example of that. Just out of the box FSX would not in any way be the phenomena that it is. Go and watch! Whats the first thing all those Steam FSX-SE newbies do? Yup, test the boundaries. Can you crash the plane? What happens if you try to fly under a bridge? Can you drive a car? Can you drive a boat? Can you reach orbit?

 

If the boundaries remain static/inflexible due simply to inertia or due to some concept of genre purity (even when modern programming makes flexibility possible) then those people will do exactly what they did before, and move on.

 

I simply don't think you will see any new civilian sims that are flightsims only (unless there is a heavy dlc model to bring in cash to the originating company) It just makes no financial sense at all. Even Aerosoft backed away.

 

A new sim would need other hooks. Other ways to create a broad tent and draw in a wide variety of users, and the best way to create that is something that deliberately crosses genres.  Because a hard-headed business is going to say "Show us the money" and as mentioned in another thread..... We, as a niche market, simply don't have it.

[TooWings 17]

I like the concept of Cities Skylines but feel it looks quite dated (circa 2004?).  I'd almost prefer to run it in sepia or monochrome rather that have the existing 'toy-town' colours. But I see where you're coming from in terms of using something similar to this to create cities and towns etc.

[codechris 9]

I did write a very long response, but in reality, I don't think anyone cares enough. But I'll summarise;

 

What you're asking for is a game engine that can cope with a multitude of sims, each with their AI, weather, physics, handling, force feedback, and in the end all the extras (races, train mission, plane mission, ATC etc etc etc)

 

There isn't a game engine in existence that can do all of this out of the box. You need to incorporate a physics engine, like Havok, and then use the engine to deal with how ever many simulators you wish. The amount of work would be huge. Cities doesn't require any real life physics, not like flight or driving sims require. Cities works on the Unity engine by the way, whose major selling point was cross platform support, not anything you're asking for.

 

Imagine building a sim which has physics code to realistically handle cars, trains and planes. It doesn't matter how far development has come back in the last 10 years, you still need very good physics developers to build accurate physics for not one type of vehicle, but 2, 3, 4..how ever many sims you want to include. It's not one size fits all. A plane does not care about the physics of driving a McLaren F1 at 180 mph around a dry Silverstone, and then how that's different to an F1 car in the wet. It doesn't care, it doesn't matter. A car doesn't need to know what the effects of wind are like descending over the mountainous area of Nice at 15,000 feet. However, all of that needs to be in one engine.

 

I think what you're asking for is a "game" not a "sim". You can build a game where all this is possible, but not a sim. Not without a few hundred millions pounds and a huge team of very good physics and game engine developers. In terms of mods, yes mods can do a lot. I have the PMDG's, Active Sky Next, EZDOK, and I have Pro Maps for ETS to name just one. But none of this has to do with the core engine, or the physics right at the heart of it. You state "As long as the basic functionality is there" but what you're classing under "basic functionality" is a game and physics engine that can deal with all major transportation methods in the world currently.

 

The Unity engine, that Cities is based on, does not have clout at this point to pull off a multi-sim. Unity's main selling point was it's huge cross-platform ability. While they've upped their game recently, I can't see any sim developer, who are no where near the scale of Rockstar, pulling off an engine that copes with multi-sim in a realistic fashion. It would be a game

[HiFlyer 9,345]

Its interesting that you say that but I wonder how much that's still true. At this very moment Outerra has two engines running, Bullet physics and JSBSIM, and the program itself is intended to be modular, in that you can call on different engines to perform specific tasks. Its also intended very much to be a "wide tent" sim offering multiple experiences.

 

At this moment planes are on the table, but the battlefield (TitanIM) simulator that it's licensed to, will also be modeling humvees, tanks, tanker trucks, boats from small to large...... Not to mention The aero kinetics mod by Uriah that will be doing sophisticated spacecraft and orbital mechanics.....

 

I would also note that even as we speak, Gta5 does a passable job doing many many types of various vehicles, and I suspect the only reason the physics is not carried further is less about it requiring vast resources and more about it not being what they were interested in. DTG's next gen train sim will be using the unreal engine, an engine that already has all it needs to create/depict quite passable cars and boats, buildings people, animals a fishing sim.......

 

And now (apparently) a train sim.

 

In a world where passable train, plane, boat and vehicle sims can run on ipads, it's hard to believe that modern computers don't have the oomph to do a credible job at multiple targets, especially when massive worlds that do just that are on the plate of every engine company you can point a stick at.

 

Obviously the various engines see it as their job to offer licensees the opportunity to create anything their minds can imagine, and that's the wave of the future.

 

Past that, I won't even go near the game vs sim argument, because for me it's a completely meaningless tomato/tomoto thing that I have never ever seen go anyplace good.  :smile:

[codechris 9]

GTA 5 doesn't do a good job in any driving or flying respect. At all. It doesn't even model bullet drop to any close extent that ARMA does. And itdon't speak of computers holding everything back, I'm speaking of an engine that can give us a flying, driving, train, boat, whatever else model that is realistic as any of the best, single title sims we have in existence.

 

I'll happily eat my words on this and concede I'm wrong, but at this junction, I'm not seeing anything that can give me the army sim of ARMA, the truck driving of ETS, the flight sim of FSX/P3D and the train sim of Train Simulator, in one package. I'm imagining buying Active Sky Next 4 times, for 4 sections of the sim. Or one huge cost of £100 because they've had to code in the effects on trains, planes, cars et al.

 

Although, one unified engine, that everyone worked off, would be fantastic. It allows a huge pool of different developers to come together. For example, I can pull up to Gatwick airport train station, developed by UK2000 for example, that's the same airport that I then use to take off in. Or Active Sky Next that works cross platform to give me plane and train weather. A train from London Bridge to Gatwick in the rain, to then take off and fly to Berlin in the snow would be great. Do I see that happening, in the tiny market of simulation? No. One can dream

[TooWings 17]

 

 

Past that, I won't even go near the game vs sim argument, because for me it's a completely meaningless tomato/tomoto thing that I have never ever seen go anyplace good

 

Agreed.  At the end of the day its all just pixels on a screen.

[HiFlyer 9,345]

I'll happily eat my words on this and concede I'm wrong, but at this junction, I'm not seeing anything that can give me the army sim of ARMA, the truck driving of ETS, the flight sim of FSX/P3D and the train sim of Train Simulator, in one package. I'm imagining buying Active Sky Next 4 times, for 4 sections of the sim. Or one huge cost of £100 because they've had to code in the effects on trains, planes, cars et al.

 

Well, I never ever underestimate the ingenuity of human beings with a dream. Even as we speak, somebody is hard at work getting more realistic vehicles into Unreal: There are several videos of his progress in testing feasibility.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ITgPhghow

 

In the meantime, Outerra is being designed from the ground up as a multi-sim. It was never ever intended to be anything else!

 

Here you see a very (very very!!!) early Outerra, in its prototype form, showing some of what they had and still have in mind. Two different engines working together: one for flight, and one for ground vehicles in this case.

 

 

Early Outerra again: Hopes and dreams.

 

[TooWings 17]

GTA 5 doesn't do a good job in any driving or flying respect. At all.

 

Flying....

 

https://youtu.be/yA7rtQNLu84

 

Driving....

 

https://youtu.be/3vrlDQLSZZs

 

Stunning metro tram drive (interactive)

 

 

Exit the tram into GTA-5's virtual world...then drive, sail, fly etc.....

 

https://youtu.be/jcTsaz5Z7tQ?t=173

[codechris 9]

Environment is brilliant, looks are amazing. But you think all the cars represented in there accurately depict the real life version of the cars they are modelling? The flying was not close to real, at all. But it doesn't need to be. It's not the point of the game. I guess the tennis simulation was accurate as well, or golf for that matter.

 

I've driving fast round Los Santos with just a keyboard and mouse without much issue, I can't say it's depicting realising driving physics, considering the hard time I had the first time I loaded up Game Stock Car and used my wheel and peddles