Menu item to add residential or commercial or industrial?

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Request to be able to have three buttons that will create a tool like the tool to add a random attraction, only it will build a random lowest-level residential, commercial, or industrial building. (So that's one button for each of these three).


Additionally, a request for two buttons, sort of like +100/-100 for cities, only a +1/-1 level that affects a single tile.


I think with these two, it would make Simutrans be used sort of like SimCity - and help custom map creators.


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Original post follows:

Since I saw somewhere that we can turn off city growth, I think it's time to experiment with using Simutrans as a sort of SimCity... Because if there's no city growth, that means I could safely create highways in a city without worrying about cities taking over the roads, right?


So instead of using +100 to grow cities, I should use a tool that would allow the placement (or upgrade) of a residential, commercial, or industrial block.


We don't have that right now, right? Making sure before I file a new extension request...


I know we have something to add a random attraction...


Thoughts?

[prissi]

Yes there is. Any buildings you place with the map editor will increase the passenger numbers of the next city they are placed.

[Sarlock]

In the big game that I'm playing (chronicled in the Stories section) I have turned off city growth in every city and I am placing every building manually using the Public Service.  It works, it increases passenger demand, etc, and allows me to control the growth of the city so that I can plan road networks, build highways, etc... but it's slow doing it tile by tile.  This allows me to build nice looking residential and commercial areas that all have similar level buildings.

What we don't have is the ability to manually upgrade buildings at a later date... you have to bulldoze it and recreate it with a higher level building.  The +100 tool will replace highways, build new roads and create all sort of havoc that is fine in a normal game but doesn't work when you want to create the shape and layout of a city and its infrastructure.  But it works how it is, just a lot of manual work.

If someone created a +1 level tool that increased a res/com/ind block by +1 level every time you click on it, I'd be infinitely happy

[Ters]

I rather want proper highways.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Yes there is. Any buildings you place with the map editor will increase the passenger numbers of the next city they are placed.

I'm sorry - I wasn't clear. I meant that the city doesn't organically take over more tiles by itself, which would mean taking over road tiles, too.

[Roads]

Isaac, there is a way of handling this, I posted it once before and no one responded to the post - maybe most just don't like the idea or didn't see it.  At any rate, here goes again...

You can use the sign to control where your city grows!  I do it all the time.  Of course I don't actually use the sign.  Instead, using VS's instruction on how to do it, I created a little addon that simply preserves the original landscape preventing the engine from building on a square.

Honestly I don't see why more people don't use this as the engine often builds where it is least desirable such as out along a road entering the city or as you noted where you will want to build a road or railroad later on.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Update with an idea that also would work: A tool to "zone" areas as res/com/ind (drag rectangular areas) - with level zero, represented by green/blue/yellow tiles  -- plus a city mode of "only grow into building tiles, don't create or take over roads". (As an addition to the "growth"/"no growth" toggle for cities)

This would also work.

Either way, we're really close to making Simutrans support a SimCity-style mode.

[Roads]

Great idea!  I always kinda liked SimCity but there was just not enough variety of things to do.  If the only thing going is watching a city grow, it is a little like watching grass grow.

This would actually add a vast new dimension to the game, in fact about all that is SimCity unless that game has improved a lot since I played it several years ago.

Just want to add and sorry Isaac, for muddying the topic but if this is added, it sure would be nice if 2x2 res squares were also included in the upgrade.

[Ters]

All modes of transport under the player's control, all industry under the player's control, and with this, urban development under the player's control. Sounds like SimuSocialistState. Add area of control and military units, and we've probably got the most complete RTS ever.

[Sarlock]

Haha!  I think we can skip the military... although...  *goes to make a military jet pak*

In all seriousness, though, it depends on the playstyle... it's not really about playing a simcity style game because all of the other elements of simcity aren't there and they don't need to be there.  What we already have here is a game with excellent transportation options and a city that builds quite nicely around it.  All that is desired is the ability to shape and mold a city directly so that you can make the city part of the "sandbox" experience of creating your very own model railroad and everything else that comes with that.  There is certainly one aspect of gameplay that focuses purely on the transportation end and the need to adapt your network to a growing city base and this is, of course, what Simutrans is primarily designed to be.  But as a result of all of the wonderful things that the game has to offer a game player, there arises a different type of game that one can play and it just happens to run exactly parallel with the game that is already there... take control of the city and shape and mold it to match a transportation network and you have the ability to craft your own beautiful cities and networks that are custom designed to exactly what you want them to be.  Now you can create your favorite city/cities/countries and all of the intricacies that go along with that (see Carl's wonderful Britain rail network for a prime example of this).  All you have to do is flick off "city growth" and go to work.  (it would be nice to also set this globally for all cities with one click)

Imagine, two games within a game!  And nothing extra added except a couple of handy tools to make it easier to do

[Ters]

Other aspects of the game stand in the way of my model railroad dream, so this sandbox thing doesn't appeal to me under the premises of the foreseeable future. Something I did suggest a while back was to have Simutrans, "Simuindustry" and "Simugovernment" players interacting on a common server.

[Vladki]

I like the idea of buttons for random com, ind and res. It would be perfect for preparing scenarios and real-world maps with real cities.

For those who like to affect city growth and (like I) do not want to "cheat" by using public player. When I want the city to grow in some direction, I just build the road grid (using the cheapest roads) for my planned city transport lines, and let the city grow and take them over.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a five-button system:

- Place random Level I residential / commercial / industrial
- +1/-1 tile level

We already have city-road in special tools, new-city tool...

One of my desires is to run a server where I am public_player, creating the map and some basic infrastructure (public freeways, for example) - perhaps having very large cities with factories in the towns with a little space so companies can create stations... leaving room for rail right-of-way...

I've always treated Simutrans like a sandbox.. feels like we're on the verge of having it replace SimCity, which I've wanted for nearly a decade now.

[Sarlock]

We can already put a level 1 building down by selecting a random res/com/ind in the public player, but it would be nice to have the game do the random selection for us with a button, it's a bit tedious having to switch level 1 building selections while building a new section of city.  What would be even better would be to drag a selection area with the mouse and have a bunch of level 1 buildings drop there of the type we select (ind/com/res).  That would make custom city building way faster, but it may be quite a bit more coding (not sure how easy it is to do a selection area).  Then you can use the +1 tool to change the density as you desire for each tile.

This would be superior to simcity in some ways: right now you zone your selections but the simulator decides what grows in that spot, you don't have a lot of control over that part unless you individually place buildings that are set as "droppable" instead of "growable".  With Simutrans we could custom develop the city to be exactly how we want it... choosing where to put a dense office tower core, multi-level housing, low-density housing, etc...

[wlindley]

The simplest way I can think to do this, would be allow the existing "Build Buildings" dialog permit multiple selections of building types; when the user clicks in the map with more than one building type selected, we simply choose one of them at random.  We thereby inherit all the selectability of type, rotation, and so on from the existing dialog. 

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

If that would be the simplest method to add the functionality, I'd be okay with that. Though I'd still like to see the per-tile +1/-1 buttons, as I think it'd be very handy

In fact... the simplest solution might well to be to just have the per-tile +/- buttons, as one could place the same low-level res/com/ind and increase the tile and it would be random anyway... But it'd be handy IMHO to have a button to place random low-level R/C/I just because it'd be faster... maybe the same method "s" key chooses the road or "t" key chooses track when you open a game - buttons could choose the first/lowest level RCI tile to place...

I'm trying to guess how to make this easy to add since I think that's the most likely way to see this capability added. hehe