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Ihop

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Sep 27, 2012, 12:51:31 PM9/27/12
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Just wanted to drop a line and say how pleased I am with the most recent release. It is so much more pleasurable to use than those from last year, and it makes the results look that much more realistic. Occasionally I'll find a building on top of a road, and the simulation balance is a bit kooky, of course, but I'm playing again.

The R:C ratio seems too far in favor of commercial, I think. I suggest imposing more limits for building heights, where the maximum height of a building scales with the total city population (in addition to the current density/land value factors). I like my cities to have some decent sprawl.

The last tweak I recommend at some point is loosening the coupling between residential demand and the current C and I "population." At the moment, I keep reaching points where the commercial demand is sky-high with negative res demand, but I want to keep building suburbs, hoping that the downtown zones will grow to compensate. I can't force the downtown towers to grow by bumping up demand because no more residents will move in. Jobs and residential demand should be linked, of course, but there will ultimately be lots of reasons for R demand (realizing most of these don't exist yet): land values, tax rates, parks, traffic, crime rate, etc. Perhaps this is obvious. If so, go about your business as normal.

Synekism

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Sep 28, 2012, 1:08:07 PM9/28/12
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Its always good to confirm the progress is noticeable (and helpful). Thank you.

I have also noticed the R:C ratio problems. I guess a lot of people
just live at the office :). I will massage this ratio for the next
release in favour of residential.

Regarding building height limitations, I would prefer to skip the city
population dependency and directly implement a more dynamic
relationship with land values. I mean, in theory anyway, tall
buildings build only in areas where the land is so expensive that you
need a lot of "renters" to justify the cost. Obviously, city
population indirectly affects this land value as land value in a way
is just "demand" for that piece of land. But I would prefer to tie
building heights to land values instead of imposing somewhat
artificial constraints on the heights.

Ihop

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Oct 2, 2012, 6:50:57 PM10/2/12
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That makes sense, and it is certainly more realistic than predefined thresholds. And if R and C are balanced better, that should help reduce skyscrapers in towns of a few thousand, too.

Two other things:

- Is the ability to over-ride the road texture completely gone? I'm not a huge fan of the default texture, so I created and used a custom pavement image for a previous release. I know there have been a lot of semi-secret sorts of shortcuts and things in the past. Is this one of those, now, lol?

- I'm working on a fictional rendition of Chattanooga using a groundcover map as a terrain. Any chance of a tool to zone without being bounded on all sides by roads? Suburbs are a bit tricky to do at the moment. I think maybe I read a question about this a while back, but I get the impression some aspects of the development are in flux, so I thought I'd ask.

Keep up the valiant (solo now?) effort!

Synekism

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Oct 2, 2012, 11:48:31 PM10/2/12
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> - Is the ability to over-ride the road texture completely gone? I'm not a
> huge fan of the default texture, so I created and used a custom pavement
> image for a previous release. I know there have been a lot of semi-secret
> sorts of shortcuts and things in the past. Is this one of those, now, lol?

Unfortunately that ability was lost once I switched to embedding all
textures within the executable. But it shouldn't be much work to bring
this feature back. I'll include this in the next release.

> - I'm working on a fictional rendition of Chattanooga using a groundcover
> map as a terrain. Any chance of a tool to zone without being bounded on all
> sides by roads? Suburbs are a bit tricky to do at the moment. I think maybe
> I read a question about this a while back, but I get the impression some
> aspects of the development are in flux, so I thought I'd ask.

Ya, this feature was always on the roadmap. But like most features, it
would build on code that I need to rewrite so I'm not as comfortable
implementing it. With any luck, the code in question will get that
rewrite for the most part this current cycle. But no promises on this
one.
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