Monday, May 13, 2013
What kind of software and hardware am I using?
Hello again!
I thought it might be relevant to describe the tools I will use to create my own resource-based city simulation game.
There are two constraints:
1) The first constraint is my hardware. I am currently using a mid-2011 MacBook Air with Mac OS X Lion. So I need something compatible with that.
2) I wanted to use a high-level programming language I am familiar with and figured a good deal of math would be involved, so Matlab or something similar came to mind immediately. At university, I used Matlab all the time and got reasonable proficient in it. However as a normal citizen without any fancy educational license, it was too expensive. Fortunately, there is GNU Octave, a free open-source clone of Matlab.
This will be the programming language I'll use for this project. With GNUPlot, I should be able to make some decent graphs. More info on how to set this up on these helpful external websites: Island 94 and SourceForge. I am using Tincta, a free text editor with syntax coloring to write the Octave scripts (m-files).
This is a pretty flexible set-up. Should you wish to try something similar...Octave is also available for Windows and Linux and there are of course plenty of text editors with syntax coloring available for any OS.
Building my own SimCity
Creating a resource-based city simulation game from scratch
Hi all,
My name is Tom and I work at a large high tech company in the Netherlands. Since my youth, I have enjoyed building things. I remember well playing the classic SimCity on my Dos PC at least 15 years ago. Let's face it, the game was ugly - even for that time - but so much fun to play! You could create your own city! And you had to be smart to make it work and make your citizens happy. Then years later, SimCity 2000 came out. That was a revolution...the graphics were gorgeous, you could build underground, construct fusion and microwave powerplants, and even arcologies (little ecosystems in their own right). I enjoyed the game and played it extensively with childhood friends.
And then...I grew up. I went to high school, studied mechanical engineering at university, played sports, dated, and got a proper job. I forgot about Simcity altogether, until reading on The Verge about the disaster that was the SimCity 2013 launch. Intrigued, I read up on the game, which seemed fun although maybe a little limited. Being an engineer, I was also interested in how it all was put together...and learnt a bit about Glassbox, the new simulation engine from Maxis that's at the core of SimCity 2013. And of course, a thought popped up in my mind: 'how hard can it be to make my own city simulator?'.
This blog is a logbook for myself and fellow enthusiasts of my efforts to create a city simulator. So why read this? The source code of the classic SimCity is available on Sourceforge and there are many people that have created clones of SimCity. Well, I guess this is my story of how to build a resource-based city simulation game from scratch step-by-step with my thinking along the way, instead of checking out a finished monolith of code in a computer language I am not specialized in.
There are two notes to add: (1) Since I am a mechanical engineer and not a programmer by profession, my code might not always be the most efficient nor pretty. But it should get the job done. (2) I will focus mainly on the code, less on the UI (user interface). In essence, this is a proof-of-concept.
The most important thing is that this journey will be fun. I hope you'll enjoy this blog. If you have comments, feel free to add them.
Hi all,
My name is Tom and I work at a large high tech company in the Netherlands. Since my youth, I have enjoyed building things. I remember well playing the classic SimCity on my Dos PC at least 15 years ago. Let's face it, the game was ugly - even for that time - but so much fun to play! You could create your own city! And you had to be smart to make it work and make your citizens happy. Then years later, SimCity 2000 came out. That was a revolution...the graphics were gorgeous, you could build underground, construct fusion and microwave powerplants, and even arcologies (little ecosystems in their own right). I enjoyed the game and played it extensively with childhood friends.
And then...I grew up. I went to high school, studied mechanical engineering at university, played sports, dated, and got a proper job. I forgot about Simcity altogether, until reading on The Verge about the disaster that was the SimCity 2013 launch. Intrigued, I read up on the game, which seemed fun although maybe a little limited. Being an engineer, I was also interested in how it all was put together...and learnt a bit about Glassbox, the new simulation engine from Maxis that's at the core of SimCity 2013. And of course, a thought popped up in my mind: 'how hard can it be to make my own city simulator?'.
This blog is a logbook for myself and fellow enthusiasts of my efforts to create a city simulator. So why read this? The source code of the classic SimCity is available on Sourceforge and there are many people that have created clones of SimCity. Well, I guess this is my story of how to build a resource-based city simulation game from scratch step-by-step with my thinking along the way, instead of checking out a finished monolith of code in a computer language I am not specialized in.
There are two notes to add: (1) Since I am a mechanical engineer and not a programmer by profession, my code might not always be the most efficient nor pretty. But it should get the job done. (2) I will focus mainly on the code, less on the UI (user interface). In essence, this is a proof-of-concept.
The most important thing is that this journey will be fun. I hope you'll enjoy this blog. If you have comments, feel free to add them.
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