If you zoom in where you zoomed out it is cached. If you zoom in somewhere else it downloads that part of the world. I don’t want to keep the whole world in memory on the client and get all updates about things being built in the whole world.
yay, 300 replies 
Mike
I think the ‘reputation’ feature is very dangerous and extremely hard to balance, as it’s an artifical ‘patch’ to a situation deemed ‘unfair’: hijacking other peoples cities.
It’s a vicious circle: one screwup will lead to a low reputation, which leads to less passengers, which makes you unable to expand in the city due to lack of funds, which makes the queues in the bus stations longer, which makes your reputation worse, which makes you finally hated, at which point all is lost.
:emo:
(What I’m trying to say that you want to avoid a feedback-loop at all costs)
Hi Riven,
I agree that it’s really hard to balance but I hope (and believe) that the future versions will improve upon it. What I think will help is:
There is a quick way now already to fix an hated stance. Make sure you have enough buses going to the city and build 100 trees (which will take you away from hated), as long as you pick up the passengers coming your reputation will start growing again.
Am I just rambling or do you think it might work? 
Kind regards,
Mike
As this game will heavily rely on ‘balance’, especially once there are more and more factors weighing in, I think the only way to keep it both manageable and understandable for your player (very important!), is to model your game after reality. In the real world, ‘reputation’ is easily gained and lost, and hardly affects the amount passengers will travel, it’ll only make them grumpy. If you’re the only transporter in town, regardless of whether you’re hated or not, people will take that bus. They will not sit at home, watching their garden, hoping somebody of the bus company will plant some trees nearby
I might sound like I’m running the place (?), but I really enjoy the game (!), and would love to see the least possible ‘unexpected variables’ that have a big impact on the gameplay.
I agree on the fact that reputation should influance repartition of passagers between station (A station must have always a minimum of passager though).
The total amound of passagers of a city should only influance base on the size of the city.
To do something great, for each house, you should distribute a amount of passager to nearby station base on a random number and reputation (something like 20% chance to go to this station, 30% to another, 5%, …)
But doing so seems really CPU consuming (I don’t know how you deal internaly).
After the events during the previous two or so weeks I agree that there should be a minimum reputation of 1 or so instead of 0. That means that if you’re alone in the city you’ll get all passengers, and if there is another person with 100 rep you’ll get 1/101th of the passengers. Reputation should be logical and I’m spending more time on explaining things around it than adding new features to improve the system.
I honestly, truly, do not mind at all
(Almost) agreed, expect it in the next restart of the server. You’ll still get a bonus to your passengers if you have a great reputation, but the base passengers that everyone will share will be constant.
That way is what I actually had in mind when I started thinking about passengers (and the missis always wanted it like that as well) but to make the calculation a lot quicker it goes like this:
Get all stations in the city
For each station add up houses within 4 squares*reputation
Split up the above number to give each station a share of the total number of passengers the city can provide, based upon houses within 4 squares and reputation.
If the player has more than Neutral reputation, give them some bonus passengers (caps out at 50% if you’re godlike).
Kind regards,
Mike
EDIT: Right, the server is running in debug mode, changed it and it’s visible. If you’re hated and so are the others in the city you will still get lots of passengers. If so, increase your reputation and the others won’t get hardly any passengers at all :
Research is added, only farms left before reset
If you don’t browse the forum of the game, here are the latest updates:
2nd of September 2011
New:
Research! There are four kind of research at the moment, bus speed, bus capacity, station capacity and station load time. Click here for a more detailed post about it
Modified:
Buses now carry 30 passengers instead of 50
Bus maintenance is halved
Stations can now hold half as many passengers
The economy overview page now uses . delimiters in the numbers
The economy overview page now displays the statistics for two days ago
The economy overview now displays money spent on research
Improved the layout and changed some items around in the economy overview page
When setting the destination of a vehicle you can now click on another station window to tell the vehicle to go there
Removing stations now give you some 4000 instead of costing you 4000, this to allow people with negative numbers to be able to raze unprofitable stations
Vehicles always pay maintenance, even if no end station is set
31st of August 2011
New:
There is now an economy overview page that displays information about what all incomes and expenses are for yesterday and today (in game time, one day is 2 hours as will be possible to see on the game time clock once implemented)
Modified:
You can no longer by accident scroll a list when clicking making you click on something you didn’t mean to
The vehicle list and window now displays profit per day (in game, 2 hours) to be in line with the other preparations for in game time
The station list now displays the cost for each station and it’s sortable, if your maintenance on a station is huge it will help to build another station in the city to off load the first one
The station window now displays the maintenance per in game day instead of hour so it is relevant with vehicle profits
Bugs:
Fixed a page cache problem that could give you the wrong pages when browsing around
30th of August 2011
New:
All server side code for statistics is finished, now just to make a page so it’s visible for you
Modified:
Increased the vehicle maintenance cost significantly
Lowered the station maintenance cost when having a ton of passengers coming to a single station
Lowered the chance that city houses only follow straight roads instead of going their own way
When trying to build too long tunnels/bridges there is a message about it instead of nothing happening
Improved the performance of the station list window
Sorting on name in the vehicle window list now gives the correct order of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8… instead of 1-10-100-101…2-20-200-201…
Renamed some cities with not desired names
Bugs:
Fixed a bug where it wasn’t possible to remove a tunnel/bridge if there was no road next to it
Fixed a bug that caused vehicles to drive on forever if they moved square container while the square container was loading. Please let me know if there still are vehicles driving off road or off the map
29th of August 2011
New:
Vehicle profit for the previous hour no longer resets to 0 with every server restart after the current one
When cities add houses they now remove unused roads owned by players to be able to place their houses
Modified:
Removing your own roads now give you 20 instead of costing you 20. Removing bridges/tunnels give you 60 per square instead of costing you 60
The maintenance cost for stations with a lot of passengers have been lowered and a minimum fee has been added
The vehicle profit has been adjusted to even out short and long trips. Long trips give some more money but requires more buses to uphold your reputation
Maintenance cost on stations is now displayed per hour (in the game, 5 minutes in real life, will make more sense when there is a clock). Vehicle profit is still displayed as real life hour, that’ll be changed soon
Even if you’re hated you’ll still get 90% of the passengers of the city if you’re the only one in the city. If there are more players you do not get nothing but you might very well get less than 1% of the passengers
Bugs:
Fixed a bug where you could remove your own roads, even if they were used
Mike
I’m in the red now ;D
No research to lower maintenance cost ?
The game is a less forgiving for building stations without transporting most passengers or only having one station in a huge city
I considered it but seeing as there is so much money running around (lots of people have 50 or even 500 million), lowering their costs didn’t seem like the best idea Once the game is more balanced in regards to money coming in and money going out I’ll add it.
Eventually I’d even like a research tree (think skill system of diablo/world of warcraft) so there is a lot more coming in regards to research.
Mike
Tomorrow (Sunday) at approximately 12.00 CET Alpha version 1.2 will be brought online and the world will reset.
The changes that will be implemented during the restart is:
New:
Farms! You now get to place one free farm with two trucks when you start playing. Farms generate food and by bringing it to cities you will earn money and make the city grow quicker. For a full list of changes refer to this thread.
The area used when deciding how big a share of the passengers in the city should go to your station is now highlighted when building a station
There is now a clock visible with the current time and date of the in game world. At a later stage the clock will be incorporated into the new menu. For a description about game time vs real life time see this thread
Modified:
Upgrading the speed of the buses now increase the maintenance cost with half of what it previously was
Removing stations now come under build/remove station on the statistics page
Tweaked the graphics and sizes of all buildings
You can only invest into research if you have money
Slowed the speed of the vehicles a little bit
Bus stations now has a max number of people waiting of 150 (instead of based upon number of houses in the vicinity), with research you can increase the capacity to 900. Passengers added still uses houses close as a factor
When you build a bus station there are already 50 people waiting to get money a bit quicker
Goods waiting on stations is stored in the database every 30 minutes and read back if the server needs to restart
Cities grow both based upon passengers transported to and from the city instead of only from
Cities always grow even if you don’t bring anything (but really, really slowly), transport people or bring food to a city to increase the growth significantly
When the server restarts it continues at the hour where it stopped instead of restarting at the beginning of the day, making the daily statistics better
The statistics page now displays until what hour of today that it is displaying
Bugs:
Fixed a bug where old graphics cards could not always see the grass texture
Fixed a bug where vehicles were displayed as being on a station they weren’t
Fixed a bug that could cause several java processes to linger around if the connection was lost
Fixed a bug that caused the vehicle to be sent to the wrong station when there were several windows on top of each other
Fixed a bug that would display your vehicles as “loading” and never leave if you stopped them last time you were logged in
Happy playing!
Mike
Version 1.2 is now up and running :point:, I’ve updated the post above with the final changes.
Good luck!
Mike
Hi guys,
I’m in need of some uber java/game design knowledge (which is why I turn to you! ;)). I’d like to make the world twice as big for the next reset (and possibly even bigger in the future if I want to fit 1000 players in one map) but the map you download when starting up the game is now already about 1mb, which is too big imo. I create the map once every 20 minutes to not lag too far behind when it comes to roads being pulled and landscape changing height. The map is stored as a png of 3200px*3200px and is downloaded by the applet from the webserver. I have some ideas but for every idea I come up with I find at least one reason why it’s a bad idea.
Option: Split the map up into smaller pieces and stream the map to the client when necessary a la google maps.
Option: Make the map 1/4th of the size, when generating it take the average height for the height color and have houses/roads color the map even though only one of the squares is a road (or else you won’t see all roads)
Any nice ideas guys?
Kind regards,
Mike
combination of splitting and mipmapping
That’s a cryptic answer
I’m already mipmapping it on the opengl side of things, and that doesn’t help on download size/speed when starting up the game. I’m guessing you mean something else though (combining pixels on the server to create several qualities of the map? Something like my option 2?)
If you mean splitting up the png into smaller pieces on the server then the client will have to wait while it downloads each piece instead of it being fluent, right (option 1)?
Mike
First let me say I don’t like the zoom-out feature too much (to reveal the whole map), because it takes away from discovery.
=> Option 2
but create a couple of versions: 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, each with 1 road = 1 pixel
display the one appropriate to the zooming level.
I actually didn’t connect the zoom out feature with taking away from discovery but it’s a definitely a nice point. I’m not sure about fog of war in a game like this and only allowing people to zoom out a bit and having to scroll around the whole map seems more like an annoying limitation than discovering the world. Did you have anything else in mind seeing as some kind of map is needed, especially when your empire starts spreading over the map.
As for the initial idea, several mipmapped versions and only streaming the necessary ones it is (hello google maps :)).
Mike
1mb for the map? how are you storing tiles? how many tiles do you have?
I’m creating a png where one tile=one pixel with a total of 3200*3200 tiles (approx 10 million).
what kind of data are you storing in 1 pixel? what are all different values stored? how many different types of each are there? (like for example, you store height of a tile and then building placed on tile. you can have 10 different height values, and 10 different building values)
Well, I’m only storing the color, there are 15 heights (I’ve considered only showing 11 so there only is one color for water instead of showing the depth, which should make the png smaller) and 2 other types (one for buildings and one for roads).
Mike