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Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

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Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#81

Post by ripperdoc »

Pannoniae wrote: post #21
LargeTomato wrote: post #2

This is awesome. I like cities skylines but I prefer the simulation aspect to the gamified aspect.

Yeah. Cities: Skylines just feels so soulless to me. It's like me looking at a model railway - it might look cute but it's just dead. The game is effectively a traffic simulator, with citizens not really having agency (beyond the Chirper which most people are annoyed by), and next to zero economic management. No mixed zoning or organic growth, you effectively run a completely planned economy. There's not much externa…

Upcoming Citities Skylines 2 seems to have improved a lot on the simulation parts. Removing "pocket cars", giving more agency to agents, more types of zoning, hopefully more challenging economy, trading of resources with external cities, etc. So at least I'm hyped about it!

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#82

Post by mnky9800n »

Uriopass wrote: post #76
jimmySixDOF wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice !! Please check out Spectra City if you are not alread aware they are a fully CC0 project built for WebGL (WebXR), although I think for now they started on a platform called Spatial.io & my impression is they are closely tied to the real built environment or proposed so as in a way for the local community to active participate on a new city block restoration project as an example. https://www.spectracities.com/

I have to say I'm confused by this. After looking through their website I do not really understand what Spectra City is about or how I can get involved.

> Spectra is a cross-platform, open-source community where physical placemakers and virtual worldbuilders come together to create sustainable, human-centered, and technologically progressive urbanization.

How can it be any less obvious what Spectra is. Haha.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#83

Post by andybak »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #60
Uriopass wrote: post #34

Hi, I'm the main developer of Egregoria. I did not expect to end up on hackernews that early. While I've been working on this project on and off for 3 years it is still in its infancy. I have so many things I want to rewrite, so many features missing even for the most basic game loop. So many 3D models I have to make. And so little time! Working on this as a side project with a full time job has been hard at times. I…

Nice !! Please check out Spectra City if you are not alread aware they are a fully CC0 project built for WebGL (WebXR), although I think for now they started on a platform called Spatial.io & my impression is they are closely tied to the real built environment or proposed so as in a way for the local community to active participate on a new city block restoration project as an example. https://www.spectracities.com/

> built for WebGL (WebXR)

Seems it's built mainly for spatial.io which has WebXR support but also native apps for iOS, Android and Quest.

(I say this because the performance is probably better on the native apps)

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#84

Post by glenneroo »

Uriopass wrote: post #75
fendy3002 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, though alternatively indie can resort to kickstarter (factorio) or patreon. Then do early access on steam. However yes the pressure is different than full time job

TIL Factorio was funded on Indiegogo! But yes, I'm really not ready for that kind of pressure and marketing efforts. I feel - and even more so since Cities:Skylines 2 announcement - that there isn't enough I can do alone to turn this into a full-time job.

You should definitely at least get a Steam page up so that we can wishlist it. Today's HN posting would have gotten at least one wishlist (from me :) When a game gets enough wishlists on Steam, the game is promoted to various lists which get shown constantly to people (as soon as you have game released and purchasable, even if Early Access). You are otherwise penalized if you create a store page late and have very few wishlists, since Steam's algorithms prioritize giving the banner spots, etc. based on your # of wishlists.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E656RcGWcEs

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#85

Post by Uriopass »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #69
Uriopass wrote: post #34

Hi, I'm the main developer of Egregoria. I did not expect to end up on hackernews that early. While I've been working on this project on and off for 3 years it is still in its infancy. I have so many things I want to rewrite, so many features missing even for the most basic game loop. So many 3D models I have to make. And so little time! Working on this as a side project with a full time job has been hard at times. I…

Awesome to see a Rust based game. What are your thoughts on the state of rust for games and games working in 3d?

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#86

Post by Uriopass »

justanotherunit wrote: post #77
Uriopass wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not much at the moment really, the idea is that all citizens have their own state and decide what they want to do themselves. For example, all of them have hunger state, have jobs assigned to them, a house etc. So a single citizen will always go back where it lives everyday instead of a random house, it will try to go near its home to buy groceries. I've decided that they don't have money as I found it too ha…

That’s really interesting, what kind of AI implementation have you decided to work with? I am making a similar project but more of an medieval approach. I went with behavior trees since it felt more appropriate and scalable for such a task

I went with a utility approach as I felt it would incur nice emergent behaviour.

Every so often, citizens and companies (I call the abstraction a "Soul") look through everything they can do and pick the on with the highest utility score.

If they're hungry, they'll get food. If it's the time of day where they should work, they'll go to work, except if they're too hungry!

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#87

Post by Uriopass »

dosshell wrote: post #79
Uriopass wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All aspects of the game need more work, I think anyone that ever worked near the video-game space could help. - 3D assets - Audio assets - UI/UX design - Low-level graphics shenanigans (platform support, debugging tools, dos-and-donts, optimizations) - Simulation depth (logistic chain, economics, city services..) - Mod support Any help with these would be greatly appreciated

What are your thoughts about AI generated 3D assets that many, now startups, promise to sell to indie developers? For me, it sounds like city models such as cars and buildings will be one of the easiest models to generate (from what I have seen in papers). As an indie dev myself I'm counting on that I will be able to buy most 3D content for a fraction of time/cost in a couple of years. And I plan my development aroun…

I'm all for AI generated content. I think any automation helps push society forward.

In practice however I didn't see any real good generated 3D asset for now. The problem is probably much harder as there are far more 2D assets than 3D, especially with PBR support.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#88

Post by DonHopkins »

itsmartapuntocm wrote: post #25
Pannoniae wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Cities: Skylines just feels so soulless to me. It's like me looking at a model railway - it might look cute but it's just dead. The game is effectively a traffic simulator, with citizens not really having agency (beyond the Chirper which most people are annoyed by), and next to zero economic management. No mixed zoning or organic growth, you effectively run a completely planned economy. There's not much externa…

The goofy aspects of Simcity like the animated advisors and the music really made it feel alive. It’s why I still prefer the old ones to CS.

I agree -- I still prefer the stark simplicity and pure fun of the original "classic" version of SimCity, as well as the rich multimedia graphics, sound, and music of SimCity 2000.

This 1996 talk by Will Wright to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford takes a deep dive into SimCity 2000's design, what made it so successful, and how it compared to other less successful Maxis games. It includes a retrospective of SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and a preview of The Sims (called Dollhouse at the time).

I attended the talk and took notes, which I had Will review, and years later (after working with Will at Maxis and EA on The Sims) updated it with more details and retrospective learned by developing The Sims.

Just this year I discovered that the Stanford Library had finally published the video of that talk and many others, so I made a transcript and updated the article with lots more quotes and screen snapshots and analysis.

Egregoria looks really cool and impressive, and I'm glad to see it carry on the tradition, benefit from the inspiration, and learn from the successes and shortcomings of the SimCity and City: Skylines franchises, and other great simulation games like Factorio.

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

>A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26:

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

>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

>Use and reproduction:

>The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#90

Post by thelazyone »

Uriopass wrote: post #67
thelazyone wrote: post #59

Truly impressive endeavour! I would definitely love to contribute, thanks HN for showing this up this morning! Rust + architectural models + wgpu is a great combo! I am still in the mid-early learning phase of Rust, but it's where I'm putting my learning juices in... and at this point I can consider myself a professional architectural 3D modeller ( https://www.myminifactory.com/users/TheLazyForger ). Would be happy t…

Hello, all contributions are welcome! The discord badge in the readme is not very big, here's the discord link: https://discord.gg/CAaZhUJ EDIT: very impressive portfolio!

Thank you, sir! :)

Joined the discord.

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