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Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

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Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel genuinely insane trying to parse this site. It's a miracle that there's no mention of Web3.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I feel genuinely insane trying to parse this site. It's a miracle that there's no mention of Web3.

Oh I just assumed this was all on the blockchain.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#93

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…

[dead]

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#94
post #42

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 train simulators that have city building as an afterthought often feel much more like a game than the city builders; probably because you have external forces acting on you and driving your decisions

It’s ironic since that’s the origin of Cities: Skylines. They were building transit simulator games (Cities in Motion series) and turned it into a city builder when they saw the gap after Sim City 2013 crashed and burned.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#95
post #7

I wonder what happens if you add an LLM behind each person, reading the readme, apparently individuals are simmed and can have impact. Hmmm

If you’re talking about using LLMs as part of the simulation, where decisions and commitments made during discussions are reflected in the simulation, that sounds terribly expensive if you’re simulating a full city.

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#96
post #45

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

You may like Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. [1] Fair warning: it has a rather brutal learning curve. It's somewhere between Factorio, Simcity and OpenTTD. To build an apartment building, you need prefab panels. To get panels, you need to build a panel factory, which needs gravel. To get gravel, you need a quarry. And then you need vehicles to haul the gravel to the panel factory. And then the panels to the con…

I adore this 'game'; you can actually engage with it like a simulation in many aspects. I didn't fully get it until I found myself spending hours optimizing forklift paths between factories and warehouses, and thinking about pedestrian thoroughfares as I expanded my industrial center. Unlike most city builders it's not on a grid, so you have a lot of freedom to just be creative!

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#97
Looks interesting - I tried to build it but got:

[ 2176412 ERROR C:\Users\user\.cargo\registry\src\index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f\wgpu-0.16.0\src\backend\direct.rs:1174] Shader translation error for stage ShaderStages(NONE | FRAGMENT): FXC D3DCompile error (0x80004005): C:\Users\user\git\Egregoria\called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value(432,18-24): error X3005: 'ddx': identifier represents a variable, not a function

(Windows 10)

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#98

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.

SimCity did a lot of things right, especially the ability to upgrade your facilities rather than having to plop another whole one down like Cities: Skylines demands (apparently this is addressed in the upcoming sequel). And the 'specializations' in SimCity offered much more interesting industrial opportunities to pursue than anything in Cities: Skylines. Also the 'agent' system was used to simulate pressure over distance in the water and sewage systems, which made for interesting challenges in placing your pumps and treatment facilities. I still come back and play it every once in a while :)

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#99

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 thought your comment meant this was somehow based on Rust the game. I was wondering if it had such a flexible modding system to enable things like this!

Re: Egregoria: 3D City Builder without a grid

#100
post #63
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You perfectly describe my sentiment every time I try playing CS. No matter how gorgeous it looks at some point it just strikes as hollow and disengaging.

The simulation is just so fake, almost everything that goes on is just decorative. There is a budget, but after the first 30 minutes you'll always be running an enormous surplus without trying. Citizen commute to work, but if they can't get there, the workplaces will continue to work, with some trivial penalty to efficiency. There is traffic simulation, but if a jam forms, vehicles will start vanishing to unblock the…

It sounds like they tried to remove failure modes, when they should instead have figured out a way to forgive failure modes after they occur. That way, players could still fail but it wouldn't result in a death spiral that wrecks the last hour+ of citybuilding.
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