>SimCity doesn't lend itself well to multiplayer functionality
You make a lot of great and accurate points (including blaming EA instead of Maxis). But I disagree that SimCity doesn't lend itself well to multiplayer functionality. (And perhaps EA isn't the right company to pull it off properly, being more focused on competition and violence than collaboration and education.)
I agree that it would be difficult to adapt SimCity to competitive play without over-complexifying and spoiling it, but SimCity is ideal for collaborative play, and constructionist education (as envisioned by Seymour Papert and Alan Kay)!
I designed and implemented a collaborative multiplayer version called SimCityNet that I released online in 1993 (with node locked and floating DRM, but that worked offline or on a private network), including text chat and shared whiteboard overlay and voting dialogs and pie menus, which I described in my other post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38155984
Multi Player SimCity for X11 is now available from DUX Software!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement...
SimCityNet: a Cooperative Multi User City Simulation at InterCHI '93:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Back when ActiveX was a thing, Mike Perry at Maxis produced a web browser plug-in version of SimCity that was simply integrated with a text chat window, so although you were playing your own local copy of SimCity, you could chat with other users playing their own cities in their own browsers, brag and gossip about your city, ask questions and help each other. It was a huge hit relative to the amount of effort it took to implement, and despite its clunky stripped down user interface, but it demonstrated how essential and engaging communication between players was, even if they couldn't actually affect each others games or share save files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Perry_(game_developer)
http://www.andywest.org/pr/simcity/misc/introduction.html
>Meanwhile SimCity Classic did not die: Maxis/EA has transformed it into a Web game you can play from your browser (after registration). The Web SimCity plays just like the computer game, except that it does not have every feature. Also, since the game is an ActiveX control, you must use Internet Explorer to play it.
I also designed and produced two different educational versions of SimCity/Micropolis, one an OLPC XO-1 Laptop interface for kids (X11/Cairo/PyGTK/Sugar) and one a web client/server interface (Python/TurboGears/AMF/OpenLaszlo/Flash) for an online community around shared multiplayer games and a storytelling platform. I completed MVP first-cuts, shipping the single player X11 version on the OLPC, and a web interface supporting multiple players sharing simulations running on the server.
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/turbogea...
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/laszlo/m...
I haven't fully completed the long term plans for the web based version, because Sugar never panned out then Flash died, and I didn't have the resources or support.
Finding support for developing educational software is tough, and I'd rather contribute new stuff to a truly free open educational community inspired by Seymour Papert's philosophy, like Snap!, than sharecrop on EA's intellectual property.
https://snap.berkeley.edu/
I believe Seymour Papert's collaborative constructionist educational ideas can be applied to other city simulators, many other types of games, and especially visual programming environments like Snap!
It's fortunate that SAP supports Jens Mönig to continue building on top of the block based visual programming ideas that he, Brian Harvey, John Maloney, Yoshiki Ohshima, Alan Kay, the MIT Media Lab Scratch project, and others developed:
https://faberllull.cat/en/resident.cfm?id=38258&url=jens-mon...
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...
Plan for developing Micropolis for OLPC:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
Micropolis for OLCP Sugar User Interface:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...
Notes on adapting Micropolis to the OLPC Sugar user interface:
Core Ideas:
Activities, not Applications
First cut:
Integrate the current TCL/Tk version of Micropolis to run as a simple activity within Sugar.
Restructure the multi-window TCL/Tk code to run in a single full screen window.
Implement a simple activity-oriented tiled window management interface.
Disable advanced features like multiple editor and map windows,
that require more sophisticated window management.
Instead of using a traditional multi-window management approach,
Make a simple wrapper around it that makes it appear in the Sugar user interface as an activity, like eToys does.
Long term:
Implement activity specific modes that reconfigure the user inteface (like Eclipse "perspectives").
- build/edit oriented interface
- query/analysis oriented interface
- financial oriented interface
- communication/coordination oriented interface
- dynamic zone finder analysis
- grid of several overall map views, each configured to show a different overlay.
- grid of several close-up map views, each centered on a different parts of the city (or tracking a player's cursor)
Collaboration: Enhance multi player mode to support sharing activities.
Both publishing your game for others to clone and play themselves (massively single player, like Spore),
and letting others join in your game (like the current cooperative multi-player mode)).
Multi player inte
Expression: Enhance chat, journaling, storytelling, and personalization aspects of the game.
Journaling: Record all events (both user edits and simulation events), chat messages and drawings.
Checkpoint the game state, and implement the ability to deterministically replay time stamped
editing events into the simulation, so you can fast forward and rewind from any checkpoint to
any step of the simulation.
Enable players to write newspaper articles about the cities, with live links to a snapshot
of the simulation and a place on the map, related to the story. Other players could browse
their published newspapers about the history of a city, and jump into that history at any time
from any story.
Iteration: Checkpoint game save files, allowing players to rewind history, and try "what-if" experiments.
Presence is Always Present
First cut:
Enhance the current X11 based multi player interface to support presence, the grid network, and messaging.
The current multi player interface runs a single Micropolis process on one laptop,
which connects to the local X server, and/or several other X servers on laptops over the net.
Rewrite the "Add User" dialog to be grid-network aware.
Instead of asking for an X server DISPLAY screen, provide a list of friends on the network.
Send an invitation to play to friends on the network.
Rewrite the built-in chat interface to integrate with the chat system used by Sugar.
Improve the shared "white board" overlay, so kids can draw on the map in different colors,
enable and disable different overlays, save overlays with the map, add text to overlays, etc.
Implement location based chat, by overlaying people icons and chat bubbles on the map.
Each player has a people icon "cursor" that they can move around the map (which follows
their selected editing cursor), and their chat messages show up in bubbles overlayed on the map.
When you select an editing tool, you can type what you're doing with the tool,
other people will be able to watch you, and make comments on what you're doing.
Long term:
Rewrite Micropolis in terms of Python/GTK/Cairo, and take full advantage of the Sugar libraries and services.
Support sharing, mentoring, colaboration, voting, political dialogs, journaling, etc.
Develop Micropolis into a exemplary, cutting edge demonstration of all that's great about Sugar.
Tools of Expression
Micropolis is great at supporting personal expression, interpretation and storytelling,
and leveraging what the player already knows to make connections to new knowledge,
and stimulating conversation, debate and analytical thinking.
Develop a web based "Wikipedia" oriented interface to Micropolis, supporting colaboration, discussion,
annotation, history journaling, and branching alternative histories.
Journaling
The "Micropolis Journal" could be realized as a web-based
newspaper-like interface.
Expose the multi player user interface through the web, instead of
using X11.
Automatically generate a newspaper for any particular time in a
city's history, from the simulator events and state, combined with
user written articles and chat messages.
The newspaper has sections that present automatically generated
snapshots of the information displayed in the various dialogs
(graph, evaluation, chat, notices, etc), and stories about
significant events (both user-generated and simulation-generated).
Enrich the city save file with metadata including the chat and
event journal, overlays, snapshots at different points in time (in
a branching "what-if" tree structure), etc.
In the Python version of Micropolis it will be easy to implement a
web server based interface that lets users read the city's
newspaper through the web browser, automatically inserting
pictures of the map corresponding to particular events in time. An
article about pollution going down could show a before and after
overall map with the polution overlay, and stuff like that.
Plug in modules to the simulator that analyze the state of the
city and generate events for the newspaper to write articles
about, including interesting stastical information and other
parameters to insert into the story template.
Implement "online surveys" that let newspaper readers vote on proposals
(expose the voting interface to web based users).
Use OpenLaszlo to develop a rich graphical AJAXian web service
based Micropolis interface, eliminating the need for the X11
interface, and enabling all kinds of interesting interface
customizations and mash-ups with other web services.
[... lots more at:]
OLPC-Notes.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...
PLAN.txt:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...