MicropolisJS: A JavaScript clone of the original SimCity • Hacker News Board

Re: MicropolisJS: A JavaScript clone of the original SimCity

#51

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 6:20 AM UTC

jonwinstanley wrote: post #15

bradrn wrote: post #11

Amazing, it even warned me after I spent half an hour on the game! I wish more programs would do that.

The ask for a donation at this point was a great touch too. He knew we’d had some fun by this point.

Graham's great work deserves generous donations to his favorite charity (which helps refugees, very important these days)!

His approach is much less destructive and annoying than what the commercial version of Unix SimCity did before it was GPL, if you hadn't bought a license, which I called the "Akira Effect".

The free demo version (which could be unlocked by buying a license) would let you play for about 5 minutes, then it would abruptly and without warning melt your city with one of two different cellular automata effects, animating the cells using the SimCity tiles, while the editing tools would still work, and sprites like the monster and tornado would still run around the melting city!

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...

>Multi Player SimCity is available directly from DUX Software, and via anonymous ftp from ftp.uu.net (192.48.96.9), in the directory "vendor/dux/SimCity". You may freely copy it, and play the fully functional game in "demo mode" on one display without a license, but the city melts every 5 minutes. If you enjoy SimCity, you can buy a license over the phone by credit card, without leaving your seat! A single player license lets you save and restore your cities, and play for as long as you like on one display; a multi player license lets you play SimCity with your friends over the net!

(You couldn't use credit cards over the internet in 1993 so we had to sell license codes over the phone.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8KJ--drZO8

> Cellular SimCity: Cellular Automata in SimCityNet on Unix.

In retrospect, melting your city seems like a pretty mean and hostile way of intimidating prospective customers into forking over their money. I'm glad Graham's figured out a better approach, which helps a deserving charity, and also reminds you not to ruin you life by playing too much!

Re: MicropolisJS: A JavaScript clone of the original SimCity

#52

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

sdoering wrote: post #4

Oh this brought back memories. I remember playing Sim Ant on my Macintosh Classic for hours on end. The same look and feel. Just that I had a b/w screen. What a great way to have a throwback Monday.

I've got the original black-and-white SimCity tile set kicking around somewhere, as well as all of the original color tile packs, too. (Medieval Village, Moon Base, etc.) It should be possible and straightforward to convert and reformat them into a single tile bitmap, and drop it in. If somebody wants to add them, ask me and I'll dig them up.

Original color tiles:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...

Chaim Gingold's SimCity Reverse Diagrams visually illustrate how all the tiles are organized, grouped, and animated, how the different phases of "Simulate()" perform different kinds of analysis over time, how the traffic and other simulations work, how data flows through the different map layers and models, and how different parts of the simulation interact with each other.

https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

>SimCity reverse diagrams, by Chaim Gingold (2016).

>These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

>If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

>Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40.

>Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010.

>Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

Re: MicropolisJS: A JavaScript clone of the original SimCity

#53

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 7:01 AM UTC

yosito wrote: post #16

Mezzie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sim Ant was the first game I bought with my own money, back in the day, as my start to collect ALL the Maxis games after getting my hands on SimCity + SimEarth. This was an excellent thing to wake up to.

I really wish I could play SimAnt on my iPhone.

I've always wanted to do a mobile MMPORG version of SimAnt, in which every player is a unique ant (or villainous spider!), crawling around with the GPS, with waving and shaking and spinning gestures for digging and eating and fighting and dancing and communicating!

Re: MicropolisJS: A JavaScript clone of the original SimCity

#54

Post by salmo » Tue, Mar 08, 2022, 6:55 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #48

salmo wrote: post #20

This is so much fun. I love the simplicity of the original feel of the game. No need for fancy graphics, etc. for it to be enjoyable. And I'm amazed at 0 browser issues or weirdness. Takes me right back to my Tandy 1000. My only wish it had the help stuff to remember how to resolve some of the problems in the city. I can't remember if that was in the game or in the book back in the day. I have housing and unemploymen…

Here is the html documentation from the Micropolis source code, which I typed in from the original SimCity manual (originally into FrameMaker, but then I converted it to HTML), that was released by EA under GPL: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol... Introduction: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol... Tutorial: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micr…

Oh wow. Thanks!

I actually downloaded the TCL/Tk version because the railroad stopped dropping for me right on the web one and I was hooked again.

My 8yo daughter saw me playing and said “is that game like Minecraft”. I almost cracked up and told her it was a game I used to play when I was a little older than her. She sat with me a while and we played together.

It was so much fun. Just like when we’d huddle around a PC together pre-Internet. I was so glad to share that experience with her.

Thanks for all your work over the years on this breathing life into this.

Re: MicropolisJS: A JavaScript clone of the original SimCity

#55

Post by cxr » Wed, Mar 09, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

good8675309 wrote: post #12

jenscow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery

During my day job I use Vue and and Typescript. In my side projects I use Java to build web apps and to serve the pages and jQuery to add bits of dynamic interactivity. Love jQuery. I miss the old days, everything is so overly complex now.

jQuery is overly complex.