Citybound - What Sim City Should have been

Hey everyone,

Just thought I would share a game i have been following the past few days. CityBound is aiming to be the city building game the Sim City was not. It is currently being written in Javascript and WebGL with Node Webkit.

Here are the goals of the project -

  • It will be a single-player game that works completely offline.
  • The goal is to simulate one whole, huge region at once - no need for tiny city lots or artificial city interaction dynamics.
  • It will be affordable and will not rely on DLC.
  • Alpha and Beta versions will be available for a reduced price.
  • Moddability will be a priority, not an afterthought.

So yeah that is City Bound. You can find the Official Reddit here.

Bloody shame they’re building it in WebGL/HTML5.

3 Likes

Care to explain? I am a bit clueless :\

It means it’s written in JavaScript with an OpenGL API that’s currently pegged at OpenGL ES 2.0. What that means is it’ll be very slow with crappy graphics which further means it’s unlikely its simulation will be particularly advanced. To put that into perspective they say right on their site that with 85k road segments and 51k cars they only get 30fps. That’s very slow, our planetary demo’s run at well over 100fps and that’s with multiple planets including atmosphere’s, oceans, and other complex physically based shaders. We can render a few hundred thousand particles at 500fps and that’s single threaded performance.

They could probably get it up to Sim City 4 quality but if I wanted Sim City 4 quality I’d just go back and play Sim City 4. As disappointing as the new Sim City was, and I was one of the suckers who pre-ordered it, I think it’s unlikely they’ll be able to succeed in building a legitimate competitor though they may create something novel and fun to tinker with for a bit.

They’re probably also going to have a ton of browser compatibility/stability issues as well.

2 Likes

I like this, new old school. They look similar enough…

OpenTTD

1 Like

Completely different genre.

Yea true, both have cities yet TTD is 20 years old and is still more indepth.

Wha-… just out of curiosity, after all the work you put on the engine, what’s the biggest scene/most intensive scene you can render at a decent framerate? Because for example the quantity of asteroids in that planetary ring in the 2010 tech demo was really impressive and was running at ~30fps I think(?).

On Topic: eh, but why in Javascript, of all the things?

From what I understand the developer behind citybound knows Javascript like the back of his hand.

But it will have giant cheese monsters.

1 Like

He must have an ugly hand.

Javascript and WebGL with Node Webkit.

Stopped reading there.

On that point I have no problem suggesting he must be on the Green side. Bleck :stuck_out_tongue:

Go PURPLE!!!

Well now Sim City 2013 does have single player, its much less buggy, the servers work, so you may want to try it again. However, what other city management game simulates every single car, person, and unit of energy. That’s pretty impressive. What most people just don’t seem to get into their heads is that the engine cannot support larger city sizes without ruining the framerates of people who are playing on older PCs. The infamous “small cities” problem was caused by limitations, not by bad business decisions. Plus, the game is a reboot, not the sequel to Sim City 4 that so many people expected. They were trying to build a foundation on which other games could be made. I bet that Sim City 2 will have a far more optimized engine that will support having the entire region as a plot. The futuristic expansion pack is pretty cool too.

tl;dr: Sim City is overhated.

Pretty sure the current Sim City cheats on a whole bunch of that, all the statistics are artificially inflated for a start.

I think a flamewar is about to start. This is most of the gaming community’s reaction to my post: “What! Someone is able to be reasonable about this game! I’M A FIRIN MA LAZOR!”

I honestly don’t care either way, or any of the drama around it. I just wasn’t that impressed by what the game simulated. Maxis made more accurate city management simulator prototypes for SPORE before spending the last couple years of development cutting anything vaguely interesting out of the game’s launch build.

(They put out whole bunch of interesting little free prototypes for it that never saw the light of day in the full build over the course of development to help generate some hype.)

They can do better when they try; it’s just not something the higher ups think will help sell titles.

Cities Skylines is now a thing :smile:

https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines