Cytopia: Open-source city simulator with pixel-art graphics | Hacker News Reader

Cytopia: Open-source city simulator with pixel-art graphics

github.com

303 pointsposer-boy97 comments

Very nice to see this genre is alive and well! Looking good, and I look forward to seeing the progress on Cytopia :D

I was just looking into city builder games this weekend, after having binged on SC4000 for two weeks. There are actually a lot of new city builder games on the market, but their focus is mostly more narrow than the original SC series.

Have you played Cities: skylines? I feel like it’s hard to even compare it to SC at this stage. It’s a wonderful game.

Biggest difference (for me) was that Cities: Skylines is marketed as a "city simulator" but it's more of a traffic simulator than anything, while SimCity focuses more on the city simulation part and just has a small focus on actual roads.

I see what you mean. Traffic is a really important part of the game and people (including the modding community) seem to focus on it a lot.

But I do think there's a lot of freedom in terms of how you play and shape the game using mods.

To me CS is more of a weird mix of Factorio and a bonsai tree. I need to tend to it from time to time, slow down the gameplay and trim here and there (plop a new neighbourhood or a small detail). Fixing traffic issues is a small part of it (in my case).

I loved SC2000 and SC3000, but now SC4 (edit: SC4, not SC4000) feels just really ugly.

Sorry what is Sim City 4000? Is it a mobile game or are you referring to Sim City 4? Or was SC4 called different things in other markets?

Hehe, nope, just went on autopilot when listing different versions of the game. I meant Sim City 4 of course.

Ah thanks! Thought I'd missed out for a bit there.

Cities Skylines ends up being a city painter after awhile once you’ve learned how to solve traffic problems (roundabouts and planning go a long way).

The parklife DLC greatly enhances the painting aspect.

IMO, the Industries DLC makes it strongly about traffic again, with the huge amount of industrial traffic it generates. Then, once you run out of space in the relatively small 9-tile city area, there's not much city painting left to do. It's been a long time since my main city was about city painting; it's all about traffic again.

Honestly, I rarely play the game with 9 tiles. It's much more fun to unlock the entire map and work with a bunch of smaller satellite towns connected to the main one, local rail transport, perhaps a few villages with farms etc...

I play on the Xbox edition where you can't unlock it :(

I've tried many times to get into Cities: Skylines but it always ends up with people dying, traffic, pollution, and me bleeding money into the negatives.

I really need to start looking at tutorials or something

Try THEOTOWN. Available on mac/windows/iOS/android. On iOS it is free. It has mods, end game content, is well balanced and has a lot of beautification content if you in that kind of stuff.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084020/TheoTown/

Demo ( https://game.cytopia.net/ ) is broken.

"Exception thrown, see JavaScript console"

It's because of this: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/enabling-shared-array-buff...

We updated our demo page to point to the download page and updated the literature. The demo was way outdated and no longer supported.

I love those city building games, especially with this gfx style. 3D simply does not work for me.

As already posted twice in this thread, i love theotown, but what theotown lacks is a proper traffic simulator. It just feels not right. What theotown also does not handle well is the subway system. It feels very basic and is not really necassary for developing a large city.

Looks quite similar to OpenTTD (https://openttd.org).

OpenTTD has more of a focus on transport and economy. This project focuses more on city building like the SimCity games.

SimCity games had a major focus on transport and economy as well, just as you'd expect from any city builder. Both of these are really just SimCity copies, which I applaud because I am a huge city builder fan. That said, I hope we start seeing something new in the genre soon. Pixel graphics just ain't gonna cut it anymore. I love playing Cities Skylines but I do feel like it's also just a newer copy and would love to see some sort of significant (r)evolution of the genre.

I couldn’t care less about the graphics. I agree with you on the rest.

I'd be very interested in a city builder where there are meaningful social, cultural, and political dimensions. Games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines have robust, detailed models for aspects like traffic and power distribution, but the actual social modeling is relatively basic. At points they seem more like complex cellular automata than cities (see Magnasanti in SimCity 3k)

I think Pharaoh does a good job at that, although it is quite old. Currently getting a remake though. Cultures: 8th Wonder of The World is leaning heavily into the society aspect as well. However I did find the controls to be extremely irritating by today’s standards

Yes, something that has the in-depth city building mechanics of SimCity with the social modeling of Pharaoh, Caesar, or Europa 1400: The Guild would be incredible.

Don't forget Zeus in that list! Think it was the third iteration in the Caesar->Pharaoh-> city-building genre.

Were the later Caesar games better for that stuff? I remember playing Caesar II back in the day, and even as a kid feeling that it was a bit on the shallow side— like the main objective at city level was just to get as much tax revenue as possible, and that meant getting your housing to be more luxurious, and that meant exposing the housing to as many amenities as possible. But the exposure was basically just making sure there was enough of everything close by that the walkers spawned by each building would find their way to each residence before their previous visit had "worn off".

That's funny... I never heard about Pharaoh until last night when I read a retrospective (1),and now I read about it first thing in the morning :-)

1: https://scientificgamer.com/in-praise-of-pharaoh/

City simulators seems to a large extent exist to reinforce the idea that cities == cars. It bores me.

Cities Skylines have a good walking and cycling modeling alongside an excellent public transport system. You can totally create a city with really little trafic. Even industrial trafic can be done essentially via rail or via seaway. It seems that most (all?) actors in the game will prefer your infrastructures over the road as long as they are more efficient. You can now even add toll gates on the road to make the incentive even stronger.

That because most cities right now are road/car-based. Maybe once Cytopia is further developed walk-able cities can be designed.

As the sibling says, Cities Skylines definitely does a better job than its predecessors of legitimizing non-car strategies for managing transportation. However, as the player, the path of least resistance is absolutely to just do roads everywhere and bulldoze buildings and houses to widen roads (just like in the real world). I don't think CS has much/any modeling for the longer-time-horizon benefits of an active-transportation city, in terms of culture, health, pollution reduction, and so on.

So yes, it's a major step forward in terms of it being possible at all, but it's something you have to be pretty intentional about— and maybe that's reflective of the real world too. But it's always nice when media (games, books, movies, whatever) inspires us to dream bigger than we might otherwise have done.

I am a fan of city simulators and I found out the reason for this is all of them copy the USA style zoning system in their rules.

USA style zoning is just stupid and is a major culprit of cities needing cars.

As far as I know there is no major city simulator that simulates non-zoned cities that are full of organic growth instead of the player, like a US mayor, deciding where people are allowed and not allowed to live and work.

In Infraspace there's no zoning as such (you can do it yourself to some extent with their "districts" feature), it's still early access alpha though with hopefully a lot more to come. For some production you need so many of some of the buildings that it's easier to slap them in their own area.

It does have trains, but they are fairly limited use right now and it's pretty car focused.

I'm trying to just do one super long road in my current game.

Infraspace is not a citybuilder that allow organic growth.

I am talking more about a potential game where cities would grow like in real life, with people moving in voluntarily, and building stuff voluntarily, and the government focused more on building infrastructure. As far as I know there are no major game like that.

Closest to it in a sense is a space game (Distant Worlds, where you build the military ships and colonize planets, but the population builds commercial stations and mining operations, and the population have their own civilian ships for immigration and tourism)

Cities have zoning mostly to figure out how to provision infrastructure for an area. Not to get people to move there involuntarily.

One of my biggest gripes in most city builders is a lack of mixed zoning, and realistic dense zoning. Most CBDs are dense mixed zone and that is really the heart of what makes a dense inner city area operate. There usually is no "dense commercial" zone in most cities, it's low to medium density specific use and then dense mixed use. Exceptions abound of course.

Check out Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It's essentially an Eastern European factory town simulator, which means walkable tentament blocks linked by bus lines directly to massive industrial blocks. It's also the dark souls of city managers, which means get ready to have everything crashing down because your heating plant ran out of coal in the middle of winter and now everyone is too sick to mine more

You can build whole cities without cars in Cities Skyline. With mods like TPME banning private cars is easy. You can still allow services (police, fire engines, ambulances, etc), good trucks, buses and taxis but can also disable any of these on a per-road basis.

I like to create areas that have no cars in my cities. Add lots of pedestrian and cycling paths, lots of trains, metro, ferries, etc and just watch oodles of people using public transport or cycling everywhere.

It's such a satisfying game.

The Tropico games may interest you. I had a lot of fun playing them when I was younger (think I played Tropico 1 and 3, but not sure exactly).

I recall them being quite tricky and including political/social aspects (you need to appease your people to be re-elected etc), but since I haven't played them in years that stuff might not be as deep as I remember.

Do have a look though and see if it'll suit you!

I played some Tropico 4 and 5 in recent years and had a decent time of it. I think I ended up in a love/hate relationship with the mission structure, though. On the one hand, having a series of shorter "scenarios" with concrete goals is good for gameplay and helps give shape to the overall game in a way that old-school endless city builders lacked, plus it fits with the deeply cynical lore of the game, about you playing as a wannabe dictator bouncing between banana republics and doing the bare minimum to keep them afloat as you line your own pockets by sending cash to the Swiss bank account.

But that structure also meant that I struggled to feel as much long-term ownership over what I was creating. It felt like I could get away with cutting certain corners that I shouldn't have if the game forced me to sit just a little bit longer with the consequences of my actions. Maybe that's just a sign that I was playing it right, but I felt like I would have had a better time if I'd been just a little bit more accountable.

>'d be very interested in a city builder where there are meaningful social, cultural, and political dimensions.

You may be interested in CityState II:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1352850/Citystate_II/

I'm a big fan of pixel art, but the screenshots on the GitHub are a bit too "programmer art" for my liking.

> Pixel graphics just ain't gonna cut it anymore.

How so? To be honest, I don't know why we even need something as "realistic" as pixel graphics — when immersing yourself in city planning, an aerial view of the city you're building is actually too much noise; for the signal you need, it'd be far better to be looking directly at overlaid zoning grids, coverage maps, etc. And for that kind of thing, it seems that vector graphics should be more than enough.

In other words, I'd personally love a full-sim city builder in the style of Mini Metro or Mini Motorways. That sort of simple+clean aesthetic can be a lot more informationally-dense than a SimCity game ever could.

Ooh, thanks for the mention, these games look lovely:

https://dinopoloclub.com/games/mini-metro/

https://dinopoloclub.com/games/mini-motorways/

I’ve played Mini Metro. Love its minimal and non-intrusive aesthetics but it doesn’t use pixel art the way game in question is using. Its graphics treatment is way different.

I didn’t say they did. I said they used vector graphics (more specifically, they use vector schematics), with the implication that these vector graphics are “lesser” even than pixel graphics in terms of potential for representational fidelity / skeuomorphism — but also that this doesn’t matter (and in fact, is a benefit), because most sim games are fundamentally about simulating abstract models, not about simulating reality; so a direct representation of the model is clearer and more "fun" than any attempt to embed that model into a view of reality.

Also, games like Stardew Valley use pixel graphics (pixel art) and that hasn't hurt their popularity.

Transport Tycoon is probably more of a copy of Railroad Tycoon.

Absolutely not, get your facts straight: “Though [Railroad Tycoon] shares the "Tycoon" suffix, it is not related to other Microprose games such as RollerCoaster Tycoon and Transport Tycoon, which were developed by Scottish programmer Chris Sawyer.” [1] There are similarities, yes, but they play very differently.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Tycoon

They are all great games – although I am greatly favourable to Transport Tycoon – but do not fall for Microprose’s 90s naming that most likely was purely for marketing reasons.

I agree with you. My argument was against Transport Tycoon being a copy of SimCity.

OpenTTD isn’t a Sim City copy. Its a reimplement of Transport Tycoon. It’s a strategy game that focuses on business that covers multiple cities and industrial works. While city builders are a subset of strategy games, not all strategy sims are city builders. Examples of how the strategy genre covers more than just city builders would be: Theme Park, The Settlers, Theme Hospital, Railroad Tycoon, Populous, Command & Conquerer and Civilisation.

Sim City isn’t even the first city builder, let along first strategy sim. The genre has existed since the days of text-based games. Though it’s fair to say Sim City is one of the most iconic and successful entries in the genre.

I chose this artstyle for Cytopia because I wanted to created a game in the Spirit of SC2000. This is still my favorite city builder but it’s way outdated in terms of gameplay. And I love pixelart.

OpenTTD is not at all Sim City. You can't build stuff, you focus on building transport infrastructure between existing cities and resources.

The mac binary is named `cytopia-osx`, but interestingly the latest OS X (Catalina) is unable to run it. Cytopia actually requires OS 11 or higher.

If you’re talking about the release on GitHub, it’s well outdated. We always push the latest version if Cytopia to itch.io and this works fine. I’m Cytopias lead dev and I’m on a MacBook M1 with latest OSX

I got it from there and it crashed when launching. M1.

Can you submit a bug report on our GitHub page? I’ll gladly take a look at this later.

The build from itch.io (cytopia-osx-ci.zip) doesn't run on OS X either :)

    You can't use this version of the application "Cytopia" with this version of macOS.
    You have macOS 10.15.7. The application requires macOS 11.6 or later.

The "X" in OS X means version 10.

Oh, sorry, older version of OS X. We can take a look at supporting older platforms later when the project is more matured. Meanwhile you could compile it Yourself.

It's all good. I'm just poking fun at the name of the binary but it doesn't seem to get across. macOS 11 and above is not "OS X". OS X is OS 10. The X is Roman numeral for the version number 10.

There's no real issue, sorry for the confusion and good luck with your project!

Sadly, pedantic sarcasm is the most misunderstood of the humors.

Slightly off-topic (sorry!) but have you considered testing/porting to the BSDs, especially since you have a macOS port? I'm particularly interested in an OpenBSD port. I may try cloning the repo and building it myself; SDL2 and CMake are available on that platform.

It looks a lot like Theotown https://hi.theotown.com/

Before TheoTown was overloaded with microtransactions...

Dont know what you are talking about.

You get pretty much a FULL game. Through steam you pay a few Euros and have the full content. On the iPad you get the FULL GAME for FREE(!) with some options on to unlock end-game stuff like big powerlines or some government agency/secret research facility. Before you even need those things you have collected those diamonds and you can unlock pretty much everything you want and need. If you really want to have the 100% from the beginning (which you will not need/cannot use anyway) then you just pay your 5-6 Euros and there you go. No microtransaction horror.

I LOVE theotown and I recommend it to everyone who wants:

1) Sim City

2) on an iPad/iPhone/Android device

3) many hours of gameplay and a pretty balanced game + end game content

4) free mods

5) NO ADS

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084020/TheoTown/ https://hi.theotown.com/

Cytopia looks fine, but Theotown just has TONS of more content and is available on mobile, too.

Cytopia will be available for mobile devices too, when it makes sense. Right now there’s an internal build for Android on our GitHub, but that’s considered a proof of concept at this time :)

Great to hear that. Step by step!

Extemely nice project. But from the looks of its Subreddit, not much is going on community-wise.

Quite the opposite. We have quite a big community on discord and most devs including me are online a lot. I’m not on Reddit or twitter but there are team members posting stuff from time to time.

How developed / mature is this compared to the SimCity games?

Very much still a prototype compared to SimCity.

Any way to download binaries? The build process on Linux seems a little involved...

It looks like a standard cmake build. Did I miss something?

We use Conan as package manager

The guide didn't specify what to do on linux, and I had to install a ton of packages, then this conan thing proceeded to compile wayland or something?? I don't know, just seemed sketchy for a simple game.

https://github.com/CytopiaTeam/Cytopia/releases

    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ..

This is involved?

Visit our itch.io page. It’s linked on GitHub.

hi SimplyLiz, on Linux it seems that it's not possible to run your itch.io executables because it requires a libnoise version that's completely outdated. Any idea on how to fix it?

I created a symlink in /usr/lib and it seemed to work okay: sudo ln -s libnoise.so.1.0.0 libnoise.so.0

We've created an issue on Github for this, we're looking to integrate this into our build process to avoid this issue in the future.

https://github.com/CytopiaTeam/Cytopia/issues/870

Out of curiosity, what distro are you running?

There's something off about the graphics, and I think it's the fact that the game doesn't use 1:2 ratio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_video_game_graphics#...) for the X and Y axes. It's especially noticeable on the edges of the roads, which go "wibba-wobba-wibba-wobba" instead of having uniform thickness.

I see exactly 2:1 everywhere [0], including road edges. What are you talking about?

[0] https://www.cytopia.net/images/jimmy2_2.png

The screenshot [1] they used on their Github page is different.

[1] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/bc5894f89d64f4cb8f01e4c02...

The first image on the project page is off. Here is a closeup: https://imgur.com/a/JtkhVNH

It's 2-1-1-2-1-1-2

EDIT: on closer inspection, it is 2:1, but with a weird artifacting. It does a 1x3 segment followed by a 2x3 segment, repeating.

On the game site, the images do follow 2:1 with expected pixel-perfect rendering.

Looks a lot like it might be aliasing from resizing the image, maybe from github. Pixel art is notoriously difficult to scale.

This seems likely. Compare to this image from their website: https://www.cytopia.net/images/jimmy2_2.png

I'm trying to build a game with item manufacturing, a bit like a mix of factorio and sim city, with logistics and other stuff.

I never really played transport tycoon. I tried, but it felt quite overwhelming.

Cities Skylines: Industries DLC adds some logistics to the game, but it’s relatively rudimentary and the main challenge is not crushing your road network with trucks.

>I tried, but it felt quite overwhelming.

How come? TTD (OpenTTD) has a rather gentle learning curve.

Find an industry that produces a resource (say a Forest), find an industry that consumes said resource (a Sawmill). Plop a train station next to both, connect it by rail. Place a depot next to the rail, buy a locomotive + a few wood wagons. Set it to go to the Forest station, load up, go to the Sawmill station, unload, repeat.

That's pretty much the whole game. You can also learn to design complex tracks making use of signals, but you don't have to.

Why are all comments by SimplyLiz dead? False positive caused by anti-spam algorithm?

Signed up an hour ago and made five comments since, maybe tripped some protection?

In any way, if you click on the permalink to the comment (via the timestamp), you can "vouch" for dead comments in case they are actually proper. I just did for all of them, and helps fight incorrect dead comments.

Thanks! I didn't realize that I was able to vouch...

Idk, I got this link from someone from our team and felt like signing up here and commenting:)

Welcome—we're glad to have you! (I'm an admin here.)

Your comments were affected by a software filter. Sorry about that—those are a bit harder on new accounts. Fortunately a bunch of users vouched for your comments, so they weren't affected for long. In the meantime we've marked your account legit so this won't happen again.

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