Chrome Experiments: “3d city” | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Experiments: “3d city”

chromeexperiments.com

205 pointsmmastrac36 comments

Judging by the tools provided, it looks to be a clone of SimCity Classic. I'll remember those 3x3 zone tiles forever.

EDIT: Strictly speaking, SimCity Classic let you remove the edge tiles of residential plots as long as you didn't destroy the center, allowing you to force low-density suburban areas. </random sim nerdery>

Seeing this running in the browser reinvigorated my wishful excitement for the Citybound[1] project.

[1] - http://cityboundsim.com/

Strictly speaking, it's not a clone... It's a port.

SimCity for XWindows, released as Micropolis under the GPL: https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/

Ported to JavaScript: https://github.com/graememcc/micropolisJS

Ported to 3d: https://github.com/lo-th/3d.city

Another citybuilding game in the browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POTnQtJ8jcM

Citybound is looking like it could be very good. The developer is very actively engaging his audience too with live-coding streams and constant updates.

Is anyone else building a ton of police stations but still getting the notification "Crime Very High"?

Sounds about what you'd expect. Try building parks and industrial.

Here is where it is computed in the source: https://github.com/lo-th/3d.city/blob/6d206e4df362444d4c2a36...

An initial glance suggests reducing the populationDensityMap is the real solution (aka don't put so many houses next to each other, but spread it out?)? Feel free to dig into it and reply below with findings.

Looks to me like a bug -- they do a

value -= policeStationMap.worldGet(x, y);

when they probably meant to do

value -= policeStationEffectMap.worldGet(x, y);

otherwise, crime is reduced only if there's a police station right there. That's just a guess based on a cursory look, though.

https://github.com/lo-th/3d.city/blob/6d206e4df362444d4c2a36...

Before the for loop it "smooths" the policeStationMap 3 times. And this is reset every 15 cycles and in the first 8 cycles it re-populates the policeStationMap before performing the crimeScan.

(https://github.com/lo-th/3d.city/blob/5827c3be180c6b7b39076d...).

So a cursory investigation it doesn't look good and any policeStation needs to be within 3 to have any effect.

What the simulation should do is never clear the policeStationMap. The policeStationMap is constantly cooling and diffusing and it is only by refreshing where the police stations are is how new energy is introduced into the system (policeStationMap). The simulation doesn't even need to reset the spot on the map when a Tile.POLICESTATION is removed because the value will on its own cool. As an added bonus the simulation doesn't need to waste cpu cycles calling smoothStationMap three times in a row, but only needs to do it once.

yeah it's insane, I had 2x3 blocks with a police station in every single one -- 60K people and 19 police stations -- and still persistently high crime. I shouldn't expect anything from random things on the web, but that was just traumatic.

You know, the only place where you find so many policemen in real life is called a prison. Create jobs so people don't have to commit crimes, mmkay? (Probably the simulation is not that good but lets pretend)

I love seeing stuff like this. But what really excites me is when these types of 3D models start to represent real cities. Like the ViziCities project[0]. Maybe the idea of Mirror Worlds [1] will eventually become reality.

[0] https://github.com/robhawkes/vizicities

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoebo...

I'm the creator of ViziCities. It's projects like this (and SimCity proper) that inspired the project and the attempt to making something similar for real-world cities. We're getting close!

I have a plane stuck on train tracks and a train hovering over my city. Other than that, it's a pretty good SimCity imitation in 3D.

Yeah, this happened to me too. I had a 747 doing the moonwalk down the tracks at high speed.

Moving around the map is really difficult. When I select anything except the dragging icon, the map seems to scroll to the edge. After right clicking and rotating and zooming the problem was even worse. If I didn't have this issue, it would be loads of fun to play. :)

I have been moving around the map with WASD which has been working fine for me. I wasn't able to get it to scroll by going to the edges.

Nice, thanks!

Worked for me in Firefox 31. Awesome, played for a while but the citizens didn't like me; no save option! Would gladly play again with persistence.

Very impressive example of the richness in todays web. Well done loth!

There's no other energy choice aside from coal and nuclear? Bummer. Edit: Then again, if this is a sim of an 80's game or something, I guess it makes sense.

Wait wait... how old are you? This is a port of the ground breaking game Sim City. Look it up, you'll be pleasantly surprised :D

Pretty nice, though, my train and my plane got mixed up.

http://i.imgur.com/U27syus.jpg

This a beautiful re-implementation of the original SimCity / Micropolis code in JavaScript, true to the original game. I was hoping somebody would finally do that, and I'm thrilled by how well it turned out.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1dwctf/fixing_up_mi...

I'm most impressed by how fresh and clean the graphics are. I've got the original tile expansion sets for Ancient Asia, Future Europe, Future USA, Medieval Times, Moon Colony and Wild West, if anyone is interested in making 3D versions of those, too!

Nice. I hope the author adds some audio. There's something about the simple songs that came with the game that helped you zone out and relax. I could play SimFarm for days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q28WFGK8xxE

This is pretty cool, but I find it rather sad when simple games like these consume > 50% of my CPU (E8400). Didn't the original SimCity (2000?) run on a pentium 3?

Wasn't the original an isometric layout though? Not true 3d.

Yes, it was probably sprite based.

Doesn't work for me on Ubuntu 14.04 with Chrome 36. Works on Firefox with Ubuntu but much slower to render events. Very cool.

funny, the trains start flying and the planes move along the tracks :)

If only there was some kind of "save game" feature

I too like to build fully functional games and then reclassify and promote them as experiments.

There is global saveGame() function I spot

This will crash your firefox instance

Worked fine for me on Firefox 31

Me too

Crashed mine, after clicking on height map and new game a couple of times.

Tried again, it worked for a few games then it got stuck at max cpu usage, after closing the tab.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com