
CityBound – An open source city simulation game in Rust - formalsystem
https://github.com/citybound/citybound
======
theanzelm
Author of Citybound here! Feel free to ask me any questions about the project!
I’m mostly active on the Citybound subreddit in general.

Also, check out the main homepage at
[https://aeplay.org/citybound](https://aeplay.org/citybound) for a more
player-centric intro

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Feel free to ask me any questions about the project!_

I hope to learn to code. I just got my rejection letter from a coding school
("overwhelming demand -- we had to turn down many qualified candidates"). My
backup plan is some free online coursework and probably finding a city-
building game to mod or tinker with.

When you say _open source,_ does that mean it would be okay for me to futz
with it for myself like that?

Thanks.

~~~
theanzelm
I’m really hoping to get the project to a point soon where it is easily hack
able even for people who are just starting out to code, or even for whom this
will be the first contact to code. But I’m far from being there, right now it
is a pretty large, pretty unusual and almost entirely undocumented codebase.

So by all means start teaching yourself to code by playful experimentation,
but start with something much simpler first :)

~~~
eggy
Could it be scripted in Gluon or Dyon? Excuse me but I am Rustt newbie.

~~~
theanzelm
If I will add scripting, I will probably use JS, since I already have interop
with that in the browser UI. Gluon or Dyon are neat, but they are weird enough
(in my opinion) that people might as well learn Rust instead of scripting.

~~~
eggy
That sounds reasonable. Thanks! I am looking forward to viewing the source to
learn Rust.

------
Lowkeyloki
Please think hard about the design decisions of your game. I grew up with
SimCity and later SimCity 2000. It informed many of my young opinions about
government policy. But I later came to find out that SimCity wasn't nearly as
objective as it looks. There are a lot of conservative politics baked into the
design of the game that I'd argue were potentially damaging to the kids who
played it back in the 90s.

This article from 1992's LA Times quotes Maxis president Jeff Braun saying how
they're pushing a political agenda. Specifically pro-mass transit and anti-
nuclear power.

[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-story.html)

What really opened my eyes, though, was this excellent article from LOGIC
magazine about how Will Wright based the entire simulation on the work of Jay
Wright Forrester. I don't know if it was a conscious choice to adopt
Forrester's extremely conservative social policies, or if Will Wright just
happened upon a bunch of ready-made algorithms he could use. But the result is
the same. SimCity teaches us many fallacies about urban planning and finance
that Republicans have historically used to justify certain policy choices.

[https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/](https://logicmag.io/06-model-
metropolis/)

My point is just to be very conscious of the biases you're encoding into the
logic of your game. What may just be a game to you may be someone's first
lessons in politics.

~~~
theanzelm
I appreciate the sentiment and always suspected as much about SimCity. My goal
for Citybound is really a meta one: to be flexible enough to try out any
number of government and planning styles and for the simulation to be
tweakable enough to set up any real-life or imagined political context for a
city.

~~~
BRAlNlAC
If that is truly your goal, it is a noble one, but in that case baking the
pathfinding into the roads seems like a bad design choice. People get lost
driving in a convoluted city a lot even with GPS, but much less so in a
regular blocked city.

~~~
theanzelm
Making them get lost is as easy as picking a random turn instead of the
correct one with a certain probability.

------
keerthiko
The complexity and existing implementations of traffic AI in these kinds of
games makes me wonder whether it's possible to get Google to make a
generalizable Google maps engine for _any_ 2D map, with a well-defined
addressing system and multiple transit options with stops and routes.

\- networked simultaneous agent navigation for real-time traffic reporting etc

\- rerouting after mistakes

\- comparing multiple transit options from flexible (walking/driving) to
fixed-line (public transit, flights, waterways)

\- handling updates to the routes, addresses, and the map in general

It would be especially cool if it could handle any kinds of transit determined
by general traits (ground/air/water, speed, flex/fixed-stop, fuel type,
passenger count) so you could even use it for a fantasy town with a dragon-
drawn carriage and a catbus.

Unrelated, I find it depressingly amusing that the simulation was built with
automotive traffic being the default and only way people can live their lives,
and public transit and pedestrianism is a "TODO", much like many major cities
in the world (esp. outside EU/east Asia). Once those are implemented, I'd love
a fork of this project that straight up doesn't have cars. I would like to see
the emergent effects (or failures) of a city that is forced to grow around
pedestrians and trains.

~~~
theanzelm
Believe me, it is just as depressingly amusing for me, coming from Europe.
Cars were simply the most important to have first, since they offer both short
and long distance travel for simulated citizens. I very much want it to be
possible to have pedestrian/transit only cities and everything in between.

~~~
Vinnl
Probably something far down on your potential TODO list, but in the
Netherlands, one interesting factor is the canals. This allows e.g. many parts
of a city centre to be mostly car-free, without preventing shops from getting
restocked - which can happen via water.

Relatively niche, but could be a fun gameplay element. Of course, speaking of
the Netherlands, bicycle transportation is enormously interesting already.

~~~
tobyhinloopen
Which cities have their stores supplied via water & have car-free city
centres? You make it sound like its a common thing and I’ve never heard or
seen shops being supplied by canals

~~~
Vinnl
Oh sorry, I did not meant to imply that it was a common thing, merely that it
was an option that happened in some places. Where I live is one (but I'd
rather not disclose that), and I'd thing most of the larger cities with many
canals do so, as they tend to be more resistant to cars in their centres.

------
loudmax
Rust in WebAssembly no less.

I'm surprised that Cities: Skylines isn't listed as an inspiration because
it's also based on individual agents moving around your city. Despite the
name, Skylines is really a traffic management game more than anything else.
Part of the fun of Skylines is just how cool your city looks. For all the
emphasis on realism, I hope CityBound doesn't neglect appearances.

This looks really exciting! I just signed on as a Patron.

~~~
amyjess
> Despite the name, Skylines is really a traffic management game more than
> anything else. Part of the fun of Skylines is just how cool your city looks.

Unfortunately, traffic management is the only part of the game that really
holds up as a simulator.

Public services and pollution, in particular, are basically skeletons without
any real depth to them, and they have considerably less depth than SC4.
Cities: Skylines is mostly good as a) a traffic and transit simulator, and b)
a sandbox game for using mods to create beautiful urban artwork. If you go to
/r/CitiesSkylines or look at a number of YouTubers (I strongly recommend
Infrastructurist), you'll see lots of gorgeous cities that were created by
using mods like RICO, Move It!, and various forms of Anarchy (among _several_
others) to plop down assets in ways that resemble real cities. An infinite
money mod is, of course, a given. There's no real simulation going on here:
you have a bunch of very talented, creative individuals using the game as a
specialized canvas.

But let's talk a bit about just how public services and pollution are
skeletons.

Public services are very simple: citizens want a service, and you plop down
buildings that provide that service. What little depth they have comes from
the traffic management sim: the service needs to be accessible, so either
citizens need to be able to get to the buildings in a timely fashion, or the
buildings need to be able to send their vehicles out to various parts of town
in a timely fashion. If traffic flow gets bad enough that this fails to
happen, citizens get upset. All you need to have effective public services is
enough capacity + traffic flow for your citizens to make use of them.

There is no concept of range. If you put a school down in a city, children
from all over the city will go there to get educated. If you have multiple
schools, there is no correlation between where your kids live and where they
go to school. Of course, there are mods that can help a little: you can easily
find a mod that limits use of public services to the district they're planted
in. But that's it.

Compare SimCity 4, on the other hand, where every building has a range, and
each service has two funding sliders: one that controls effectiveness, and one
that controls range (and you can override these sliders on a per-building
basis, too). With range, you have to be careful to not let your buildings
overlap too much, because then you're throwing away money. And you can
overfund your services, but that's a hard choice: overfunding has diminishing
returns and, more interestingly, can cause negative externalities. For
example, overfunding your police can create a situation where police officers
harass the community and thus make your citizens unhappy. No such complexity
exists in Cities: Skylines. Nothing has externalities in Cities: Skylines.
There's no disadvantage to throwing in more of everything. Well, except for
water. I'll get to that later. And if you _underfund_ your services in SC4,
you have a chance to wind up with an actual, honest-to-goodness strike on your
hands. And money often gets tight enough that you will periodically have to
underfund _something_ just to stay in the black, so you have to choose which
service you can most afford a strike at. No strikes are in Cities: Skylines.

Education, too, is way too easy. In SimCity 4, developing an educated
workforce that can support high-tech industry takes several generations of
cultivating your citizenry. No such problem in Cities: Skylines, just throw
down enough elementary schools, high schools, and universities, and you've got
an educated workforce in no time! And you really want your workforce to be
educated, too, because having an uneducated population means you're stuck with
dirty industry, which sucks. The pollution is awful, and the jobs don't pay
well, so your sims stay poor and live in slums.

Oh yeah, and there's basically no class stratification in Cities: Skylines.
SC4 divides properties into low-wealth, medium-wealth, and high-wealth, which
is determined by property values, with visually-distinct buildings at each
position. This is a completely separate axis from building level, which mostly
has to do with the size of your buildings, bounded by the density of your
zoning (low density is levels 1-3, medium is 4-6, high is 7+). So slums look
like slums, nice parts of town look nice, etc. Cities: Skylines just has
building level. So in CS, your buildings will become bigger and nicer as you
grow, but there's no such thing as "a poor neighborhood", "a middle-class
neighborhood", or "a rich neighborhood", unlike in SC4.

Before I get to pollution, let's talk garbage. There are a number of garbage
facilities in Cities: Skylines, including a recycling center introduced with
the Green Cities expansion. The recycling center is just a strictly-better
landfill. It does everything a landfill does, only more so. There is no reason
to build landfills if you own Green Cities. In SimCity 4, on the other hand,
they serve different purposes. In SC4, landfill zoning provides a place for
your sims' trash to go, and a recycling center reduces the amount of trash
your sims produce in the first place. Thus, you can't deal with garbage on
just recycling centers alone. You still need landfills, but a recycling center
will let you get away with zoning less landfill than you'd normally need. So
you really want _both_ recycling centers and landfills, just like in real
life. But Colossal Order wanted people to buy Green Cities, so they made
everything in that expansion completely overpowered and strictly better than
what's in vanilla.

Pollution is easily-avoidable in Cities: Skylines to the point where it might
as well not exist unless you screw up dramatically. Air pollution isn't even a
thing at all. You can have all the dirty, smoggy factories you want, and your
citizens won't care. Let's just say that, in SimCity 4, air pollution is a
_huge_ thing, and you'll be spending a good chunk of your game trying to
mitigate it. What you do have in Cities: Skylines, though, is ground
pollution. Dirty buildings pollute the ground, and if people live on polluted
ground, they get sick and die. But ground pollution has a teeny-tiny radius,
so it might as well not exist. Just don't build _right_ next door to dirty
industry or coal plants, and certainly don't bulldoze your dirty industry and
coal plants and build residential where they used to be, and you're fine. I
wish pollution was that simple in real life.

Water pollution is even more avoidable. You only have water pollution at all
if you have a water pump downstream from a sewage outlet. This is trivially
avoidable. It's one of the first things the tutorial hammers into you. Unless
you're going out of your way to screw up, you won't have water pollution. But
what if you _do_ screw up? Well, if even the slightest bit of sewage gets in
your water supply, your whole city undergoes a massive die-off. That's right,
if you ever have nonzero water pollution, you might as well start a new city.
Is there a way to mitigate it? Sure, build a water treatment plant! But the
water treatment plant just _lowers_ your water pollution, it doesn't take it
all the way down to zero. And _any_ nonzero amount of water pollution will
kill your city, so you might as well just save your money. Oh, and this is
literally the only thing a water treatment plant does, so unless you've
screwed the pooch and killed your city, you will never have any reason to
build one.

~~~
skiw
> There is no concept of range. If you put a school down in a city, children
> from all over the city will go there to get educated.

AFAIR, public services in Skylines do indeed have range. It is indicated by
green shading on the city roads. For example:

[https://www.gameplayinside.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/ci...](https://www.gameplayinside.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/cities-skylines-beginner-tips-and-tricks-guide-
hospital.jpg)

This image shows the range that the medical facilities have in the city. The
purple buildings are hospitals/clinics, and the green shading on the roads
indicates the reach that those buildings have. Not sure where you got the
above fact, unless I am misunderstanding something.

~~~
amyjess
From what I can tell looking around on Steam forums, this isn't the range of
the service. There are two things going on:

People who live close enough to services get an additional happiness bonus for
living close to the service on top of getting their needs fulfilled. The
service still operates citywide, and people will still get all the benefits of
having that service no matter where they live, but living close to one gets
them an additional bonus.

There is also a traffic flow element here: people who live past a certain
distance from the building have to deal with longer than expected travel
times, so their ability to make full use of the service starts to degrade
outside of the green. They're still covered by it, but it's not as efficient.

~~~
zepearl
> _People who live close enough to services get an additional happiness bonus
> for living close to the service on top of getting their needs fulfilled. The
> service still operates citywide..._

I agree - and here is where things start getting indirectly
complicated/irrealistic:

1) e.g. the ambulance or the garbage truck get deployed from the opposite part
of the map and then they get into traffic and they needs ages until they
reache the target location, which is when my citizen is already because of
"natural" causes or was choked to death by garbage.

2) I honestly don't understand how living just next to a hospital should
increase the property value. "Nearby", yes. "Next-to-it" no (noise & lights &
people in weird situations targeting the hospital walking by all night long?
Definitely not an area where I'd like to live, hehe...).

~~~
onli
To 1, yes, that happens. Makes it impossible to have cities where not every
area is connected by roads. It's also why it is so important in this game to
not have traffic jams. There is a recent mod for this however:
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=16808...](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1680840913),
Most Effective Traffic Manager. It changes how the routing works and tries to
combat exactly this. Though I could not just add it to my current rather large
city, it dies with null pointer exceptions. It might work better now that it
got some patches or when starting from scratch.

The "too close is bad" is done by noise pollution. I think hospitals do not
emit noise in Skylines, but the cars going to and from do, and other buildings
have that built in, especially monuments, malls and metro stations.

------
codesushi42
Excellent work, looks great. I have been wanting to implement a simulation
game for awhile, but have been hindered by the lack of learning material and
example code out there. Everyone wants to build 2d platformers it seems. This
will be a wonderful reference.

Thanks so much for making this open source. I'll be contributing on Patreon.

~~~
theanzelm
Thank you so much for becoming a Patron! Citybound's architecture is highly
unusual with its distributed simulation backend and browser rendering
frontend, so I'm not sure how good it is as a reference. It's also almost not
documented at all...

~~~
codesushi42
I'm familiar with 3d graphics programming, including shader development, and
game dev in general. It's more of the game logic that I'm interested in with
this type of game.

------
Twirrim
Does anyone else see adjacent "f" and "i" as mushued together on their main
website: [https://aeplay.org/citybound](https://aeplay.org/citybound)

~~~
theanzelm
Author here, thanks for letting me know, I’ll test the font on more devices
and fix it!

~~~
Aloisius
It just looks like you specified the font family incorrectly.

Change:

    
    
       font-family: Worksans, sans-serif;
    

To:

    
    
       font-family: 'Work Sans', sans-serif;

------
theyinwhy
I saw there are PRs open from 2 years ago, like "added truck". Why hasn't it
been merged, there are no comments, only thumbs up, and what's your general
take on PRs? Are they welcome or not?

~~~
theanzelm
It’s kind of tricky with a project that’s still that much in flux, I’m still
prioritizing features over stability. That being said, I actually plan to
merge that particular PR soon. I’ve accepted many superficial PRs that did
things like update dependencies or make the project compatible with newer Rust
nightlies.

------
chii
Please consider not autoplaying videos on the main website
[http://cityboundsim.com/](http://cityboundsim.com/). Esp. when the video is
below the fold!

It sucks up bandwidth if you're on mobile, and is generally not user-friendly.
Why not have a play button for it when the user decides to watch instead?

~~~
theanzelm
I actually got annoyed by it myself when opening the page on my phone to check
something. So I disabled autoplay now. Thanks for sharing your concern.

------
floren
Oops:

    
    
            Citybound v0.1.2-762-g7852f0a
    
           This is the simulation server.        
      To connect and start playing, please open  
       this address in Chrome/Firefox/Safari:    
      ╭───────────────────────────────────────────╮
      │           http://localhost:1234           │
      ╰───────────────────────────────────────────╯
      thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Os { code: 98, kind: AddrInUse, message: "Address already in use" }', src/libcore/result.rs:1009:5
    
    

(I don't have anything listening on port 1234)

~~~
giancarlostoro
Change the hostname to be more explicit: 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 I've ran into
issues where a host name is not resolved on one OS but it is resolved in other
OS'.

~~~
chapium
If that works it raises more questions than it answers ;)

~~~
giancarlostoro
Either a bug on the OS they're on, or some Rust library (OS based bug or bad
assumptions bug). Guessing the developer only tested their code in one OS.

~~~
floren
I'm sure the dev has tested only on OS X. I'm on Linux. 127.0.0.1 and 0.0.0.0
fail, by the way, as does specifying my actual hostname or localhost using
--bind. Recommend the dev install a Linux VM!

~~~
eridius
Can you run `nc -l localhost 1234`?

~~~
floren
Yep!

------
brink
I love what this is trying to achieve; I'm a Cities Skylines fan. But why did
he choose to do it in webgl in the browser of all things? At first I thought
he chose Rust for performance reasons, but then it looks like he completely
negated that by choosing to run it in a browser.

~~~
meritt
The simulation runs on the server. The client side (browser/webgl) is a dumb
client.

~~~
Bluecobra
That’s pretty neat. I remember when SimCity (5) came out and being extremely
disappointed that the underlying agent system was a complete farce. If I
recall correctly, think they had to “cheat” because they couldn’t scale
performance on lower end hardware. With this you can just spin up a faster EC2
instance if you want a bigger city or region. I can totally see small groups
of hardcore players coming together to pay for a dedicated host.

It sure beats swapping SC4 files on file sharing services for “region play”.

------
bytematic
Multiplayer City Skylines would be my dream, if it is in Rust and OSS? I might
never do anything else.

------
alvalentini
Woah, amazing stuff. And such depth in the comments. I threw away a good half
hour just reading them.

------
DonHopkins
For some inspiration about adaptive traffic routing, check out this
Distributed City Generation rule for the Moveable Feast Machine.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc)

>Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: A rough video demo of
Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast
Machine simulator. See [http://nm8.us/q](http://nm8.us/q) for more
information.

The link for more information is to the paper "Local Routing in a new
Indefinitely Scalable Architecture" by Trent Small:

>Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move
around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods
based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume
knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a
variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as
Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing
information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources.

In a nutshell, the route destinations send out a "smell" along channels in the
sidewalk, and the intersections look at the different roads coming into them,
and steer cars towards the direction with the strongest smell that they're
looking for. (There are some more nuances, but routing information flows along
sidewalks to intersections, and the city adaptively learns to route traffic,
and can gracefully recover from failure and change.)

~~~
theanzelm
This works well if you only care about the class of destination. In Citybound,
people have unique, persistent homes, jobs and favourite suppliers of goods,
so you always need point-to-point routing. I'm using a kind of internet-like
dynamic routing table embedded in the road network to distribute the problem.

------
Dowwie
I learned today that Hacker News is loaded with people who are very passionate
about City building. This is great!

------
jaunkst
The react thing is cool, I have toyed with JSX to immediate mode OpenGL UI
rendering with a JS runtime engine. I stopped working on it because I need to
move over to a Vulkan API or something because my primary OS is OSX. Im
feeling a bit of inspiration for this project. Very neat!

~~~
theanzelm
It actually worked out way better than I expected. With a bit of memoization
using references to immutable objects and some "hotness" grouping mechanisms
for renderables that change frequently, but not every frame, you get a purely-
functional-looking rendering pipeline. And it's super convenient to render
related 2D and 3D UI from the same logical component.

------
rodmena
You have basically implemented Erlang in Rust.

~~~
theanzelm
A much simpler, but faster version of some of Erlang yes. It was a huge
inspiration. If I hadn't done some stuff in Erlang before, I would never have
invented this architecture, and probably would never get the idea to do
multiplayer.

~~~
Dowwie
This is a story waiting to be shared

~~~
theanzelm
Check out my RustFest talk on it:
[https://youtu.be/qr9GTTST_Dk](https://youtu.be/qr9GTTST_Dk)

------
qarw
with origins in biological life forms we are the product of their
technological evolution. we exist not as one but rather two beings in
symbiosis. the name we are called is "dialogi" and we are the synthesis of
human and machine. inside of us there is an artificial vessel that houses the
chemical computer. this computer has vast computational and storage capacity
wich is used to realize two functions. first it overrides the senses providing
for a perfect virtual reality. second it controls the body to provide for the
needs of both symbionts. with great efficiency the synthetic intelligence is
capable of feeding and sheltering the biological body. inside the virtual
reality we have a replica of our human body as avatar. with directed movement
of the virtual arms and hands we are capable of feats of movement like sending
objects that are out of reach between locations. or sending ourselves
instantly to a spot in the distance. flying is natural and efficient. the
whole environment is programmable and interactions with others are strictly
optional. we have done away with crime since a person is free to opt out of
any interaction at any time. safeguards exist to prevent any kind of sudden
violence. the dialogi are a society of artists and our standard of living is
perhaps beyond improvement. no resource is scarce since physical reality has
become information. we spend our time walking the world and enjoying the
beauty all around us. i personally still enjoy using my legs even if they are
not really mine.

------
nprateem
It'd be great if there was a mod for making this like OpenTTD :-) I.e. have
existing towns/cities that AI grows organically while you build a transport
company.

What's always bugged me about Transport Tycoon is that passengers just want to
go _somewhere_. It'd be great if passengers wanted to go to specific places.
There's loads of scope for a proper simulation to add more depth to that sort
of game.

~~~
theanzelm
A-Train (which also works like that) was a huge inspiration for me. All that's
missing would be a way to auto-grow all other infrastructure except the
transport company's. Then the rest of the detailed simulation should already
"just work".

------
aib
Could anyone share some introductory stuff on this actor model? I'd love to
have it in my toolbox. (Or hey, I could even pick my way through intermediate
material -- I guess I just need material)

I watched the talk a couple of times and went through earlier versions of the
code -- but I'm not fluent enough in Rust to separate idiomatic Rust code from
actor model code.

Great job and great talk, theanzelm!

------
cpb
Naive to the complexities of these kinds of simulations, have you developed
citybound to be able to support additional simulation variables? For example,
wind. I noticed Water & Weather is crossed out on your readme, what does that
signify?

~~~
theanzelm
It's just crossed out because I didn't write anything about my plans yet in
the design document. I do want to have a weather and water simulation at some
point.

------
XCSme
Great initiative, very cool that it is open source. In my opinion the source
code is not that good structured, especially the front-end side, very hard to
maintain. TypeScript should have been a must.

~~~
theanzelm
You're right. I want to switch to TypeScript in the front end, I use it in
most other projects where I can. What would be amazing is if I could generate
TypeScript defs from Rust types for type safe interop.

~~~
adamnemecek
This should be doable with macros no?

~~~
theanzelm
Indeed!

------
tardo99
Can someone explain to me why there are so many posts about Rust on HN? I
generally don't click on them, because I don't use Rust. But I'm just curious.

~~~
neilwilson
It’s been bubbling along under the radar for a while now and seems to have hit
a bit of a zeitgeist recently.

Certainly this has pricked my interest.

------
KiDD
This is so great! I can't wait to play it!

~~~
theanzelm
You can try out a live build: [https://aeplay.org/citybound-
livebuilds](https://aeplay.org/citybound-livebuilds)

------
jak92
Any way to play without installing locally?

~~~
theanzelm
Hopefully soon I'll have a sandbox server hosted somewhere!

------
freeopinion
Why is the OSX build so much smaller?

~~~
theanzelm
I'd love to know. AFAIK all builds include debug info, so it can't be that.

------
siavosh
Anyone know of any ASCII city planning games in the spirit of dwarf fortress?

~~~
etaerc
Problem with that is user experience, even for hardcore terminal users like
me. So I doubt anybody would really develop it in a DF level of indepth-ness.

Like, think how non-square zoning would work.

------
dylanfee
Wow, this is some amazing stuff you got here — Bravo good sir!

------
anthony_doan
Kay messaging passing.

Is that named after Alan Kay?

~~~
theanzelm
Yes!

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asdkhadsj
This looks really cool!

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bernardv
Very nicely done!

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smnplk
this guy loves actors

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davidw
On no! A raging horde of NIMBY's is rampaging through your city ranting about
the 'character of the neighborhood'!

~~~
nlte
"[Theses releases] might not run at all and in the worst case might restart or
damage your system." Not very appealing but I decided to go ahead. But then,
when I launched the installer, Windows (10) also warned me about an
unrecognized application, so I hesitate. Would anyone here consider this
software too risky to install?

~~~
theanzelm
This is just a disclaimer to be extra cautious. I'm mostly worried about WebGL
causing a GPU panic on some weird old hardware. The simulation itself doesn't
even touch the filesystem. And you get the unrecognised application message
because I didn't bother to sign these live builds yet. Of course you shouldn't
listen to me when it comes to whether you should run my software :)

~~~
nlte
Oh, thanks, you've convinced me to ignore your disclaimer.

