> Hundreds of thousands of cars physically move along roads and have to break, accelerate and change lanes in traffic to safely get to their destination. Future work: Other modes of transport (pedestrians, light & heavy rail, airports, etc.). Multi-modal pathfinding (combining walking, public transport, taxis and driving to reach destinations).
So this is a US simulator.
Because cars?
Every city builder ignores something that most American planning ignores: mixed-use districts.
The neighborhood bar. The grocery shop down by the corner. The bakery in a remodeled house. The multi-story apartment block with a couple restaurants on the ground floor. The plumbing business in an old warehouse completely surrounded by houses. The 150-year-old pastry shop that's been in its current location for fifty years and seen the neighborhood change around it. The run-down building whose owner has been letting it rot for four years and turns out to own about fifty properties in similar condition throughout the city. All of this is stuff I see around me in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans. I see it even more so if I go down to the French Quarter, which is still shaped like an old European city with cars awkwardly driving through it. Half the buildings down there have people living in apartments atop ground-floor shops, with hidden courtyards instead of houses awkwardly dropped into the middle of vast road-facing yards. The cook at one of the Quarter cafes I'm a regular at lives in a place right across the street, above a magic shop and an art gallery and a bar. Things are dense and intertwingled and weird and exciting.
None of that. Just, here's the residential zone, here's the commercial zone, here's the industrial zone. It was fine as an abstraction when Will Wright was trying to make something that'd work on a C64 but it all feels so absurd when I look at the actual world now that computers are powerful enough to run Sim City in a Mac emulator running in your browser with only a couple percent of your CPU time.
The archetypical city builder has "people live in the suburbs and drive into the city to work and shop" baked so, so deep into its core.
(Apparently Cities Skylines 2 actually implements this now that I go searching? Huh. City builder's really not a genre I play much and the continued persistence of this abstraction is one of the reasons I bounce off of it, it's impossible to make a place I feel like I'd want to live as a non-driver.)
You could play Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, which has no zones at all. And apparently you start with apartment blocks, not single–family housing. And if you want sidewalks, you have to place them. All of them, individually. I haven’t played it (or CS2) yet, but I’ve been considering it.
Japan’s fairly simple urban zoning scheme seems to work quite well. There’s essentially a sliding scale from light residential to heavy industrial, but “lighter” uses are always allowed in “heavier” zones.
> but “lighter” uses are always allowed in “heavier” zones.
As far as I know, this is true of the American zoning system, as well.
In the US you can usually build "lighter" within a category, up to a point, but not across categories (e.g. you could build a single family home in a high density residential zone, but not in a commercial zone).
I'm not sure how that compares to Japan's system, but from GP's comment it sounds like you can cross categories there.
Japan’s system is more about what would disrupt QoL around it. If you want to open a small bakery in the middle of a residential neighborhood you can do so. Not really economically viable, but some people run these things out of just the front room of their house.
Why wouldn't it be economically viable ? It's been done like this for centuries in France.
It depends on your local law. Where I live, we have mixed use, office residential, general office and warehousing. All broadly allow home building of various types. Going the other way, the rules are quite detailed as to what sort of commercial operations you could start from a residential property in those zones, subject to superseding HoA restrictions.
This is almost never true in practice in the US.
It’s not. US zoning often strictly regulates usage.
Cities skylines 2 implementation is still pretty lackluster in related aspects.
Lots of buildings have forced carparks.
People are content to walk absurd distances.
I almost preordered when I saw mixed use zoning.
Forced car parks for buildings is at least accurate for a North American context.
mediaeval city builders (e.g. "kingdoms and castles") typically don't have zoning at all, though arguably they are more like "small town builders" in that you place individual buildings rather than areas.
I used to contribute to the authors Patreon, and used to contribute PRs. But I stopped a while back as the author has abandoned the project. The last commit in git was five years ago. (Look at the subreddit if you don't think this has been abandoned)
FWIW the subreddit for this game has posts of dogs humping. Development appears to be dead, unfortunately.
That's a very fine level of simulation.
https://github.com/citybound/citybound/forks is always something I go poking around in when the original developer moved on. Sometimes one can find bugfixes, other times someone that has picked up the mantle quietly
Yup, abandoned 5 years ago judging by the Github page.
Does it simulate the darker side of city life, corruption, crime, etc.
Same guy behind jazz.tools
Dead/dying project unfortunately. I wish I had extra money lying around. I’d love to see what something like this could turn out to be if only the person working on it had the funding.
This is DEAD. The dev also had a bad track record on Patreon
I’m eagerly awaiting for rail