The Cities Unlimited Archives: Diagonals and More Angles

Today from the Cities Unlimited file: diagonals. Posted with the permission of their orginal author, tr0ub1e, these are articles archived from the Cities Unlimited website (along with the first page of their respective comment threads) before the boards were closed down. A huge thanks to Metropolis member Ephemeron for his foresight in hanging on to these, and his hard work cleaning up the formatting! The usual Drawing Board disclaimer applies. Note: dark red text indicates links to other pages on the boards that are no longer active.

Diagonals & More Angles

a Conceptual article by tr0ub1es0me

#17046 tr0ub1e

(author & contributors: cogo, djvandrake, JBravo, mad_genius, Poetic, tr0ub1es0me)

In SimCity 4, we could have buildings and Lots aligned facing four different angles: north, east, south and west; and transport networks could usually be aligned along eight different angles, as diagonals were included - although bridges and tunnels were restricted to four angles.

This should be expanded by having more angles available. I think the minimum should be 16:

• North
• North-North-East
• North-East
• East-North-East
• East
• East-South-East
• South-East
• South-South-East
• South
• South-South-West
• South-West
• West-South-West
• West
• West-North-West
• North-West
• North-North-West

Although this can be expanded to having more than 16 angles available in the game; or allowing free rotation (to a certain extent) like CityLife.

When using any of the game's tools, all of these angles should be available for alignment when creating the layout of everything within CITIES XL: transport infrastructure, elevated transport networks, bridges, tunnels, zone borders, lot borders, buildings, props, landscaping, marking out municipal area borders (i.e. dividing a region), marking out cities/neighbourhoods borders, marking out the border around the area of particular notable locations and points of interest, designing and laying out the contents of our own customised Lots, etc.

Having more angles than we had in SimCity 4 will give us more freedom so we can really design everything in much greater ways than before; or make a model of a real city because in order to do that we will need diagonal roads at multiple angles and building that grow or are plopped aligned along them. Connectable transport networks should be able to form intersections and interchanges when meeting at any realistic angles. Elevated networks and overpasses should be able to follow any angles and cross other networks at any angles.

Making the roads diagonal in CityLife left many open spaces and overlap problems. These overlapping problems should be eliminated by improving the way that the game references the positioning and sizes of everything within our cities, to ensure that this problem cannot occur in CITIES XL. This can be achieved using the game's internal co-ordinates system (see the Concepts article Denser Grid than SC4) to not only reference the positioning but also the points which would mark out the perimeter of Lots, transport networks, and other infrastructure. The game can then prevent other zones, lots, networks, or other infrastructure from overlapping any area that is already covered.

In addition, there should be a variety of true organic lot fillers that can used to automatically fill into any awkwardly and oddly shaped area between Lots, buildings, transport networks, and so on. These areas may be too small for any buildings and instead can be filled with paved, or open green/dirt areas, and the like; with options of trees, or street props, etc. - giving the city a seamless organic look and removing the problem of the unused spaces.

External Sources
Article contains ideas and segments from:
This post by JBravo at SimCity Central
This post by cogo at SimCity Central
This post by Poetic at SimCity Central
This post by mad_genius at SimCity Central
This post by djvandrake at SimCity Central

Post any other comments, suggestions, additions, or adjustments here too.

#17048 g314

I really appreciate you mentioned City Life's overlap issues, tr0ub1e! Networks (as you said all of them) have to be freely angled and curved, but these 16 angles could be helpful presets IMHO. ;)

4 - Important. I'd like to have these features. (75%)

#17049 Chanson

I was gonna say, there better be more than 16 ways we can have buildings. City Life had more than that. We should be able to angle our streets and consequently, the buildings, in any direction we choose. 360degrees, 360 ways to angle a building!

#17050 tr0ub1e

how many angles did CityLife have?

16 angles would be enough for me. but i wouldn't complain if we had more than that :D it's just that even with only 16 (so long as we, in addition, have true curved roads available with longer radius, to combine with straights) i think we could pretty much build a close-to-a-replica of any real layout, and that is how it should be.

#17052 Sam Fischer

I can't see the purpose of limiting road directions in a 3D-environment. For the road alignment issue, a freely rotateable and snapable grid would do much better and easier.

Hasn't MC already shown that we will get curved roads?

#17054 tr0ub1e

the more angles that we can align things, especially transport networks which must also connect to eachother with intersections and interchanges, the harder it is to program the game to deal with any eventuality in a realistic way. that's the only reason to limit it.

nothing has a truly unlimited number of angles for rotation in a computer program. not even a 3D modelling piece of software - and i think even 360 different angles would be unecessary for this type of game. what exactly is the point in having the difference between something rotated by 1 degrees and something rotated by 2 degrees?

maybe 5 degrees intervals of rotation would be highest amount of angles that could be truly necessary in a city-building game. more than that is unecessary. :) (it will complicate the programming a lot more by having that many angles though, that's all.) this would allow 72 different angles of alignment as opposed to the minimum specified in the article, of 16 angles.

having curved transport networks and edges of Lots and Zones is a seperate aspect completely which i think needs implementing. this article is only referring to the alignment angles we can use for buildings and props, straight stretches of transport networks, straight landscaping tools, area borders, and straight eges of Lots and Zones.

#17057 Joe2102001

Yup they already stated in the blog that we will have curved roads! ;)

#17061 Romaq

I really liked that The Settlers allowed you to rotate buildings this way, but you don't have vehicles. In my mind, I saw a building on a flexible lot. The lot had a 'driveway' that must connect to a street. The lot is fexible with the curved street buffers with a fixed zone around the building. In fact, if roads are going to be curved, I think it's likely they will need to design buildings with a 'velvet wrapped around a steel zone' approach. The 'driveway' texture can overlay any sidewalks, and it will all look correct.

If what I'm saying doesn't make sense, I'll cook up some example images to post.

#17101 eric

citylife has unlimited angles really. going to 16 would cripple what we allready have.

#17154 Namesys

yes eric but there come those bad empty spaces occuring when two roads meeting from an angle that's not 90°or 180° and you have buildings one next to the first road and another next to a second road. And the angle between can be only filled with those (i don't know how to say it) parks and kiosks that fit in. But they hardly do anything but just being there and being eyecandy.

#17156 Joe2102001

Thats where the property lines thread comes in. ;)

#17179 eric

correct joe :)

#17181 The Yeti

eric wrote:

correct joe ;)

LMAO@eric