The Cities Unlimited Archives: Seasons

In this Cities Unlimited Archive, a discussion about the implementation of seasonal cycles and effects. 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 Note: dark red text indicates links to other pages on the boards that are no longer active.

Seasons

a Conceptual article by tr0ub1es0me

#12718 tr0ub1e

(author & contributors: djvandrake, nofunk, sbroadbent, SJMX, Special Kei, tr0ub1es0me)

Links to relevant CitiesXL.com discussion threads:

Weather/Seasons

Let It Snow!!

As an extension to introducing visual climate and weather into CITIES XL, affecting the dynamics of your cities (see the Concepts article Climate & Weather for more information); the seasons of the year should affect not only the weather, but also the appearance of the landscape, buildings and infrastructure, and city life.

The global location and terrain should both already affect climate and weather, but also change the seasonal characteristics. Some locations would have mild winters and boiling summers. Others would have mild to warm summer and cold winters. Near-polar locations would have snow all year long ・equatorial desert locations would have intense heat all year long. Some locations would also have rainy seasons, leading to annual increased flood risks.

Winter in some locations would bring snow, and the worst-affected would have bad road and transport conditions affecting the commutes, safety levels, and the alike. This would make your cities more demanding to work with and challenging to get good growth levels, and ultimately succeed. In those regions which get snow for 3 months of the year, the city would have increased expenses for snow removal services and clearing the roads ・without which the city would shut down and eventually businesses and residents would not want to remain in your city if you neglect this for long periods of years and the city would become a lot less desirable. This would therefore increase the cost of services during these months if you wish for your city to succeed. In cold seasons, the use of electricity from your power plants should also increase, for heating. You would have problems if they are not readily up to capacity for that period, leaving you with little choice but to invest in a bigger power plant or purchase more power from another city. Failing this, you run the risk of blackouts and some residents can even die of pneumonia in the cold weather without sufficient heating. Your mayor rating and desirability level will be damaged badly, along with your health rating.

Summer in other global locations would bring heatwaves and such, and coastal locations would see flourishing tourism levels with vastly increased and heavy level of road and pedestrian traffic, and high congestion, as regional residents and national or international tourists swarm to the beaches and outdoor recreational facilities. Hotels, Bed & Breakfast Hotels, and many commercial service businesses (especially those which are recreational or entertainment-orientated) would thrive through these periods and demand for them would increase in your city as a result. You may receive special Hotel rewards or Recreational rewards if you build a successful, profitable coastal resort.

As with climate and weather in general; all such seasonal aspects would also need to be considered when players plan out their cities. They may also wish to increase financing for facilities and infrastructure during periods of the year when there are high level of tourism and recreational activity, or through the periods of the year when there are hazardous weather conditions. In autumn, what if you had to pay for the removal of leaves on the curb? During the winter, what if you had to pay for snow removal? What if you actually got to see snowploughs clearing your city streets? It could be a big problem for a mayor who doesn't budget enough resources to clear the snow and the city grinds to a halt because of it. A former mayor of Chicago was run out of office for that very reason!

The seasons should affect the visual look of the natural landscape and features too ・with those parts of the world that have both mild/warm summers and cold winters, we would see the trees change from new leaves in spring, to green leaves in summer, to brown in autumn, before losing their leaves through winter ・similar to those custom content 鉄easonal Trees・for SC4 which Pegasus and Jeronij at www.simtropolis.com have created and offered to us. Some other plants would die back for winter too, as well as flowers disappearing. As described in the Concepts article Climate & Weather, we should always be able to visually see the weather, and changes in the terrain. For example, when it snows, we should be able to actually see snow falling; with heavy snow creating a white blanket over the terrain, covering roads, and the roofs of buildings and cars with white snow.

It's about time we had seasons in a city-building game again. When was the last time the SimCity series had them... SimCity Classic?? CITIES XL needs to bring this feature back, and to a more modern standard visually and functionally.

External Sources

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

#112730 Romaq

I would say either 2 or 4, depending upon what specific parts of what you suggest. SimCity4 had no notion of 'season' beyond what texture plugin you implimented, which was very sad. Caesar IV had a notion of biome limited to the regions of the Roman Empire, and it was 'ok'. I liked the way weather was done in The Settlers even more. It appears custom buildings and such will be a part of CU, and I have NO idea how a 'weather' layer would be expressed. Can weather textures be done automatically? Or do they need to be done by the custom content artist? Could custom art design be done in such a way that if a weather texture layer is left out, it would be done automatically, but the talented custom artist can tackle every detail? How many layers would we be considering for custom content?

1. Normal day and night
2. Rainy day and night
3. Snowy day and night

Depending upon how these are implimented and automated, some of the 'day/ night' for seasonal texturing can be combined. Perhaps it's enough to have 'normal', 'night', 'rain' and 'snow' layers. Perhaps the 'rain' layer can be disposed of for MOST situations and left to an automated process. 'Snow' is more tricky. What polygons represent texture that must be shoveled off? How thick is the snow anyway?

In my opinion, it really isn't enough to throw out requirements for the DEV team to figure out. I believe it is a better idea if you can reference games they can buy down the street and take a look at. What do those other games offer? How did they do it? I really REALLY want weather, but some discussion of detail and issues is vital. Otherwise, it's really easy to take a great idea and wrap it in 10kg of suck.

EDIT: In my list of weather layers/ daylight cycles, I missed dilapidation/ abandonment. Would custom content have access to their own dilapidation/ abandonment states?

#12739 tr0ub1e

it may be better for the game to use algorithms to show visual effects (weather, night/day, abandonment, and dilapidation) on buildings, props and automata. rather than creating a set of textures for each building under different and combined conditions.

one particular program to use as an example is Adobe Photoshop. this may not be a game, but it has a massive and advanced set of filters and styles which can be applied to images. they automatically change the appearance using some intelligent programming. this technique could possibly be used in a city-building game to change the appearance of building textures. although it may be harder to program, it will save creating many different varying textures for the same parts of the same objects in the game. the game can determine, for example, which parts of objects in the game are almost or completely vertical and thus will not have snow collecting on them, and which are sloped or flat and thus will have the snow algorithm applied to the texture.

even if the game did not use this system to display textures and instaed the game features pre-made textures for every different look, a custom-content program like the BAT for SC4 could still contain these algorithms so that the player only has to make their basic model. the different states it can appear in will be automatically created. MC can also use the algorithms they would have created to save their own time when modelling - as they would only create one set of textures rather than multiple sets for each of the individual and combined efffects.

BAT'ers didn't have to create "night" models for SC4. this was done automatically, so why not weather and other effects too...

#12753 Romaq

I have yet to make a BAT, I sincerely hope I'm too busy with Cities Unlimited to get around to doing so. As I understood it, people could add night-time lighting effects and such. I suspect people will wish to do 'something' to indicate what windows light up and which ones down, and make lighted signs, and so on, and so forth. I don't believe 'night lighting' will be trivial to automate. I could be wrong. I'd prefer to be wrong in this case. I'd much rather have somebody ELSE do all the work. :)

#12762 tr0ub1e

Romaq wrote:

I have yet to make a BAT, I sincerely hope I'm too busy with Cities Unlimited to get around to doing so.

well put ;) although the customization was a big+++ for SC4, the game should have (as should CitiesUnlimited) be better so that we don't *have to* resort to modding and custom content so quickly or in such large amounts, or to fix inaccuracies. customization is great - but it should be to add extra things and not those which should have already been in the game. i want the uncustomised CitiesUnlimited to be really good and better than a modded SC4.

you're right about nightlighting in SC4 though. the player had to choose which windows light up at night. but the darker building testures for night were automatic.

#12923 Bountytaker

3- I'm all for improving the realism and the visuals of a citybuilder game. However, as your system shows, it can get very deep and, therefore, very complicated. I could see a system like this taking a year or more to create, and months for a new player to learn. It definitely has value for me, but only up to a certain point.

#13109 Steven Heuer

5-I would love to see the changing of the seasons in my city.

#13160 The Yeti

3-4 depending on the overheads involved. I really like having seasonal trees and lots in sc4 and it would be good to see this extended, but not if everything changing brought my machine to a screaming halt the way PEG's seasonal trees did if they were changing at the same time day was turning into night. (until I got my new machine that is :))

#13874 Lorusgold

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

#13877 rabanne

I rate this at a 4.

The most important for me is the graphical display of the changing seasons, rather than altered gameplay due to seasonal influence.

In other words, I would really like to see snow, ice and smoking smokestacks during winter. I care less about the negative influence the snow has on traffic, and/or on the city's budget. IT would be a really cool feature though.

Coolest feature would be the changing leaf colours of tree's, tree's eventually losing leaf in the winter, and tree's full of blossoms in the spring.

Great article!

#14451 JC Scooby

I love seasons/weather/climate and hope this is included along w/ weather(seasons/climate) related disasters.

I give this an importance level of 93%. (honestly i think this even more important transportation network) :)

#14455 Pedro Rodrigues

5 ;)

#14482 Jman47

definitly an important issue for me, i would at least like weather and seasons to be eye candy, but would be thrilled if they had effects on your city.

i give it a 6 :p

5

#15143 ckwong

3 - I think it can have a toll on my CPU. I would rather reserve my CPU for more important stuff like regional integration, pathfinding, less jerky graphics, etc. Just give me different terrain features (snow, desert, dense jungle, etc.) to start with and I would be happy.

#16761 toyfaces

5 for the sake of realism