micropolis

.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf >General Software Requirements: OLPC agrees that the OLPC SimCity will not be approved by EA for distribution under Section 2.2 of this Agreement, until the OLPC SimCity meets the following general software requirements: >1. EA’s QA team is unable to crash the game in sixteen (16) man-hours of play-time. >2. EA’s QA team is unable to find images/language that is deemed inappropriate to achieve an “E” rating by the ESRB standard. >3. No use of any EA Trademarks that would reflect negatively upon the established reputation of EA. >4. Add copyright/license information to each source file to reflect the proper licensing. It was based on the original Mac version of SimCity that I first ported to NeWS/HyperLook then to X11/TCL/Tk and made to support multiplayer (which I had to disable for the OLPC version, due to X11's broken security model): http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/SimCity.README http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold: https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27... >[71] The Unix and then open sourced versions have undergone multiple iterations. The OLPC version is based on the original open sourced version, which is written in C for X11 with TCL/Tk. Hopkins introduced some optimizations and, I believe, some bugs in this version (the tile animation system). Hopkins would go on to rewrite Micropolis in C++, cleaning up and organizing the code. Java and JavaScript translations now exist, too. >There were a couple of notable stipulations. First, that EA’s quality assurance (QA) test and approve any release titled “SimCity.” For this reason, Hopkins renamed the project “Micropolis,” an earlier working title for SimCity. Second, as a post-9/11 consideration, EA requested that the airplane crash disaster be removed from the game. Regard for publicity, both negative and positive, must have driven these stipulations as well as the decision to move forward with the project. >SimCity began life as Wright’s private toy, and went on to be continually recast as commercial software (Maxis), serious simulation (Sun), and educational plaything (OLPC). It’s polymorphic quality allowed it to be perceived and used by diverse agents, who turned it towards satisfying their own particular agendas and contexts. This interpretive versatility, which can productively be understood through Sutton-Smith’s notion of play’s ambiguity, is crucial to SimCity’s evocativeness, and ultimately led to its availability as free open source software. Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

out generating traffic and pollution. That was a tip of the hat to John Gauge's "Net Day", a mid-90's internet craze of hooking schools up to the net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetDay Chaim Gingold mentions the function s_traf.c/FindPTele in his SimCity Reverse Diagrams animation characters atlas of tiles, under "Telecommunications" -- /* look for telecommunication on edges of zone */ -- if there is a telecommunication dish adjacent to a residential zone, then its residents can telecommute without driving around generating traffic and pollution. I turned that off for the OLPC release, though. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol... Chaim Gingold has analyzed the code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams": https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr... >SimCity reverse diagrams: Chaim Gingold (2016). >These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986). >The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010). If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software. >Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013. Earlier I wrote about the "Simulator Effect" aka "apophenia", and "Reverse Over Engineering": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590 DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used. https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game... >There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia >Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE 5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0 >Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience. >Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.

e of the original SimCity scenarios, shipped with every version of the game. That was the one that caused Toho (Godzilla's owner) to sue Maxis because the scenario originally referenced Godzilla, and the box featured a picture of Godzilla. Maxis had to change it to a generic orange monster and call it a "large reptillian creature" instead, and change the Godzilla on the box to a tornado. Original versions of the box with Godzilla are valuable collectors items! >TOKYO, JAPAN 1957: A large reptilian creature has been spotted heading for Tokyo bay. It seems to be attracted to the heavy levels of industrial pollution there. Try to control the fires, then rebuild the industrial center. You have 5 years. https://imgur.com/z5gy9GW https://twitter.com/dancingcrab/status/928792064736874496 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_in_popular_culture#Vi... >The "Monster" disaster in the computer game SimCity depicted an unnamed green monster that resembled Godzilla. A scenario in the game: Tokyo, Japan 1954 parodies the original movie. The depiction of the monster in-game and on the boxart led to legal issues with Toho, with Maxis changing the Monster's design in-game and swapping it on the packaging for the "Tornado" disaster instead.

Have some links you want to share to prove what you're saying?

t.h... The multi player demo showing different kinds of voting dialogs, multiple cursors, the tool palette and pie menus, and the voting "yes" shortcut of building the same thing in the same place, starts at 5m45s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=5m45s One interesting thing about the SimCity cursor was that it was color and shape coded to show which tool was selected. The tool palette (and also the pie menus which had the same icons and layout as the tool palette) served as a legend for the cursor by showing the same color coded outline around the icons as the cursor used. So you could tell which tool other users had selected. You could hide the tool palette to make the map bigger, and use the pie menus instead, which were much more efficient. Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux: Demo of the latest optimized Linux version of Multi Player SimCity for X11. Ported to Unix, optimized for Linux and demonstrated by Don Hopkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE Source Code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis HAR 2009 talk: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

imCityReverseDiagr... >SimCity reverse diagrams, by Chaim Gingold (2016). >These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986). >If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software. >Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. >Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. >Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

happy to answer any questions.) https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol... /** * Drag a tool from (\a fromX, \a fromY) to (\a toX, \a toY). * @param tool Tool being dragged. * @param fromX Horizontal coordinate of the starting position. * @param fromY Vertical coordinate of the starting position. * @param toX Horizontal coordinate of the ending position. * @param toY Vertical coordinate of the ending position. */ void Micropolis::toolDrag(EditingTool tool, short fromX, short fromY, short toX, short toY) ... // Do not drag big tools. ... doTool(tool, fromX, fromY); // Ensure the start position is done. ... // Vertical line up or down ... // Horizontal line left/right ... // General case: both X and Y change. ... Here's the Python code for the MicropolisTool class that calls it (via SWIG), in the PyGTK user interface: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol... And here's the client/server version (OpenLaszlo/Flash client, Python/TurboGears server): Laszlo appview.drawToolStart/Move/Start: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/laszlo/m... Python Micropolis Session handleMessage_drawToolStart/Move/Stop: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol... Looks like the old TCL/Tk/X11 version even let you hold down the control key to constrain the road/rail to vertical or horizontal lines -- that's a nice feature I totally forgot about: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol... https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol... Make sure you call toolDrag on the initial and final mouse coordinate on mouse down and up, don't just call toolDrag on mouse move events (or animation ticks), or you might miss the initial source or final destination when the user draws quickly! For extra credit, make sure the drawing tools work smoothly and reliably with auto-scroll! That makes drawing long roads and railroads easy. ;) Some of the above user interface code is tricky because it supports multiple views, and each view must maintain its own independent track state. (TCL/Tk/X11 SimCity supported not only multiple views, but also multi-player mode with one X11 client connected to several X11 servers at once (which is rightfully considered a terribly unsafe practice these days), so several people could actually be drawing at once, and you don't want to get their tracking state mixed up! The Python/Flash networked version supported multiple views and users via multiple independent "Sessions" attached to the same simulator, and all the tracking state (like the last tile position to draw from) stayed on the client side.) Nowadays it's second nature for user interface views to encapsulate all of the mouse tracking state, but the original SimCity code (and the original TCL/Tk UI tracking code) just had lots and lots of global variables! So all the mouse tracking and tool drawing stuff needed to be abstracted and implemented in a higher level platform specific layer, instead of inside MicropolisCore.

with the NeWS version of FrameMaker: https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-SimCity-Manual.pdf And here's an illustrated transcript and video of the Hacking at Random talk I gave about Micropolis: https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...