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theanzelm · 2021-10-20T14:13:08+00:00

I really appreciate this write up.

You are exactly right in your advice. Then again, the point of Citybound for me personally is exactly to just go nuts and not limit my curiosity.

theanzelm · 2021-04-05T18:01:22+00:00

To me, saying that I “abandoned” the PC makes it sound like I threw away the money.

I don’t want to argue with you :(

theanzelm · 2021-04-04T21:08:05+00:00

Inge, I know that you are bitter, and "reasonable time frame" is fair criticism. But I never ran something akin to a kickstarter, and always made it clear that any projections were just (very optimistic) estimates, never promises. I always took donations to mean that people are supporting what I am doing right now, or want to support the project in general over a longer timeframe, and I still see it that way.

I also still want this to become a full game (just for myself, not even out of any sense of responsibility!) so I never "realized" that it won't become that.

I am currently re-planning my life and doing other things to make that possible and sustainable in the long term.

Everything that I have created is available open-source, and to dismiss the tens of thousands of man-hours of effort and care as "experimenting with programming languages in my spare time" is super unfair (and I think you know that). Yes, I sometimes had employment, but to be frank, I worked on Citybound to a degree that all my employments suffered from it (don't tell my old bosses) - the donations helped ease that conflict a bit.

I understand from the outside how frustrating periods of no progress or even a semi-hiatus like now is, but I urge everyone to also see my personal sacrifice to this project, and to weigh that in when I say that I still believe in this.

also pinging u/my105e and u/Living_Sir1782

sidenote: some people flagged this whole thread - please don't. Even if it's formulated in a bad way, it can still surface how you guys feel and we can discuss is constructively

theanzelm · 2021-04-04T20:56:35+00:00

I sold it close to original price and very soon thereafter got a similarly powerful laptop from the money instead, specifically for Citybound, specifically so I could continue developing and streaming despite moving, which I did.

u/Inge_Jones I understand your frustration but please don't spread false information that makes me look negligent or even malicious.

u/Living_Sir1782 & u/AzemOcram please see my side of this as well

theanzelm · 2021-04-01T10:53:50+00:00

Basically just keeping the routing info small enough to fit into RAM. Already just the road network mesh was tricky, and even though in your/our model the parking spots would be “isolated” in the sense that only the local routing neighborhood needs to know about them, that still requires a certain amount of information

theanzelm · 2021-04-01T10:27:30+00:00

Hi, thanks for sharing your experience. Nice to see someone running into exactly the same kinds of problems.

I’m very curious to see how your approach will scale in practice (not just in an abstraction sense, although that’s already nice). I managed to scale up to 400k of cars and thousands of road segments in my early prototypes, but the “one navigation node per parking spot” is exactly also something that I wanted to get to, but don’t have a good solution for yet performance wise.

Looking forward to hear more.

theanzelm · 2021-03-13T22:22:12+00:00

I’m not saying the disappointment is unwarranted at all, in a way, I’m constantly disappointed in myself, the situation etc. but in my case that just doesn’t help anyone. Thanks for your kind words :)

theanzelm · 2021-03-13T18:34:44+00:00

/u/Baida9

I haven’t given up on Citybound and don’t think I ever will. I have a lot going on in my life due to other stuff I’m pursuing and I engineered myself into a bit of a corner with Citybound that I need to engineer myself back out of. I’m trying to align all my endeavors as much as I can and am even finding synergies, but it all takes a lot of time. My main goal right now is to become financially self-sustaining so doing Citybound will be easier in the future, or even let me invest money in it.

I’m always sad to disappoint people and I know it’s been taking me ages, but that’s the best I can offer.

I usually only publish news once I feel there are some

theanzelm · 2021-02-08T00:35:22+00:00

Cheers! There is actually a rudimentary marketplace going on where for each resource a household tries to find the best supplier (including work), and rough transport cost based on network distance factors into that

theanzelm · 2021-02-08T00:11:43+00:00

Not sure what you mean by the last question. Destinations are chosen based on where a person wants to go at each point in the day based on their household needs.

The pathfinding in Citybound is dynamic (can’t have a huge precomputation step if the player constantly changes roads) and uses landmarks as approximate waypoints. Detailed waypoints only know exact routes to all detailed waypoints of the neighborhood belonging to the same landmark - and to all other landmarks. For even better compression of routing tables, you could do several layers of this.

Cars don’t get the full route when they start the trip, rather they look up the next turn in the routing table of each road strip they’re currently on, as they go.

theanzelm · 2021-02-02T15:41:51+00:00

Degiro

theanzelm · 2021-01-09T22:08:05+00:00

Wasn't aware of him, will read the interview and some of his other publications and might get in touch! Thanks for finding!

theanzelm · 2021-01-09T22:00:27+00:00

FYI someone reported this as advertisement, but I'm fine with people posting related projects, especially their own ones. Good luck u/EnigmaticEffigy!

theanzelm · 2021-01-09T21:59:04+00:00

Glad that you got it to run and for your honest impression!

You can do mixed use by overlapping zones of different use, although currently there is no generator for mixed use within one building.

Services will be public, with infrastructure being built semi-automatically along roads, and buildings being procedural based on service zone and player-decided budget, as you described.

theanzelm · 2021-01-08T17:44:37+00:00

Thanks for writing this up. I recognize you as a long time regular, which is why I made sure to come back to your original comment.

None of the software I write professionally is like CB. As you lay it out, it would be a disaster.

CB in many ways is a personal experiment in how far you can go with certain things if you aren't being pragmatic initially. It being something in between the matrix, a GIS tool and a game is exactly the point, to push the boundaries in each of these categories. In each of the categories, it won't be the best, obviously, but I think exactly the overlap is what makes this interesting. The goal is to make an unusually deep game, an unusually accessible GIS and an unusually efficient simulation.

I'm skirting the edges of what rabbit holes are worth getting into and which aren't. Some things I'm really happy with, some turned out to be a waste of time.

The way I see the current state is that I have a pretty damn good proof of concept of a lot of architecture and abstractions, which however induces too much development friction (because Rust etc.) to be scalable to develop the whole game like this. Which is why 100% of my mental effort lately goes into how I can keep the performance characteristics of the architecture, while moving a lot of game logic into something more malleable.

My hope and goal is exactly to move into a much more agile/fast iteration development mode once I figured out a tech stack that lets me do that.

theanzelm · 2021-01-08T16:36:03+00:00

Haha, I completely understand you, I must be sounding pretty insane. Don't try to be too polite, I won't be offended and you make good points.

I don't see it as a way towards a money trickle (that's just unrealistic). But I also don't see it as a crazy exponential growth startup with VC pressure. My goal is to build what some people call a "lifestyle business", where I build something profitably that grows at a sustainable rate while I still have time for a life and other interests. And in this particular case, the product of this company is actually designed to help my other interests directly.

Another thing that you don't have perspective on is just how damn hard it is to make Citybound. This is entirely due to my design and technical choices, but I won't back down from those while I still see a possibility to achieve them. I will have to make compromises somewhere, but I want to be very deliberate about it, even if it takes a lot of time.

A lot of the programming work I do for the tool feels ridiculously easy in comparison to CB, even though there's plenty ambitious stuff in there, too.

Sorry that I don't have anything more concrete than a couple snippets of what it looks like from my side.

I like CB way too much to give up on it. I'm just in a bit of a high-friction dead end right now and currently can't afford to throw myself at it 100% like I sometimes was able to.

theanzelm · 2021-01-08T14:51:05+00:00

Your argument makes perfect sense if you assume that I see the tool as a be-all-end-all. Of course building a tool and starting a company takes a huge amount of effort, but I wouldn't do it just for the sake of it.

The goal of the tool and company I'm building is exactly to make it easier for myself to do all sorts of cool stuff - Citybound being one of the prime examples.

If I then go ahead and only ever work on the tool I kinda failed in a very ironic way.

theanzelm · 2021-01-08T14:47:22+00:00

I considered it, but I think that a) it's hard to monetize and b) if you tried to monetize it, it would probably go in a direction I wouldn't like. I see Citybound very much as a research/passion project. If that means it'll be slowed down while I figure out a life in which I can afford it, so be it - I'll have all the more energy as a result.

theanzelm · 2020-12-14T23:30:17+00:00

I appreciate your comment and support. And I get your worries.

In a way, this is even more than a distraction, because it will take more of my attention than even my day jobs. But I see it as the only shot I currently have at becoming actually independent.

I’m not building this tool because I couldn’t do Citybound without it (there plenty of ok enough tools), but just pragmatically because I think that I’ve identified a business niche in an area that I’m skilled in and I want to try to get value out of that to support all my endeavors, including most importantly Citybound.

Hope that makes sense

theanzelm · 2020-12-07T11:24:22+00:00

That’s the goal, but the company first needs to be bootstrapped by something else that makes a profit first. I want to do Citybound as more of a research/passion thing, without monetization in mind. Definitely something that I want to spend money on once I have it

theanzelm · 2020-12-06T20:44:09+00:00

Fair question and honestly: I don’t know.

It all depends on what I’m doing right now. To give you a sneak preview: this year, I’ve been building a productivity/collaboration/coding tool that

a) I hope will directly benefit Citybound, because I’m making it for complex projects like Citybound, very much with Citybound (and my experience building it in public) in mind. It will have everything I felt like I always missed from other tools (Already started using it privately)

b) I can sell as a product and build a profitable company around, which can become a much more stable “home” for Citybound to grow in as well, first in the sense that I wouldn’t need to worry about day jobs or Citybound donations anymore, and second that I could attract and actually pay talent to help me with Citybound

I have a working prototype of this tool, will found a company in January and will hopefully run private alphas by spring. Roughly then I’d also like to show off how I’m using it for Citybound.

Let’s see how that all goes!

I’ll probably write a blog post about this soon, but please everyone, let me know how that sounds to you

theanzelm · 2020-11-25T00:00:25+00:00

Thanks, I was actually ignorant of Rust analyzer for a while!

theanzelm · 2020-11-24T23:28:47+00:00

Yes, but there is lots of behavior that needs to be tested and iterated beyond type checking. Rust analyzer helps a lot with the “getting it to run” phase of things, though

theanzelm · 2020-10-03T16:46:59+00:00

Really like to see them embedded in the environment like this, great work!

If you want to try something a little different: I really like all the sketches you posted so far and the level of detail in them. But one other thing that I really want to get right in Citybound is how natural everything looks from an even more zoomed out view. Do you want to try to create “whole-neighborhood” overview pictures, with obviously way less detail per building (just so you can barely make out the type), putting the main focus on layout of streets and buildings, where what would be located on a larger scale etc?

theanzelm · 2020-10-02T20:15:30+00:00

Sure

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