Politician Archive
Thread: Possible Idea City Themes
- NPC cities have roads, NPCs, droids, vehicles flying overhead, broken harvestors lying around etc. They give the city a feel for whatthe citydoes day to day.
- Player cities on the other hand look like the suburbs, and most of the items we get to place are designed to make the city look attractive, but they still look like little neighbourhoods with a couple of nice parks.
I started a mining outpost on Lok recently, and to be honest, I don't want it to look pretty, I don't want flowerbeds and fountains and statues, I want it to look like Hadley's Hope from Aliens, I want miners walking around town, I want dirty streets and broken down harvestors, lumbering mining equipment,etc.
So I thought, why not city themes, each mayor can select from a stock standard list of themes, and pick one for their city. That theme would take effect and change the entire landscape.It would put down road tiles everywhere (if appropriate to the theme), automatically build a wall around the city radius (again if appropriate), and put down things appropriate to the theme of the city. As players put down their buildings, the city themeobjects are displaced (like how the trees and rocks are handled right now). I put down a house and a statue (or some other decoration) dissappears from that spot to make way.
I can think of a few themes off the top of my head, like the Imperial Outpost (it builds a fortified wall around the town with guard posts and has Imperial NPCs walking around the city), or Mining Outpost (it puts down all that stuff I want, and has NPC miners and transport pilots etc), or Naboo Capital (puts down all the flower beds, fountains, paved streets, and stuff).
The city wall idea actually works becuase the cities can only extend to 450m and the city protected area is 500m out, so there is a 450m-500m gap the wall could go in without impacting building space. On smaller city classes it would fit just outside the current radius, and if a player building is there it doesn't spawn it...same way trees work.
If the devs did this, the database wouldn't have to track so many independent decoration objects (lightposts, fountains, statues, etc), because it would just treat them like the rocks and trees that it already handles so well. People would get their roadways and appropriately themed cities with NPCs and droids and make the city look alive or appropriate to what they are trying to build.
Ah well, like I said, pipe dream...
The ambience of a player city is entirely down to the skills of the mayor, and the community that lives there.
You should pick carefully:
* The location;
* The sort of people living there;
* The rules and regulations;
* The decorations you apply.
Darkfire has a fantastic ambience, people running around 24x7 and Entertainers running shifts in the Cantina around the clock. This is an MMORPG - the game is only the engine, it is down to us to create the content. Each day, we get more people migrating from different cities due to the lack of atmosphere where they were - many empty, desolate cities are the result of ghost citizens - a problem that will be eradicated with the next publish.
You can easily create the 'themes' your are talking about. Want an Imperial outpost? Put some Imperials bases around. Want a red light city, hire in lots of Entertainers. It's the Mayor's job!
That is my humble opinion as the mayor of the one of the biggest cities in my galaxy 
Well said, Havoclord...
In Last Hope, I've tried to keep harvesters, factories, etc OUT of the city, since I want it to be a haven in a rough wilderness.. an oasis, as you will...
But if a mining town is what someone wants... even though the harvies and factories would have to be player buildings (maybe as mayor, that "broken down harvester" would be a "rotation structure" that you'd be planting intending to just let it blow up? Expensive... but whatever you're into...)
It's doable. Just not "PC system friendly", I'd guess. But then again, aquariums weren't in the "plan" either.. but homes have them.
This is all true, but read the rest of the forum, and see people that want their city walls, and city streets, and how do you get things like shuttles flying overhead?
There are limits to what the game mechanics will allow.
It is easy to right it off and say "You should do more work on your city" well I am, but I look around and all cities are pretty much exactly the same. There's nothing that distinctly defines them as one thing or another.
And since we are a mining town, all our harvestors are out mining thank you 
Not going to waste any lots on making it look that way. Give me some 0 lot broken harvestors and I'll put them down, but again these all take up DB space for placement etc.
If the game system can be designed to include this stuff with minimum impact on DB, AND it gives all the players something they are asking for surely it warrants greater consideration?
PsychoticChipmunk wrote:
I would simply prefer them to add a few things over "themes". If we were given walls, streets, archways, bridges, and stairs I would be able to truly make a nice city that can fit the part I want it to. One other thing that is desperately needed, I feel, is for gardens to flatten the land rather then build it up. Rather then have that white thing extending downward why not make gardens work the same way as camps. That way they fite more into the town and aid the atmosphere more. Also giving us patio furniture and upping the decor limit would go a very very long way to making cities interesting. We also need player city specific buildings, primarilly skyscraper homes for Corellia (we need completely new homes anyway), large domed ones for Tat, and...well Naboo is pretty good actually, to make cities actually cities. You're right as it stands right now we are just the burbs outside of towns and not cities of our own right. However making everything a near cookie cutter by default is not the right way to go about it.
The thing I was trying to point out in my first post though, is that it is less unlikely we will be given more individual items to place down. This is due to the database and the fact it can't accomodate many items. It just generates lag and database bloat. This is why we have limits in the first place.
If we were given something that is more 'natural' to the system, then yes it will be random, we can't put things exactly where we want, but it does create the same effect of more 'items' inside the city that make it look and feel like a living city.
These 'items' would have to be handled in exactly the same way that trees, bushes, shrugs and rocks are already handled by the system. That is 'system assigned and managed'. Personally I'm also looking for more than bridges and stairs which are going to be real hard for them to do.
I do totally agree with you on the point of the gardens. Looking at the pictures on the website I was totally under the impression that they would mesh totally with the landscape, not stick out like buildings. I would love to see them handled like camps.