> You’re putting your time in now, so you’ll be ready to start fresh when the game releases into early access (“ETA sometime between Q4 2024 and Q2 2025”).
'till I went back and looked at the publish date for the article. Might be worth appending a [2024] to the title.
Looks like lots of fun though, mellow and very zen. Suspect it's just the right time to learn about it too, with the release date considered and the amount of polish that implies.
The roadmap has both early access and 1.0 goals. I just wrapped up terrain generation/modification, so all that's left is to add in the municipal services, funds, and prob. street parking. Then wrap up the overlays.
I'm the developer of Metropolis 1998. Unfortunately the launch date in the article has come and passed, but that's how things are in game development world. :D
Some tech talk:
- Custom engine (C++) using SFML for the graphics framework, and SQLite for database/data oriented design
- True isometric engine. No 3D models, everything you see is hand drawn sprites (made to look like a 3D render ha)
- Since sorting sprites is O(N^2), I figured out a way to create a depth map for each sprite to depth sort on the GPU
- Tons of work went into the pathing code to make it efficient, since this is the traditional bottleneck in these types of games. The game can handle around 100K units and vehicles moving around (on one CPU core)
- The team is just me and a couple part time contractors for the art and buildings.
- Most recent update (some cool skyscraper construction): https://x.com/YesboxStudios/status/1978928991663776224
- Fun fact: the entire game is currently 27 MB.
- Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
"Screenshots suggest cities more complex than suburban plots are possible in Metropolis 1998."
Which sounds good, but naturally, all such simulators bake in assumptions about what good urban planning is. These are the kinds that get rewarded by the simulator. SimCity bakes in the awful postwar fetish for suburban sprawl and rigid zoning, for example. Perhaps it isn't always done explicitly - game developers could very well be absorbing prevailing sensibilities and expectations about urban planning unwittingly, for example. Most people today think suburban sprawl is just a fact. They even find it desirable, as that is what they are expected to want or what they grew up with themselves.
What I would like to see is a simulator based on traditional principles of urban planning or the 15 minute neighborhood or whatever. This could have the benefit of stirring the imagination of future urban planners to look beyond broken postwar patterns.
(Side note: the Venice Biennale this year features more examples of sustainable architecture and green adaptations of existing buildings, which is a welcome change compared to the usual practice of the weird architecture Olympics where vain architects compete to maximize how bizarre they can make a building, which is not to say beautiful or useful.)
People really discount the complexity of doing isometric — it's a surprisingly nuanced thing to implement, especially if you want inner-tile sorting/depth, tiles that occlude others, etc.
For sorting for me I ended up using geometry shaders with fixed layers to basically emit objects on top of each other and render everything in one pass. It makes things like the editor and runtime incredible fast, which looks like you did as well! Happy to see more games with this style, I think the look is unbeatable.
glenstein•1h ago
mikepurvis•1h ago