Drawing Board

As you might expect, recent events here in Japan have had me thinking a great deal on the subject of disasters, and with the immediate crisis receding I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about the role of disasters in the game. Disasters have been a part of city builders since the very first Sim City (Cities XL was a notable exception to this trend). While at first glance they might seem like something of a tacked-on feature, a way to experience the perverse enjoyment of tearing down what we just built, disasters, if executed properly, play a larger role than is immediately apparent in shaping city development. In fact, allowing disasters requires a good deal of forethought in almost every area of the simulation, and is probably one of the trickiest things in the game to model.

In today's Drawing Board post I want to expand on the ideas I covered in a couple of previous topics: namely Lots and Structures, Procedural Generation, and Services Coverage. Specifically, I'd like to look beyond structures and talk about the other parts of a lot. While buildings might make up the most noticeable features of our urban landscapes, a lack of attention to what constitutes the space between them can thoroughly negate their visual impact, no matter how much care we lavish on their details. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, lest we outrun the Disclaimer:

In today's addition to the Drawing Board series (which incidentally, I decided to stop numbering; I have a ton of ideas for these articles, and I think it will get a bit unwieldy to be writing "Drawing Board XXXVII" before every title) I want to look in more detail at a feature which I touched on briefly back in my article about accessibility: a system for creating and editing presets for roads. But rather than just being limited to roads, I think this same system can also be applied to other network types, and even to zones, parks, and any other kind of object in the game. I call this system "option trees", as it mainly consists of a nested series of options (either number values, on/off toggles, or selectable line items.) As I mentioned in the Accessibility article, there is nothing particularly revolutionary about option trees, but they have the potential to add depth and power to the UI while retaining a high ease of use. But before I get started, the Disclaimer:

Today's article was a little hard to categorize; I was thinking a bit more about modularity (which, if you've been paying attention, you'll be aware I never shut up about.) More specifically, I had some thoughts I felt I should record on how the kind of modularity we want to achieve could be accomplished from a technical standpoint. So, while I did eventually decide to file this under "Drawing Board," since the actual implementation is open to change, I also want to note that the underlying principles here are important; namely, that the game should be modular, that it should be easily moddable, and that it should be easy to upgrade without breaking older modules (in other words, backward compatible). One other caveat: In addition to the standard Drawing Board disclaimer, I want to add a further one that I'm not a by any means a software designer and what I'm talking about here might be laughably naive to a professional; If that's you, please chime in and set me straight, I'd love to hear some technical insights! Oh, and speaking of the Disclaimer: