Poll: How important are people?

[JoeStrout]

Yes, that's a purposely provocative subject line.    The real question is: how important is it to see little people and vehicles moving around in your cities?

Right now, we draw buildings, trees, water, etc., but we don't actually draw the people.  You know they're there because they're constantly Squawking about things (and in version 0.21, their squawks will be even more connected to what's in your colony).  But you don't see them.



There is a rationale for this: the time scale is such that one simulated day takes about 30 seconds of real time.  That's a speedup of 2,880.  So a person walking at 3.5 mph (about 1.5 m/sec) would be moving 10,000 mph, or 4,500 meters per second.  Or, about 75 meters per frame if you're running at 60 frames/second.

So if we're realistic about the time scale, you'd never be able to see them.  It's all just happening too dang fast.

But the real reason we haven't done it yet is that it's hard.  Unlike some other city simulation games, which have a pretty restricted camera angle, in High Frontier the angle between the camera and the ground can be extreme, due to the curvature of the habitat.  This makes it quite hard to use common graphics tricks, like 2D images of people seen from various angles, to maintain performance.  And if we try to use real 3D models for hundreds of little people, it's likely to drag the frame rate way down.  There are probably tricks we can do, but it's going to take a fair amount of time to make it work well.

The original SimCity didn't draw people either, or even individual cars really; they just drew an animated texture of cars moving, in proportion to the calculated traffic density on each road segment.



We are going to add vehicle-bearing roads as an option in High Frontier, but you probably won't use them much, because cars really don't make a lot of sense in a space colony.  But we could do something similar for pedestrian/bicycle/etc. traffic, perhaps drawing colorful motion-blurred people whizzing by.

Or, we could bite the bullet and attempt to draw individual people going about their business, ignoring the discrepancy in the timescale (because hey, it is a game after all).

What do you all think?  We really want to hear your opinion!

[JoeStrout]

To get an idea what it might look like, we threw a model in at the appropriate scale.  (Actually, it's about 20% bigger than true scale, so she would have to duck when going through doors... but again, it's a game!)

Here she is, with the camera zoomed in as close as it can get:



And here's a more typical working distance:



Of course, with lots of these little people moving around, it wouldn't look quite so lonely.

This was taken on a 1080p monitor, so that first image above is about as big as they would get — about 20 pixels tall.  (We'd probably render them at something like 64 pixels tall, and then scale them down, to give us some extra wiggle room.)

[Pops]

How about trying a simple primitive shape. I don't know that I would need to see a fully articulated person. They could be traveling in little personal hover pods.

[petkovas]

I am with Pops. Just use simple colored shapes (dots, triangles, lines) for the different groups of people. Or hover pod sprites.

Anything that do not slows down the game.

[JoeStrout]

OK, thanks guys, that's good feedback. We'll see what we can do!

[KirstenMoseng]

It would be neat (although absolutely not necessary) if we can click on the Squawker messages of the people, and upon clicking your view would shift to the physical "location" of that person (or blurry texture representing same). So if a Squawker says "it's a shame they didn't install any docking ports," you could click on that, and it would zoom you to a random person that is near where a docking port might go. Crazy thought. :-)

[JoeStrout]

That's not such a crazy thought... in fact it makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the idea!