Hy, I was thinking about creating a sim city like game to play over a network. I was thinking you could be able to play over the internet against everyone else who owns the game and a connection, but the problem I run into is this: sim city is a game you often save, and continue to play the next day, but something like this is quite difficult if you are linking worlds over the internet in real time. Has anyone got a suggestion for such a game? 1c4i4

You could probably do it with a persistant universe setting. Much like the massively multiplayer games out there now, (EQ AC mankind) where everything stays active even when you aren''t around. This would require a dedicated server that operated around the clock however, but, this would probably work for such a game.


"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the human mind's inability to correlate all of its contents."
-H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Hey,

If you''ll have every player own a different patch of land, you might just put a player''s city who is not online on inactive.

If you want everyone to build on the same land, then you''ll most likely have more problems since the player who stays online the most could just build the place full with his buildings.

One of the things you could do to counter that is the combination of "town hall" and "tax".

Let me explain: You give a new player a starting location, represented by his town hall. He can only expand his city so that the additional building is not too far from his existing city like the way Transport Tycoon used to build its cities. Or like you build a base in Command & Conquer (beware of the sandbagging cheat that could be done with roads in a simcity game ) Then you could decide that time in the game follows time in real life, more or less. If the citizens pay their taxes every real week for example, you as player-major would have to do with your fund for the rest of the week, thereby prohibiting an all to active player from overrunning the available land.

I hope this will help you shape your ideas.


******************************
Stefan Baert

On the day we create intelligence and consciousness, mankind becomes God.
On the day we create intelligence and consciousness, mankind becomes obsolete...
******************************