Notice window welcome scenario descriptions warnings zone status window display live map picture reconfigure to support various tasks editors for chaging zone invest $ => develop zone => increase land value population density crime prevention environmental cleanup enhance growth editor pie menus demand gauge budget multi user dialog hour glass timeout auto budget toggle pause/resume toggle (to allow changing budget while simulation is running) map drag rectangles to pan map views menus on palette generate terrain mode lengend rearrange switch overlays dynamic zone finder graph 2x3 palelet, 10/120 years double buffering communicate data. hard wire in c? evaluation historical graphs? surveyor other editors dynamic zone finder washboard filter sliders get key dialog new city -- or "use map"? "lobby" name, level scenario selection random terrain generator player can propose a city by selecting a scenario, loading a city, or generating a random terrain. all players must vote unanimously on a city to play selecting a new city clears all votes players can press next/previous to page through proposed city history you can go back to randomly generated terrains, because it saves the random number generator seed clears votes, proposes new or old city terrain editor todo: Integrate terrain editor code into map editor, and have a button on the new city map to run in terrain editor mode. Terrain editor will include only terrain editing tools, plus random terrain generation interface, and simulator will be paused. print dialog Newspaper printing and publishing metaphore. Optionally save a snapshot of the city state, to link to from the newspaper article. Publish in newspaper, print on paper, save to disk, copy to clipboard, add to journal, blog, etc. Allow user to enter text to be printed along with an image, like blogging. Can print any map or editor view with data overlay and chalk drawings, entire map (fit on one page, or split across multiple pages), or other windows like graph, evaluation, notices, messages, chat log, etc. Export text content as html with embedded images. Make an html/image city overview and journal, like The Sims family view and scrapbook. Printable windows and views should have a "print" button or function that pops up a pie menu of possible destinations, for quickly making snapshots in your journal, etc. Publish illustrated newspapers in the game, like The Sims storybook, with newspaper articles composed of pictures of the city, text excerpts from chat logs, etc. A player could be a "reporter" interviewing other player politicians via chat, before and after the vote on building a stadium, asking them to make their case for or against the stadium, and publish the interviews in the game's newspaper, the "Micropolis Journal". Players can browse each others newspapers over the net, and download the city snapshots the articles write about. Flash: Monster invades Micropolis, near nuclear reactor! (story and link to saved city so you can read the story, then bring up the city and play it live from the point the story was written) quit confirm multi player logout save dialog load dialog network city browsing and sharing "What-If?" history tree. Publish your cities on the net. Download other peoples cities. Use a URL to point to a saved city. Grab a live snapshot of somebody's running city. Checkpoint and branch timelines. Save a city back to the point where it branched, to create an alternate history that other players can load. Multiple players build a tree of saved cities with branching alternate histories. Like the parallel universes in Niven's All the Myriad Ways. Rewind any city up the tree and select available alternate histories at each branch point. Play back alternate histories edit by edit, stop them at any point and take over, making a new branch point at that location. When you play together in the same city, you have to discuss and agree with other players about what to do, and convince other people of your ideas. You can try an idea out yourself, by branching your own private history, giving your idea a try, and reporting back to the other players in the main shared timeline what happened (with links to the save file and history so other players can see for themselves). GUI: Branching history tree outline viewer of saved files. Drag and drop a history point into the chat log which other players can click on to open a live view playing that history. status control views players new player new view Keep and export logs of simulation values r, c, i demand evaluation tax rate, collected funds funding levels event logs simulation events extend simulator to log all interesting simulation events, so newspaper reporters can write stories about them editing commands Log enough information to replay all edits against a save file to recreate same city. This is the key to high level multi player protocol between multiple parallel lock-step simulations, like The Sims Online, better than using low level x11 to implement the multi player interface. Treat any editing command as a "what-if" branch point where it could go another way. Give players an easy interface to replay a simulation up to a branch point, and and re-make the decision, to see how it would turn out differently. chat logs everything else of course web service to access logs export logs as xml for programs or csv for spreadsheets import and export chalk overlay as vector drawing support image overlays with transparency (begs for photoshop-like drawing interface)? Careful how far down that road you go, because you could use it to paint the image of a happy emerald green city over a dreary industrial wasteland. The simple white chalk overlay has the advantage that you always know what's chalk and what's not. opml outline with geo-codes store city overlay information in opml register the corners of the map with real-world lat/long values allow rotation and scaling but not arbitrary shearing or distortion register nodes of the opml outline at lat/long points and areas on the map what's a good way to associate an opml node with an arbitrary area on the map? an attribute with a polygon in lat/long coordinates? a list of rectangles in lat/long coordinates? a list of tiles in row/col coordinates? associate geo-coded opml nodes with features on the map like zones, buildings, streets, neighborhoods use opml nodes to give names to features, take notes about them, attach pictures to them, write stories about them, support overlapping features, so roads can cross, and each tile can belong to any number of features. allow users to plant signs on the map, like micropolis 2000. represent signs with an opml node. signs can contains arbitrary opml outlines with links to other opml nodes like a sign at a crossroad, linked to the nodes representing each road, and the regions of the city that the roads bring you to. use opml to write a city guide attach chalk overlays and signs to opml nodes so you can show and hide them hierarchically head window Represents root window of Micropolis application to TCL, and ties all the other windows together. Contains the application's main menus and scrolling message and chat log. An artifact of the way TCL/Tk/X11 works. With another gui, might be the main base window that contains all other subwindows. In X11, we depend on the user's chosen X11 window manager to manage all the separate windows. In a better world (Sugar) Micropolis should let users save and restore windows configurations and multiple views, tailored for various roles and tasks. When a new player joins, the select a role to play, which will grant them permissions and customize the interface, opening and positioning the appropriate windows and tools for their role. Each role supports various tasks that might themselves reconfigure the user interface. User interface configurations should be selected based on the role and the task. Users first select a role that stays the same (forever or most of the time) and which grants them a set of permissions. Each role supports a set of tasks (like Eclipse's "aspects"), which users may switch between, to reconfigure the user interface. Players can hold elections to grant each other roles (like mayor, treasurer, planner, builder, reporter, god, etc). Ownershop This vastly complicates the game, so I didn't try it, but I wrote down some ideas. Consider the screen area of the user interface it would require to enable the user to micro-manage all the ownership issues, in terms of the number of acres of city map it would cover. It seemed like it would be too complicated to be fun. Even if it could be magically implemented with a simple gui, would it be any fun? That said, here are some ideas. Ownership plane: 0 => nobody, 1-256 => user id (note: Can't save ownership user ids into save files if we want multiple players to enter and exit independently from the city itself, or if we want to support an open-ended, possibly large number of players over time. As I said, this gets complicated pretty fast, without a lot of beneficial fun.) Players have separate funds. This raises issues about: who gets paid how much of the city's overall income, and who pays for city services? Could have a main shared city budget, then certain players can be appropriated funds from that budget earmarked to perform various tasks. But again, that gets pretty complicated, and how is it fun? Competition or cooperation? Should we attempt to make the game support competition between players, or is it better to keep it cooperation-oriented, by requiring unanimous votes, sharing the budget, etc. I think it's simpler and more educational to give players the freedom to misbehave, while building in social networking and accountability, to let players discuss, negotiate, make and break deals, establish reputations, reward good behavior, and punish bad behavior, by developing real-world social interaction skills. What fun would politics be if you couldn't have scandals? Land value higher resolution land value grid effected by sales asking price Tiles are owned by someone, and may be for sale, and given an asking price by the owner. Requires complex user interface for selecting tiles, assigning price, etc. How is that fun? Groups of tiles: parcels of land, for sale all at once, to highest bidder. M.U.L.E.-like multi player auctions for land. Developers can build on empty tiles that are for sale, and they're bought automatically. What's so fun about being a developer? Nothing to do after setting the price of the land. Buyers can offer to buy something that doesn't have a price, which initiates an M.U.L.E. dialog with the owner, and allows other players to join in the auction, submitting their own bids. Transaction tool - $ (or local currency symbol) select group of cells negitiate deals with the owners automatically calculates default land value suggested price (upon which the tax rate based) based on modified land value through worth communication window so people can negotiate and talk irc-like chat rooms where people can have a side discussion private person-to-person messages calculate evaluation for each player Independent and combined scores and statistics. Hard to define what this means in terms of the current simulation. Would have to deeply change the way the simulation works, but then would it still be fun? Zone ownership. Develop Micropolis into a more Monopoly-like game: SimCitopoly. A player can own power plants and other utilities, and makes money by selling electricity and other services to other players. Zones don't develop until someone buys them. Own residential => collect rent, pay maintainence. Own industrial, commercial => collect income, pay expenses. All zone owners pay taxes. Multi player editig tools Recast editing tools/cursors as sprites/robots. Navigate tools around the map like a turtle/car/helicopter. Also move tools with the mouse. Alternative interfaces: Tool cursor follows cursor all the time. (current "traditional" implementation) Relegates pie menu and panning to secondary status: shift/option keys. Move tool while shift or option key is down. Makes it possible to put the pie menu or pan tool on the primary unshifted mouse click/drag gesture. Pick up and drag tool. Properties the interface should support: Direct manipulation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation Continuous representation of objects of interest, and rapid, reversible, incremental actions and feedback. Real-world metaphores for objects and actions. Allow a user to directly manipulate objects presented to them, using actions that correspond at least loosely to the physical world. Pick up, drag and manipulate and edit first class objects like tools, sprites, robots, avatars, etc. First person. Represent users with in-game avaters. Relative polar coordinate system. (Logo turtle graphics.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics Drive the helicopter around on the map. Keys to relatively rotate clockwise, counter-clockwise. Keys to turn to absolute directions (N/S/E/W/NW/NE/SW/SE keypad). Keys to go forward and backward in the current direction. Keys to strafe left and right of the current direction. Also a remote control panel with graphical control for the mouse. iPhone app that lets you remotely control the helicopter (or whatever) form your iPhone. Doesn't even need to support editing the map. Just fly around and chat. (voice chat?) Operate avatar with keyboard, game controller, control panel, etc. Natural language based. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_user_interface Text command interface in chat window. Fully usable via keyboard input and speech recognition. Conversational interface with intelligent, helpful "chat bots", as well as on-line teachers and mentors. Educators and entertainers can write interesting, informative personality simulation scripts for chat bots, that interactively chat with students playing the game, answer frequently asked questions, perform various utilities (like a banker or loan shark you can borrow money from), and refer them to web links, wiki pages, discussion groups, etc, for more information and interaction with real people. Scripts can be triggered by pattern matching on chat text from player, or monitoring game events and conditions. Chat bots can remember things about players, and continuously tell long stories and share personalized knowledge over a long period of time. Text based command interface inspired by ideas from Jeff and Aza Raskin's work. The Humane Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface The book puts forward a large number of interface design suggestions, from fairly trivial ones to radical ones. The overriding theme is that current computer interfaces are often poor and set up users to fail, as a result of poor planning (or lack of planning) by programmers and a lack of understanding of how people actually use software. Ubiquity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox) Ubiquity, an add-on for Mozilla Firefox, is a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages. It also allows Web users to create new commands without requiring much technical background. Multi-player tools that require more than one person to operate. The X11 multi player version required players to vote on expensive zones including stadiums, seaports, nuclear power plants, coal power plants and airports. When a player places an expensive zone, it is not immediately drawn on the map. Instead, a shadow is cast over the tiles where it would be placed, and the zone is animated bouncing up and down above the shadow. This draws the user's attention, and makes it obvious that the zone has not been "plugged in" yet. A "voting dialog" opens up in a window, that says "Don has proposed to build a nuclear power plant for $5000. Do you support that proposal?", with an animated view of the bouncing building, and a "YES" and "NO" button. Or a hand with a thumb, that you can turn up or down (a two item pie menu). Besides pressing the "YES" button, There is a shorthand way to vote yes to a proposal: select the same tool, and draw the same zone in the same place. When enough people have voted for the proposal (unanimous), the zone lowers down, plugs into place, and starts simulating. Ideas for new design for multi player building tools: It takes several people to agree to buy an airport, and where to put it. In-game voting dialog, around the proposed site of a building. Like the bouncing buildings in the X11 multi player game, but with a in-game voting interface on the map, instead of in a separate dialog. (direct instead of indirect manipulation) When you place an airport, it doesn't actually get built immediately. It just places a "proposal" hovering over the map, represented by a suitably ghosted image of the airport, floating up and down, with adjacent text describing the proposal and voting buttons. I think this is simpler and more "local" than the X11 voting interface, since the text and voting controls are drawn over the map next to the zone, instead of displayed them in a separate window. Also, several proposals can be going on at the same time at different (or the same!) places on the map, which the X11 version did not support.