Maybe this is totally offtopic, if that's the case I apologize...

I'm playing under winnie a beautifull online game that is called simcountry (www.simcountry.com), here you are the president of an country or an ceo of an enterprise. It's very complcated and needs a good deal to learn it well.

However, there are two main disadvantages in this game:
1. Simcountry is NOT based on a real world situation and I think that is a missed opurtunity because it would the game far more enjoyeble if it was a little more realistic ...
2. There are 4 worlds, 1 payed world (golden rainbow-> about $5,- a month) and 3 free worlds. I always played on this free worlds that (however less(er) realistic and with less options) are a must to play! But now the makers of the game want to add a reset rule in the free worlds, so every 3 months they get resetted! Only in the Golden Rainbow this will be not implemented...

Please have a look for yourself at this game, it really is beautifull done!

Now my question (already ?!? ) :
Couldn't we (the open source community) make such a cool game? I really have 0 programming experience so it would be a while before I can enter this devellopment....but would the community have any interest in making such a game ?

Or *is* there already such a simming game around?
I'm eager to hear!

grtz

sure there is, lincity for example, http://www.floot.demon.co.uk/lincity.html

Lincity looks nice
However it is still quite underdevelloped, are there other projects or planned projects maybe?

Edit: The websites last update was in september 2001 ......
So I can assume that lincity died a silent dead ?

hmm, i do think there is a linux version of simcity 3000, although that woould be commercial, not freeware or shareware best of luck and sorry for taking so long to reply

ha, no problem....just happy that somebody responded

So, no continues project for a simming-country game huh? Maybe a good idea to start one myself....when I have enough programming skills

See ya in a few years!

I am playing with an idea of a multiplayer world simulation for some time already.
Not completely unlike Earth: 2025, or SimCountry, but with more accent on culture, politics, economics. I dream of a game where evil multinational corporations, big countries oppressing smaller nations, multilingual and multiethnical countries fit naturally.
You name some global problem - it's there.
It will make people more aware of these problems, but also may yield a very enjoyable gameplay.

Of course, all this needs to be open and free (both as speech and beer)

And yes, I have programming skills necessary, I just need a team and more ideas

You have been granted the digging award for digging very very very old postings!

But hey! Thank you for posting in it! I like to participate in your project if that is feaseble
I don't have the programming skills neccesery, but hey, I already have bought a good book about C
Just have to read it properly, when I have time...whenever that might be
But, lets start my role then in the debugging department

Simcountry, beware! Here are some Tux'es comming!

Hehe, that's an attitude
I believe we need ideas more than coding, though.
It's not C++ or any other language that decides the success, but great ideas.
There are tens of open source projects doing various MMORPGs and stuff for _years_ without much success. In my opinion, they just don't know what they want.
I definitely would not like to end like that. I say we need gather initial ideas, plan, play with prototype, replan, gather more ideas, gather initial players, launch second prototype, iterate...
But first of all, we need to stop hijacking this forum )
I may set up a project on SourceForge at least to keep discussion organized.
What do you think?

PS: bring more friends with you

I think just a new project has been born

Why should we reinvent the whole weel?
We have our mentors all over the internet!
I was inspired with some ideas of Simcountry, 1000ad, utopia and last but not least kings of chaos...
Ofcourse we musn't try to litterally copy them, that is lame and even contra productive for ourselves, because we are just morons if we did such a thing...
Okay, what does this Simulation needs?
* reconizeble but unknown pieces of Earth, (why not making an history sim at a later stage aswell? )
*Politics and Economics playing a major deal, not war, like those others...this sim much bring MMORPG's to a whole new level.
* why not making only a limited amount of countries? In that way not everyone can be an president/dictator/emperor/etc--> elections? revolutions? Are there farmers? Citizens? An government loyal Army?
* Different political systems!!! : That's what most irritated me about simcountry, you were stuck in the rules...if you wanted your country going to be wealthy, you HAD to be democratic/capitalistic.....I think this stinks....was the soviet union an democray or capitalist system? ...
* Expansion to space?
* A long time line! Playing sim in the 23rd century, like in simcountry or in the year 10 000 like in one of their subsims is not realistically... lets start with the very beginnings of civilisation: old Egypt like civ? Atlantis???
* a time passing of 1:1000 or 1 year in reality is 1000 years in the sim, that way we are assured that the sim continues for some time to come
* Having good servers! This is a weak point of the ever failing kings of chaos (KoC), maybe an open variant aswell? So that everyone can open their own channel
* a good interface: this is maybe a good idea to work out, it's kewl to have a landmap like in SimCountry (SC) but if you are barely able to see what's on it, you could aswell forget the whole thing...maybe inzoomeble charts?
* the last point of view is especially great when you are the leader of the country, but what if you are a citizen? an scientist? a warrior? etc? We ofcourse need to creat a revolutionary interface for them...

Well, that are just a few of my hopes and problems that come with this project...and again, I would NOT like to be this another war game! Politics and economics should balance eachother like in the real world...this won't attract much young ppl, but more ppl of an elder age, and they are more experienced in live and if they like the project they might participate in it aswell.....well, stop dreaming!
First things first, let's begin this thing!


Edit:
my 100th post! Free beer for everyone!

A mug of ale for me :)

What is your vision of the general gameplay?
Open-ended or time-limited?
Turn-based or mobility-based?
Will it require from players an hour daily to keep up to speed?
Or 10 minutes every hour? :)

BTW, I am in the middle of my first Utopia game, and just started playing SimCountry yesterday :)

Now to your ideas:
> * reconizeble but unknown pieces of Earth, (why not making an history sim at a later stage aswell? )

You mean real continents/countries/cultures?
Snapshot at what date? According to history written in which textbooks? ;)

> *Politics and Economics playing a major deal, not war, like those others...

Agree wholeheartedly.

>this sim much bring MMORPG's to a whole new level.

I'm confused :)

> * why not making only a limited amount of countries? In that way not everyone can be an president/dictator/emperor/etc--> elections? revolutions? Are there farmers? Citizens? An government loyal Army?

We need to provide an interesting gameplay at all levels, then.
If everything a farmer can do is digging his turf then nobody will play farmers.

> * Different political systems!!! : That's what most irritated me about simcountry, you were stuck in the rules...if you wanted your country going to be wealthy, you HAD to be democratic/capitalistic.....I think this stinks....was the soviet union an democray or capitalist system? ...

Was the SU wealthy? ;)
I live in Latvia, and I am old enough to remember Soviet times :)

> * Expansion to space?

Meaning on the surface of the planet or to the Moon?

> * A long time line! Playing sim in the 23rd century, like in simcountry or in the year 10 000 like in one of their subsims is not realistically... lets start with the very beginnings of civilisation: old Egypt like civ? Atlantis???

That might be very challenging...
The whole structure of the civilization was changing between ages... Industrial revolution was not just +10 to production :)
Requires a lot of research...
BTW, what is your background?
I am Master in Computer Science, I think this project requires some philosophers, historians, and economists (not that I skipped these lessons in school, hehe).
I am 26, living in Latvia (europeans should know where it is),
working for software company.

> * a time passing of 1:1000 or 1 year in reality is 1000 years in the sim, that way we are assured that the sim continues for some time to come

Not sure I understood this :(

> * Having good servers! This is a weak point of the ever failing kings of chaos (KoC), maybe an open variant aswell? So that everyone can open their own channel

Good hardware, bandwidth or software?

> * a good interface: this is maybe a good idea to work out, it's kewl to have a landmap like in SimCountry (SC) but if you are barely able to see what's on it, you could aswell forget the whole thing...maybe inzoomeble charts?

UI is one of the most important issues, agree.

> * the last point of view is especially great when you are the leader of the country, but what if you are a citizen? an scientist? a warrior? etc? We ofcourse need to creat a revolutionary interface for them...

My imagination is failing ;)

I am positive we need to find some exisiting community, it might take a while to build one ourselves. Do you have friends who share your enthusiasm?
I might have a couple...

Bed time here, will be back tomorrow :)

Ok, let's give you some answers abou what the heck I meant whith my visions

>What is your vision of the general gameplay?
>Open-ended or time-limited?
>Turn-based or mobility-based?
>Will it require from players an hour daily to keep up to speed?
>Or 10 minutes every hour?
hmmz, why not having both? We could setup different serversystems and having a different timeline on each of them

>BTW, I am in the middle of my first Utopia game, and just started playing >SimCountry yesterday
Good work! Have some inspiration!

>You mean real continents/countries/cultures?
>Snapshot at what date? According to history written in which textbooks?
Real and not real, fact and fiction Why not build a server system which begins at old Egypt times but has a totally open end? it should be interesting to see how history repeat itself (or not ofcourse...)
But why not begin with a fictional world, it should be lesser of a challenge in the beginning

>>this sim much bring MMORPG's to a whole new level.

>I'm confused
Well, what I meant is that if we get a good political/economical system online, we have tilted MMORPGing to a whole new level, don't we?

>We need to provide an interesting gameplay at all levels, then.
>If everything a farmer can do is digging his turf then nobody will play
>farmers.
Indeed! We need to think about that one...

>Was the SU wealthy?
>I live in Latvia, and I am old enough to remember Soviet times
No offense intended! : Well, it WAS a super power, wasn't it? That it citizens were suppressed doesn't count....(this should make the game a lot more interesting btw, we are just reflecting the real world ). That the former SU are now a bunch of 3rd world countries doesn't matter ...
Btw, you know aswell as me that the SU was a dictatorial country, not a communism... maybe it should be interesting to see what it takes to make a true communism/socialism?

>Meaning on the surface of the planet or to the Moon?
Why not going further then that? Why not let humans build structures in space itself? or warping thoughout space (that would make an interesting startrek sim )

>BTW, what is your background?
>I am Master in Computer Science, I think this project requires some
>philosophers, historians, and economists (not that I skipped these lessons
>in school, hehe).
>I am 26, living in Latvia (europeans should know where it is),
>working for software company.
O yes, I forgot to introduce myself: I'm Emil Jacobs, I'm studying Physics in the Netherlands were I live and was born I'm 18 years old.
I agree wholely! We need to find some people that are educated in a broad range to get this thing moving!
And yes, I know were Latvia is located

>Not sure I understood this
Well, I'm comming back at it... we need to slow things down a bit if we are using different sims in the future....maybe 1 real year could be a century in the game? (1:100)

>Good hardware, bandwidth or software?
Having it all!
The serversoftware what we use should be open source scource so everyone can start it's own gameserver
Bandwidth is another problem what we need to challenge indeed...

>My imagination is failing
Mines is aswell... We need to contemplate on that one

>I am positive we need to find some exisiting community, it might take a while to build one ourselves. Do you have friends who share your enthusiasm?
>I might have a couple...
Indeed! We need to find another community! Maybe we lookup the communities of the other open source games about you were talking before? And I think I've a few friends that would participate aswell

Btw, do you have ICQ, Jabber or Yahoo ?
Mines are:
ICQ: 342044027
Jabber: Q-collective@jabber.org
yahoo: q_collective@yahoo.com

See you on IM!

And if you don't wanna use those IM's, why not IRC?
I'm waiting in irc.tweakers.net #opensim

Edit:
I'm of now @ 14:00 hours CET, I might return in the evening, see ya!

Hmmz, pitty ... I've waited several hours in that irc room, no one that came in

Maybe better luck tomorrow!

Umm, sorry, I was working overtime yesterday...
I've contacted you by ICQ though.
I am online in ICQ 9:00-18:00 GMT+2, and use web up to 21:00 usually.

A VERY interesting game, and it comes quite close to what we want
However, it has it's own flaws...
1. It isn't open source
2. There is no option to wage war at all! (at least I didn't found any)... a bit of weaponsnoise must be possible huh
3. IMHO it has to few game options, you can't do anything you really want
4. A pure text game, no pictures of your country, nothing
5. Were is the research button ? ;P