by pinback » Sun Mar 15, 2015 7:58 pm
One of the true joys of gaming, and there are very, very few of those, is when something you took for granted in a game, something you gave no thought at all, does something unexpected and spectacular.
Cities: Skylines provided me one of those this evening.
The game features rivers, you see. The purpose of the rivers, I assume, is to look nice, and give you a way to pump water into your city, and maybe give boats a way to get to your harbor. Fine. They're not the nicest looking rivers in gaming, but they're, you know, fine, for background scenery.
And then I built a dam.
Like everything else in the game, it looked very nice, and the little people and cars did their little people and car things on it, and it provided some extra electricity to the city, and everyone was happy. For about 30 seconds. That's when I saw a "warning icon" I'd never seen before, and it was over pretty much every building near the dam. Mousing over the icon revealed that these buildings were flooding. Flooding? Why are th---
The river that I had mistaken for background scenery had risen, due to the dam, and was now flowing all over the nice quiet residential area alongside it.
Now look, in any other game, this would be a matter of statistics. But in Cities: Skylines, the river is an actual flowing volume of liquid. There is no apparent "flooding method" being called in the code anywhere. The liquid is programmed to act like liquid. And so, when it gets high enough, it just spills into the city.
In a panic, I removed the dam, and the water acted just like you'd expect water to act... an enormous wave poured down from where the dam had been, sloshing about to and fro, eventually leveling back out further down the river...
The screenshot above was from a couple minutes later -- I was too busy being amazed to capture the actual thing as it happened -- but you can still see the ramifications of adding and then removing that dam. Looks like a goddamn wave pool.
And then it all settles back down, and the water -- being water -- eventually started to drain back out of the city, once the river level subsided.
An incredible amount of detail implemented for something seemingly so tangential to the whole thing. But that's how the whole game is implemented, so after a while, it stops being surprising, and you just smile.
An astonishing achievement.
[img]http://parrish.club/csriver.jpg[/img]
One of the true joys of gaming, and there are very, very few of those, is when something you took for granted in a game, something you gave no thought at all, does something unexpected and spectacular.
Cities: Skylines provided me one of those this evening.
The game features rivers, you see. The purpose of the rivers, I assume, is to look nice, and give you a way to pump water into your city, and maybe give boats a way to get to your harbor. Fine. They're not the nicest looking rivers in gaming, but they're, you know, fine, for background scenery.
And then I built a dam.
Like everything else in the game, it looked very nice, and the little people and cars did their little people and car things on it, and it provided some extra electricity to the city, and everyone was happy. For about 30 seconds. That's when I saw a "warning icon" I'd never seen before, and it was over pretty much every building near the dam. Mousing over the icon revealed that these buildings were flooding. Flooding? Why are th---
The river that I had mistaken for background scenery had risen, due to the dam, and was now flowing all over the nice quiet residential area alongside it.
Now look, in any other game, this would be a matter of statistics. But in Cities: Skylines, the river is an actual flowing volume of liquid. There is no apparent "flooding method" being called in the code anywhere. The liquid is programmed to act like liquid. And so, when it gets high enough, it just spills into the city.
In a panic, I removed the dam, and the water acted just like you'd expect water to act... an enormous wave poured down from where the dam had been, sloshing about to and fro, eventually leveling back out further down the river...
The screenshot above was from a couple minutes later -- I was too busy being amazed to capture the actual thing as it happened -- but you can still see the ramifications of adding and then removing that dam. Looks like a goddamn wave pool.
And then it all settles back down, and the water -- being water -- eventually started to drain back out of the city, once the river level subsided.
An incredible amount of detail implemented for something seemingly so tangential to the whole thing. But that's how the whole game is implemented, so after a while, it stops being surprising, and you just smile.
An astonishing achievement.