freecity / News: Recent posts

The biggest change is that the game can now save&load. For the moment the path is hardcoded but making that flexible will be easy.
Apart from that I did quite alot of Javadocs, translated most of the game to German, fixed some bugs and did some general cleaning.
Next on the list: multi-square buildings, and with that some major rewriting especially of the endMonth code.

Hi everyone,
Here is the new version of freecity. As always, please send feedback (by forum, mail, icq, msn, whatever).

This version again brings quite a lot of changes, the biggest one being research. It is (like alot
of other stuff as well) basically just a placeholder to get the structure in place but can now be
extended very easily.

Other important changes:
Moved sources from directory "newswing" to "src"
Moved most of the data off into Data.java, made the game (mostly) available in German now
Added a messagebar to fcframe
Added Map.dumpWholeGame Map.dumpGlobalMapValues for testing, these will also be used by save/load
The output is now in a parameter=value format
Changed building details methods to parameter=value format
Fixed a few bugs
Did only some quick&dirty testing.

This version brings quite a lot of new/fixed features and many clean ups again. I also started javadocing stuff better.
Apart from the code I also updated the readme and the webpage to match whats going on in the code.

These are the main new/fixed features:
growth - now depends properly on desire. only thing missing is schooling and shrinking the levels of buildings.
zoned buildings - made subclasses Residential and Employment to Zoned.
Removed ppl from zoned and introduced pop and jobs respectively in the new classes.
power and water cuts
schooling - added primary and secondary schools, included that in the desire calculation for residential

This is a pretty big version really. The biggest portion of the changes was to move the
storage of the current game state from arrays in Map to objects of class Building (or its
subclasses). I also moved the static game data (names, max population, pathes to images, etc.)
to these new classes. In the process I added water which was very very easy with the new
data structures.
I also mostly implemented growth now but I just wanted to get this version out as the missing
bits are minor and the finished bits are huge. Note that I removed year for the moment but will
re-implement it later (but not as a seperate variable, what a stupid idea...).
Please also see the detailed changelogs and/or svn commits 51 to 56.
Note that the readme and webpage are still outdated, I'll be doing that (and some other such
things) shortly I think.

This version contains an initial implementation of commercial and industrial buildings and zones and employment. I somehow seem to have broken residential growth in the process...
But v0.19 will have desirability and a much better (and generic for all zones) growth system so I won't bother fixing the old growth code.

Please send comments/suggestions/flames!

After a long break I sat down for a few days again and implemented electricity and residential growth from low through medium to high buildings.
The code is also much cleaner I'd say but I still got some cleaning to do.
I'd be very interested to hear comments particularly on the Data class and the data structures in Map.

Next on the list is probably industrial zones&buildings, jobs/employment and desirability.
Expect more soon!

Restarted from scratch, again. When I started implementing multi-square buildings I realised how many calls will have to be made all the time, and how slow that'll probably be. Also it's not exactly easy to read such code. So I decided to basically forget object-orientation and just store all the data in a few nice, simple and rather efficient arrays.
In the conversion process I reorganised building into a more sensible manner, and bulldoze now de-zones if there's no building on the square.
Growth up to medium works properly now. Also the buildings dont randomly change around when they reach their max pop anymore.
Basically this version has the same functionality as 0.14, except it's much nicer to work with, more efficient, and less buggy. Oh and theres a lot less javadocs, but the code is much simpler anyways. I'll write the javadocs at some point in the future.

Started this from scratch again after version 0.10, and now its already effectively got more working functionality. Now you can build roads and trodden pathes, designate low/medium/high residential zones and change from month to month. The zones will then develop into low density buildings, and if you made med/high zones, into medium density buildings. No high density buildings yet.

Also the code is much simpler now, previously it was full of variables and methods I put in just in case, making many changes needlessly time-consuming and tedious. The new code I think is equally clean, just has less API.... read more

I finally got around to adding the first file releases, namely v0.03, 0.04 and 0.09
v0.03 and 0.04 are merely for reference, but v0.09 is the current version of the game. It is now possible to build roads and trodden pathes. Stand by for more :)