[Uriopass]

Hi, I'm the main developer of Egregoria.

I did not expect to end up on hackernews that early. While I've been working on this project on and off for 3 years it is still in its infancy. I have so many things I want to rewrite, so many features missing even for the most basic game loop. So many 3D models I have to make.

And so little time! Working on this as a side project with a full time job has been hard at times. I do not recommend making city builders :D

I wish I anticipated the attention so I would have given the README bit more love.

Anyway, I will try to answer any questions in the comments.

[gaudystead]

Hey there! I'm just here to say... Keep up the great work! I love city building games and am quite excited to see yours once you've had more time to put into it. Don't let it be the death of you though! I'm patient and appreciative for you putting some coolness out into the world. :)

[Uriopass]

Thank you for the kind words, very much appreciated.

[dmvdoug]

Honestly, you’re doing great. I think the best things I see here are precisely the ones that aren’t “ready for HN yet.”

[Uriopass]

Thank you! Could you elaborate on what things you found best? As to me, almost none of the project is ready for HN yet :D

[jimmySixDOF]

Nice !! Please check out Spectra City if you are not alread aware they are a fully CC0 project built for WebGL (WebXR), although I think for now they started on a platform called Spatial.io & my impression is they are closely tied to the real built environment or proposed so as in a way for the local community to active participate on a new city block restoration project as an example.

https://www.spectracities.com/

[Uriopass]

I have to say I'm confused by this. After looking through their website I do not really understand what Spectra City is about or how I can get involved.

[mnky9800n]

> Spectra is a cross-platform, open-source community where physical placemakers and virtual worldbuilders come together to create sustainable, human-centered, and technologically progressive urbanization.

How can it be any less obvious what Spectra is. Haha.

[DixieDev]

I feel genuinely insane trying to parse this site. It's a miracle that there's no mention of Web3.

[mnky9800n]

Oh I just assumed this was all on the blockchain.

[jimmySixDOF]

You guys are a little behind. Web3 is dropping the Metaverse and moving on to AI now.

[andybak]

> built for WebGL (WebXR)

Seems it's built mainly for spatial.io which has WebXR support but also native apps for iOS, Android and Quest.

(I say this because the performance is probably better on the native apps)

[NegativeLatency]

Really enjoyed playing a bit of it, cool project!

It would be cool to have more bike/pedestrian/train/mass transit transportation options available, instead of cars and trucks being the default option. Also tooltips would be really helpful.

I feel like there's almost enough here that you could do steam/itchio.

[Uriopass]

Public transportation is definitely planned, although it's a lot of work. Cars + trucks + trains are the minimal set of transport methods to allow anything to go anywhere.

I love tooltips! Thank you for the suggestion, I have opened an issue.

>I feel like there's almost enough here that you could do steam/itchio.

I think it's way too early for this. As people say the last 20% takes 80% of the time. There's a lot of systems I've neglected for an actual release. It probably needs a few years more work before any kind of "real" release for players instead of developers.

[fnordpiglet]

Awesome to see a Rust based game. What are your thoughts on the state of rust for games and games working in 3d?

[Uriopass]

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

[sundarurfriend]

I thought your comment meant this was somehow based on Rust the game. I was wondering if it had such a flexible modding system to enable things like this!

[tamimio]

What’s your motivation to make it?

[Uriopass]

I spend a lot of time in public transportation looking out the window, thinking about the mechanics of society. I have always liked simulations so I thought: Why not try to simulate what I see? Watching the simulation from above of people going to supermarkets, going to work, trains delivering goods and such. Creating your own city and watching patterns emerge would certainly feels great.

A lot like watching little ants going around doing their business. This idea is also explored in one of the books of the Ants trilogy from Bernard Werber (I think?) where a society simulation is used to try out advertising campaigns.

[culopatin]

What knowledge would you want your partners to have to help you accelerate the project?

[Uriopass]

All aspects of the game need more work, I think anyone that ever worked near the video-game space could help.

- 3D assets

- Audio assets

- UI/UX design

- Low-level graphics shenanigans (platform support, debugging tools, dos-and-donts, optimizations)

- Simulation depth (logistic chain, economics, city services..)

- Mod support

Any help with these would be greatly appreciated

[dosshell]

What are your thoughts about AI generated 3D assets that many, now startups, promise to sell to indie developers?

For me, it sounds like city models such as cars and buildings will be one of the easiest models to generate (from what I have seen in papers).

As an indie dev myself I'm counting on that I will be able to buy most 3D content for a fraction of time/cost in a couple of years. And I plan my development around this and ignore art assets for now.

[Uriopass]

I'm all for AI generated content. I think any automation helps push society forward.

In practice however I didn't see any real good generated 3D asset for now. The problem is probably much harder as there are far more 2D assets than 3D, especially with PBR support.

[irq-1]

Check out: https://github.com/nv-tlabs/GET3D

License looks open. Very demanding hardware requirements (8 A100s).

[t3433]

What on earth makes you think that license looks open? Read carefully, its license is very restrictive.

[steveklabnik]

A game I'm playing recently started with AI generated art, then has their artists adjust it or re-do it later when they have time.

That is 2D though.