[yanslookup]

I'm not a gamer but I remember playing SimCity as a kid... Did game play change in the last ~25 years or is my browser broken? It doesn't seem to do anything? I can load a city and watch it do things but I remember being able to actually build cities myself in SimCity... Is there supposed to be a way for players to... play?

[DonHopkins]

It's an early snapshot of a work in progress -- I just got the simulator and tile engine working, but haven't implement much more of the user interface yet. (I'll put a disclaimer on the page to avoid confusion.)

The "Space Inventory" is actually a couple of cellular automata rules, one is a dithered 8 bit chaotic wrapping heat diffusion, kind of like "Heat", and the other is a variation of "EcoLibra" that Rudy Rucker came up with and published in Autodesk's Cellab, which he made with John Walker. It combines "Anneal" (aka "Vote 4/5") with "Life" and "Brian's Brain".

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#EcoLiBra

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Brain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian%27s_Brain

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Vote

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_Life-like_rules

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Heat

I added those CA rules to SimCity so they display the cell values with the SimCity tiles back in 1991, which I distributed via anonymous ftp as a free fully functional unlockable demo, that used cellular automata as DRM: you could play the game for a few minutes, then if you hadn't bought a license, it would switch to the cellular automata and melt your city!

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-revi...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-SimCity-Manual.pdf

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/HyperLook-...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/SimCity.IN...

>Now that you have installed SimCity, you can run the "GetKey" shell script to get a license key from DUX software, or run "SimCity" in demo mode without getting a key. In demo mode, your city will melt after 5 minutes, or when you try to save it to disk, so buy a license, it's cheap! When you buy a license, DUX will ship you the latest version of the software, a nice 100 page manual with lots of nifty illustrations, and a handy reference card. And when you're ordering, don't forget to ask how to embezzle funds!