Notices

Hey all. If anyone knows about this, and I'm sure some people have, I just found out about this. Apparently the original SimCity was released as open source under the GPL in 2008. I loved the original SimCity, even if I was no good at it, but would love to have it on the go. It goes by the name Micropolis and the only way to distribute any copy of it the way you want is to not call it SimCity.

Anyway, the source code is hosted on Google Code and thought it would be great to have this classic game on our handhelds. Hope it can be done!

http://code.google.com/p/micropolis/

I want to know if this gets done.

why not setting up Maemo SDK or MADDE, and try to compile it Yourself? Despite, that it's great learning experience (no matter of results), most able people here are already over-projected.

Not to mention, that if You *try* compiling it, your life will be better afterwards Even if You fail, you'll have questions about specific problems You encountered (if searching/googleing fail), so You'll probably end up with working micropolis anyway, as added benefit.

/Estel

Yesterday after I found this thread I had a short look at the Micropolis source code and various bug reports and it seems that the screen resolution is hard coded or at least tied to hard coded steps. The one closest to what we need is something like 800x600 but of course that means that parts of the screen are invisible and scrolling down might not work.
Adding additional screen resolutions is on the ToDo list for several years now but it doesn't seem to be implemented. And since the project seems to be dormant (to avoid saying it's dead) I doubt that this will change.

Isn't there a Lincity(ng) package in one of the extra repos? I suggest trying that.
I'd like to check that but it seems to me that apart from the forums maemo.org is currently completely dead. I'm not sure if that's a technical difficulty, a first result of what has been discussed in the "ask the council" thread of if it's just my browser that's messed up.

Can't find anything like that in repos.

/Estel

You're right!
However, I had a look at the Debian packages of Lincity and Lincity-NG and the former seems to suffer from the same resolution issue like Micropolis.
But I think Lincity-NG (using SDL) should in principle work on the N900 after optification and some minor adjustments to the dependencies (even the GUI should be pretty N900 friendly). I'll give it a try this weekend. My biggest concern is that the CPU might not be up to handling the game, at least I'm almost certain that complex scenarios will become sluggish at some point.

First status report on Lincity-NG:
Just optifying the Debian Squeeze packages isn't sufficient because the compiled Debian binary actually needs libxml2 functions that the Maemo version doesn't provide. I guess compiling Lincity-NG against Maemo's libxml2 would solve that.

As an alternative I installed Lincity-NG in Easy Debian where it runs fine with the following command line:(-f = fullscreen; -s = use sdl)
On my N900 (overclocked at 850MHz) the scenario "good times" (approximately 1/4 of the map covered with buildings) uses about 80MB of RAM and 60-80% of the CPU without changing anything in the scenario (building or destroying something). The game runs at normal speed and everything sems to work fine. In the menus the GUI looks a bit cramped due to the low resolution (buttons partly overlapping each other) but it's completely useable. In game the interface is fine, just like it was made for this screen.
Pulseaudio uses additional 12-25% of the CPU unless the game is started with the parameter -m (=mute). Alsa in Easy Debian is spitting loads of warnings but the sound is working fine as long as the overall CPU usage doesn't reach 100%.

A mayor problem I encountered is that after hitting the quit button in the main menu the interface just freezes and doesn't return you to the desktop. Since the interface covers the whole screen and grabs all keyboard inputs you have no chance of getting out of the game if you started it via debbie and have no ssh connectioon from another computer to the N900 to kill the lincity-ng process remotely. I even tried to get other application on top by opening the lens cover or making a call to the phone but although the other application is displayed on top lincity-ng still has the input focus. So the only chance to get out is a reboot.
If Lincity-NG was started from within the Easy Debian desktop Ctrl+Backspace works so you can kill the game from a terminal.
I don't know if this problem is exclusive to Easy Debian or if it would appear in a version running natively on Maemo too.

I had a look at the source code to figure out how much OpenGL code there is. It's all concentrated in the src/gui/PainterGL directory and it's only a hand full of files. Until today I had absolutely no knowledge about the differences between OpenGL and OpenGL-ES but as far as I understand it up to now the main differences are in the lack of the glBegin (and end) function and the missing double data type. I greped the source code for these keywords and there seem to be no double variables in the OpenGL code and only six appearances of glBegin. So I think porting the code to OpenGl-ES shouldn't be too hard for someone who's familiar with that topic (any volunteers? ). My hope would be that using OpenGL-ES instead of sdl would significantly reduce the CPU usage making it playable even on non-overclocked devices or with more complex maps. Is that realistic?

Bottom line:
If we'd be able to port the game to OpenGL-ES and can sort out the quit button issue I believe the game has great potential, playing in the same league like Boswars, Neverball or Supertux. The cramped interface is only a cosmetic problem at worst.

Wow, thanks for the info. Wish I knew how to code or I'd help you. >.<

Kinda feel bad for requesting this, but the SimCity game has been a fav, even if I suck at it. lol

Just for the record:
I tried the original Simcity in Dosbox and in principle it runs. The problem is that you can't scroll in a reasonable way because on the touch screen every cursor movement starts with a click (when touching the screen). This means that whatever tool you have selected in Simcity (bulldoze, build road, etc.) will be executed along the path of your mouse cursor while scrolling.
Since Simcity neither has a "none" tool nor allows scrolling via keyboard it's practically unplayable.

Lincity-NG in extras-devel, and has now own thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1192323

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I checked state of Micropolis and seems to me that there are two different Micropolis branches/forks, both dead/stalled, and neither supports small screens.

1) https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/
last modification date is 2011-07-30, opened issue about screen size: https://code.google.com/p/micropolis...s/detail?id=11
(but it is about some GTK-version which is not in compilable state)
This summaries what is planned: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Micropolis . GTK-version sounds good. Currently game is using very old version of TK, which e.g. doesn't support fullscreen.


2) http://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/micropolis
This is what Debian/Ubuntu uses (based on 20071228 version).

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Screenshots. Compare them to: http://opengamedevelopment.com/origi...as-micropolis/