micropolis VS TrueCraft

https://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/simcity-source-code-released-to-the-wild-let-the-ports-begin https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/community

One great reason for taking a high level networked based approach to graphics (like the C++ and Cairo based Micropolis TileEngine and the Python and AMF based Micropolis Online server and the XML / JavaScript OpenLaszlo / Flash based client use, of only sending the tile differences between each frame) would be if you were implementing a multi player game or distributed graphics application, and wanted to run WAForth on a server instead of in the browser, i.e. like low cost CloudFlare Worker edge servers that run WebAssembly and are geographically located near the users, that send commands to the clients to render graphics in their web browsers. (WebRTC is the way to go for doing that! Forget about all the old proprietary Flash AMF media server crap I was using back in the day for Micropolis Online.)

This is somewhat helpful: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/daa4297696d955a93b051627e6d84a7da5f8a4a3/micropolis-activity/src/notes

You can check out the original SimCity Classic source code here, which I cleaned up, refactored and renamed for consistency and readability, documented, and translated to C++, but it still retains the original behavior and intent:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

This is also an earlier version which that code was derived from, that I started from the Mac version, ported to Unix, cleaned up and translated old C and 68k assembly to ANSI C, and made a user interface with the TCL/Tk scripting language and X11 GUI toolkit:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/micropol...

The one little "modernization" I made to the simulation was to copy the radar dish tile animation from the airport, and make it individually placeable as a "high speed network connection" that let people telecommute from home without generating traffic and pollution. That was a tip of the hat to John Gauge's "Net Day" craze of the mid-90's internet.

Chaim Gingold mentions the function s_traf.c/FindPTele in his SimCity Reverse Diagrams animation characters atlas of tiles, under "Telecommunications" -- /* look for telecommunication on edges of zone */ -- if there is a telecommunication dish adjacent to a residential zone, then its residents can telecommute without driving around generating traffic and pollution. I turned that off for the OLPC release, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetDay

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...

Chaim Gingold has analyzed the code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

>SimCity reverse diagrams:

I love this article! Great analysis and solutions. It's nice when user interface designers care enough to think through, implement, try out, and refine such important details.

I developed a multi player version of SimCity for X11 that I released in 1993 and demonstrated at the InterCHI '93 Interactive Experience, which showed you other player's cursors moving around and editing the map, but of course it required a fast network to run on and updated all the clients synchronously, due to the limitations of X-Windows, so there were no interpolation issues. (X-Windows clients aren't even capable of performing local computation and feedback the way NeWS clients could and web browser clients now can, so it was a moot point.)

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

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.h...

The multi player demo showing voting dialogs, multiple cursors, and voting by building the same thing in the same place, starts at 5m45s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=5m45s

One interesting thing about the SimCity cursor was that it was color and shape coded to show which tool was selected. The tool palette (and also the pie menus which had the same icons and layout as the tool palette) served as a legend for the cursor by showing the same color coded outline around the icons as the cursor used. So you could tell which tool other users had selected. You could hide the tool palette to make the map bigger, and use the pie menus instead, which were much more efficient.

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux: Demo of the latest optimized Linux version of Multi Player SimCity for X11. Ported to Unix, optimized for Linux and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

Source Code:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

HAR 2009 talk: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

Actually, EA released the source code and binary Linux version the original SimCity under GPL-3, which I ported to various Unix platforms including Linux and the OLPC.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...

>Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.

Granted, EA's QA folks had never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to walk them through installing VMWare on Windows and gave them a Linux operating system image to test it with, but it did pass QA, and they released it in binary on the OLPC as well as in source code form.

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

Here's the contract with all the legal details:

https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf

Can also get the original source code for SimCity classic: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

I've got the original monochrome SimCity tile set kicking around somewhere, as well as all of the original tile packs, too. (Medieval Village, Moon Base, etc.) Should be possible to convert and reformat them into a single tile bitmap, and drop it in. If somebody wants to add them, ask me and I'll dig them up.

Original tiles:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...

There was TrueCraft that attempts to reimplement Beta 1.7.3 but it has been abandoned for a few years now.

You might find this project interesting: TrueCraft (The physics are really janky in my experience unfortunately.)

Calling the ability of third party launchers to launch Minecraft a feature of Minecraft seems odd. I imagine you could make a launcher for pretty much any game for Windows (or many Linux-based operating systems)). I don't think that makes game launchers illegal in general though, but it does mean that launchers are not necessarily legal in all cases (i.e. if the launcher does something illegal, like circumvent DRM). I don't know how to tell if a launcher is circumventing DRM by for example lying to the Minecraft client to trick it into allowing play, other than by examining the source code of the launcher and/or Minecraft and I don't have time to do that (plus I'd like to be able to freely contribute to projects like TrueCraft).

You might be interested in TrueCraft, or other third-party clients/servers, or perhaps MineClone (not a re-implementation, but just a similar game). All of these are incomplete I think, for now.

That said, if you want to go back to when Minecraft was simple, you might be interested in TrueCraft (It's not very playable IMO, but it is interesting.).

Well, I guess I am sort of repeating things I don't fully understand. I've never actually read the source code of Minecraft, because I want to be allowed to contribute to re-implementations like TrueCraft, for example (even though currently, I don't really have the skills to do that).

There was TrueCraft which was a clean room implement of Minecraft beta 1.7.3 in C#.

Your comment intrigued me so I did a little bit of digging.

> I remember Drew DeVault (sircmpwn) used to have a big scary warning saying if I have looked at the official minecraft code, I should not contribute to truecraft (now archived I believe).

The repository is indeed archived, but is still available on GitHub. It was changed in 2015 [0]. The older notice is as you recall:

> Pull requests will be rejected from authors who have read any decompiled official Minecraft code.

The current notice [1] adds some other ways the formerly rejected developers could get involved:

> If you are a developer, you have two paths. If you have not read the Minecraft source code, you are what we call a "clean dev", and you should stay that way. If you have read the source code, you are what we call a "dirty dev", and the way you can contribute is different. If you are a clean dev, you're welcome to contribute to this repository by adding features and functionality from Minecraft Beta 1.7.3, fixing bugs, refactoring, etc - the usual. Send pull requests with your work.

> If you are a dirty dev, you are more limited in how you can help. You can work on projects that are related to TrueCraft, but not on TrueCraft itself. Direct contributions that you can participate in includes the website and the artwork. You can also work on things like helping to build a community by spreading the word, participating in IRC or the subreddit, etc. You may also work on reverse engineering Minecraft to provide documentation for clean devs to use - see reverse engineering guidelines on the wiki for details on how you can do this. Under no circumstances may you ever share any code with a clean dev, decompiled or otherwise.

[0] https://github.com/ddevault/TrueCraft#get-involved

[1] https://github.com/ddevault/TrueCraft/commit/fcfd3886746fd1f...