Screenshots
Some screenshots of the development progress, with the most recent version obviously being shown at the top.
Elevators are now working.
The pathfinder is now working. Clicking on an item using the inspector tool draws the item's route to the lobby.
After a long period of ceased development, the new restart branch is catching up. SFML works like a charm and the overall new architecture is far superior to the old SDL-style game. The libRocket-powered GUI is fully functional. Not everything from the original master branch is implemented yet, but those things that are are far more complete than before.
Certain changes to the gameplay will be made right from the start. For example, the toolbox will be wider than the original SimTower, featuring all available items fanned out for easy access, as well as new speed buttons for pause, normal, double and quadruple speed.
After a few months of reduced development we now have working offices and a bunch of other items that can be built.
OpenSkyscraper now compiles on Linux. Here it is on Ubuntu 10.10:
After a lot of restructuring and reorganization of the source code, the game is back up and running and is doing so better than ever. We now have elevators! I handcrafted a set of formulae for calculating the elevator car's exact positions based on time. Works like a charm.
Things are about to get messy in a hotel tower. People arriving at the elevator push the button which calls the elevator. When a car becomes idle it responds to the oldest call. Cars pick up people along their way in a very comfortable and reasonable way. This counteracts a weakness of the original SimTower whose elevator system was actually pretty bad. If you had a lot of offices, the lower ones would keep getting underserviced by the elevators since the cars had the tendency to service the higher floors first and would return full, not able to service the lower levels.
Everybody asleep. As you can see the elevators don't return to their idle floor yet. Calm before the storm.
Rush hour in the morning. Some people are leaving the tower while others are still asleep. The janitors have to jump around the floors like crazy in order to get things done. As you can see, everybody avoids the service elevator except for the janitors which use nothing but. There's still some green shading of the hotels that have an assigned janitor for debuggin purposes.
Hotels are now visually populated with guests.
The hotel cycle is up and running, except for the housekeeping services. At 17:00, people start moving into the hotel rooms …
… go to sleep around midnight …
… wake up around 7:00 …
… and leave dirty bedsheets behind.
Tweaked the way items are managed a bit to simplify state changes. Here you see all hotel rooms, in various states. During day …
… as well as night.
Finally figured out where the lobby bitmaps are stored in the SimTower executable. Now the tower draws the original lobbies. Added the single hotel rooms.
Added population to the tower! Offices and items in general generate inhabitants if they're not vacant. These inhabitants will move around items inside the tower and leave from time to time.
People arriving in the morning …
… and leaving in the evening.
Items are being informed if they have a connection to the ground lobby. Having such a connection is one of the necessary attractivity factors which decide whether an office, condo, etc. will have people moving in or not.
People moved into the offices as I added stairs and escalators:
Escalator mania! Stairs and escalators can now be constructed; on top of other facilities as well as stacked vertically. The entire construction code has been rewritten to allow for the stairs to be built vertically stacked, even if they technically overlap.
After hours of searching and skimming through the SimTower executable resource, I finally found the resources containing the replacement palettes for twilight, night and rainy sky sprites.
So now you get day …
… twilight …
… and rainy skies.
Added the tower ratings indicator, for 1 star …
… 4 stars …
… and the TOWER rating at the end.
Added the Controls window in the top-right corner. The watch shows the current time. Internally the game also has a date, but that is not yet shown due to the text drawing that has yet to be implemented.
The tower now plays sounds! Unfortunately quite difficult to show on a screenshot :)
Construction bitmaps and the construction workers are now being drawn and animated properly.
Lobby construction now with a temporary ground lobby taken from a SimTower screenshot, since the previous one was a skylobby.
I've managed to extract all bitmaps from SimTower properly, except the lobby bitmaps. I haven't got the slightest clue where they are and what image format they're using. For the sake of presentability I now use a temporary lobby taken from a SimTower screenshot as bitmap… ugly!
