Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits

bruce511

I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time. Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport. So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood. But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed. And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.

JamesCoyne

Am i missing something? How do you add power poles?

Nevermark

I would actually love a Sim City designed for realistic economic experimentation. A population of 1000’s of professions all acting self-interestedly with their various characteristics, motives, social and economic arrangements. With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!

bob1029

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGpFEv1-mAo

sdellis

This is brilliant, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend time playing it as a game. No one in my town wants to run for mayor since it is a thankless and impossible job that pays a fraction of the cost of living here. There is no fun or joy or escapism in being hated by everyone and not being able to please anyone.

jstummbillig

"free, because you are loved" And because LLMs are making love cheaper.

Angus_Sugna

Brilliant idea. Welcome to the real world and your annoying neighbours.

solyin

Couldn't get past the new city screen where I'm choosing "Blank Slate" or the other one. I assume theres a button to press odd I scroll down, but scrolling is locked. Fun idea tho. There's a Factorio Mod where the biters attack you with paperwork instead of trying to kill you directly that this makes me think of.

zamadatix

Screen turns largely black after a short bit of loading the city with these errors: .WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_OPERATION: glRenderbufferStorageMultisample: Texture total allocation size is too large. play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. 228[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElementsInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. 11[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElements: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. 10[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArrays: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glBlitFramebuffer: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size. play/:1 WebGL: too many errors, no more errors will be reported to the console for this context.

BatmansMom

A little too much going on all at once in the beginning. For a complex game like this I think you have to start small and slowly introduce functionality. Why are so many buttons available to me from minute 1? I'm not using them.

richardfey

Was it inspired by this? https://housing.over.pizza/

darksim905

Please god stop making the x to close windows on the middle or the left. Majority of people who using computers are using Linux or Windows where it's on the upper right and it's a muscle memory. You aren't being clever or helping. I get that in some cases you may want people to read the information you have and pause a bit more, but it just irritates me and does not make me want to engage with whatever it is if I have to waste so much more time closing every window as a result. It literally wastes an exponential amount of time. If this was an installable, moddable game, this would be cool. Further, I'm not sure why they could not add this as an existing module or feature within SimCity 3000 itself. It's a nice little wanna be clone. But playing a browser game just doesn't feel like a game.

zabriel_goss

The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality. But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on. This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.

ramesh31

Guys please just add a line to your Claude.md "never use bordered cards" to avoid the vibe look

blobbers

I haven't tried the game, but this is slightly hilarious and awesome. I've often wondered about this kind of thing. When I go to an airport, it seems strange to me that each one is different with some of them having elaborate train systems, or multiple runways. The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator? Sim City was a fantastic simulation from the stand point of a game, but I'm curious; if you build a city simulator and let it grow organically (game of life style) can you put in sufficient regulation/parameters that get you to where we are today? And if so, is there a simulation that shows us a way to get us to a better tomorrow?

pinevale

We had another person vibecode a very similar thing few weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864 Both are similarly unplayable, but I guess it's the thought that counts.

Aboutplants

Idea, digitize a town/city and apply all current codes, permits restrictions etc, and then run simulations based on permitting changes

rootlocus

How do I turn off the music?

bel8

For those who are curious, this is what I could gather: - Three.js for rendering - react 18+ UI built with Vite - charts are custom, no libs - main bundle size is a js file of 1MB (290KB gziped) - No router, no redux/zustand - saves using indexedDB + service-worker

chem83

Cool project! Tangential: Elon was tweeting recently about how he blames bureaucracy for the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor's failure ( https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2112102304782680107 ). Whether that is ignoring other major problems with the plan or not, there's been bi-partisan criticism of how the traditional western democracy has severely slowed down infrastructure investment (see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_... ). I see a lot of people going to China after being oblivious to it for years mostly due to western propaganda and being in awe with how fast the country has advanced its industry and public infrastructure with superior high speed rail, power grid, and other investments. I wonder if the west will ever find a way to adapt the dynamism that an autocracy affords to its system of government (which sadly has been increasingly described as an aristocracy/plutocracy/corporatocracy/kleptocracy).