Game inspired city-planning, Mina Kvarter wants your help!

[TheLetterZ]

Good day to you lovely people of Cities: Skylines!
This is somewhat of an unusual post as it is not something directly affiliated with Paradox Interactive/Colossal Order however we truly support this cause!

In short Mina Kvarter (page in Swedish but questions will be answered in English in this thread ) is a Swedish based project educating young people about city planning and all that it entails by incorporating games! Early on this was mostly based on the Swedish hit title Minecraft however they have now stated interest in expanding into Cities: Skylines by reaching out to our community and our modders!

This thread is set up as a point of contact tying the two parties together, the people users @Davisx3m and @Preath from Mina Kvarter will be in here answering any potential questions you might have and if you think this is a good idea and something you want to support, maybe you’ll decide to help them out!


It’s a super cool project!

 

[Hanse00]

I feel like there's an obvious question to be asked here, what can we help with?

 

[Ressud]

Cities Skylines is heavily skewed towards the disastrous city planning from the middle of the last century that focused on cars, suburbs and all it that it implies to the detriment of humans, livability and decency. How will you take this into account if you're trying to use it to educate people on the cities of tomorrow, that are going in the direction of being everything that the cities affected by the planning Cities Skylines represent wasn't?

 

[TheLetterZ]

I feel like there's an obvious question to be asked here, what can we help with?

I think they are mostly looking for modders to help them create assets (which could of course still be uploaded as regular mods) or just dedicated builders in general!

Hopefully they'll enter the thread soon to answer these questions in more detail.

 

[Davisx3m]

Hello everyone!

I can answer that @Hanse00, you can help us in a few different ways.

1. Contributing in ideas on how we can use Cities Skylines, what parts of the game are better in a process like this. (Also what mods you think can benefit this project)
2. Helping on site (Workshops) This though is mostly applied to Swedish players, since we won't be able to ship people from abroad to help us.
This means that you will be able to sit down with a few project participants and help them use the game, be their... guide to say.
3. Help us import 3D models into the game, we have a few 3D models that we would like to get into the game, but are unfortunately not skilled enough to do it ourselves, so we
would be eternally grateful if someone could help us there.
4. And of course, if possible and willingly, develop mods that could benefit the project.

We currently have a mod collection for the project, which is filled with mods to either make it easier for us to create a real area in Cities Skylines and mods that we find to benefit the project, mods that give us more information and freedom when it comes to handling roads, etc.

You can find that collection here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598983755

@Ressud

That is the thing, we need to be able to show the flaws as well. We've had one workshop with Cities Skylines this far, and we did notice that of course everything isn't possible to show in Cities Skylines, same with Minecraft. But it doesn't matter too much because Cities Skylines is one part of the thought process, not the whole process. It's a way to come up with ideas and if possible somewhat simulate them. One example is that one group wanted a ropeway instead of roads, and that is not possible in the game, but the idea can still be represented in another way, in this case we used the electrical lines, it cannot be simulated, but it can be presented as an idea. But it's also good in a educational way, because as you say it show you that the planning of yesterday was not thinking of tomorrow, and how will we be able to think two steps ahead now and not repeat the same mistakes. We are also always looking at mods on how to make it more open as well.

But yeah, it is important to tell the involved what they can expect and not except when it comes to Cities Skylines as a tool. Another thing that is worth mentioning is that all projects where we have been using Minecraft or that one case when we used Skylines were cases where the timephase of when their ideas were to become reality was only around 20-30 years, so it isn't too futuristic, they would still apply under the city planning that's been going on for the last decades.

 

[tman4usa]

Hi there Mina Kvarter team! I saw the post on Reddit and thought I'd come and see how I can help!

Let me start out by saying that this is my first post here on the paradox website, but I have lurked around for some time now, this just seems to be the first time I can provide input on something interesting . I don't know if I can be especially helpful to your team as I'm not a modder- I can't make 3D models, and God help us all if I try coding something. What I can do is offer some advice and insight into using a city-building game as an educational tool: something that can be both fun and promote learning.

Here in the United States we have a nationwide competition for 6th-8th graders (12-14 years old) that promotes learning about engineering, city design, and how to be environmentally friendly, all while thinking about how today's technology will affect the future. The competition is aptly named the Future City Competition (FCC). The competition can be basically boiled down into 3 main parts:

1. Designing a city using a city building game (which I believe is still SimCity 4) while having it meet certain criteria
2. Build a to-scale model of either a part, or the whole, of your city
3. Take your model to a regional competition where you will show it off and explain to various panels of judges how your city is "futuristic." If you win you move into the national competition which takes place in Washington DC. If you win there, you get to meet the President or something (I don't know I never made it that far )

So I participated in FCC when I was in school and what I learned was that while it is fun to design cities and see your imagination become something tangible in front of your eyes, it was VERY important to make sure you were researching how cities are built, why they're built, who built them, and what technologies were used to build or improve upon them. As well as what technologies you can bring to your fictitious city. How would a city like New York change compared to a city like Berlin if all road vehicles were self-driving? Would it require upgrades to the road surface? Would it require the widening or shortening of roads? Would we be able to remove stop lights from intersections and light poles from highways? Would our city be able to invest more into education if we no longer had to pay police officers to patrol the streets looking for speeders? Would anything change at all? These were the kinds of questions that were more important to the competition than "should we build houses here, or a garbage dump?"

I think Cities Skylines is a great tool to get a more visual representation of how a city would work than an actual city simulator. It has the look and feel of a real city, but the way it operates isn't quite realistic. Because of this, I think it's more important to you as builder than as a simulator. Which is what I think you want anyway, so, perfect! Due to its weaknesses as a simulator it is more important to understand city design. Your in-game CIMs will always be employed if there's a job available, even if it's a possible 4 hour drive. Your CIMs will also move into a house within meters of a nuclear power plant. Neither of these scenarios seem particularly realistic, so it's important to keep things like that in mind. Try not to build houses next to industry or you risk people getting sick and dying, never a good thing for a city! With that said, you don't have to build your dirty industries all the way out on the border, just far enough away that they don't make your citizens sick or keep them up at night. Notice that many large cities have warehouses and other small factories in different locations throughout the city.

Since I don't really know if this is the kind of information you're looking for exactly, and I'm sure you've probably covered a lot of it yourselves, I'll try to wrap up my advice for you and your students:

Study real cities. See how they're built. Think of why they're built the way they are. Don't just build a city to make it look cool; make it people-friendly, make it traffic-friendly, make it Earth-friendly. Focus more on the learning than on the building. If you can learn about the hows and whys of city building, it'll make playing Cities Skylines so much easier and more interesting.

Good luck on your future projects, Mina Kvarter! I'll be around so if anything I said was somehow important to you, or you have any questions, just let me know and I'll be very happy to help!

P.S. I thought you might want the link to the FCC website to see if there are any ways your two organizations might be able to help each other: http://futurecity.org/

 

[douglasrac]

I don't understand absolutely anything.

 

[Davisx3m]

Hi there Mina Kvarter team! I saw the post on Reddit and thought I'd come and see how I can help!

Let me start out by saying that this is my first post here on the paradox website, but I have lurked around for some time now, this just seems to be the first time I can provide input on something interesting . I don't know if I can be especially helpful to your team as I'm not a modder- I can't make 3D models, and God help us all if I try coding something. What I can do is offer some advice and insight into using a city-building game as an educational tool: something that can be both fun and promote learning.

Here in the United States we have a nationwide competition for 6th-8th graders (12-14 years old) that promotes learning about engineering, city design, and how to be environmentally friendly, all while thinking about how today's technology will affect the future. The competition is aptly named the Future City Competition (FCC). The competition can be basically boiled down into 3 main parts:

1. Designing a city using a city building game (which I believe is still SimCity 4) while having it meet certain criteria
2. Build a to-scale model of either a part, or the whole, of your city
3. Take your model to a regional competition where you will show it off and explain to various panels of judges how your city is "futuristic." If you win you move into the national competition which takes place in Washington DC. If you win there, you get to meet the President or something (I don't know I never made it that far )

So I participated in FCC when I was in school and what I learned was that while it is fun to design cities and see your imagination become something tangible in front of your eyes, it was VERY important to make sure you were researching how cities are built, why they're built, who built them, and what technologies were used to build or improve upon them. As well as what technologies you can bring to your fictitious city. How would a city like New York change compared to a city like Berlin if all road vehicles were self-driving? Would it require upgrades to the road surface? Would it require the widening or shortening of roads? Would we be able to remove stop lights from intersections and light poles from highways? Would our city be able to invest more into education if we no longer had to pay police officers to patrol the streets looking for speeders? Would anything change at all? These were the kinds of questions that were more important to the competition than "should we build houses here, or a garbage dump?"

I think Cities Skylines is a great tool to get a more visual representation of how a city would work than an actual city simulator. It has the look and feel of a real city, but the way it operates isn't quite realistic. Because of this, I think it's more important to you as builder than as a simulator. Which is what I think you want anyway, so, perfect! Due to its weaknesses as a simulator it is more important to understand city design. Your in-game CIMs will always be employed if there's a job available, even if it's a possible 4 hour drive. Your CIMs will also move into a house within meters of a nuclear power plant. Neither of these scenarios seem particularly realistic, so it's important to keep things like that in mind. Try not to build houses next to industry or you risk people getting sick and dying, never a good thing for a city! With that said, you don't have to build your dirty industries all the way out on the border, just far enough away that they don't make your citizens sick or keep them up at night. Notice that many large cities have warehouses and other small factories in different locations throughout the city.

Since I don't really know if this is the kind of information you're looking for exactly, and I'm sure you've probably covered a lot of it yourselves, I'll try to wrap up my advice for you and your students:

Study real cities. See how they're built. Think of why they're built the way they are. Don't just build a city to make it look cool; make it people-friendly, make it traffic-friendly, make it Earth-friendly. Focus more on the learning than on the building. If you can learn about the hows and whys of city building, it'll make playing Cities Skylines so much easier and more interesting.

Good luck on your future projects, Mina Kvarter! I'll be around so if anything I said was somehow important to you, or you have any questions, just let me know and I'll be very happy to help!

P.S. I thought you might want the link to the FCC website to see if there are any ways your two organizations might be able to help each other: http://futurecity.org/

Hello and congratz to you first post!

This is very interesting, and we have actually already been involved with Future City, Swedish schools have adopted the same thing, and for two years we helped them
run Future City with Minecraft. But I do find your points very interesting and especially important, that the whole point is not just to build a city of the future, rather why you choose
to build it that way, and what consequences your choices will create.

And yeah, the building aspect works out better, like shape your own parks, draw your own roads, the simulation aspect is quite important as well but we have been and will be very
precise on how "reliable" it really is, It's more an indication of what could happen and not an answer or what would happen. And the simulation aspect is really the one that we would love to see an improvement of. But at the first workshop we let all groups show us their results and tell us what their thoughts were, and we had workshop leaders that are educated in city planning that were able to ask questions about their choices, and that's the perfect place to point out on the things that the game doesn't simulate too well.

But it's always good to have this noted, the more times the better, because it is very important and I thank you for your post.
We will by the way post results of workshops here, etc so you will be able to follow the project more detailed.

 

[Finwickle]

Sounds like a great project. How will you be using C:S? Will you give people an empty map to have them start building, or will you give them pre-built maps with certain problems to solve or empty plots for them to fill?

We currently have a mod collection for the project, which is filled with mods to either make it easier for us to create a real area in Cities Skylines and mods that we find to benefit the project, mods that give us more information and freedom when it comes to handling roads, etc.

You can find that collection here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598983755

Some issues I see in your collection:
- Road Protractor has issues with the current game patch. Precision Engineering is also in your collection and has the same functionality.
- Road Color Changer has issues with the current game patch, I suggest switching to Road Color Changer Continued.
- Toggle Zoning conflicts with NoPillars ( v1.1+ compatible ), which has the same functionality.
- CityWebServer : Mr Slurp's Extension is an extension to a mod you don't have in your collection (and which is quite old).
- You have included several Building Themes, but not the Building Themes mod or the assets from that theme.
- You have included several assets that have not been updated for the 1.2 (After Dark) patch, which means they will be completely dark at night (no lights). Anything updated before September 24th 2015 will likely have this issue.

Some mods that might help (at least in some scenarios):
No On-Street Parking
Custom Milestones
Elevated Stops Enabler
Unlock All + Wonders & Landmarks
Multi-Track Station Enabler
CSLMoreGraphs
Cimtographer (more complex to use)
Overlayer (more complex to use)

Some collections that might also be of use:
Swedish architecture: Stockholm row/terraced houses
SCANDINAVIAN- No's all in one
Offical "Swedish Grace Lund" Building Collection

 

[Davisx3m]

Sounds like a great project. How will you be using C:S? Will you give people an empty map to have them start building, or will you give them pre-built maps with certain problems to solve or empty plots for them to fill?



Some issues I see in your collection:
- Road Protractor has issues with the current game patch. Precision Engineering is also in your collection and has the same functionality.
- Road Color Changer has issues with the current game patch, I suggest switching to Road Color Changer Continued.
- Toggle Zoning conflicts with NoPillars ( v1.1+ compatible ), which has the same functionality.
- CityWebServer : Mr Slurp's Extension is an extension to a mod you don't have in your collection (and which is quite old).
- You have included several Building Themes, but not the Building Themes mod or the assets from that theme.
- You have included several assets that have not been updated for the 1.2 (After Dark) patch, which means they will be completely dark at night (no lights). Anything updated before September 24th 2015 will likely have this issue.

Some mods that might help (at least in some scenarios):
No On-Street Parking
Custom Milestones
Elevated Stops Enabler
Unlock All + Wonders & Landmarks
Multi-Track Station Enabler
CSLMoreGraphs
Cimtographer (more complex to use)
Overlayer (more complex to use)

Some collections that might also be of use:
Swedish architecture: Stockholm row/terraced houses
SCANDINAVIAN- No's all in one
Offical "Swedish Grace Lund" Building Collection

Thanks for your post.

How we will use Cities really depends on the ones on the other side, we have different ways of doing this, empty map, existing map, etc.
So it's open for everything, but this far we have only used a real area in Stockholm where the problem they had to solve were traffic.

When it comes to the collection we are aware of some of the problems, but they still remain there just not used currently.
About the CityWebServer we must have missed adding the main thing, but since it's quite old maybe we will skip it.
And I haven't really noticed any building being completely dark, but we mostly disable night anyway. But I'll keep it in mind

We'll take a look at the mods you put forward, we tried the cimtographer once, but it didn't seem to work that time and I thought we'd already added the no on-street parking.
We'll add it now.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

 

[karliknos]

Well, I must say that I'm quite pleased to see that you've included some of my buildings in your project collection. Pleased and humbled. With Stockholm very much being "mina kvarter" any project that might improve the city planning process here is a cause I'd consider worthy of a contribution. However, I'm not very good at modelling those big, fancy buildings, which is what I imagine Norra Djurgårdsstaden will be mostly about. But maybe you need smaller buildings too? If so, PM me and I'll see what I can do.

 

[Davisx3m]

Thanks for your already great buildings karliknos.
We do have some buildings we'd like to have modelled, we will take a look
at which we really want, and send you examples, they aren't actually too bad.

You live in Stockholm?

 

[Alex24]

I don't live in Sweden, but I still could create some assets. So far I haven't visited most of the buildings I have made. So this shouldn't be a problem. I am more into sights, churches and other public buildings (though I have created some residentials lately - see link in signature)

 

[karliknos]

You live in Stockholm?

I do, most of the time.

 

[R-TEAM]

Hi,

i would not say anything against CS on this project .. but why not get THE real toy from the Proffesional city enginers .... -> http://esri.com/software/cityengine

Regards
R-TEAM

 

[Alex24]

Hi,

i would not say anything against CS on this project .. but why not get THE real toy from the Proffesional city enginers .... -> http://esri.com/software/cityengine

Regards
R-TEAM

way too complex for getting a game-like introduction to city planning.

 

[R-TEAM]

For an game-like yes .. but game-like introduction is only one part if i read this correct ....
But i dont know if the cityengine available for teachers/students for a cheaper price .... as the base cost 500€ - the Full over 2000€ , and then you have not much more than an city painter - the all other modules together to make this to an (then, however, a very precise and scientifically solid) simulation, around 20k ...
(besides the PC you need ....... )

Regards
R-TEAM

 

[Davisx3m]

Alex is right here, we are all about making it easy and fun to learn.
And Cities Skylines is a good tool for that. And that sounds great Alex, we'll be in touch and see
if you and karliknos can help us with assets!

 

[grimkm]

Alex is right here, we are all about making it easy and fun to learn.
And Cities Skylines is a good tool for that. And that sounds great Alex, we'll be in touch and see
if you and karliknos can help us with assets!

TBH, playing games like simcity was part of the reason for me ending up working as an urban designer. Now I'm curious how our in house software 'place logic' could be utilised by the game industry.

http://www.placelogic.org.uk/

It analyses connectivity amongst other things and makes pretty heat map pictures to explain a design rational or propose development opportunities. Incidentally, the big boss is running a summer school in Sweden this year, so if of interest perhaps he could make a small appearance with you guys..well..just planting seeds here.

 

[Davisx3m]

TBH, playing games like simcity was part of the reason for me ending up working as an urban designer. Now I'm curious how our in house software 'place logic' could be utilised by the game industry.

http://www.placelogic.org.uk/

It analyses connectivity amongst other things and makes pretty heat map pictures to explain a design rational or propose development opportunities. Incidentally, the big boss is running a summer school in Sweden this year, so if of interest perhaps he could make a small appearance with you guys..well..just planting seeds here.

This looks very interesting. I'll nudge people above me about it.