Hey guys, I have been enjoying C:S for months and logged more than 100+ hours in to it, and this is coming from me migrating away from long-time fan of Simcity series. Biggest reason why I love Cities Skylines is how frendly the game is to the modding community and the large repository of custom contents out there I can freely choose to enhance the gameplay experience.
With that said, one key feature I think is missing from the game is municipal network/IT infrastructure. We live in Internet era so the Internet has become a necessity in every crevice of our life at home and at work.
I had put together my idea down in writing, and I hope to hear responses from others as well on the idea.
Before I begin, a brief background on me is that I work as a network administrator for a large manufacturing corporation, and before that I have helped out at small businesses and such, so I got to see first-hand how Information Technology is shaping the economy, lifestyle, and how businesses are working to streamline their operation with IT and Internet services.
Internet, Information Technology and Their Impacts
We live in the era of Internet where it's no longer a luxury but a
necessity in life. This applies to businesses around the world and
also to our home lifestyle. It's the service that often get
overlooked.
Businesses seize the benefits of the Internet to provide online base
where customers can access services on demand. The service also
provides new opportunities for entrepreneur to create innovations to
increase operation efficiency, reduce expenses and to also drive
profits. As a result we see many kind of IT services sprung up, from
datacenter hosting hundreds of servers to internet service provider
providing traffic routing for terabytes to petabytes of data 24/7,
technologies such as satellites, DSL, ISDN, VPN, MPLS, PPPoE, radio,
wireless, Bluetooth , and different kind of network protocols like
EIGRP, IS-IS, BGP, etc are developed to increase efficiency,
reliability, speed, convergence time and so on that make up the
Internetworks.
For home use, we all utilize Internet through our smartphones, our
mobile tablets, laptops and computers for variety of reasons such as
recreational purpose, purchasing stuff online, running home
businesses, and so on utilizing DSL/ADSL, satellite (for those that
live in rural area), fiber optic cable. The boom of the Internet also
allows users to interact with others that are far away.
Often time private companies work with city council, state agency and federal agency to deploy network service to the area (e.g. USA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program through American Recovery And Reinvestment Act of 2009), so I do not see how this can clash with Cities Skylines gameplay.
Internet as Service for the Cims
For the sake of the gameplay, hardware limitations and game engine
limitations, concepts surrounding the Information Technology service
will be simplified in this part of the section. Later on I’ll amend to
the article the in-depth details that the community can pick up and
make the suggested ideas in to a reality. For now this section will
focus on details that developers can do to lay down foundation for
City Skylines fans to expand on.
1. Basic Gameplay Concepts
The Information Technology Service is an optional city service player
can choose to implement in to their city timeline at any point in
time. Not implementing the service will keep the Cities Skylines
gameplay the same as it’s always been before and life for the cims
will continue as normal.
If the player chooses to roll out the Information Technology service
through their city early on in the game or later on, then the player
has opened up a new realm of approach to how he or she can impact the
entire city in positive ways or negative ways through the deliverance
of IT services.
To begin laying down the basic network, the player is given some basic
assets to start off under the “Internet/Information Technology” tab,
and as the network expands, then more efficient assets will be needed
to replace obsolete assets to keep up with the demands. Basic assets
can be the following:
· Telephone circuit (ground level)
· Coaxial Cable (below ground level)
· Local Telephone Exchange
· Satellite Dish
Player must lay down the local telephone exchange first before a
network of circuit or uplinks can be established, and then the
exchange must be supplied with sufficient water and electricity in
order for it to operate at optimal level. Once placed, player can
begin laying down telephone circuit/copper cable to form any network
topology (e.g. bus, star, partial mesh, full, hub-and-spoke, etc).
Once the player is finished with laying the network through
residential zone, industrial zone, or business zone, then the player
can begin to see the stream of bits of 0s and 1s running up and down
the circuit (or across radio wave from the source to destination if
clicked on satellite dish). The visual cue will allow player to know
the uplink is running in normal state.
What visual cues can be used to represent several states of the circuit?
· Normal circuit – Green or blue highlight of the circuit
with bits streaming bidirectionally, this is normal state
· Offline circuit – Blacked-out circuit – can be caused by
external sources such as insufficient power or no uplink destination
(e.g. damaged telephone exchange due to a natural disaster or fire)
· Congested circuit – Represents by yellow to red highlight,
means the circuit is too congested, either because the bandwidth is
reaching the maximum allowed throughput on that circuit, DDoSes
(magnitude of the attack determines the severity of the congestion)
Regarding bandwidth usage, variables like zone type, education level,
and the population density within the vicinity of the serviceable area
can be used to determine how much bandwidth will be used on that
circuit.
Other assets for expansion of the network down the road:
· Fiber optic conduit
· Fast Ethernet Cable (For MetroEthernet)
· Central Office
· Radio Cellular Tower
· Cybersecurity office (intentionally vague)
Why the additional assets? As the Internet grows and the city grows,
so will the demand for bandwidth. Since telephone circuit and coaxial
cable can only allow up to maximum bandwidth over certain distance,
player can be given ways to be more efficient:
· Lay down more telephone circuit or coaxial cable to
load-balance between the lines. This is more costly and speed remains
the same for each circuit.
· Utilize fiber optic to accommodate higher bandwidth usage.
Fiber optic can be drawn over longer distance and with much more
consistent performance, and can withstand higher magnitude DDoS
attacks (and other cybersecurity attacks)
· Utilize satellite dish, allows for creating service in
rural area that is hard to reach and cheap as well, but slow speed
· Go wireless with radio cellular tower which allows greater
scalability and cheaper option, but sacrificing reliability and speed
(but still faster than telephone circuit).
These are some basic ideas that can be implemented to create a
barebone foundation. The rest of the work can be done by the community
to add custom resources such as faster lines (e.g. 1000BASE-LX w/ max
theoretical output of 1Gbps over the distance of 70km), Google
datacenter or generic datacenter/colocation to act as load-balancing,
NSA office to act as cybersecurity for combatting cybercrimes (e.g.
DDoS mitigation/prevention).
2. Benefits from using the Internet and Information Technology Service
Many benefits from the Internet and Information Technology innovations
can be seen everywhere in real life. At home we use the Internet to
make our life easier—from reducing waste, increase our efficiency,
improve our education, recreational purpose, reduce the needs to
commute, and so on. At business, IT department and services nowadays
might as well be part of the business and finance department, because
IT drives the company to fail or to succeed depending on how the
service is utilized. IT service is used to reduce workload, streamline
business operation, reduce workforce, save expenses, drive profit, and
allow companies to interface with their customers.
So with that in mind, we can deploy some of the benefits in to the
Cities Skylines world:
· Incentivize businesses – bring in demands for businesses
(commercial/industrial/office) if IT service is implemented properly
· Accelerate growth – IT service allows for zones to grow
faster depending on the quality of the service
· Increase export/import demands – Lifestyle become
fast-paced with adaption of IT service
· Businesses with IT service connected to them are able to
withstand higher tax rate
· Provide job opportunities for the well-educated cims
3. The Cons of Using the Internet and Information Technology Service
Like anything else, with IT service comes the consequences and risks.
The consequences and risks should be utilized to encourage player to
be mindful of how they deliver their service to the cims in an
efficient manner and to develop disaster recovery plan in case of
worst case scenarios.
· Electrical and water consumption grows exponentially as city grows
· Vulnerable to external elements and internal
elements—natural disasters and cyberattacks can do unpleasant damage
to the network infrastructure
· Reckless budget spending can lead to very volatile economy
where a natural disaster or a severe cyberattack can send economy
spiraling downward
· Can become costly to maintain infrastructure as player
begins to scale up
· Increase in unemployment rate
· Network-connected businesses and residents become
vulnerable to new type of crimes: data breach and tampering of
business operation that can lead to shut down/abandonment, thus
decreasing land value
Becoming Involved
With IT service a revamp should be made to the city statistics to
display valuable visual information and numerical data, such as:
· Cybercrimes over time
· Population being serviced vs total population
· Current total distance of circuit/line
· Highest bandwidth consumption (and who/where)
· Total amount spent on IT infrastructure
IT service can also be used to expand Chirpy to make it become more
useful, such as allowing player to subscribe or unsubscribe from
certain topic such as:
· Breaking News – Critical headlines such as natural disasters
· General City News – Generic city news such as “new school”
or “increase in demand for commercial zone”
· City Chirps – Random cims bantering and commentary
· Helps/Tips – Unblock/block city council advisors from
providing players with tips and reminders
Conclusion
These are some of the ideas I have in mind for Internet/Information
Technology service in Cities Skylines. Is it doable? I think so, or at
least PI can implement the foundation and let the community do the
rest of the work in expanding the service by creating custom contents
players can choose at their own freewill to enhance their gameplay
experience. This reduces the workload on the developers, allowing them
to focus on the core function, and then letting the modding community
take over from there to upload their custom contents to the workshop
where players with different gameplay approach can choose what they
want to add and what they can ignore. Such modularity, huh? This
maintains the basic principle of giving the modding community the
freedom to modify the contents to their desire.
More contents to be amended later
With that said, one key feature I think is missing from the game is municipal network/IT infrastructure. We live in Internet era so the Internet has become a necessity in every crevice of our life at home and at work.
I had put together my idea down in writing, and I hope to hear responses from others as well on the idea.
Before I begin, a brief background on me is that I work as a network administrator for a large manufacturing corporation, and before that I have helped out at small businesses and such, so I got to see first-hand how Information Technology is shaping the economy, lifestyle, and how businesses are working to streamline their operation with IT and Internet services.
Internet, Information Technology and Their Impacts
We live in the era of Internet where it's no longer a luxury but a
necessity in life. This applies to businesses around the world and
also to our home lifestyle. It's the service that often get
overlooked.
Businesses seize the benefits of the Internet to provide online base
where customers can access services on demand. The service also
provides new opportunities for entrepreneur to create innovations to
increase operation efficiency, reduce expenses and to also drive
profits. As a result we see many kind of IT services sprung up, from
datacenter hosting hundreds of servers to internet service provider
providing traffic routing for terabytes to petabytes of data 24/7,
technologies such as satellites, DSL, ISDN, VPN, MPLS, PPPoE, radio,
wireless, Bluetooth , and different kind of network protocols like
EIGRP, IS-IS, BGP, etc are developed to increase efficiency,
reliability, speed, convergence time and so on that make up the
Internetworks.
For home use, we all utilize Internet through our smartphones, our
mobile tablets, laptops and computers for variety of reasons such as
recreational purpose, purchasing stuff online, running home
businesses, and so on utilizing DSL/ADSL, satellite (for those that
live in rural area), fiber optic cable. The boom of the Internet also
allows users to interact with others that are far away.
Often time private companies work with city council, state agency and federal agency to deploy network service to the area (e.g. USA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program through American Recovery And Reinvestment Act of 2009), so I do not see how this can clash with Cities Skylines gameplay.
Internet as Service for the Cims
For the sake of the gameplay, hardware limitations and game engine
limitations, concepts surrounding the Information Technology service
will be simplified in this part of the section. Later on I’ll amend to
the article the in-depth details that the community can pick up and
make the suggested ideas in to a reality. For now this section will
focus on details that developers can do to lay down foundation for
City Skylines fans to expand on.
1. Basic Gameplay Concepts
The Information Technology Service is an optional city service player
can choose to implement in to their city timeline at any point in
time. Not implementing the service will keep the Cities Skylines
gameplay the same as it’s always been before and life for the cims
will continue as normal.
If the player chooses to roll out the Information Technology service
through their city early on in the game or later on, then the player
has opened up a new realm of approach to how he or she can impact the
entire city in positive ways or negative ways through the deliverance
of IT services.
To begin laying down the basic network, the player is given some basic
assets to start off under the “Internet/Information Technology” tab,
and as the network expands, then more efficient assets will be needed
to replace obsolete assets to keep up with the demands. Basic assets
can be the following:
· Telephone circuit (ground level)
· Coaxial Cable (below ground level)
· Local Telephone Exchange
· Satellite Dish
Player must lay down the local telephone exchange first before a
network of circuit or uplinks can be established, and then the
exchange must be supplied with sufficient water and electricity in
order for it to operate at optimal level. Once placed, player can
begin laying down telephone circuit/copper cable to form any network
topology (e.g. bus, star, partial mesh, full, hub-and-spoke, etc).
Once the player is finished with laying the network through
residential zone, industrial zone, or business zone, then the player
can begin to see the stream of bits of 0s and 1s running up and down
the circuit (or across radio wave from the source to destination if
clicked on satellite dish). The visual cue will allow player to know
the uplink is running in normal state.
What visual cues can be used to represent several states of the circuit?
· Normal circuit – Green or blue highlight of the circuit
with bits streaming bidirectionally, this is normal state
· Offline circuit – Blacked-out circuit – can be caused by
external sources such as insufficient power or no uplink destination
(e.g. damaged telephone exchange due to a natural disaster or fire)
· Congested circuit – Represents by yellow to red highlight,
means the circuit is too congested, either because the bandwidth is
reaching the maximum allowed throughput on that circuit, DDoSes
(magnitude of the attack determines the severity of the congestion)
Regarding bandwidth usage, variables like zone type, education level,
and the population density within the vicinity of the serviceable area
can be used to determine how much bandwidth will be used on that
circuit.
Other assets for expansion of the network down the road:
· Fiber optic conduit
· Fast Ethernet Cable (For MetroEthernet)
· Central Office
· Radio Cellular Tower
· Cybersecurity office (intentionally vague)
Why the additional assets? As the Internet grows and the city grows,
so will the demand for bandwidth. Since telephone circuit and coaxial
cable can only allow up to maximum bandwidth over certain distance,
player can be given ways to be more efficient:
· Lay down more telephone circuit or coaxial cable to
load-balance between the lines. This is more costly and speed remains
the same for each circuit.
· Utilize fiber optic to accommodate higher bandwidth usage.
Fiber optic can be drawn over longer distance and with much more
consistent performance, and can withstand higher magnitude DDoS
attacks (and other cybersecurity attacks)
· Utilize satellite dish, allows for creating service in
rural area that is hard to reach and cheap as well, but slow speed
· Go wireless with radio cellular tower which allows greater
scalability and cheaper option, but sacrificing reliability and speed
(but still faster than telephone circuit).
These are some basic ideas that can be implemented to create a
barebone foundation. The rest of the work can be done by the community
to add custom resources such as faster lines (e.g. 1000BASE-LX w/ max
theoretical output of 1Gbps over the distance of 70km), Google
datacenter or generic datacenter/colocation to act as load-balancing,
NSA office to act as cybersecurity for combatting cybercrimes (e.g.
DDoS mitigation/prevention).
2. Benefits from using the Internet and Information Technology Service
Many benefits from the Internet and Information Technology innovations
can be seen everywhere in real life. At home we use the Internet to
make our life easier—from reducing waste, increase our efficiency,
improve our education, recreational purpose, reduce the needs to
commute, and so on. At business, IT department and services nowadays
might as well be part of the business and finance department, because
IT drives the company to fail or to succeed depending on how the
service is utilized. IT service is used to reduce workload, streamline
business operation, reduce workforce, save expenses, drive profit, and
allow companies to interface with their customers.
So with that in mind, we can deploy some of the benefits in to the
Cities Skylines world:
· Incentivize businesses – bring in demands for businesses
(commercial/industrial/office) if IT service is implemented properly
· Accelerate growth – IT service allows for zones to grow
faster depending on the quality of the service
· Increase export/import demands – Lifestyle become
fast-paced with adaption of IT service
· Businesses with IT service connected to them are able to
withstand higher tax rate
· Provide job opportunities for the well-educated cims
3. The Cons of Using the Internet and Information Technology Service
Like anything else, with IT service comes the consequences and risks.
The consequences and risks should be utilized to encourage player to
be mindful of how they deliver their service to the cims in an
efficient manner and to develop disaster recovery plan in case of
worst case scenarios.
· Electrical and water consumption grows exponentially as city grows
· Vulnerable to external elements and internal
elements—natural disasters and cyberattacks can do unpleasant damage
to the network infrastructure
· Reckless budget spending can lead to very volatile economy
where a natural disaster or a severe cyberattack can send economy
spiraling downward
· Can become costly to maintain infrastructure as player
begins to scale up
· Increase in unemployment rate
· Network-connected businesses and residents become
vulnerable to new type of crimes: data breach and tampering of
business operation that can lead to shut down/abandonment, thus
decreasing land value
Becoming Involved
With IT service a revamp should be made to the city statistics to
display valuable visual information and numerical data, such as:
· Cybercrimes over time
· Population being serviced vs total population
· Current total distance of circuit/line
· Highest bandwidth consumption (and who/where)
· Total amount spent on IT infrastructure
IT service can also be used to expand Chirpy to make it become more
useful, such as allowing player to subscribe or unsubscribe from
certain topic such as:
· Breaking News – Critical headlines such as natural disasters
· General City News – Generic city news such as “new school”
or “increase in demand for commercial zone”
· City Chirps – Random cims bantering and commentary
· Helps/Tips – Unblock/block city council advisors from
providing players with tips and reminders
Conclusion
These are some of the ideas I have in mind for Internet/Information
Technology service in Cities Skylines. Is it doable? I think so, or at
least PI can implement the foundation and let the community do the
rest of the work in expanding the service by creating custom contents
players can choose at their own freewill to enhance their gameplay
experience. This reduces the workload on the developers, allowing them
to focus on the core function, and then letting the modding community
take over from there to upload their custom contents to the workshop
where players with different gameplay approach can choose what they
want to add and what they can ignore. Such modularity, huh? This
maintains the basic principle of giving the modding community the
freedom to modify the contents to their desire.
More contents to be amended later
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