Gameboy Development Forum

Thanks.

Yeah, fires happen randomly, the chances of that happening are reduced the more fire stations you build, up to a limit. You can disable disasters in the options menu, by the way.

I've tried to document most things. There are some simple details I haven't bothered to explain (the comments in the code should be enough) but most things should be documented from a high level point of view, enough to be able to know what you are dealing with.

Steps are quite slow, and they get slower as your city grows. The CPU is in double speed mode and I've done some optimizations to try to reduce the time it takes, but there's only so much I can do, the CPU runs at 2MHz! You can speed up a bit the simulation by disabling animations, music and disasters.

I tried to optimize everything while developing it, but I only bothered to actually do optimizations when something was specially slow. WRAM has been a problem from the start. I can't save partial results of the simulations (not enough RAM) so I have to recalculate everything at every step, which is on of the reasons why this is slow. I only keep the traffic simulation results, because that's specially slow to calculate (https://github.com/AntonioND/ucity/blob … ganisation) and it is needed for the pollution simulation. ROM isn't usually a problem in GB games, you can have ROMs as big as 4MB (even 8MB). This game is 128 KB in size, and it's not completely full, but ROMs come in sizes that are power of two, so... Fun fact: version 0.5 is bigger than version 1.0 because I compressed the scenarios after 0.5, saving some memory.

The code doesn't fit in ROM0, impossible. I don't know the exact number, but I would say more than half of the game size is due to code (so more than 64KB). There's no way to fit that in a 16KB bank. I just have a few helpers to do cross-bank calls, and try to split everything so that they are only used when needed. For example, each simulation module is in a different bank. When I start the simulation of the traffic, I use a cross-bank call. Inside the simulation, I don't need them because everything is located in the same ROM bank.

I guess you are talking about this, right? https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

I took a look at it for inspiration, but I couldn't implement pretty much anything the same way because of lack of RAM, or simply because I didn't like how it was done there.

However, I tried to stick to whatever was available in SimCity and then added some elements of SimCity 2000 that were easy to implement (like variable sized residential, commercial and industrial zones, some kinds of buildings, etc). It's like a SimCity 1.5.