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Bringing one SimCity per child to the OLPC (LinuxWorld)
LinuxWorld talks with
Don Hopkins, the developer who ported Micropolis (GPL-licensed SimCity)
to the OLPC XO system. "It's brilliant code to read and learn from,
which is why I'm so happy to get it released as GPL Open Source
code. People don't usually write programs as simple and efficient as
SimCity any more, but it's still important to write code for the OLPC as
small and fast as possible because of its limited memory and CPU power. The
OLPC is an amazingly powerful machine, compared to home computers at the
time SimCity was originally released."
(Log in to post comments)
Bringing one SimCity per child to the OLPC (LinuxWorld) Posted Dec 12, 2007 16:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] That's Don, not Dan. (He's one of the ancient demigods in this area, from way back in the NeWS days. He's been doing this sort of thing since before some current X hackers were born.)
choice of SimCity Posted Dec 12, 2007 18:35 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] The choice of SimCity as a "poster" game for the OLPC seems a bit strange. Despite the user having a large amount of freedom with designing the city, SimCity is still very loaded culturally. If the target audience of the OLPC is children living in rural area in developing countries, a game that dispense a view of the US/European city might not be relating to them.
Re: choice of SimCity Posted Dec 12, 2007 19:33 UTC (Wed) by macson_g (subscriber, #12717) [Link] Yet, this is a wonderful and really educating game. I'm very glad it will be distributed along with OLPC. I grow up in rural area in developing country (in eastern Europe), and I enjoyed the game. Those night at frieed's house with his 286 PC...
choice of SimCity Posted Dec 12, 2007 21:03 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] Is pacman any better?
choice of SimCity Posted Dec 13, 2007 6:05 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I guess you don't realize that in many developing countries, the population is concentrated in urban areas, and that these cities dwarf the cities of Europe and North America in size?Certainly SimCity will seem relevant to the residents of Lagos, Nigeria.
choice of SimCity Posted Dec 13, 2007 13:23 UTC (Thu) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link] Yes but there is a lot more in SimCity that doesn't make sense. Cities are plannend quite differently around the world, I remember several sessions with SimCity2000 where I was very confused by the growth patterns. The original Sim City, that we are talking about here, is so abstract I'm not sure it matters. And has no good mass transportations AFAIK.
choice of SimCity Posted Dec 13, 2007 21:42 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] See the part about "Will the kids be able to change or modify the rules behind the game play?" -- the plan is to allow users to change the assumptions behind the game. (I always wanted to be able to add mixed use residential/commercial and mixed use residential/light industrial zones to my cities.) It would also be fun to have transit options between road and rail, such as road with bus lane. Brazil has both OLPC and Bus Rapid Transit, so maybe someone there will add BRT.
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