I'm presenting a talk around Terrarium development at the Edmonton .NET User Group on September 25th. The talk is focused on upgrading a legacy app (1.1) to 2.0 (and beyond to 3.5 eventually), building and running your own Terrarium (complete with man-eating critters), and the future roadmap. Here's...

To skip to the chase… http://www.codeplex.com/terrarium2 Origins A long time ago, on a development team far, far, away, some bright dude (or dudette) came up with the idea of Terrarium. Terrarium was a .NET 1.x game/learning tool that was aimed at getting people interested in .NET and building cool stuff...

As you can tell, I really suck at running a city. By the year 2023 nobody likes me, power blackouts are everywhere and pollution has consumed the city creating a race of carbon dioxide breathing mutants. The UI is Python using Glade. Yes, the numbers are real and being fed from the Micropolis game engine...

Anyone out there got a copy of the Terrarium client and server they can flip me? I'm working on something new and need to find a copy of it. It seems to all but vanished from any Microsoft site I can find. For example, the download page is here on the WindowsClient.NET site but doesn't work. It continues...

Sitting for the first session as we're going through the XNA session with Pat McGee. The session was an intro to XNA (and filled with a room full of guys who haven't done any XNA work so it was a good audience) but was fun with the people involved. XNA on Xbox requires you to be connected to XBox Live...

This morning I stumbled across a project on SourceForge named Micropolis. Of course this got my attention and after realizing there was nothing there (no code, no web pages, nothing) I fired a note off to Don to see what was up? I knew his distaste of SourceForge and there was talk of setting up a Google...

MicropolisCore is package put together that is a fairly clean port of the original C code into a C++ mega class (called Micropolis). The distribution is a set of three projects, but this post focuses on the main one Micropolis. This contains the core simulation code. One other project we need is the...

Well. My last post was a little, ummm... popular? Slashdot , Boing Boing , BluesNews , and pretty much the rest of the planet have all linked to it. Glad everyone is happy about the source release. Anyways, there's been a lot of buzz about the code and the main questions that come up are "how do...

This past holiday (I've been bugging him since November about it) my good friend Don Hopkins got a lot of work done on the finishing touches on releasing the original SimCity source code under the GNU General Public Library (GPL) . The code won't have reference to any SimCity name as that has all be...

Now you've got a runtime distribution running of the Micropolis demo. Doesn't do much does it? Sure you can spin around and navigate throughout the city. Perhaps you've changed the name of the city to load and checked out the other layouts. Otherwise, it's pretty bland and boring. Let's spend a little...