Design Idea: Zoning, Zone Map, Zone Mode

[mokun]

@bevans2000 @Urwumpe

A. Zoning

We briefly touched upon zoning in this comment with regard to zoning.

The idea of zoning is not new.

Simcity makes use of 3 types of zones, namely, residential, commercial and industrial.

In case of the sandbox mode, if a settlement is a commercial venture, zoning seems to make more sense because the profit is suppose to drive the real estate planning.

But zoning is at least a way to make sure that the building modules of similar kinds will stick together in a Construction Mission.

It will be interesting to see settlements of different nations grow and further differentiate and develop their own niche districts on Mars.

The idea of the overarching objective of a settlement has been explored.

Zoning may be able to lend a hand to help out further in developing this idea.

What would it look like as they develop different specializations ?

If they are fairly close to one another, how well will they trade together in such a way to give more robustness to their commercial and industrial development ?

B. Zone Map

In terms of implementation, I see that we should develop a new level map.

We have Mars Navigator (which consists of a small Mars globe and a surface/topo/geological map having no zooming capability)

And we have the Settlement Map with limited zooming capability

But we ought to have something in between these two levels.

For now, let's call it the Zone Map.

While it will not show the internal layout of the buildings, it will highlight the functional aspects of the type of buildings or structures in terms of a spectrum of color.

I suppose it will be especially useful for a Phase 4 settlement having a lot of buildings but we can custom tailor for all settlements.

C. Zone Mode

Alternatively, we can implement Zone mode as a new way of playing mars-sim and interacting with the settlements and the settlers on Mars.

The goal of the Zone mode will involve a different game style.

This will break mars-sim out of just micro-managing those daily activity of the settlers.

Rather, players will be given the opportunity to do macro-planning for a colony district or a conglomerate that owns a number of colonies on Mars.

It gives players a flavor of urban planning while still being resource-based and survival-based.

If we can transition from Swing to JavaFX, we will need to build new UI anyway.

I see that the idea of zoning, zone map or zone mode aren't really that radical anymore for us to explore. It's the next step forward for mars-sim.

Let me know what you think.