I’m feeling a wierd sense of strain as I arrange my first bus route in City Bus Manager. I wish to get issues proper for the general public transportation customers of this metropolis, in all probability as a result of it’s town I truly stay in. City Bus Manager makes use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) knowledge to populate its maps, so I can see all of the acquainted streets and factors of curiosity specified by entrance of me. These are my neighbors, who, like me, need an environment friendly transit service. I would like to have the ability to present it to them — even when solely in a simulation.
City Bus Manager is a part of a small group of administration sims which might be utilizing OSM’s community-generated database to make the entire world their sport setting. Other examples embody Global Farmer, NIMBY Rails, and Logistical: Earth. In these video games, gamers can construct farms, railways, or supply networks everywhere in the globe, utilizing knowledge about actual fields, settlements, and infrastructure to tell their choices.
When the thought of utilizing OSM was first raised at PeDePe, the studio behind City Bus Manager, “we had no thought if it might be technically possible,” says Niklas Polster, the studio’s co-founder. But as soon as established, the license gave them entry to a complete world of streets, buildings, and even actual bus stops. And these do extra than simply type the sport’s world. They’re additionally used for gameplay parts like simulating passenger habits. “Schools generate visitors within the mornings on weekdays, whereas nightlife areas reminiscent of bars and golf equipment have a tendency to draw extra passengers within the evenings on weekends,” ” Polster says.
Typically, Polster says, persons are drawn to taking part in City Bus Manager of their native areas. (This appears to be confirmed by taking a look at YouTube playthroughs of the sport, the place creators usually start by saying they’re going to dive into their very own metropolis or city.) That private connection seems nearly hardwired into folks, says Thorsten Feldmann, CEO of Global Farmer developer Thera Bytes. When they showcased the sport at Gamescom in 2024, “each single sales space customer” wished to enter their very own postal code and have a look at their very own home.
There’s a selected fantasy about having the ability to remodel an area you already know so nicely, Feldmann says. In addition to your individual dwelling or city, the advertising for Global Farmer suggests utilizing well-known vacationer areas, reminiscent of Buckingham Palace, as the start of your new agricultural life. “[Players creating their] personal tales round these locations could be much more impactful than in purely fictional environments,” Feldmann says.
There is one thing inherently enjoyable about being accountable for a spot you see each day or one that’s deeply iconic. In explicit, tearing down a superbly manicured gated backyard from which the British royal household takes £510 million per 12 months and turning it into land to develop meals for a rustic the place 4.5 million kids stay in poverty may not be a one-to-one political answer, however it’s emotionally compelling.
“We’ve heard tales of gamers who grew to become all in favour of public transport as a profession because of the sport.”
The high quality — or lack thereof — of public transportation is one other key political matter the place I stay. The native buses are at the moment within the technique of being nationalized once more after what South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard calls a “failed experiment” in privatization. Maybe that’s why, although these may simply be pixels on a display screen, I wish to do it proper. That’s a sense many gamers appear to expertise. “Our Discord neighborhood is filled with gamers who’re captivated with public transport,” Polster says. “We’ve heard tales of gamers who grew to become all in favour of public transport as a profession because of the sport.”
Of course, sport builders utilizing OSM knowledge are nonetheless making video games, reasonably than precise simulations. The actual world will not be all the time a well-balanced sport design area. “In smaller cities and villages, routes could be unprofitable with sensible numbers,” Polster says. City Bus Manager compensates for this by giving gamers extra monetary help, which is a simple and helpful little bit of sport design. But in relation to treating the video games as direct representations of the world, it elides some complexity. For instance, in accordance with Polster, some gamers have reached out to their native transportation businesses with knowledge they’ve gathered from taking part in of their native areas — even though the sport will not be truly designed as a trustworthy recreation of the actual world, even when its map is.
Another problem is that OSM knowledge isn’t all the time absolutely dependable. Polster explains that there could be errors or lacking knowledge that break very particular areas within the sport, requiring PeDePe to manually discover the problems and repair them. But OSM can also be a volunteer-run program, which means gamers can right the info on the supply. “Many of our gamers contribute on to OpenStreetMap,” in the event that they discover errors of their native space, Polster says, which improves the dataset for everyone, it doesn’t matter what they’re utilizing it for.
Density of information can also be a specific problem for the Global Farmer builders, who discovered that OSM has much more details about roads than area techniques. There are loads of areas the place particular person area boundaries aren’t mapped, making “complete gray areas the place gameplay truly couldn’t occur.” The builders compensated for this by making a map editor, the place gamers can copy satellite tv for pc photos from different sources to right the info, nevertheless it signifies that those that don’t wish to construct their very own maps are restricted to the locations the place OSM has detailed knowledge or the place different gamers have shared their creations.
Management sims have usually reached for a way of realism, and OSM knowledge is a useful gizmo in that toolbox. It additionally permits gamers to regulate environments they know nicely and may join with. But it isn’t an ideal recreation of the world, and even when it was, that isn’t all the time what video games want. According to Feldmann, navigating these elements “could be very irritating.”
But, similar to gamers, builders are drawn to the thought of blurring the traces between locations they know and locations they simulate. “It can also be tremendous rewarding everytime you handle to discover a answer and get nice outcomes which might be related to the actual world,” Feldmann says.
