Since many of us find discord a bit chaotic, I think the forums is a great place to discuss this in length, plus record our opinions in a more organized place.
Personally, I find Canvastown interesting and nice if they were going to just be an optional feature and never replace the city model for future DLC/release, as it worries me how tied it seems to be to optimization and how small it seems (1/8 of Dowon is very small if that is the whole usable space/ walkable distance etc)
If this model would have to replace the cities as we know them now, Iâd like to request for these Canvastown/neighbours to be at least as big as Cahaya, or Dowon.
I donât do Discord so have no real idea what this Canvas Town thing is all about.
If it wouldnât be too much trouble, could you summarize what Canvas Town is supposed to be, what features it has and whatâs missing compared to the current worlds, how it might affect gameplay, and anything else you think is important to mention.
No, you should not have to do this on the official forum, itâs the developersâ job, but unfortunately they seem to be dropping the ball and not communicating with their customers (us).
Personally I like the idea of a customisable Canvas Town and I think it would work well for smaller towns/villages. However I definitely wouldnât want it to replace the existing big cities, or be used as the template for all future cities. Luckily there doesnât seem be any suggestion of this in Kjunâs post; in fact he specifically says it would be an optional feature.
As future DLCs add at least 1 town the size of Dowon, and others if any at least the size of Bliss Bay.
Canvas towns, given the proposed size I would call them âlocalitiesâ or âtownshipsâ, are interesting and can be additions to a larger town - a village, a large market place, a corporate district, a family-owned-shops only area, a large amusement park, a zoo, a nature reserve and so on.
Do not compromise on performance of the game if such canvas towns are added.
But this is besides the point.
The reason that such canvas towns are proposed seems to be performance of the game. So that should be the discussion - what kind of performance is expected of the game, where and how that can be met and what can be or needs to be compromised - and other such points. And hence the last point in the list above.
@GDfromRivendell mentioned nice points on discord about texture loading and such. Iâm sure he will discuss those here.
Given a hard choice between a Dowon sized city with about 50% dummy props for buildings versus 4 or 5 separated, fully editable 1/8 size townships (and no large cities in the game), I would say keep Dowon and make it partly player editable with appropriate focus on the game performance. Small editable townships seem to lean more towards the âbuildâ side of the game (I donât mind that), rather than zoi-engagement. So I feel players may get bored soon if they canât move about much and have only 25-30 zois to interact with (1/8 number of current 200 zois in the city).
There is a respectable exit for the Devs â
Keep the 2 current cities as is and inform players that these may have performance issues on lower end systems. Allow more lots to be player editable in these cities. This will be good game play for higher specâd systems. Additional big cities can be added as DLCs which the players have choice to install or not, based on their system specs.
Add 2 or 3 smaller canvas townships with better performance, which will increase the player base to those that have lower specâd systems. These InZoiDevs-built townships will be like templates for player created townships. More such townships could be added from canvas or removed.
Without compromising performance, have a reasonable framework to transit between all such cities and townships (considering there would be many such townships that players may download from canvas)
Such a modular structure will allow for additional cities as DLCs, and smaller townships as player built canvas downloads; while making it possible for a wider range of systems to run the game.
To summarize - keep both the big cities and add a framework to transit to and from a small buildable/editable locality, without compromising the game performance.
Hello. I could, of course, start a discussion, but as itâs demanding in resources, with almost no payoff from forums, Iâll just copy the points that seem most problematic to me, and you can decide for yourselves or maybe youâve already decided. In that case, just spam Discord.
Hi there! Here is some screenshots for Kjunâs message about Canvastown. Itâs all the information we have at the moment, although I hope he will expand more about it tomorrow in the next Q&A.
Iâd say they do communicate with customers a lot, which I love, although so far itâs only on Discord. Kjun writes to us every Wednesday and Friday, and gives us a small video on development each Friday, but I too wished the communications reached the forum as well. Not everybody uses Discord or likes using it, and Iâd say particularly the life simulation community is not that much game-oriented, so they might often not be on Discrod at all. Letâs see if they decide to post here in the future too!
I could not agree more to everything you said. This is the way Iâd like for Canvastown to integrate in the game: simply an addition that allows us to not compromise in performance in the future while also still getting cities like Dowon or Blissbay in the future.
I hope we can get more information from Kjun tomorrow, regarding this
iâm worried that its not exactly optional as they are passing it off as. they want the game to run on current gen consoles and the only way thats going to happen is massive downscaling or instancing. this means theyâll also have to devote resources to it. i hope it doesnât effect the games development to much or point to a new direction for future maps. itâd be so much better if they targeted the next gen consoles as the bar (i saw ps6 is poised for 2027).
in case it isnât clear: iâm not against a small area that is like a create-a-world/sandbox, itâd be a welcome addition. iâm worried about it becoming normalized.
It definitely should remain only an addition and not become the new normal. The bigger towns should still be priority for newly introduced features and places.
Also even for the Canvas town it seems so very small. I cannot judge regarding technical requirements but would it not be possible to make it about double the shown size? Or would it then again cause performance issues on low-end PC`s?
I still think it would work better to portray small villages, rather than what looks like a single neighbourhood of a city. That way you could surround the playable area with rural stuff which would look nice, make for a unique setting, and not be so taxing on performance. But of course the whole point is that itâs customisable by the player.
No doubt you could have larger Canvas Towns as well - but yeah, I assume that the bigger the town, the more itâll affect performance. It reminds me of that meme about âyou can have two of these 3 thingsâ (usually some variation on âgoodâ, âfastâ, and âcheapâ). For InZoi the trade-off seems to be âlarge citiesâ, âdetailed citiesâ, and âsmooth performanceâ.
it should scale to where size is optional. my guess is they chose 1/8 of dowon because thats what theyâre testing a ps5 devkit with. this all comes back to consoles for the most pat.
i hope that if they do go through with this feature, at least make it into a more create-a-world thing. varied sizes, tools for laying roads/navigable layouts/routing, ability to put down specific lot sizes. basically unlock all the dev stuff they use to create a map like cahaya, but available to the user. iâve been hoping the game would eventually get such a creation tool anyways.
Not another game with âSorry canât do that⌠Console limitationâ.
Otherwise known as âHow to shoot your gameâs scope in the foot 101â
One limitation should apply to those with said limitations.
For the rest of us, this feature should be applied to bigger towns as well.
Bliss bay may be large, but it has room to add MANY new lots. Iâm thinking residential here, but with the advent of small businesses soon? it would fit.
Itâs a good idea, provided itâs not the only option, and that we get the same feature on larger maps as well.
Among other things, Iâm concerned about CanvasTown regarding the custom textures issue. It was mentioned that it will be a small neighborhood that can be customized and shared with other users. Certainly some users will create amazing things to download⌠but with two hundred custom textures included. Iâm afraid PCs would explode maybe they should solve the texture issue first?!
(I tried a local LLM for this translation, donât stab me for how wrong it is)
I think the texture bug is really serious, but it will be fixed. For any game engine, it shouldnât matter where the textures are loaded from, only that they meet the engineâs requirements. In the future, when itâs fixed, your PC wonât explode because of a bunch of custom textures.
Thank you very much for the clarification and also for using Italian (perfect translation)
Yes, I hope they resolve this issue before the update with CanvasTownâŚ
I think Canvas Town needs to be a little bigger and livelier than it was presented, and definitely made as an option. The idea may be interesting today, especially because it is new today, but my concern is that the game develops too similarly to the neighborhoods of The Sims 4. We already have a The Sims 4 and we donât need any more: Inzoi has the possibility of being a large open world. I also think that the Fate Engine function could be of interest, but that it shouldnât be limited to randomizing a character into a random family because this is something the player can already do. More depth should be added, more storylines, a plot to follow and objective quests that can determine a real story in âfateâ. In summary, I would like a more guided game mode when it comes to âFate Engineâ. Sorry about my english
He also said this, but with the wording above is only natural that some of us are worried the team will swtich completely to Canvastowns if the feature is popular â and it will be, because is kind of cool, but only if its optional.
Some of us in Discord are speaking and asking for clarification on the matter, and @Moooody is conducting a survey about whether Canvastown even possibly becoming the model for future cities is a dealbreaker for the players or not.
If you guys want to participate so that the sample pool is bigger, please vote! Whatever your opinion is, youâre welcomed.
maybe they should solve the texture issue first?!
