City Bus Manager

City Bus Manager
Author:	PeDePe GbR
License:	Proprietary
Platforms:	Windows and macOS
Status:	Active
Website:	https://store.steampowered.com/app/1364210/City_Bus_Manager/

City Bus Manager is a video game for Windows and MacOS. Players pick a settlement and build up a bus business, creating bus routes, building offices, hiring staff and managing their finances.

Since 10th November 2022, the game has been in Early Access on Steam.

City Bus Manager is powered by the Unity game engine.

Uses of OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is used for planning bus routes. Buildings and Points of Interest have a big influence on the value and popularity of a bus line. The game awards points for a certain coverage of buildings and points of interests.

The game also uses significant points of interest in random events, e.g. asking the player to set up a shuttle service between two locations.

Related mapping

So far, there's no reason to believe that malicious edits, like those related to Pokémon Go, are being made. While the game does not explicitly incentivise players to edit OSM, a few players are likely fixing and adding data on OSM with City Bus Manager in mind.

• Adding simple POIs (like shops) will boost the popularity of bus lines.
• Adding more buildings will boost the popularity of a bus line.
• Adding significant POIs (like schools and dwellings) will feature them in random events.
• Fixing lane information and bus access on road will allow players to rebuild real bus lines.
  • Some one-way streets allow buses in both directions.

Regions

By selecting a region and country from drop downs and entering a settlement's name or its postal code, the player can start their bus company in almost any settlement of the world.

City Bus Manager is developed by the German studio PeDePe GbR and seems to have a slight focus on Germany (e.g. default currency, default company name (ends with "GmbH"), default region, most complete settlement dataset) and the USA for its public architecture.

Before the update in March 2024, the game offers large regions as downloadable content without additional charges. These included Asia, Africa, the Americas, Oceania and regions of Europe. Most regions took up several gigabytes of storage space. In March 2024, the map data delivery was changed to download only the required area when starting a new game. Some popular cities are still included in the game files to allow offline players to start a game.

Map updates

• On 28th March 2024, a map update was released. It is said to include OSM changes made by 18th February 2024.

Technical implementation

The game is powered by the Unity Engine. It loads vector maps from PBF files which are shipped with the game.

Separate files for visual maps and routing information can be found in the game's files.

For every country, a CSV file lists all settlements (and sometimes postal codes). Every settlement has a latitude and longitude associated with it. It it reasonable to expect that by modifying these files, any location in the world can be a starting location.

• Example map file: CBM_Data/Maps/central-europe/7044.tar.gz/[OSM][VectorPBF]7044-4224-14
• Example routing file: CBM_Data/Maps/central-europe/Routing/35--1.osm.pbf
• Example country file: CBM_Data/Maps/central-europe/Germany.csv

When a settlement is selected, the game will generate a cache of the local region.

The bus routing uses Key:highway and other values to determine if a bus can drive there and how fast it can be. It also looks at Key:access, Key:oneway, Key:barrier and other attributes to determine where buses can drive. Most of this logic seems to be in the file CBM_Data/Maps/pedepe-bus.lua.

Links

• City Bus Manager on the PeDePe GbR blog
• Official forum
• Forum on Steam