I love this article! Great analysis and solutions. It's nice when user interface designers care enough to think through, implement, try out, and refine such important details.
I developed a multi player version of SimCity for X11 that I released in 1993 and demonstrated at the InterCHI '93 Interactive Experience, which showed you other player's cursors moving around and editing the map, but of course it required a fast network to run on and updated all the clients synchronously, due to the limitations of X-Windows, so there were no interpolation issues. (X-Windows clients aren't even capable of performing local computation and feedback the way NeWS clients could and web browser clients now can, so it was a moot point.)
The multi player demo showing different kinds of voting dialogs, multiple cursors, the tool palette and pie menus, and the voting "yes" shortcut of building the same thing in the same place, starts at 5m45s:
One interesting thing about the SimCity cursor was that it was color and shape coded to show which tool was selected. The tool palette (and also the pie menus which had the same icons and layout as the tool palette) served as a legend for the cursor by showing the same color coded outline around the icons as the cursor used. So you could tell which tool other users had selected. You could hide the tool palette to make the map bigger, and use the pie menus instead, which were much more efficient.
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux: Demo of the latest optimized Linux version of Multi Player SimCity for X11. Ported to Unix, optimized for Linux and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins:
I developed a multi player version of SimCity for X11 that I released in 1993 and demonstrated at the InterCHI '93 Interactive Experience, which showed you other player's cursors moving around and editing the map, but of course it required a fast network to run on and updated all the clients synchronously, due to the limitations of X-Windows, so there were no interpolation issues. (X-Windows clients aren't even capable of performing local computation and feedback the way NeWS clients could and web browser clients now can, so it was a moot point.)
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.h...
The multi player demo showing different kinds of voting dialogs, multiple cursors, the tool palette and pie menus, and the voting "yes" shortcut of building the same thing in the same place, starts at 5m45s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=5m45s
One interesting thing about the SimCity cursor was that it was color and shape coded to show which tool was selected. The tool palette (and also the pie menus which had the same icons and layout as the tool palette) served as a legend for the cursor by showing the same color coded outline around the icons as the cursor used. So you could tell which tool other users had selected. You could hide the tool palette to make the map bigger, and use the pie menus instead, which were much more efficient.
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux: Demo of the latest optimized Linux version of Multi Player SimCity for X11. Ported to Unix, optimized for Linux and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
Source Code:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis
HAR 2009 talk: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...