dude i love your idea i already reserve a good spot on the main promenade :D

meh i think griefer age will be ended you really think they are going to griefe to get banned? and then have to pay a new account? Mmmm im not sure about that there wil be some but way less since ban will hurt more

I can imagine all those little settlements and villages and mines in the outskirts... it's going to be epic :P

A form of currency would be neded; like plain wood and plain rock is $1, iron ore is $5, gold ore is $20, diamond ore is $50, and the red stuff would have to be graded depending on the level it normally spawns (i dont know where yet!!)

Currency would be used as normal to buy items from other people and stores, to buy land and houses, and to upgrade equipment.

We would need a form of currency to settle argumants and keep society from falling apart.

Some basic laws would be good too.

Multiplayer Infdev would/will be so full of win. 

I think that the currency should be gold ingots, as gold isn't used all that much anyways. As for the laws, I say that each community may have their own laws, but must still use a set of laws defined by whoever owns the server. Those laws could be: no stealing(obviously) no arson, do not kill, and if you break the laws in one city, they you aren't allowed in for a certain amount of time.

the only thinkg is how peple would get money like if someone is on patrol he would have to be paid because he is busy killing monster he cant mine and even for miner if someone discover gold or diamond it ould need to go to a corp who then redistribute them but i think i would go freelancer i mean i mine my own ore and i build my own house and who know maybe sell house to people

yup that sounds good

the only problem with being on your own is , yes, your your own man, but theres only one of you, in a raid(greifers) or mob attack your chances of recovery are reduced significantly

I would love to have a living breathing city but i just dont know if we could get a up and running economy. Moderators could give gold to people who did community jobs like guard duty or building. Once they get money they could start their own buisness and thus offering jobs to other people and so on. Then there is the possiblity of a transportation service. if we were to build the city around a river or source, we could irrigate that water into channels we could use for transporation. Later on in the villages life we could have a working tram system if we collect enough red ore so we can control the carts. If we do have a tram system we will need opperators manning the levers and switches. So yea. It seems like we are going to need some sort of currency if we want any of this possible, because people are going to want somthing in return for spending time doing a job when they could be mining for gold or some other collecting task.
         I also agree with MechPlasma, we need a sort of block system.We can't just let everyone building anywere they want, this would cause too much cluttering and then we would be out of space very shortly. Puting land plots up for sale would help with the whole economy but we could have just the builders build in the plots for people in exchange for money.Thats all i have for now on my head for the moment.

I think that the 'government' should be able to mint coins when there simply isn't enough money to go around, and for paying people to build stuff etc for the government.

How does one get this code? Thru email or ingame? (I'm not at home so i cant check)
edit: hmm, seems to me that its very exclusive. oh well

Well... why don't we have a competition? The one who can come up with the best city design by, let's say, Sunday 8th, gets his design used as the design for the city! As decided by... oh lets say a public vote.
Yeah, it's a short deadline, but SMP comes out next Thursday. I'm not saying "Thursday" because that's too short and it'd be better to spend a few days experimenting with SMP first.

So how will this work? Just create a rough town in either Alpha or Creative, make a little blueprint just explaining what the buildings are for or other details, and post it here (pictures of it, I mean, not the save files). It doesn't need to be (read: shouldn't) exact or detailed, but it should be usable as a good guideline. In other words, a builder should know the exact layout of the buildings, but should have a bit of leniency designing them and shouldn't need to keep looking at a reference pic/blueprint every five seconds. If a building doesn't look right or should look better, it can be changed after the basic city is built.
Also, this is survival, not creative, so the city needs to be focused more on function than it does on looking good. Resources shouldn't be a problem or anything, but if it takes an unnecessarily long time to reach the nearest furnace because all the buildings are so big and fancy, then it's a problem! And if the most commonly-used buildings are the furthest away from housing, then it's also a problem!

Here's some suggestions:
-The more buildings in the city plan, the better. Small plans can always be built onto, but making big plans now means that it'll look better! But buildings should NOT be redundant (unless they're design-related buildings). For example, having two workshops at opposite sides of a residential area is good, because it means less walking to reach one, but having two furnaces really close to each other is just pointless, even if it does slightly reduce travelling time.
-Relatedly, try to come up with as many building functions as you can! Here's some I thought of: a Town Hall/meeting place, a storage area (aka: people who get a lot of resources can be allocated chests here, which they can access themselves. Regular can just use their house, of course), a crafters building, a furnace building (those two can be combined if you want), a scenic area (like a garden, or a statue, or something that looks nice. Just don't have a lot of these though), an out-of-town railway, a subway (maybe?), a farm, maybe shops? and...
-An infinite cobblestone generator (you remember, right? Having lava and water produces mineable cobblestone?) Just trust me in this, it should be 5 wide, (I think) 7 tall, and X+2 wide, where X is the number of cobblestone blocks appearing at once. I'd recommend 2 per person using it at once. If you want to make multiple rows, add +3 to its width for each intended row.
-DON'T have the entire town within earshot of running water. It's very loud and some people really don't want to have to hear that all the time. ...Which should really only happen if you put fountains everywhere. Don't be discouraged from having some of the town with running water though, just as long as people have a choice whether to be stationed in those parts or not.
-Housing. Decide for yourself what housing block sizes should be, including height above and below ground level. Solely as a reference I'd recommend something like 6x6 wide, 10 above ground and 5 below. You don't need to be too specific about where they go as long as there's room. Also, while you can decide what style public buildings should be in, you CAN'T decide what houses should look like. That should be entirely left to the player! However you can impose a ban on things that affect other players, like running water or explosives. And expect a LOT of houses!
-Don't use rarer blocks like Iron/Gold blocks, or Mossy Cobblestone. They can be used later on, if we get enough, but they shouldn't be used in the starting plan.

I don't mean to sound like the Big Boss here, and I'm not trying to impose my own opinions. All the points I listed here (aside from building suggestions) are supposed to be basic common-sense stuff. Foundations, in other words. Stuff that practically needs to be in!

Also, Sunday is only when the voting takes place. After that, we'll need to organise smaller changes, more specific designs, whose going to build it, etc. Of course, this is all assuming that we can get the

I have a... somewhat small... plan already done myself. I'll upload it tomorrow to give you an idea.
...And because I want to be able to compete too, of course!

Edit: okay, wow, I really did not mean for this post to be so ridiculously long!

Right, well, even though I said "I have a small example I'll post tomorrow", I decided to make a brand-new city altogether instead! Half because I realised the example city was WAAY too small (seriously, it was about 1/4 the size of my new plan), half because it didn't really have all the functions this plan has, and half because I'm already using it for myself. Err... yeah.

So, presenting: "My City Idea". Creative name, innit?

Side-view. I didn't make it, but all outside the path encompassing it is meant to be grass and houses. As for why sand? Well, because I just couldn't think of any other block to use!
There's also supposed to be a (bell?)tower on top of the City Hall, but I didn't have it in in this screenshot.

Aerial view.
The purple things are meant to be floor pressure plates, by the way. I took this screenshot in MCedit.

Night side-view. With belltower. It's only partly lit up because this is an example pic, so I didn't put lights everywhere I should have.

MSpaint-d blueprints of the city. It also shows where the houses/streets will be. ...they're meant to be at the other side too, but I just didn't get around to drawing them in.

Soo... explanation. Starting from the top of the Blueprints and going clockwise:
-The massive building is more of a free-space area, for any kind of building that doesn't have room. Naturally, it'd be empty to start with. If we get some sort of economy working, it could act as a super-market! The grey thing at the back is stairs.
-The small orange-y building is a crafting building. Nothing special.
-The big partly-grey building is a furnace building. It's divided into four parts, which have 8 or 12 furnaces. Each part is covered with pressure plates that, for as long as they're stepped on, will shut the steel door going into the part. This is so that people aren't able to go in and steal stuff from someone's furnace mid-use. I used pressure plates as opposed to a switch because not only is this way automatic, but it means the door will open again if the user logs off.
-The red and blue room is a cobblestone generator, that I talked about last post. It generates 10 cobblestone blocks at once per level. The grey thing at the back will be stairs- at the moment, it's only one level, which is why they aren't in my screenshots, but if it starts being filled too much it's easy to add another level on.
-The massive green thing is a garden. It's one block deeper than regular land, and the grey blocks surrounding it are half-blocks going up. In other words, its walls are 1.5 blocks high, meaning that animals won't be able to jump out!
-The oddly-shaped partly-olive thing is a railway station. It's fairly self explanatory, it's meant for a railway that leads out of the city. To other cities, or whatever else there may be. It's elevated off the ground, so even though it looks like it's taking up part of the garden and footpath in the blueprint, it really isn't.
-The orange-y building is a crafting building. Like the other one, but a little bit bigger and at the opposite side of the city.
-The grey-ish building is a stairway. It's for going down, if there'll be a subway installed (or anything else), and for going up if we want to add extra levels to the next building:
-The big browny building is a storage area. I also already explained how this would work in my last post. It has 24 2-wide chests per level. Like the parts in the furnace building, all the floor is covered with pressure plates that close the door. Unlike the furnace building, all the pressure plates close the front door of its level as opposed to individual doors... in my current level/blueprint. It was only when I was writing this up that I realised it should be divided into two parts instead.
-The small grey/olive building is a smaller, more temporary railroad. Whereas the big one is intended more for going to other cities and such, this one is intended for smaller distances, such as going to the nearest mine. It uses a single lane, so only one train is allowed on the rail at once.
-The red paths are made of furnaced rock, and the blue "puddles" are... pretty much that.

(Most of) The buildings are really intended to be built up as needed, and it looks somewhat flat at the moment. The centre building is the City Hall/meeting place, and on top of it is a planned tower of some sort. Each houseslot should be 6x6 and 10 high - 6 blocks above ground level, and 4 below. The odd-shaped houses in the blueprint do still count as 1 houseslot. And I call dibs on the tall one on the right! =P
The one thing that I haven't got here is a City Wall. I do want it to have a city wall, but just a small one. To keep out monsters and such! But it'd be better to be built later on, when it can cover quite a lot of houses, as opposed to building it just outside the centre city and leave houses vulnerable and obscure their view of the city centre.

I think that's it! ...oh, except that the buildings at the moment are all very... cuboid-shaped and regular, for the most part. That's not by design, I just couldn't make them... less so. Not without tacking on some horribly out-of-place thing like a right angle roof. If anyone thinks they can make an improvement, go ahead!

Click here to download the map for yourself!

...why do all my posts end up being so ridiculously long?

It will work perfectly now since notch has put in automated minecarts and they could push people to the next town

anyone starting 24hour  SMP server? put the ip as as a reply

So SMP came out. Woop!

Unfortunately, it's at a much too incomplete state at the moment. In that, for this to work, we need three things:
1: Checkpoints/teleporters. I wasn't expecting it, but development expands out very very fast in multiplayer, so the only way this city would really be put to use is if it could be used mainly as a stop point, where you can access any facilities and keep your stuff secure in a protected region. Having a checkpoint/teleporter means that you can still get to unused land without taking ages to get back to the city.
2: Chest data be saved to server. The main point of houses in the first place is that you can use them to keep your chests secure. But that won't happen in the current system because chests are client-side, so any stuff in them is lost if the player disconnects.
3: Block protection. Aside from the obvious griefing issues, which would be pretty big if it's constantly being used as a checkpoint, there's also the issue with that, without being able to secure chests, it would be all too easy to just steal from other players. And the usual "people should just protect their own house" rhetoric... just does not work.

So I say we start this as soon as we have those three things. Which, at the very least, is within a week.

In an ideal scenario, someone would be able to make a plug-in that made house management much more simpler and automatic... but that's highly unlikely. This is, after all, just one small project. Maybe if these kind of cities become popular, someone will, but until then...