BolognaSoup
Member
Yep. It kind of pisses me off that so many people gave EA money for this steaming pile of shit when it was pretty clear it was a joke from a million miles away.
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SimCity Traffic and AI is broken, Sims are fake
- Thread starter jambo
- Start date
Yep. It kind of pisses me off that so many people gave EA money for this steaming pile of shit when it was pretty clear it was a joke from a million miles away.
I've played this game for over 10hrs now and this makes so much sense. I've been enjoying the game but it was really is to see that it's fundamentally broken in some way. Now I actually know what is broken, I think my enjoyment is going to nose dive
The biggest thing that totally breaks the game for me personally, is the fact that the best way to build a city is that the best city layout is a single line throughout the city territory. Thats horrible and destroys any kind of desire to create an interesting city. That issue is sort of based on the glassbox "foundation" problems mentioned in the OP, but thats just game breaking.
Maybe you should play it as a meta game where you find ways to maximize your city in a batshit crazy world.
I don't have the game but I was thinking about the traffic issue and how would you design transportation for people who make poor decisions and only take the shortest route no matter what. What I came up with is that you would have only 1 or 2 14 lane highways that run east/west. Every other street would run exclusively north/south. This would force our batshit crazy hamsters to take the road with the most capacity for a good portion of the trip. There would be no east west running side streets, city streets, or competing highways.
It was fun to think about solving that problem, not sure if it would actually work in the game.
I don't have the game but I was thinking about the traffic issue and how would you design transportation for people who make poor decisions and only take the shortest route no matter what. What I came up with is that you would have only 1 or 2 14 lane highways that run east/west. Every other street would run exclusively north/south. This would force our batshit crazy hamsters to take the road with the most capacity for a good portion of the trip. There would be no east west running side streets, city streets, or competing highways.
It was fun to think about solving that problem, not sure if it would actually work in the game.
Best solution already found:
Its the only way to perfectly optimize your city. Anything that deviates from that will create issues. Now doesnt that look like fun City building!
The video also makes it seem like a two part process - it starts off by saying how the factories send out help wanted agents, which go through the residential areas. Then, the residents go to the nearest available job. So you can imagine that this is short-hand for a rather sophisticated simulation - sims are getting word on where jobs are (they don't have perfect knowledge of all factories), and then they pick which job to go to based upon which is nearest. Then, presumably, they return to THEIR home.
Instead, the sims DO have perfect knowledge of the location of every factory. They all head to the nearest one (no help wanted agents?). Then, at the end of the work day, they go back... to the nearest house! So it's not a sim making a decision as to where to work, based upon which job he knows about that is nearest to his home. It's just a way to move sims back and forth between arbitrarily picked home and work locations.
IISANDERII
Member
If you look at this video it shows that they don't go by the shortest path. I think they just drive blindly until they find what they're looking for.
The deeper we go, the more feces we discover.
wow at that screenshot. Yeah I heard about this and saw the other screenshot on page 2, but this one shows just how efficient that one street method is, the game is plain broken right now. I'm going to try this one street method out but I can't see me playing the game beyond that point as it would be pointless.
No, I'm not. Hence the reason a problem exists. And has existed for multiple iterations.
You'll notice more problems with workers as you progress in the game and you have more goods, etc. to transport or sell. It's an interesting balance that is required (keeping a dumb workforce, keeping them paid well enough, bringing in a smarter workforce, then bringing in a dumber workforce as your originals go through school, etc.).
It's honestly nothing like SimCity though. SimCity is a game that you are designed to play in perpetuity. Tropico is designed as a finite game period. You slowly unlock additional buildings and technologies over time, a la Civilization. It isn't an exact comparison, but the fact there is combat and the slow "leveling up" process makes it far closer to Civ than SC. It's an interesting blend of gameplay types.. but it's not like SimCity so people suggesting someone play that OVER it is setting them up to expect something that Tropico isn't.
They should get around the Sim AI problem by merging The Sims with Sim City.
The Sims players would control groups of maybe a dozen or so sims. So being human controlled, they'd be 'human intelligent'.
The only problem is - to have, say, a population of 20,000 sims would require 2,000 The Sims players engaged in one city, for just one Sim City player. But mere technicalities
The Sims players would control groups of maybe a dozen or so sims. So being human controlled, they'd be 'human intelligent'.
The only problem is - to have, say, a population of 20,000 sims would require 2,000 The Sims players engaged in one city, for just one Sim City player. But mere technicalities
I realized this as soon as someone mentioned the headline and I remembered them saying that, so I wasn't surprised, but the pathfinding and everything is still crap from what I've experienced and everyone else has. So unless all you want is a giant winding single avenue city for all your cities, the simulation is kind of in trouble here.
SimCity and CitiesXL seem to be the only zoning-style kind of city sims. The rest are econ managers which are nice, but those have stayed strong while no one has really stepped up to the plate to tackle a SimCity (except Monte Cristo/whoever did Cities XL and it did pretty meh)
RumblingRosco
Member
They should get around the Sim AI problem by merging The Sims with Sim City.
The Sims players would control groups of maybe a dozen or so sims. So being human controlled, they'd be 'human intelligent'.
The only problem is - to have, say, a population of 20,000 sims would require 2,000 The Sims players engaged in one city, for just one Sim City player. But mere technicalities
At this rate, I'm pretty sure there'll easily be 2,000 The Sims (original version) players per 1 person playing this version of SimCity.
Hari Seldon
Member
I gave up this game after about 8 hours of play time. Utter and complete shit. Even without the server problems this is a 60% score type of game. Maxis should just be closed down because their developers are shit.
I really, really hope this game does not have long legs. They already got way too many day 1 purchases, and hope their upcoming DLC crash and burn, so that they notice that people were not satisfied with the quality of the product.
What? That video shows exactly that they do go by the shortest path - the workers leaving the factory take the shortest path from the factory they are leaving to the nearest "open" house (as decided at the time they leave the factory). The sims don't reach another decision point until they get to the house, find it's full, and presumably take the shortest path to the next "open" house.
I just looked through the reviews on gamerankings and havent found a single one that mentioned these issues in their review, despite it being rather apparent from playing 10+ hours.
My mind boggles.
On another note: 67% gamerankings score. Good, good. Even though its not for all the right reasons.
My mind boggles.
On another note: 67% gamerankings score. Good, good. Even though its not for all the right reasons.
From my layman and ignorant point of view, it seem they could create a reserve system that decides who goes to which house and let that decide who goes to the next house. Making a bunch of agents go to the same house and only changing their mind after is full looks wrong on a design level; it doesn't even seem a failure of programming or engine, just bad decision regarding how the engine should behave.
But again, what do I know? (part of the post is hoping someone can explain why it isn't like this)
I know that problem. I had the same line of thought about 95% of all 'AAA' games and recently throw myself into the, at times rather rough, ocean that is the Indie gaming scene after only dipping my feet into it once in a while for years. That rejuvenated my passion for games, no exaggeration.
Curious, how many of the 95% you talk about were Indie Games?
ResidentDante
Member
I want to build stuff like this again:
Confidence Man
Member
I seem to remember in one of the other threads someone touting how having all the sims doing their thing was some kind of big advancement for the game and how it justified having smaller cities.
dragonelite
Member
They do find the shortest path only it takes a while to register that the house is full as you can see at the end of the video the cars go to the left instead of the full house only the cars that went straight through were probably commanded to go to that single when it wasn't full right away.
Maybe they should make a heat map of residences and only send X amount of workers back to Y area of residences of X amount of homes.
Hari Seldon
Member
Tom Chick gave the game a pithy 1 star review, but then posted a long comment talking about these issues. Chick had our backs but we didn't listen.
nicoga3000
Saint Nic
You're best bet is SimCity 4 at this point.
Pinko Marx
Banned
Lol a game that's complete and utter shit and you say it deserves a 60. 7-10 scale at its best.
You are way too generous with the 60%. The game is straight up broken.
To think that took years to build the perfect city in Sim City 3000
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
Hari Seldon
Member
This game was coded to be a facebook game that they converted into a PC release after the facebook game market crashed. I am convinced of this. That is why the code is so fucking shitty. Perfect for a server side facebook game where you want to keep your algorithms as simple as possible. Either that, or Maxis has the shittiest coders in the industry.
IISANDERII
Member
But why are the cars going down a big dead-end street that's completely empty?
I'm wondering, shouldn't the problem be fixed relatively easy by slotting up buildings as soon as sims start travelling instead of when they arrive. Add a bit of randomization in choosing their destination (so not always go to the nearest house / workspot, but make the chance of them going to a location closerby bigger then one further away) and the worst would be solved wouldn't it? After that they could add some extra factors for each sim (population density, job type, etc) though that might be harder.
Or am I on the wrong path here?
Or am I on the wrong path here?
I'm actually thinking something like this too. The whole game seems designed at the core to take advantage of the social/facebook market.
diffusionx
Gold Member
I totally had an open mind with this game. I totally bought into what they said they were doing - a simulation on an individual person level is revolutionary. Apparently Maxis is not up to the task.
Not that just making another game like SimCity 4 is the answer. I've played that game plenty of times already over a couple decades. I'd rather see the game they talked about in the run-up to release, not this hackjob.
Not that just making another game like SimCity 4 is the answer. I've played that game plenty of times already over a couple decades. I'd rather see the game they talked about in the run-up to release, not this hackjob.
Yeah, that idea crept up on me as well. Like they were taking cues how popular FB games work and tried to shoehorn that into an AAA release. Not to mention that the game had Day 1 building DLC, lol.
Ace Harding
Member
Because they never claimed that the game was modeling individual sim behavior? Honestly, I am shocked that people thought they were doing this. You really think this would have been possible in cities with tens of thousands of sims, or 100k+? That's all they would have been talking about. They would have won a Nobel prize.
It sounds like the implementation of what they did needs (a lot of) work, but the system isn't "broken" because they aren't modeling individual sims.
It also sounds like this is fixable, but who knows if they'll actually fix it.
The problem is that the engine currently doesnt do that on a somewhat deep level at all. What you say COULD technically be possible, but maybe they didnt do it because the engine is way too unoptimised to account for that on a decent PC? Everything missing from the game will need additional resources to be simulated. And that for 200k people. if the engine is not optimised for that from the ground up, they might as well make a new engine instead of trying to fix this one.
Watch the video again. The street is not completely empty - there is a house at the end of it. By the logic of the game, every single person leaving the group of factories when it's closing time first attempts to go to that house. When the house is full, the factories start sending their agents to the other, large residential area. Every agent that has already been sent still goes to the first house, finds out it's full, then turns around to go back to the large residential area to find the next nearest open house (which will presumably also be full by then, but the fakery would be harder to spot as they'll just move down the road little by little looking for the next open house).
I think you are on the wrong track here. They did sort of advertise it as such:
The problem is that the engine doesnt simulate "individual Sims", it basically just simulates one mindless, big herd organism.
Again, can anyone with the game test CPU utilization with 1k, 10k and 100k city on high speed? Thanks.
We cannot downplay optimization solutions of algorithms if we dont know their cost. Its like people would downplay LOD issues of shadows or reflections being only screenspace because we cant use ray-tracing.
We cannot downplay optimization solutions of algorithms if we dont know their cost. Its like people would downplay LOD issues of shadows or reflections being only screenspace because we cant use ray-tracing.
I'd love to try but thankfully I didnt buy the game, maybe you should ask in the OT?
Nope, they announced this in Youtube videos before (see last page). It works exactly as intended.
No, Simcity 4 had this problem. Its a Glass Box flaw. Hence the NAM mod.
if the simulation worked the way you guys thought it worked it would never work
especially since we as the controller can destroy entire work spaces and houses
if the game has a sim at work and you destroy their house where do they go after that they would basically end up driving around in circles since when you do create a house its damn enar instantly filled with workers
especially since we as the controller can destroy entire work spaces and houses
if the game has a sim at work and you destroy their house where do they go after that they would basically end up driving around in circles since when you do create a house its damn enar instantly filled with workers
Doesn't Tropico deal with a lower amount of citizens though? Still, now I want to bust out Tropico 3 Steam Edition, only played it for an hour or so, something always comes in my way when I want to play city builders
. Same happened with CivCity Rome lol.Fucking EA. I'm now pretty certain that Peace-sign city you advertise would be a huge clusterfuck of a city.
But wouldn't this problem happen regardless if they fill the nearest house or have a dedicated house? 'sides, game could just hide the sims and put them in a "homeless" pool, or have them wander the streets as hobos who mess your city up.
I don't think so, there's no way pathfinding could have been designed to be processed server side, it's all local.
Then explain older games that can make sure their citizens end up at their house and go to their same job everyday. Even tracking family history.
And that video of Maxis explaining the simulation is vague as vague can be. They could at least differentiate between different wealth levels at but they don't even do that.
dragonelite
Member
I will try to monitor this i think right now. I will report back in about 2~4 hours or so
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