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SimCity Traffic and AI is broken, Sims are fake

Fire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire.
I just tested this and it is absolutely true.
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
vreenak-fake.jpg
 

Retro

Member
Reading about the various failures of this game may actually be more entertaining than the game itself...

Yep, I said that last week. Watching this shit implode has been one of the true Popcorn moments of gaming history.

Back to Sim City 4? Does it even keep track?

I may be wrong, but I believe SimCity 4 was meant to be tied heavily to The Sims, and as such you can actually plop your Sims into the city and watch them doing their thing. Never seen it in action.

Fire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire.

Holy Shit.
 
Are people really asking for a game to run an agent for every citizen when there are 200k+ citizens in a city? I'm sure that'll have low system resources. No game I've ever played keeps track of the routines of 200k NPCs at the same time.
No, but EA was advertising this shit. They said that since there are so many sims, your pc wouldn't be able to run the calculations fast enough, so they were moving it to the cloud.

At least, that's what everyone in the always-online controversy threads was saying.
 

Skyzard

Banned
They don't *have* to make 200k unique agents. Just having a few hundred work correctly couldn't possibly be that unbelievable or impossible to code.

Yeah, just a fraction of the total. - A representative sample that you could see in action.

I may be wrong, but I believe SimCity 4 was meant to be tied heavily to The Sims, and as such you can actually plop your Sims into the city and watch them doing their thing. Never seen it in action.

Ah I don't remember trying that myself either, in general would people recommend 4 over the new due to the mechanics? Any major advantages you'd be going without?
 
Tropico 4 + all DLC is on Steam for $10, I tried it last night and was pleased to find that every citizen is accounted for and fully simulated, having their own job, daily routine, family and happiness level.
 
Oh yeah and traffic in this game is totally fucked. Look at this:


This is with almost every single street in my city designated as high density. All my businesses were failing because they couldn't get the supplies they needed and they couldn't get their products exported in a timely fashion.
 

GavinGT

Banned
Nothing pleases you guys. EA gave everyone a free disaster right at launch and people act like they're being wronged.
 

Darkkn

Member
Theres still no economical way to simulate 200k NPCs at the same time. It pretty much has to be faked to work in any way.

Well, you could make it better with some easy steps like having database entry for sims of where they live and where they work.

Traffic stuff seems perfectly fixable tho by tweaking the pathing algorithm. I won't hold my breath on i better individual sim simulation, since they touted that so much and faked majority of it. Too much work to fix.
 

bluehat9

Member
Saw the swarming of taxis on a stream the other day. Hundreds of taxis following each other around. Sometimes they'd get stuck in a roundabout for 5 minutes then they just all decide to move to another area all at once. Eventually they all went to a road between the city entrance and a train station and the traffic literally just stopped moving there. Guy had to demolish a quarter of the city to get traffic moving again. It was hilarious.
 

Skyzard

Banned
^ oh boy...surely patches incoming?

Oh yeah and traffic in this game is totally fucked. Look at this:



This is with almost every single street in my city designated as high density. All my businesses were failing because they couldn't get the supplies they needed and they couldn't get their products exported in a timely fashion.

Did you try..building more roads ? :0)

How are all these points compared to Sim City 4?

I'd also like to know...
 

SnipeyMcGee

Member
Man, I really hate that I bought this game. What a waste of time. Traffic is broken, the sims don't work as promised, the city population is misleading, the small plot sizes, the server issues and the lack of options like subway systems. They burned me, a Sim City fan since SC 2000.
 

Retro

Member
Man, I really hate that I bought this game. What a waste of time. Traffic is broken, the sims don't work as promised, the city population is misleading, the small plot sizes, the server issues and the lack of options like subway systems. They burned me, a Sim City fan since SC 2000.

Try getting a refund?
 

MormaPope

Banned
Oh yeah and traffic in this game is totally fucked. Look at this:



This is with every single street in my city designated as high density. All my businesses were failing because they couldn't get the supplies they needed and they couldn't get their products exported in a timely fashion.

So the game doesn't even function correctly when you get the chance to actually play it?

EA isn't pissing in consumer's cereal, they're putting rat poison in it.
 
Maxis and delusional fanboys defended Sim City 4 until people started datamining the game files which proved that the algorithms were completely off and the game itself was broken.

I'll give EA/Maxis a few months just to see how they respond to the hardcore min-maxers, but I doubt we'll see a NAM-equivalent because modding support is going to be limited for an always-online game.
 

JWong

Banned
Oh yeah and traffic in this game is totally fucked. Look at this:

This is with almost every single street in my city designated as high density. All my businesses were failing because they couldn't get the supplies they needed and they couldn't get their products exported in a timely fashion.

Looks like you messed up your road set up.
 

MrDaravon

Member
Yep, /v/ figured this out a while ago.

spark20130127193819.png

Jesus Christ.

This is also way, way beyond Diablo 3 levels; regardless of how you feel about the actual quality of that game, once the server issues got straightened out the game operated as intended. This game still apparently is having crazy server issues (including wiping progress), and on top of that in-game systems are outright broken, removed, or lies. As someone who's been watching this from the sidelines (never played a Simcity game before) this whole launch has been madness.

It has made me think about checking out SimCity 4 though.
 

IcedTea

Member
Are people really asking for a game to run an agent for every citizen when there are 200k+ citizens in a city?
No. No one asked for that. No one. Maxis decided to do it anyways, and then used it as a justification for the "city" size. Apparently they faked it anyways though.

I don't even know how they can get away with calling it a "city" anyways. I grew up in a small town of 7000 people, which is literally 10x bigger than the "city" size in this game.
 

vpance

Member
They don't *have* to make 200k unique agents. Just having a few hundred work correctly couldn't possibly be that unbelievable or impossible to code.

A statistical and generalized based simulation like they always did for previous SC's worked just fine. Approximations were good enough since we were managing cities after all.

Instead they somehow ended up with this bastardized Tropico style sim with all of the detail and CPU drainage but nothing that reflects city life or patterns of human living...
 
An accurate simulation of EA customers - faced with better quality games at lower prices, they choose to pay 60 dollars for mediocre and abysmal experiences.

Damn

It took me a second to figure out what I was looking at.

Now I want to know why I'm looking at it.

Why was this created.

What gnarled hands brought forth this twisted abomination from the depraved depths of the human unconscious.

What motherfucker made something so bad that I'm almost 90% certain it's actually scientifically proven to be a sign of the apocalypse.

lol

fbc.png


Amazing.
 
Are people really asking for a game to run an agent for every citizen when there are 200k+ citizens in a city? I'm sure that'll have low system resources. No game I've ever played keeps track of the routines of 200k NPCs at the same time.

Well there kinda is a middle ground here, groupings of citizens that follow logic other than "shortest route" to X would be nice, it doesn't need to be 200k+ unique and complex routines.
 

fritolay

Member
It has been what 10 years since SimCity 4? Why hasn't someone else come up with a challenger then? I have purchased and played Cities XL and don't remember it being great.
 
I think this post (linking to this video) says it best.
Haha basically this is the way every system works. I need plastic for my processor factory, I watch as the plastic delivery truck drives all over the city - everywhere except where I want it to go. It's incredibly frustrating.

Looks like you messed up your road set up.
I don't think so. I took out a part of that road to the left (if that's what you're looking at) to have less intersections along the main road, thinking it would help get more traffic into the city faster. It didn't.
 
Mh, never saw that used as a major selling point myself, but if that's the case, yeah.

That's really stupid to promise that though, the processing power to actually achieve that sort of thing would be fucking ridiculous. Game would be unplayable

I don't know how much EA touted that, that's what I've around these parts about what's great about.

The whole reasoning we've been given behind why cities are so small is this apparently amazing simulation at work.

It appears that sims and traffic are nothing but power and water, they flow exactly the same way with nothing but 'take the shortest route' ai. This is fucked.

Yeah, that RPS article about SimCity being inherently broken is looking more and more accurate (although I don't think was a point brought up in it).
 

vareon

Member
I just tested this and it is absolutely true.

Wait, so ignoring the always online requirement that may or may not affect you:

- The traffic AI is broken
- No actual simulation on the sims, they just pidgeonholed themselves into the nearest homes/jobs
- Police and firefighters cannot handle more than 1 problem at a time
- Population is somehow padded up exponentially

I'm not a serious Sim City player but all of the above problems seems wrong for a simulation game.
 
That's depressing.. no way to have more entrances at least? Split up the traffic?
I was trying to do that, only issue is there's only one way in and out of the city (well there's another entrance on the other side of the map but no one really came in or out of there for whatever reason).

If I could build a highway through my city and have off ramps that'd be great, but it's not possible. You can only have a big road and every time it intersects a cross street there's a traffic light and that jams up traffic for miles back.
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
It has been what 10 years since SimCity 4? Why hasn't someone else come up with a challenger then? I have purchased and played Cities XL and don't remember it being great.

Because there isnt much of a market, Sim City is a known name and "brand", it sells on its name and the majority of people who buy it will never play it to its fullest, they just know they've heard the name before, probably had fun with it at one time in there lives and buy it.
 
Uuuuh they're backed up because the roads inside aren't placed well.
OK Mr. City Planner. =P

Trust me I tried everything. All it takes is one intersection and the traffic backs up for miles. I take it you don't have this problem? What was your solution?
 

Skyzard

Banned
I was trying to do that, only issue is there's only one way in and out of the city (well there's another entrance on the other side of the map but no one really came in or out of there for whatever reason).

If I could build a highway through my city and have off ramps that'd be great, but it's not possible. You can only have a big road and every time it intersects a cross street there's a traffic light and that jams up traffic for miles back.

Is there a way to join multiple big roads outside of the city? Or maybe have them running side-by-side out of/towards the city but going in the same place so you can still have them leading to different sides of the town/city, they could still branch surely? Sort of doubling up at the perimeter.

Maybe that would reduce the traffic in general so it wouldn't build up at street connections...you'd think..
 
Is there a way to join multiple big roads outside of the city? Or maybe have them running side-by-side out of/towards the city but going in the same place so you can still have them leading to different sides of the town/city?
Nope you have zero control of anything outside of your city. This particular city started with an entrance on the east and west sides with a high density avenue (the biggest possible street) linking the two.

Edit: I suppose I could have tried the branching out thing, that may have worked. I may try that later.
 
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