Have you ever tried OpenTTD? Certainly one of the best management games ever. It's a modernized, expanded version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The Anno series, as mentioned by the previous poster, is great too if you're after micromanagement heavy games.
...Are we sure this isn't Caesar V?
This is one year old
http://www.andrewwillmott.com/talks/inside-glassbox
And pdf is describing path-finding in details.
http://www.andrewwillmott.com/talks/inside-glassbox/GlassBox GDC 2012 Slides.pdf
This pdf also talks about online interaction lol. Games journalism...
I think they've worked something out with EA where they either get refunded or credited or in some other way compensated. Otherwise I have to imagine they'd have stopped selling the game (as they did briefly last week).I finally caved and got a refund from Amazon. It just kept piling up until it was too much and I couldn't take it anymore. Does anyone know if Amazon eats the money on that refund or do they somehow not pay EA for that copy?
I finally caved and got a refund from Amazon. It just kept piling up until it was too much and I couldn't take it anymore. Does anyone know if Amazon eats the money on that refund or do they somehow not pay EA for that copy?
Was this allready posted?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d0b41H-Lnk&feature=player_embedded#!
I really want to like this game. I really want to buy it and love it. I want to build a region with friends but this is really game breaking. The game looks fantastic but with DRM, the AI being horrendous, lack of glassbox working, and the some of the simulation is broken has turned me off.
Can this be fixed with a patch? Has Maxis responded?
This is one year old
http://www.andrewwillmott.com/talks/inside-glassbox
And pdf is describing path-finding in details.
http://www.andrewwillmott.com/talks/inside-glassbox/GlassBox GDC 2012 Slides.pdf
This pdf also talks about online interaction lol. Games journalism...
I really want to like this game. I really want to buy it and love it. I want to build a region with friends but this is really game breaking. The game looks fantastic but with DRM, the AI being horrendous, lack of glassbox working, and the some of the simulation is broken has turned me off.
Can this be fixed with a patch? Has Maxis responded?
I can't stop laughing at this, it's incredible. Why have I never seen it before?
Actually, there is a serious tell in there - slide 37, headline Agents. Bullet point "Do not run rules (10,000s of agents)". To be clear, they do have UnitRules, but those are apparently just things like "GoToWork."
So yeah, if not in PR, at least the developers were already saying back then that Sims were just something that carried resource, handed off from one bin to another.
Of course, the Path Based routing slide also says that it will take into account capacity, congestion, and speed limit.
Edit: Hahaha slide 59: Asynchronous server model - No reliance on dedicated live server running to support your play session
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&feature=iv&src_vid=zHdyzx_ecbQ&v=zcEaHT9mt-Y
It just keeps getting more and more stupid. The absolute rigidity of the system, combined with horrible solutions is just... I have no words.
Otherwise I have to imagine they'd have stopped selling the game (as they did briefly last week).
all these issues don't seem like they could be patched, feels like they'd need to make an entirely different game
Yeah. I worry that at some point, EA is going to shift from damage-control mode to cutting-their-losses mode, and the game will end up being put out to pasture. And since it's EA, this could also signal an end to the whole Simcity franchise, outside of crappy Facebook games and whatever other living dead hellscapes the Ultima franchise is dumped in these days.
It's looking like there's no pathing at all, on the individual sim level. Traffic just flows from one end to the other like a TD game.Because the data sets aren't that large, and can be represented in memory very efficiently. Transportation networks are just graphs. Even assuming you have 1000 distinct transportation pathways, representing that amount of data in memory is trivial.
Of course you have to recompute things. But you only need to recompute them under certain circumstances, such as when changes to the road networks occur. And any single change is only going to require a recomputation of pathing that sims that use that road, not the entire system. It seems that since the sims do not remember their job or their house they actually created the requirement that pathing algorithms be run for every sim on every cycle, instead of simply when necessary. That's just bad design. The RAM really isn't the issue here. It's not an astronomical amount of data.
So, uh . . . has fucking EA responded to this shit? Last statement I knew about was the one where the company rep came out and basically said server-side calculations were programmed directly into the code of SimCity and offline play wasn't possible. That has since rumoured to be debunked, then we have this goddamn shitstorm.
It's looking like there's no pathing at all, on the individual sim level. Traffic just flows from one end to the other like a TD game.
I actually wouldnt mind them selling the franchise if they are unable to cope with producing games in that genre. Apparently Maxis themselves had a big part in this mess though.
EA will never do this. That's why Richard Garriott's new Ultima game is not called Ultima, and why the word "System" doesn't appear at the front of any of Irrational's new Shock games.
Oh was that the official reason given? I didn't hear.Which was unrelated to the going ons of SimCity servers, unless you think that it shared the error message of all other things Amazon runs out of and don't know when or by how much they're being restocked coincidentally.
This made me smile.
Yeah. I worry that at some point, EA is going to shift from damage-control mode to cutting-their-losses mode, and the game will end up being put out to pasture. And since it's EA, this could also signal an end to the whole Simcity franchise, outside of crappy Facebook games and whatever other living dead hellscapes the Ultima franchise is dumped in these days.
Yeah. I worry that at some point, EA is going to shift from damage-control mode to cutting-their-losses mode, and the game will end up being put out to pasture. And since it's EA, this could also signal an end to the whole Simcity franchise, outside of crappy Facebook games and whatever other living dead hellscapes the Ultima franchise is dumped in these days.
This made me smile.
And the opinions tab is really funny. Also you can control the population by executions.
I just came up with yet another altering that could've easily been done to SimCity, which at least would put a patch on the gaping wound that this system is turning out to be:
When you follow a sim, that sim becomes persistent. When you click "follow" on that sim, that sim is assigned a permanent slot in a job, and a permanent house. You could add to it as much info as you want to. You could give him an age, a family situation and dreams, and say you only save 1000 (or really, whatever number) entries at a time. It would take extremely little memory, and you'd feel connected to your city, since you have the impression that Sims are persistent. After all, you have no ability to verify that Bob has been working at that factory for the last two months like the game states. You could do the same with people you hover over.
You don't need to give all 1,000,000 (or 50,000 as it would be in this case) unique backstories, as no one would ever get into them all. So make sims persistent when it's needed. You could even use free CPU cycles to populate this table, and fill in more and more persistent sims that each calculate its route when the game has time. This means your game would go from having mindless, closest hit mentality, to being a persistent crowd that has a daily routine over hours of gameplay, and is ultimately limited to free memory and performance.
I just came up with yet another altering that could've easily been done to SimCity, which at least would put a patch on the gaping wound that this system is turning out to be:
When you follow a sim, that sim becomes persistent. When you click "follow" on that sim, that sim is assigned a permanent slot in a job, and a permanent house. You could add to it as much info as you want to. You could give him an age, a family situation and dreams, and say you only save 1000 (or really, whatever number) entries at a time. It would take extremely little memory, and you'd feel connected to your city, since you have the impression that Sims are persistent. After all, you have no ability to verify that Bob has been working at that factory for the last two months like the game states. You could do the same with people you hover over.
You don't need to give all 1,000,000 (or 50,000 as it would be in this case) unique backstories, as no one would ever get into them all. So make sims persistent when it's needed. You could even use free CPU cycles to populate this table, and fill in more and more persistent sims that each calculate its route when the game has time. This means your game would go from having mindless, closest hit mentality, to being a persistent crowd that has a daily routine over hours of gameplay, and is ultimately limited to free memory and performance.
Marxist propaganda.
Hehe, nice.Or anti-Maxist propaganda.
I think not making them persistent makes traffic simulation much more cpu intensive, if you want to do traffic simulation on all sims in the simulation though. It would be better to make all sims persistent so that you don't need to constantly recalculate their paths each go around.
You'd still need to do that for every single sim, since I would probably pick a favourite Sim that I check back with a few days after to see how he is doing and then you'd still need to have the same data and cant generate it from random 0's again.
But you are still correct fundamentally, they should have come up with better ways to disguise these issues.
I think not making them persistent makes traffic simulation much more cpu intensive, if you want to do traffic simulation on all sims in the simulation though. It would be better to make all sims persistent so that you don't need to constantly recalculate their paths each go around.
What bugs me most about this is...if they do the traffic properly unlike this BS I have just found out about...they are going to need horsepower...which makes more sense to have this game run online so the servers can calculate all this stuff.
But that is clearly not the case. I use a corei7....so when you say the CPU can't handle the processing power...I mean come on? EA/Maxis..you do know how powerful those intel core CPUs are right?
Maybe leave the online option for those with less powerful CPUs (assuming this server calculation thing is even true in the first place).
But in all honesty, I bet even a Corei3 could handle this offline with no problems. The leap from the CPU generation of SimCity 4 is SO HUGE. How can there be not enough power to calculate without needing servers?
Bloody joke Maxis/EA
Yup. There is really no need for a D* algorithm (and what the fuck would D*-lite be, anyway?), since the terrain most certainly is never unknown. These kind of design flaws might be the result of someone highly trained in algorithms, but with a poor sense of creative and critical thinking. D*-implementation is no minor feat, but when you realise that it's not an unknown terrain, the whole thing falls flat.
The number of nodes and paths in this game is not that complex, anyway. Preprocessing a handful of clusters, some thousand buildings and at worst some thousand paths is a way easier job than each created "agent" having to do its own run. It's as if all computers don't have twice the RAM they need, and we don't know what a pagefile is.
Ah I am finally seeing this from your perspective I think. You are saying that you just need to create a pathing table from structure A to all other structures (or a subset of structures, and so on), and then a sim in structure A just needs to decide what other structure he wants to go to and then just lookup the path in the table? I hadn't thought about it from that angle.
I finally caved and got a refund from Amazon. It just kept piling up until it was too much and I couldn't take it anymore. Does anyone know if Amazon eats the money on that refund or do they somehow not pay EA for that copy?