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SimCity Traffic and AI is broken, Sims are fake
- Thread starter jambo
- Start date
Bending_Unit_22
Member
Definitely, except most annoyingly they didn't seem to update the interface as far as I can tell. Other than that I love it, before I downloaded it I hadn't broken out pencil and paper to sketch out transportations grids in years.
Hmm, there was a thread about SimCity being stuck in 1950 but maybe the problem with this one is its stuck in 2050. You know when machines do all our work like the slaves of Rome, and the people's job is just to rest at home unless they want to muster up the energy to go to the ampitheatre/park/stadium for entertainment.
1) They haven't been to Britain and so that is culturally insensitive, or 2) they haven't been to a major city on the northeastern US coast where that is normal traffic rules.
Neuromancer
Member
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).
You did the right thing.
Hahaha. This game is providing a lot of fun.
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?
Can this be fixed with a patch? Has Maxis responded?
Ignis Fatuus
Banned
It's not a mistake to be fixed, it's deliberate chicanery.
In other words, working as intended.
endresults
Member
These are the kind of bugs that we can all live with. It's goofy and charming in a way. I'd take 100 of these bugs for a fix to even one of the fundamental problems with the game right now.
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
I am like 90% sure that these issues wont be fixed since it would need a completely new game approach and/or engine to "fix" them.
IISANDERII
Member
I can't stop laughing at this, it's incredible. Why have I never seen it before?
Yeah, but at least gaming sites could use secret Maxis source and create 3-4 news about SimCity lately, so thats a plus, right? God dammit this industry ;\
But yes, this pdf answers all lately questions and shows examples ...
I like how the few cars that end up using the high density road end up doing a u-turn anyways.
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.
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.
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.
SapientWolf
Trucker Sexologist
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.
valkillmore
Member
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.
Nothing official as far as I have seen. Curious as to if/when outlets will begin contacting Maxis/EA for comment.
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
As a software developer I am willing to say that if I were associated with this project I would be completely shamed by the level of shoddy work that seems to have gone into it. Then again, it's more the lead architects fault.
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.
Neuromancer
Member
Oh was that the official reason given? I didn't hear.
Edit: now that i think about it, it seems unlikely that both the digital and retail copies both stopped being sold the same day as that warning message came up. I don't think it's unreasonable to guess that Amazon temporarily delisted them while they sorted out what to do with all the complaints and returns coming in.
outlawedprod
Member
This made me smile.
Mavromatis
Member
This made me smile.
And the opinions tab is really funny. Also you can control the population by executions.
Would that really look any different then the current SimCity?
When did the theory that this could have originally been a Facebook game start? Before release, based on something developers might have been saying that people picked up on, or quickly after release after people got a look at the game and were comparing it with past games? Etc?
EA is the master of shitting on its consumer. I believe the game servers will be down within three years.
This made me smile.
Marxist propaganda.
Bending_Unit_22
Member
Yup, Somebody doesn't like El Presidente, El Presidente can have that person executed, arrested, fired, or destroy their house as El Presidente deems suitable. If other people don't like what El Presidente did, then El Presidente can do the same to them or call out El Presidente's well paid army to deal with said people. El Presidente can then continue to build Tropico into the dreamland El Presidente imagines.
It is good to be El Presidente (though simple and with problems, one of the things I do really like about Tropico).
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.
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.
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.
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
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.
Ace Harding
Member
Or anti-Maxist propaganda.
I knew about the fake sims for awhile. I think it was mentioned in an interview or so before the game released a long time ago. Anyways, the traffic and other problems have been issues that always plagued these games. The difference is that there were mods to fix it before. Hopefully this stuff gets ironed out sometime......if it even will be.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
See Maxis? This is what happens when you turn off Cheetah speed! Gamers will be forced to take a look at what your game is actually doing!
Puppet Shadow
Member
Hehe, nice.
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
The idea is that you won't know what the sim you pick has been doing until you pick him. So by only making sims persistent once you click on them is a very good way of having computation be less taxing. Look at a table near you. You can't see all the details. So you can't prove their there. But when you move close, you can see them. Do the same with sims. You can't prove they don't have a persistent life, because whenever you watch them, their behaviour changes. And they stay changed from the first time you watch one. So you don't necessarily have to keep a rich backstory or persistent work-place for EVERYONE, if you can't simulate all that, but you'll give the illusion.
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.
Think about it. Just think about it for a second. You think EA is going to have the equivalent of an i7 for every single concurrent player? Yes, this can be load-balanced, but even if you put just a fraction of the calculations online, you're going to need so much hardware just to RECEIVE the thousands of players' data concurrently that it's not even worth it. If they haven't implemented the game smartly enough so it can be run locally, doing it on a server means double the overhead, latency and rockets your game's cost.
BlueTsunami
there is joy in sucking dick
SimAqueduct
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
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.
Yes. You have to cleverly divide it, so it's either recursive or built on smaller blocks. It's not feasible that every house should have a table for that sim to reach all other constructions. You need a table that says how you can get to someone that knows how you can get to somewhere fastest (recursive), or you need to know what streets are the fastest way to where in a master lookup table, which means the entry you need to have yourself is the one that tells you how to get to someplace where the MLU can tell you how to get on from. Like "I know how to get to "junction 1" (say you city gets divided into 100 junctions), from junction 1, you need to go to junction 34. The master lookup table tells you how you do that, and from there you can figure out how to get to your destination yourself, since it's only some streets away.
That way, the sim already knows how to get to the places he needs to go, and you need no computation.
Marty Chinn
Member
Digital or physical?
PoweredBySoy
Banned
F it. I just purchased Tropico 4. I'm too in the mood for a city builder.
EmCeeGramr
Member
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