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SimCity Traffic and AI is broken, Sims are fake
- Thread starter jambo
- Start date
It's not unreasonable to think that's perhaps what happened, but the way it's being paraded around as that is what happened, as a fact, when the same message is used for things that Amazon has no idea when or how many they're being restocked with is bothersome.
Especially given various timelines involved (the physical version wasn't available for like 2 hours when the digital version wasn't available for most of the day), that third party sellers were still able to physical versions despite Amazon being on the hook for chargebacks, that other games with significantly less problems or controversies at launch had the same thing happen on Amazon (GW2 for example), and that other games with similarly bad problems weren't pulled from Amazon (D3).
It reeks of yellow journalism and jumping on the EA hate train (warranted as that train may be).
I got a refund through Origin even as a direct download. I did it quick enough that I beat the masses and their official statement on the matter. Also got a great CS rep I suppose.
I've quite literally been more entertained reading through these topics of failure discovery than I've been in the 8 or so hours I played. I should give Gaf my $60 instead.
I've quite literally been more entertained reading through these topics of failure discovery than I've been in the 8 or so hours I played. I should give Gaf my $60 instead.
Neuromancer
Member
Thats fine but if you look at my original post I was really just speculating.
The 650k city with no intersections is not a good example -- in that screenshot that city was in sandbox mode. Pollution, crime, sickness, everything turned off. And taxes set to 0%.
This guy who built a 400k city with no mass transit is a better example. Note how he avoids SOME kinds of intersections, like makes sure the route from the highway only intersects medium roads -- that way the main traffic never has to stop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV6PrEjaH8Q
And he also does NOT use streetcars avenues because they always create intersections. He talks about all the problems mentioned in this thread and exploits them, but the city does not look like a snake.
Now if a snake city can hit 400k with no mass transit, and no cheats enabled, that is a problem. But I haven't seen evidence of that.
This guy who built a 400k city with no mass transit is a better example. Note how he avoids SOME kinds of intersections, like makes sure the route from the highway only intersects medium roads -- that way the main traffic never has to stop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV6PrEjaH8Q
And he also does NOT use streetcars avenues because they always create intersections. He talks about all the problems mentioned in this thread and exploits them, but the city does not look like a snake.
Now if a snake city can hit 400k with no mass transit, and no cheats enabled, that is a problem. But I haven't seen evidence of that.
TimeEffect
Member
I think Ill jump in too, but have no spending money to spare at the moment.
Tropico definitely sounds fun, I'm going to see what else I could possibly get around the Sim market.
I'd purchase Sims 3, but that's too expensive.
It's not really much of a city builder especially if you're looking for something similar to simcity.
EmCeeGramr
Member
Bahaha, I didn't even notice that.
beat
Member
SC4 had a simulated population. Just because there weren't 200K 'agents' running individual lives doesn't mean there wasn't a simulation. It was just abstracted and using collective statistics. X number of schools for the population with Y funding per school = literacy rate or something, etc etc.
But before the game came out, the mainstream game press story was that SimCity 5 would have a revolutionary system of simming with this 'agent-based modeling', which EVERYONE took to mean 'simplified Sims living their lives in SimCity': persistent characters who would move into the city, take the same job day after day, go back to the same home day after day, etc. And that would have been cool!
It sounds a lot like they got the worst of both worlds here: the simulation, at the big picture, is actually less accurate than SimCity 4's aggregate simulation method AND at the micro level, it's not compelling because Sim "Jason Michaels" only exists for any given commute; once he arrives at his destination he merges into that building's aggregate stats and a new Sim is generated a few hours later.
All that said, that was what the reporting was. Now that I look at the 2012 GDC talk on Glassbox (and that video DOE3 linked), I see that their 'agents' were always going to be as this thread has described: practically identity-less automatons. I don't think it necessarily solves any SC4 problem better than SC4, except for the way SC traditionally used to visualize traffic in a somewhat crappy way. Now that agents move about the roads, cars don't vanish. Hooray.
That's great, but in the end, it is still a sequel to a franchise that has delivered quite admirably with statistics-based methods and the cure is worse than the disease. Esp since if I understand you correctly, the scale of a genuinely 'realistic' agent-based model of a city would overwhelm home PCs for decades to come.
Puppet Shadow
Member
PM me your Steam info, I have an extra copy you can have for free.
LemonGremlin
Member
I can't play this game anymore. I click on houses and I see "Cooper Residence", "Anderson Residence", "Raj Residence", but it's a lie! Wool over the eyes! I click on little Bobby Jackson walking to school and I feel nothing.
Puppet Shadow
Member
I probably shouldn't have laughed at this.
I'm reminded of how disillusioned I got with Star Ruler when I found out that the ship AI didn't understand the Newtonian mechanics used to calculate ship velocities. It led to bizarre behavior like a fast ship being unable to catch a slow ship and obvious intercept paths being missed.
I was glad I didn't buy SimCity, but was still intending to pick it up at a later date when it was cheaper and all the issues were ironed out. Now I have no interest whatsoever, although this sort of thread is massively entertaining. Sympathies to anyone who bought it.
I was glad I didn't buy SimCity, but was still intending to pick it up at a later date when it was cheaper and all the issues were ironed out. Now I have no interest whatsoever, although this sort of thread is massively entertaining. Sympathies to anyone who bought it.
bigdaddygamebot
Member
This just keeps getting better and better.
Bending_Unit_22
Member
That hurts way more than it should.
Also, that SimCity, err, city is bonkers. That many nuclear power plants, that many stadiums, that many undeveloped and underdeveloped R zones, 3 police stations next to each other, 4 bridges over a lake from not much to not much, a seaport on said lake, so many zones and buildings without power, really? At least the train station and fountain are reasonably placed.
PoweredBySoy
Banned
I'm feeling the love.
So... I guess that's what happen?
1) someone at EA thinks having to simulate every single person in a city is a good idea.
2) It obviously needs a lot of computation, so use that as an excuse to make it online only.
3) But then the server would cost too much, so let's not do that (but online only is a good idea to sell SC Bucks so keep it).
3) Let's just give it some very simple algorithm to minimize the computation required. Such as always take the shortest path without considering other factor (such as road load).
4) Then, let's start with reducing the city limit to a mere block. This will reduce the population (thus number of sim)
6) But then it will make the population looks too low for a "city". Let's artificially increase the number display by an arbitrary factor.
7) ???
8) Server down
1) someone at EA thinks having to simulate every single person in a city is a good idea.
2) It obviously needs a lot of computation, so use that as an excuse to make it online only.
3) But then the server would cost too much, so let's not do that (but online only is a good idea to sell SC Bucks so keep it).
3) Let's just give it some very simple algorithm to minimize the computation required. Such as always take the shortest path without considering other factor (such as road load).
4) Then, let's start with reducing the city limit to a mere block. This will reduce the population (thus number of sim)
6) But then it will make the population looks too low for a "city". Let's artificially increase the number display by an arbitrary factor.
7) ???
8) Server down
It's not a huge issue for me, but it does feel deceptive and pointless. I say deceptive as in the game itself being deceptive, not the developers, because I don't feel like I was sold on this being a feature anyway.
I think the behaviour of traffic in general and particularly the emergency services is game crippling though. Not only can emergency vehicles not get through traffic, but the logic behind them is stupid. A combination of random fires and poor dispatch management means that you can have half a dozen fires burning and only one being tackled, for example.
I have enjoyed some of the time I've had with the new Simcity; I built up a moderately sized city, ran out of space and decided to build a nice suburban town nearby. These guys took up the extra jobs in the main city nicely. Decided to create some industrial jobs in another city because the population was growing in that small town, and shit starts to go wrong from there. Literally nobody from the town would commute to the new industrial city; these were low wealth sims; the most basic kind, and they wouldn't take the most basic industrial jobs. Every factory shut down.
In addition, I tried sending £250k from my large city to the residential town. Money was deducted, but never arrived at the town. £250k just disappeared on one of their servers somewhere. How the hell can that happen?
Also, moved my casinos to the city 'entrance' and suddenly they're making money. I guess the flow of tourists wasn't reaching them. Now just to knock down a chunk of residential high rises to move the expo centre to. At least these weird game logic revelations have explained this, but it still sucks that you have to take advantage of it in annoying ways to make money.
lazorexplosion
Member
It really seems like a very naive implementation. It means sims will do pathfinding to get to a destination that will be full before it gets there, causing it to have to do pathfinding again when it gets there and the location is full. This is then often repeated several times before the sim finds an unoccupied location. That doesn't seem very optimal from a performance point of view (no wonder that the path finding must be simplistic) and it certainly isn't realistic. Simply claiming the a destination before setting out would avoid the need to do pathfinding more than once per trip and produce more realistic behavior, let alone more sophisticated solutions.
When you also consider that the simulation is also limited to a single core you have to conclude that the programming of it is simply incompetent.
When you also consider that the simulation is also limited to a single core you have to conclude that the programming of it is simply incompetent.
You can easily simulate millions of agents if only a small percentage of them are active at any time. Just deactivate sims when they get home, get to work, get in a car, etc. unless the player is actually looking at them or when an event that affects them happens. Let the job, house, and car be agents that contain multiple sim agents.
It's not hard. Only hundreds of agents have to be simulated at any time if you properly layer them and only simulate them when shit is going down.
Jake Tower
Banned
SPAWN MORE OVERLORDS
Looks like Guillaume Pierre ‏is very engaged with people on Twitter, even shared some tech under the hood , like this one about path finding algorithm:
Guillaume Pierre ‏@MaxisGuillaume
@Le_Belge_a_dit it's using D*, not A*, but yeah, looking into some changes to the planning AI.
Guillaume Pierre ‏@MaxisGuillaume
@Le_Belge_a_dit it's using D*, not A*, but yeah, looking into some changes to the planning AI.
Heh,well i am enjoying that game more,way better polished. Zerging all the way.
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TheChewyWaffles
Member
So glad I didn't buy this.
cooljeanius
Member
Darn it I just nostalgia'd
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Caesar III
Member
Just tick the box when creating a new region
Fusion Pizza
Member
Nobody fucks up quite like EA.
It's a checkbox when you create a region.
Then:
ALT+W - Add §100,000 to City Budget
ALT+F - Toggle Fire On/Off
ALT+C - Toggle Crime On/Off
ALT+M - Toggle Health Issues On/Off
ALT+A - Toggle Air Pollution On/Off
ALT+P - Toggle Ground Pollution On/Off
ALT+H - Toggle Homeless Sims On/Off
ALT+S - Toggle Sewage On/Off
Just wait for Activision Blizzard. Next they will do Diablo 3 Online only too and drop all the talent trees and randomization of the maps.
outlawedprod
Member
Brutal
Added to the op.
This, coupled with the fucked up happiness stuff and everything else that is slowly coming out about this game (underwater streets) is just making it look pathetic.
What were they doing for the past 5 years?!
God's speed, and good luck.
endresults
Member
No takebacks in this digital future.
Yeah, combine that with choosing a destination dependent on the place that they leave (ie if a sim leaves an expensive house they generally choose a place to go with high paying jobs and some randomization where they won't always choose the closest option and you should have a decent and far more believable simulation.
Eppy Thatcher
God's had his chance.
whoa... flashbacks.
Thiss is probably the most unforgivable aspect to me (haven't not played the game yet myself.)
I've probably missed someone commenting on this already but would anyone who purchased mind telling me how the smaller city size feels? Did you not notice because of the level of micro stuff there is to do or did you quickly feel kind of claustrophobic?
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