

SimCity traffic AI is why services and traffic are broken - ry0ohki
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060[

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ripperdoc
Glassbox engine has been shown as a challenging and CPU-sucking way of solving
the simulation. I'd love for it to actually work, but is it really so
difficult/resource intensive to solve the problem? In old SimCities one could
click a house and see which route that invididual worker would take, e.g. a
(permanent?) mapping between worker and job, student and school, etc. Of
course, then the actual traffic simulation in previous SimCities was just
crap. Why couldn't an agent based system work, just that you keep in memory
for each agent where they belong and where they go? And then at regular
intervals (every few game days or so), randomize some of those mappings to
create people moving, jobs changing, etc. Is it that the path-finder is too
resource demanding if every agent has a pre-defined destination, and much less
taxing if just picking random targets?

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sturmeh
This is a link to a thread in a forum, not any official statement from EA.
(For those who may be a little confused at first.)

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ImprovedSilence
haha WOW. I haven't played many Sims since the early ones, but that sounds
pretty bad/1998esq level of effort.... Did any of the previous Sim Cities have
any level of intelligence above this?

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wmf
AFAIK the earlier versions had coarser simulation which paradoxically tended
to produce more realistic results. The new SimCity appears to have a sort of
"uncanny valley" level of simulation which is both highly detailed yet not
detailed enough to work properly.

