
SimCity’s Sims Don’t Seem That Smart After All - webjunkie
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-dont-seem-that-smart-after-all/
======
potatolicious
This is a _huge_ problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.

The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let
this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an
absolute showstopper.

Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack"
the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a
city _with no intersections_ , since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with
them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This
_forces_ your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.

Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still
maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains _some_ semblance to real-life
cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something
that bears _zero_ semblance to any real city, then it has failed.

The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the
game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to
intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in
basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need
to build to statistically serve an area. You have to _grossly_ over-build your
fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.

I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty
that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server
issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.

~~~
ChrisLTD
"in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior"

It's actually the opposite, sims always go to the nearest source for whatever
it is they need despite traffic or congestion. Some randomness in picking a
destination might actually solve the problem without requiring any particular
intelligence.

~~~
Lambdanaut
It's SUCH a better idea to simply weight paths based on their congestion.
Like, that's A* path-finding 101.

~~~
espadrine
I'm not sure they're actually using A*. In the following video, some cars are
going directly right, although it isn't the shortest "bird-view" distance to
their destination.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_ufAd79bOA>

Edit: actually, they seem blocked by cars from the left lane. They'd go left
otherwise!

~~~
blaabjerg
Though I can't find any official sources to back it up, various internet
citizens seem to claim they're using a D* Lite algorithm. I find it hard to
believe. Either they're using some much cruder algorithm or they've
implemented D* Lite horribly.

~~~
UberMouse
D* Lite Source <https://twitter.com/MaxisGuillaume/status/311218564600315905>

------
JumpCrisscross
I am the guy who builds agent-based models for fun. A lesson you learn quickly
is that heterogeneity is your guardian angel - varying the path-finding model
a little bit from agent to agent hedges against the resonance structures on
display here. Additionally, you periodically check the accumulated micros
against a macro model and correct gross deviations. Neither step is
computationally strenuous.

~~~
aidos
Could you explain a little bit more about how that works - you used words I
don't understand :) It seems as though something as simple as a random
selection when presented with intersections is better than the behaviour here.
I guess there should just be a weight on the streets though, right?

~~~
carlob
Let me translate this to physics talk for you: when you use a greedy algorithm
with no interaction between agents and no randomness, it's effectively like
bosons at zero temperature, they will all fall in the lowest energy state and
form a Bose-Einstein condensate.

This can be avoided in one of two ways, make them aware of each other, so that
they can't all be in the same state (like fermions) or raise the temperature,
i.e. add randomness. Probably you'll need to do both and find an energy
function that's less retarded than choose the first branch you see…

~~~
skore
Apologies for going meta, but - Only on Hacker News will you see a "simpler"
explanation involve the mention of _Bose-Einstein condensate_.

------
JustARandomGuy
_and you absolutely cannot follow a Sim anywhere – once they’ve entered a
building, whether residential, commercial or industrial, the game stops
following them, and good luck finding them after._

This made me laugh sadly. I remember playing SimTower when it was released in
1994, and you could follow any Sim around as he went about his day. It's now
almost 20 years later, with vastly more powerful computers, and the AI engine
is actually worse.

~~~
morsch
You're comparing apples and oranges. I'm sure the simulation engine in Sim
Tower was wildly less complicated than in Sim City 5, or any other Sim City
game after the original, for that matter.

Honestly, I don't really _care_ about following individual Sims in a Sim City
game. It's out of scope. If anything, they went too far in that direction in
the current Sim City game, wasting resources on individual entities as opposed
to having a solid macro model. I assume that's why we ended up with these
pathetic city sizes.

~~~
tiglionabbit
Is SimTower really less complicated?

They each have multiple methods of transportation. SimTower has stairs,
escalators, elevators, and express elevators. You can see congestion as your
sims' silhouettes pile up in front of elevators. To get to their destination,
they can switch elevators once, and take four staircases/escalators. Sure
everything is orthogonal and not curvy like SimCity5, but cities could be
build that way too.

~~~
morsch
I don't have any special insight into the internals of both games, so I can't
say for sure. I certainly think you could make a tower management game that
has a simulation engine that is just as complicated as SimCity 4 or 5. On the
other hand, I think that in principle a game attempting to simulate, to a
degree, an entire city is bound to offer more complexity than a game
attempting to simulate the goings-on in a single building.

I can make an argument from observation: Sim Tower is a 68030/386-era game,
and from what I remember, my 68040 ran it very well. SimCity 4, OTOH, can
still bring (a single core of) a modern CPU to its knees. Of course it's
possible that SimTower was incredibly efficient and SC4 incredibly _in_
efficient, but it seems much more likely that SimCity 4 is in fact vastly more
complicated.

~~~
zaphoyd
Simtower definitely seemed to simulate individuals and had a population cap of
15-20k. Its path finding was drastically simpler though.

Every floor (110 floors max) was essentially a single zone that could be
crossed instantaneously so each person needed a path only from floor A to
floor B. There were strict limits as well about how many transfers were
allowed per path and how many total stairs, escalates, and elevators were
build able.

Sim City 4 allowed many millions of "people" on networks of significant
complexity. The SimTower simulation was simple, satisfying, and relatively bug
free. It also wasn't complex enough to continue to be satisfying for 10+ years
the way SC4 has been.

------
gizmo
With games you always have to create illusions of complexity in order to get
acceptable performance. Smoke isn't real smoke (no real time smoothed particle
hydrodynamics) but instead you billboard couple of semi-translucant textures.
Bullets don't use real physics, but act as a point mass with specialized
collision detection mechanics. Enemy AI is often just a simple state machine
and hacked together heuristics. Everything is fake.

With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region.
SimCity has to model the economy, happiness, education, water, waste, power,
pollution, traffic, industry, and much more. So if you want to do this for
100.000 Sims in real-time you've got to cut many corners. There's just no
other way. And the illusion in SimCity 5 is pretty damn good, from what I've
seen. Cars drive with purpose from one place to another. Traffic congestion
seems to make sense. Air flow affects pollution in a sensible way. Sure, there
are a bunch of bugs but in general the illusion holds up. It's really quite
impressive.

~~~
potatolicious
That's just it though, SimCity 5's problem is that it _insisted_ on agent-
based micro-simulation even though technical limitations would require these
agents to be lobotomized.

In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on
each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro
simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and
back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a _proper_
simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.

Agent-based simulation is the _correct_ implementation (i.e., closest to
reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A
macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant _far_ fewer
corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent
negative agent-agent interactions.

To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures
for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of
each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even
look like smoke anymore.

~~~
bentcorner
> _This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back_

Note that in SimCity 2013 you still can't really do this. A sim finds a new
job every day and finds a new home at the end of the day. Really.

~~~
estel
I believe I read that the sims find the nearest place that has a job available
and the nearest house at the end of the day.

~~~
nwh
That's correct, but it's not carried over from day to day. Every morning a new
job, every evening a new house.

------
chao-
The single biggest question on my mind is how this ended up functioning
_worse_ than the community-made solutions such as NAM (Network Addon Mod) for
Sim City 4. If all they did was monkey-copy that behavior, available for many
years now, I would have been more satisfied.

I am reminded of Gabe Newell's recent comment of how _“[Valve] can’t compete
with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little, but
by a lot.”_ [1] and am starting to understand what he meant in a more visceral
way: My low-bar for the experience, my expectation of quality, was _not_ for
Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4. My expectation was for Sim City 5 to
outperform Sim City 4 Plus Community Content, because to my brain in consumer
mode, those last 3 words don't exist, and it all just gets the label "Sim City
4" on the experience.

[1] [http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-
ne...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-newell-
claims-users-have-defeated-valve-created-content-and-thats-a-go)

------
methodover
The response from the community in regards to SimCity is understandable -- but
also disturbing.

SimCity isn't unplayable. Quite the opposite. It is an engrossing, beautiful,
rich game with plenty of gameplay available. I've played the game for probably
forty hours so far, across four different cities -- and the game has only been
out for a week. That's amazing. A game hasn't captured my attention like this
in quite a while.

And yet, many players seem to believe the game is completely unplayable. The
top comment on this thread as I write this says that the game is a 'travesty'
and shouldn't have been shipped. That's unreasonable.

I can only begin to imagine what SimCity's developers are feeling right now.
They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively
amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about
how shit it is.

Usually I place the blame at the feet of the developers, but not this time.
This time, I think it's the community that needs to get over it. There is a
rich, great game here if you just look past your own expectations for half a
second.

~~~
benjarrell
It is broken when things such as this happen all to regularly:
<http://i.imgur.com/7cd6VZV.jpg>

Every single police car in the entire city will respond to the exact same
crime in progress, ignoring all others, creating a traffic black hole, and
leaving you with no police.

~~~
jellicle
Things like that could not help but have been noticed. Somewhere there is a
bug report: "All police cars respond to every crime". It is marked something
like "WONTFIX - by design" or "WONTFIX - no time before release" or
"WISHLIST".

That is all anyone needs to know about the game to judge it.

------
JonnieCache
_"rather than individual little Simmy lives, they instead operate as an
homogeneous mass, distributing themselves like a collection of marbles rolling
down a board covered in holes. As they reach a job, whichever job, ignoring
their previous day’s job, they take it, until all the jobs are taken. It
doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial or industrial job – they just roll until
they fall into the next available slot. ... They don’t trundle off back to
their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with
work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their
lives, no permanence."_

This reads like a terrifying vision of a perfectly optimized post-fordist
near-future dystopia.

Maybe the Maxis gang have deeper ideas in mind than we realised...

------
cmelbye
I've noticed some weirdness with this as well. I'm not sure if this is
intentional behavior or not, but I had a Nuclear power plant in my city, which
has more than enough capacity for the entire city. However, when you look at
the power view which shows how electricity is flowing through the streets, it
seems as if the units of electricity travel randomly through the streets and
would actually not reach certain streets and just pass by them. This caused
blackouts in certain areas of the city, and required me to build a smaller
power plant by this area of the city to restore power. Is this correct
behavior? Is electricity supposed to have some sort of limit of how far it can
travel?

~~~
chiph
There are transmission losses when moving electricity along wires (I seem to
recall it's up to 10-12% on long-distance lines in the US).

But the electrons don't do stuff like bypass entire streets...

~~~
cmelbye
Yeah I mean certainly power can't travel forever in long distance wires, but
the "electrons" we're passing right by a side street when they got to an
intersection. There was no issue in other cities when I starting exporting
that extra power to them.

------
nanodeath
I've found that the biggest problems have actually been in the emergency
dispatch stuff. For one, police, ambulances, and fire trucks /get stuck in
traffic/. Hugely obnoxious and unrealistic (at least, when there are open
lanes on the other side of the road). The other problem is when if you have
multiple events in the city at a time, e.g. two fires. Usually all or most of
your fire trucks will go to the first building (and get stuck on each other in
the process) and ignore the second one until its burned down. It's like
there's nothing actually coordinating the vehicles and it's purely first-
inferno-first-serve.

------
3dptz
Notwithstanding all the bad press SimCity got since launch; I got the game 3
days after it's release.

I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the
stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial
server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase.

During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the
plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode
any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected
server 'Europe West 6' and started playing.

Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server
related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message
that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer
than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay.

I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend).
All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10
of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave
the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the
snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking
great to play!

"This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.

The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let
this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an
absolute showstopper."

Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or
denying the initial server problems.

"...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this
state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics
that are still fundamentally broken."

Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a
fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline
in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have
very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.

~~~
saraid216
You've only been on HN a month, but give it a year. You'll get used to the
wild hyperbole, especially in the top comment. It's how people get attention.

------
dyselon
> Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to
> "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior.

To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path,
no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part.

I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining
deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your
cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only
problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding
issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels
"cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do
about some of the pathfinding issues.

Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over
again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such
little hoodlums.

[EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post.
Whoops.

------
Goronmon
RPS already knew this is how it worked prior to release.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_dont_seem_that_smart_after_all/c8uux82)

~~~
kitsune_
This was clear to anyone that followed the development of the game. It was
made clear in many developers interviews and videos about the GlassBox engine.
Hell, there are official developer videos that describe the GlassBox engine in
detail dating back to early 2012. RPS knew about this behavior before the
release of the game, to act surprised now is rather disingenuous and
malevolent.

~~~
nextstep
You mean "disingenuous".

~~~
kitsune_
Thanks, I'm a bit tired and English isn't my native language. I've edited the
post.

------
josscrowcroft
_"They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no
consistency to their lives, no permanence."_

Strangely enough, I can relate.

------
arkitaip
How wasn't this discovered in beta? Why didn't reviewers catch any of this?

~~~
inerte
It was discovered, but someone decided it was worth the risk to release with
the known bugs.

This is becoming quite common with games, on PC or consoles. You just patch it
later. Some games even have patches available on release day.

~~~
pseudonym
I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to
compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like
Microsoft and Sony is a _long_ process that can go for weeks (or much longer,
if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an
actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers
working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting
on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the
bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the
process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and
hope that you allocated your development time properly.

Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for
a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the
difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office.

*Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".

------
matterhorn
My impression is that EA has some great creative talent, but that the business
management function is entrusted to people who have honesty and competence
issues.

One of the big problems with American business is the focus on academic
credentials, particularly with regard to "soft skills" (no skills?) in areas
such as management. You will not learn management in a classroom. Furthermore,
if you can't grasp the fundamentals of what you are supposedly managing, then
you are just in the way.

The path ought to be:

Become an engineer -> Become a high-performing engineer -> Get some business
education -> Do management

If you can't handle the engineering phases, why on earth should anybody put
you in a decision-making position in an engineer endeavor?

While the practice should not be barred, it is unproductive for universities
to offer "management" degrees at the undergraduate level, unless such degrees
require the demonstration of significant prior work experience. Graduate
management programs should not accept twentysomethings arriving straight from
undergraduate programs.

Less fluff, more umpf.

~~~
EvanKelly
It seems your experience in the business/corporate engineering world is vastly
different than mine.

The problem with your path to management is that many engineers have no desire
to manage, and anecdotally, those who do, end up being ill-suited for
management.

The best managers I've had are not top engineers, rather they're managers that
are willing to understand and listen to their top performing engineers.

Google/Microsoft/etc. offer PM positions to students directly out of
undergrad. From my experience, the skillset between a top-performing engineer
is vastly different from that of a top-performing and well liked PM.

~~~
sirclueless
They still hire people from engineering and math backgrounds. People who you
know have the competence to understand any technical problem you throw at
them, at least at a shallow operational level.

The prerequisite is deep mathematical, rational and process-oriented thinking.
You can get that lots of ways, but an MBA alone won't give it to you.

~~~
EvanKelly
I don't disagree with that. If you run a technical company, managers shoudl
demonstrate an ability to think and understand technical problems.

I disagree with the notion that the path through management should be through
demonstrating your value as an engineer. If a high performing engineer desires
a move into management, I think that should certainly be considered, but I
have no evidence that top engineers transition into being top managers.

~~~
sirclueless
I would certainly argue that it is easier to find engineering-trained people
who can become successful businessfolk, than business-trained people who can
competently manage tech companies.

Being a successful engineer is evidence that you understand processes and
systems very deeply. What remains is interpersonal skill and basic economics.
Being a successful business person is evidence of the complement.

Couple this with the observation that it is easier to find people who picked
up economics and interpersonal skills without training than it is to find
people with deep untrained technical skill, because interactions with other
people and decisions about money occur every day so any motivated somebody
with a curious disposition may well have been pondering and improving those
skills their whole life.

Remember, it's not that every engineer you find will be better rounded, it's
just that those magical omnibus people are more likely to be found among the
engineering ranks than the business ranks, especially when engineering jobs
give a much more reliable salary out of college so that anyone with
engineering skill _and_ business skill is incentivized to study the former in
school.

------
zeidrich
If you watch their videos on the glassbox system on youtube you'll find that
this is exactly how they billed it. It was users who expected more. Not that
it's bad to expect more.

The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do
was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were
based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that
modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads
you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the
road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra.

In the new Sim City, there's a few components,

There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property
value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of
certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on
the area.

There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power,
pollution, profit.

There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water
transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to
another and carry resources.

There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents.

So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically:

You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to
the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction
vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building
material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has
building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it
will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction
resource is depleted.

A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the
highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will
occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population
will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names
of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have
names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith
Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname.

From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests
along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance
send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with
a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and
decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination
of the requesting commercial business.

During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the
roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests
and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery
vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods
resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the
factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload
some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way
back it will respond to it.

When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens.
When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and
begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial
business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available.

If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents,
the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on
them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once
the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building
increments.

Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the
number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a
resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied
residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1
and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun.

It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of
simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area,
residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will
have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go
from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock
of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as
they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As
soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest
unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a
circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle,
instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to
the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the
circle.

In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun
to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub
with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it
needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the
commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return
home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A
sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and
the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory.

Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by
increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending
money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density
is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is
increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds.
Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase
education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase
happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to
increase happiness or education.

I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic
happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not
congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have
another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off
when they reevaluate their paths.

The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested
road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that
way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck,
and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge
into another congested road on the other side anyways.

The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being
dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to
residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high
density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets
demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to
find an opening in a residential building.

If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road
doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially
but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights.

I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous
version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a
city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game.
However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun
game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in
previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was
mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those
abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do
really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once.

Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it
can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm
not sure about that.

------
bentcorner
If EA thinks that the vocal minority is worth saving, they need a hero. They
need to hire somebody popular and smart that can say "hey everybody, EA asked
for my help, I'm helping them figure out how to solve this. The server issues
are mostly resolved now and we thank you for your patience. Over the next few
weeks I'll blog about Sims behavior and modeling, and what changes you can
expect to see. SimCity is already simulating an incredible amount of detail
but many of you noticed situations where we didn't do so well. Expect to see
improvements over the next few months that will address these problems."

We've already heard EA's leadership say there's nothing wrong with the game.
Even if they admit to any problems, they have little trust with the community.

I have to admit to some schadenfreude about this whole fiasco. On the surface
it is a very pretty game, it'll be interesting to see how EA addresses the
community discontent.

------
smutticus
As a network engineer who spends his days routing packets around the internets
I find this hilarious.

What if every intersection were to function as a sort of router with each road
leading from it as a link? Then distribute routes between intersections and
calculate shortest path using the Dijkstra algorithm(OSPF). They could even
implement congestion control by having clogged intersections stop advertising
routes periodically.

Have a problem with cops, fire trucks and ambulances not getting through? Put
them in a different QOS queue that prioritizes them.

This is a solved problem in so many ways. They could literally buy these
algorithms from people with decades of experience working on this class of
problems.

------
ics
Relevant: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU>

~~~
tiglionabbit
It would be nice to be able to see the invisible agents so you could find out
what craziness is afoot when people start walking around in circles.

------
hristov
EA should just hire Toady one from dwarf fortress to do the Sim simulation.
Dwarf fortress has very complex and very accurate path-finding as well as
excellent creature simulation.

That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance
improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a
lot of resources, like EA.

~~~
rurounijones
Dwarf Fortress can also bring my 1 year old quad core computer to a crawl.

I also seem to remember that once he left debugging symbols in a build and
people managed to use it to determine that all path-finding is done twice for
some reason.

Not the person I think that could help EA with performance problems :p

~~~
mbetter
You ever misplace something and have to retrace your steps to find it? Dwarves
are pretty dumb so they have to do that all the time.

------
ghshephard
What's disappointing to me is that, unlike Settlers 7, Caesar 3, or Stronghold
- we don't have 100% intelligent agent simulation creating emergent properties
and markets.

I used to spend hours, with all three of those products, watching agents go
about their various chores and skills, and be either gated on another agent's
behavior or resources, or have a clear pipeline stocked up for them to
perform.

Sounds like I'll get sub-optimal non-intelligent behavior from SimCity, which
is sad. I rather have a smaller environment, that was 100% intelligent agent
based.

------
agentultra
After purchasing the game and enduring the mess that is forced logins, I
thought the game was pretty good. I haven't encountered any of the path
finding issues discussed or demonstrated in the article. However I haven't put
that much time in to it and haven't bothered to look. As a casual player it
seems like a pretty rock-solid game so far.

I'm curious how the alternatives stack up. I'm not terribly pleased with Sim
City 5 due to the online-only component. Has anyone tried CitiesXL Platinum
for example? Are there others?

------
drcode
I feel like my latest HTML5 website is somehow pertinent to this discussion:
<http://lisperati.com/nfc/>

~~~
rivd
i dont know why you are downvoted, i see the link and think it's pretty cool.
almost feel bad i dont live near the meetups :)

maybe you should submit it to the frontpage ?

~~~
ars
It's cool, and he's proud of his work. But it really doesn't have anything to
do with the discussion.

------
cmelbye
No big deal, obviously all they need to do is push out a server update since
all of the calculations are being done there.

------
swartzrock
I love these videos! You could almost teach a class on graph theory and AI
with enough of them, and they look great!

------
bane
man...and all I wanted was basically SC4 in 3d with mixed-use zoning, curved
roads and a more robust transport network. I would have thrown money at them
for that game.

------
eps
Makes you wonder if the backend issues were geniune or if it was a way to buy
more time for finishing the game (and to release _something_ on a promised
date).

------
jasonlingx
They should call it SimCity Lemmings :)

------
10thfloor
Will somebody please write a positive review of this game and put an end to
the incessant trolling ... For example, the attention to detail in the design
is astonishing. It is truly the best, and most 'realistic' Simcity to date...

