

Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem - Gmo
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeRose/20130219/186896/Using_SimCity_to_diagnose_my_home_towns_traffic_problem.php

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monkeypizza
I love simcity, but recently played it and noticed it is really paternalistic.

The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything
is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's
job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people
happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without
government planting efforts. Farmers can't choose their own crops.

This is actually really different than what happens in the real world. Really,
if a community doesn't have a school, people get together and start one. Small
civic organizations evolve into permanent buildings, training schools, etc.
Pickup sports leagues evolve into organizations that commission their own
stadiums.

If there is no fire department, a volunteer one starts. People build churches,
or start them at home, whenever they feel the need. But in simcity world,
everything good comes from the government.

I love simcity, but I do think it's weird that there isn't a mode where you
can just let people build whatever they want. I love the built-in, realistic
needs people in it have - but where are the entrepreneurs who will actually
start a society, or borrow money to build a building on their own? Where are
the rebels who start a revolution if the government doesn't meet their needs?

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guelo
WTF. Libertarianism is like some grumpy religion, people are always trying to
bring it up even when it doesn't fit.

And it's so wrong about how the real world works. If a community doesn't have
a school the first thing that normally happens is they form a government and
elect a school board to figure how to build and fund it. Same with a fire
department, even with volunteers there are a lot of expenses that need to be
paid by the town. Even the sports team is normally brought to a town via the
work of politicians.

What these government-haters don't understand is that government IS the
community. It's how a community comes together to get things done.

~~~
bdunbar
"What these government-haters"

Hi. libertarian here. I don't hate government. Government is probably a
necessary evil.

I hate obnoxious, inefficient, bug-ridden, corrupt, expensive, government. I
hate government that says one thing to get elected and then promptly does
another. I hate government that ostensibly is an extension of the will of the
people and then acts against their expressed wishes.

But I'm not grumpy about it.

~~~
n3rdy
Hi. Anarchist here, I do hate government. Government in my opinion is an
unnecessary tragedy that has befallen humanity and murdered close to 1 billion
people.

This is by far the most intelligent community I have come across in all my
internet travels, and if there is any group of people who can think of a way
for society to run peacefully, it is this community.

Any problem we have as a society that people currently point to government as
a solution, can be solved without resorting to threatening everyone with
police action.

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chrisbennet
It worked in that utopia called Somalia after all. :-)

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n3rdy
The non-sharia controlled parts have been better off than they were with their
previous government. Their air travel industry is even profitable, more than
we can say.

I'd say that's a lot more than you could ask for considering the exploitation
of the region.

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jiggy2011
Kinda sucks if you do live a sharia controlled part then. Here in the UK there
are groups who would love to annex of chunks of the country as sharia zones
but thankfully the law prevents this.

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mcphilip
In the original Sim City my brothers and I eventually figured out the solution
to ALL traffic problems was to simply never build roads and only use rail
lines. Apparently sims were much happier waiting for hours or even days for a
train to finally pass their out of the way residential area.

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jlgreco
Subways can be even better, since they leave the surface clean for other
things.

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tcdent
Original Sim City didn't have subways, just railways with very sparse commuter
trains.

I tried the all-rail town, too. There was a persistent alert to "build more
roads".

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ihaveajob
You could have a few sparse roads to get rid of that alert, and all things are
good. Also, bulldozing congested roads was a net positive.

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jstanley
He should have built the town in mirror image so as to account for driving on
the right. It may be that the interaction of various turns across the road
have an impact.

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pbhjpbhj
That was my first thought too. It surely would make a difference as in one
case a busy road moving to another via a left turn can simply filter in and in
the other it has to wait for the opposite flow of traffic to clear.

Is there a widely available traffic profiling tool like Sim City without the
extraneous "fun" parts?? I assume there's some sort of gui based analysis prog
that city planners use?

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justjimmy
Sim City should be a recommended game for those taking Geography, especially
in HS.

When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters,
as they happened, which was already too late.

Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a
ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other
trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Alert isn't going to
work here.

Can't wait for the latest SC!

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wlesieutre
Just so you're aware about the new SimCity, it requires a constant internet
connection to play, and there's no way to save/load previous versions of a
city. You can't mess around and experiment without doing irreversible damage,
which was a big part of the fun.

~~~
undergroundhero
I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-
side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

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morsch
The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading
it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely
powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server
infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power
available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power
than I had for SC4), are they going to put up 50W of processing power while
I'm playing?

I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or
made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way,
using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same
kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.

I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's _everything else_
that I'm hearing that scares me.

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undergroundhero
I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally
and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other
players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing)
tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on
Maxis servers.

It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster
than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number
of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.

That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into
account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build
massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long
sessions.

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gnoupi
The game can actually go on for a few minutes when you lose connection. So I
don't think there is much of the simulation happening server-side.

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Alphasite_
Yep, one of the developers mentioned that everything is verified server side,
but the temporary offline mode indicates that its not that important.

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Yhippa
FTA: "...including the fact that once I'd built East Didsbury, the strip of
shops in Northenden stopped making as much money as they once were, and some
were even beginning to close down as my time ran out. Walk along Northenden
high street, and you'll know that feeling."

This is interesting. Urban planners out there, do these types of simulations
occur before an area is zoned?

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waterlesscloud
The problem with a lot of small to medium sized towns is that the people in
charge of making zoning decisions are just local good ol' boys (or girls) who
got voted in office because people knew who they were. They are in no way
qualified to make these kinds of decisions.

And so you get what you get.

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JoshTriplett
s/voted/appointed/ in most cities.

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arrrg
My uneducated opinion is that appointed/career people tend to do better. You
do not want to get politics involved, that tends to screw things up.

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msrpotus
Who do you think appoints those people? It's all about politics, either
directly or indirectly.

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arrrg
There are ways of shielding those decisions from politics. Relying on
appointed people is one such way. No shielding is perfect – but it’s better
than nothing.

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specto
I had the opportunity to play through both betas, and I'm fairly certain we
haven't even scratched the surface of the interesting "experiments" we can do
with it.

I'm still purchasing this game, but I do wish EA would consider not forcing
you to connect to their servers at all times.

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brokentone
Anyone have info about the beta program? Simcity 2000 was my favorite game on
my 486. 3000 and classic were flops... this looks really really good.

As for the article, really interesting. Sounds like proof of the power of
SimCity's engine. Would be more interesting to see him fix his issue.

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potatolicious
I got into the final wave of the beta over the weekend.

Absolutely buying this on release day - gorgeous game and IMO a large
improvement over previous installments. The only things that bother me is the
limited size of the map (unsure if it's a beta thing or not) - if I can't
build a megacity I'm going to be sorely disappointed.

Traffic model, economic model, new zoning model, and new utilities model are
all IMO simplifications that make the game more fun, but does not remove
depth. For those who haven't followed the game: power, sewage, and water no
longer require power lines/pipes/etc, and travel along roads. They propagate
along roads outwards from their generation source (water towers, power plants,
sewage plants, etc) until their capacity is reached. There's a great animated
overlay view that lets you monitor the state of each of these pretty easily.

The biggest pleasant surprise was how well it _ran_. I pushed all settings up
to max and it didn't even flinch. SimCity 4 in contrast got insanely slow when
your city became even slightly large - even on today's hardware.

The ability to monitor cashflow is also a welcome change. Instead of having to
dive into your balance sheet to figure out your fiscal position it now shows a
very clear flow rate (negative or positive) next to your balance.

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webjunkie
What video card are you using? Mine was apparently too old, so I'm looking for
a new one.

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potatolicious
Two GTX570's in SLI - I'm surprised all the newfangled overlays and
postprocessed effects ran so well, though the real surprise is that the CPU-
side simulation didn't eat my computer for lunch. SimCity 4 for mid-sized
cities and above _still_ kills a i7.

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a_p
Sim City 4 is single threaded and only uses one core, which is why it is so
slow on new hardware.

The other major drawback to Sim City 4 is that there is a bug which prevents
rich ($$$) Sims from working in the High Tech industry. The only way to fix
this is to use a 3rd party mod.

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potatolicious
There are _many_ problems with SC4. The most egregious one (for me anyways,
someone who likes to build insanely dense cities) is that pathfinding "bug".

The short version is, your sims must find a reasonable commute from home to
work, otherwise your economy stagnants and unemployment runs rampant. SC4's
pathfinding heuristic _disallows_ a sim from going backwards to go forwards.

This creates _many_ transportation deadzones and a lot of unintuitive
bottlenecks. You will literally see sims live _directly next to_ a subway
station that takes them directly to work, but they will drive instead.

There is a mod to fix this, but the performance impact is expectedly awful.

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a_p
Ugh. It's been a while since I played, so I had forgotten about this.

It's not as bad as you described it. It's even worse.

The hack the creators of SC4 used to get around the problem of traveling the
same path twice in one trip is responsible for a large waste of CPU cycles.
Essentially, the hack allows the Sim to "forget" how he got to a certain
location and start a new trip to the final destination. The downside is that
this is that all of the information from the previous leg of the trip is lost,
and the algorithm must run again. There isn't a 1:1 ratio between the amount
of citizens and CPU cycles wasted, because as your city grows the path each
citizen must take becomes more complex and consumes more cycles.

You can read more about it _here_ , at a third party fan site. [1]

[1]
[http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=fcff28ec82...](http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=fcff28ec82b1624d842dbd7309a161d6&topic=2763.0)

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unkoman
Too bad it has horrible DRM.

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dasloop
Microscopic traffic simulation is a difficult problem to solve, it's not car
movement, it's driver's behaviour. The model has to be good enough to
reproduce the current situation and, what is the most important part, be able
to test realistically future scenarios.

In any case the new SimCity looks fantastic, maybe we can exchange our
simulation model (Aimsun) for their graphic engine :)

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uptown
I haven't been this excited for a game to come out in probably more than a
decade.

~~~
joeblossom
Me too. I had the chance to play the beta last weekend and even with reduced
functionality the game was quite a lot of fun.

I rarely if ever play games and I'm certain this will be a terrible time suck.

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chrisu_de
Here is the first of 3 videos explaining the simulation engine:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS0qURl_JJY>

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rcfox
I wonder if adding toll booths on either end of the city would be a viable-
enough source of income to make up for the terrible traffic in the city.

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stretchwithme
I think the solution, at least where you create everything, is buses that go
non-stop between major hubs. And with traffic lights synchronized to allow
them to hit their top speed. And, where possible, set the speeds high.

If every spoke is timed so it takes the same amount of time, you can minimize
how long people have to wait. Make everybody get on at one end of the bus and
exit at the other and hub stops can be short.

You'd have to walk to the nearest hub and from the one closest to your
destination. But you need the exercise anyway.

And charge tolls for passenger cars that vary with demand, something that
would work without recreating the roads.

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chrismealy
Unless you can build cycle tracks there's no point.

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elktea
You can't. It's a super car-centric game. You can't even build pedestrian-only
streets or lanes. Light rail is married to roads. There's no way to set bus
routes, buses will visit every single stop in town. Oh and subways don't exist
either.

Hopefully there's a 'rush hour' style expansion that lets us simulate cities
other than Los Angeles.

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Alphasite_
There is a pedestrian only road, but at the moment its tied to the university
as a plopable. But a developer mentioned that he would have a look at it.

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mratzloff
It seems to me that they blundered when it comes to marketing. If they had
just called it SimCity Online and promoted it as an MMO, no one would get
upset about the persistent connection requirement and no save/load
functionality.

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batiudrami
That may do more damage than good. [Franchise] Online titles tend to be met
with suspicion and disinterest from gamers who traditionally enjoyed the
franchise.

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winthrowe
It's already SimCity Online in everything but name, and many gamers who
traditionally enjoyed the franchise are exceedingly sceptical about the
changes. Might as well call a spade a spade.

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robbiemitchell
I would love to see someone do this with the Holland Tunnel traffic on both
sides.

