[HN Gopher] Documentation related to the implementation of SimCi...
___________________________________________________________________
Documentation related to the implementation of SimCity 2000
Author : Lammy
Score : 222 points
Date : 2023-02-15 03:54 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cloudmike wrote:
| A friend of mine is making a new city-builder called Metropolis
| 1998 [1]. If you're into SimCity 2000 specifics, you might also
| enjoy his dev updates where he posts about his pixel graphics
| engine, custom pathfinding for agents/cars, etc.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/
|
| (his subreddit is called Archapolis but he recently changed the
| name)
| jwmoz wrote:
| That looks like a really cool project to work on. The name is
| great.
| YesBox wrote:
| Thanks for linking me! :)
|
| SimCity 2000 was the first simulation game I've ever played. I
| had a neighbor friend who had a copy and I watched him play a
| couple times before I was hooked.
| elevaet wrote:
| Which is the best SimCity (by whatever criteria you find
| important)? The only one I ever tried was the OG, which I
| absolutely loved at the time.
| bombcar wrote:
| SC4 is the best SimCity.
|
| Cities Skylines isn't a SimCity but it's a very very good
| modern game.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I loved SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. The modding for SimCity 4
| in particular was (is?) out of this world.
| izacus wrote:
| Cities: Skylines is probably the best SimCity these days.
| goodoldneon wrote:
| I've played a lot of Skylines but it doesn't quite feel like
| a SimCity. I think it has a dearth of quirkiness (e.g. it has
| 0 llamas)
| massysett wrote:
| The quirkiness is in the building art, the Twitter clone,
| and the radio stations. My favorite is the radio commercial
| for "The Law Accounting".
| [deleted]
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Played 2000 for perhaps thousands of hours for years. Didn't
| get 3000. Got 4, played for a hundred hours, and decided that
| it wasn't as much fun. It felt too complicated compared to
| 2000, and the traffic simulation never liked the way I built
| cities (everybody would always use the busiest streets,
| ignoring the completely empty streets running parallel to it).
| mysterydip wrote:
| > The newspaper specification is considered a work in progress as
| it can parse all of the text, but very little around how stories
| are composed has been determined.
|
| This is the part I was most interested in seeing how it worked,
| unfortunately not developed much yet.
| aliqot wrote:
| Has anybody asked Wil Wright to explain it to us?
| mdtrooper wrote:
| There was a good wiki about file format and other things of
| games: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097508
|
| But it is offline (more or less two years):
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180127174342/http://rewiki.reg...
| TapamN wrote:
| I did a bit of work on re-implementing SC2K years ago (it was
| going to be called "21st Century Micropolis") that never got much
| further than creating asset rippers, a city viewer, and
| researching into how the simulation works. Nothing playable.
|
| I did discover a semi-easter egg in the newspaper. One paper has
| an opinions section, and there are two possible lines that have
| fixed names (both are in the list of tax complaints):
| -fred Haslam: "I just *[0x7f] to say, property taxes are
| primitive, repressive and regressive. only barbaric societies
| continues to tax the rich." -pat Mullanney: "you bet I
| mind! I feel like the *mo's got a gun to my side, robbing me of
| MY *[0xb9]."
|
| Fred Haslam was a programmer on SC2K, and was also credited for
| being one of the newspaper writers. I'm not sure who Pat
| Mullanney is.
| scrlk wrote:
| Unrelated to SC2k, but I hope someone decides to kick off an
| "OpenSimCity4" project in the future, in a similar vein to
| OpenTTD or OpenRCT2.
|
| IMO SC4 is still the peak of the genre, good depth to the
| simulation and a pleasing style of graphics. Sadly I never got on
| with Cities Skylines.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have a lot of love for SC4 but once I "got onboard" with the
| smaller cities in Skylines (and computers got better) with mods
| it's not super bad.
| spongeb00b wrote:
| SC4 also has an impressive modding community still adding new
| features.
| everyone wrote:
| Tangentially related but interesting imo...
| https://youtu.be/_51_YJQpeg0
| nirvgorilla wrote:
| [flagged]
| snac wrote:
| This could be interesting paired with the documentation posted:
| https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/simulation%2...
|
| In the video you posted, the host talks about Magnasanti a
| project to create the perfect city (in the eyes of the game).
| There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or traffic. A
| population of 6 million with no hospitals, and no public
| funding except mass transit and police. Ultimately we can see
| that the game does not reward citizen happiness, but industry.
|
| The "black box" nature of the simulation within SimCity is
| fascinating, thank you for the rabbit hole.
| adql wrote:
| That's kinda the problem with some actual city planning,
| running it as business instead of service
| CalRobert wrote:
| People might be interested in this - ever notice there's no
| parking in sim city? https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-
| city-greenwashes-pa...
| Lammy wrote:
| SimCity 2000 also misleads people about the safety of atomic
| energy due to the way power plants work:
|
| - Destruction of the nuclear power plant spreads radiation
| tiles that persist for 10+ thousand in-game-years.
|
| - All power plants are automatically destroyed at the end of
| their design life, so if you forget to manually replace your
| nuclear power plant every 50 years you get radiation.
|
| - All power plants will catch on fire and eventually be
| destroyed when overloaded, and there is no option to choose
| load-shedding / brownouts, so if you overbuild you get
| radiation.
|
| - The "Nuclear-Free Zone" is the only in-game ordinance that
| costs no money, earns no money, and basically only exists to
| make a statement.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Incidentally, the hydroelectric plants lasted forever. It was
| the only kind I ever built after realizing that.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you're interested there are "realistic" parking mods for
| Cities Skylines.
|
| They do change things but not as much as some urbanists would
| hope ;)
|
| Should You Use TM:PE Enhanced "Parking AI" in Cities Skylines?
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=20pyEA3GpAQ
| walrus01 wrote:
| For a good example, the red shading here is what portion of
| downtown Edmonton, AB is dedicated to parking:
|
| https://i.redd.it/p7fofu76ols91.jpg
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Everytime parking (or how cities transit should be) is
| mentioned, the US is (rightfully) shown as a bad example, and
| usually compared with Europe.
|
| So I feel like I could give an example about other parts of
| the world, just for perspective. In summary -- man, I wish my
| city is half this good so I can actually park in peace.
|
| I live in China, a relatively large size city (pop around 8M
| to 10M, not too special within China) and we have what I
| would say "good" public transit system (hundreds of bus
| lines, 8 metro lines and increasing), not to mention millions
| of people just commute in e-bikes.
|
| But the thing is, people still need to drive from time to
| time. (So traffic is as bad). How do we solve the parking
| issue without building enough parking places? Well, we kinda
| of don't. For most of public places, you just park everywhere
| that you can squeeze in. On Roads, on sidewalks, you name it.
| You better be instantly good at parallel parking and
| reversing, otherwise you won't survive.
|
| Residential locations are much better nowadays since most new
| communities now build with parking in mind, but public
| locations are still a nightmare (an exception is large malls,
| which usually have underground parking). Everytime I want to
| go somewhere the first thing I need to do is to plan how to
| park once I were there. It's awful.
|
| Anyway, my point isn't that "the US is fine as soon as other
| places are worse", just that "it's complicated" I guess. I
| lived in the US for years including some large cities. While
| I really wish there is better public transit (especially when
| I were traveling), at least parking is bearable thanks to
| enforced parking lot requirement.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The point is that there should be less parking, not more,
| and there should never be subsidized parking. You do not
| deserve to store your giant metal box on public property
| for free, and I want to be able to patronize businesses
| that aren't surrounded by parking lots and forced to raise
| prices to cover the cost of building/renting parking.
| thomasthetrain wrote:
| > Everytime I want to go somewhere the first thing I need
| to do is to plan how to park once I were there. It's awful.
|
| I'd say it's a fair requirement: if you want to carry a big
| machine around, you are responsible for leaving it
| somewhere adequate.
|
| Enforced parking lot requirement is just obliging other
| people to reserve mostly unproductive land in their
| properties, and that has very negative effects, such as
| creating big distances between destinations and, as a
| consequence, making public transportation less efficient
| and walking more difficult. It usually (always?) makes
| cities worse.
| rendaw wrote:
| > In other words: SimCity deliberately misleads players about
| parking because if they showed parking in its true dimensions,
| it might make dysfunctional land use patterns look (and act)
| dysfunctional.
|
| > And we can't have that.
|
| That seems like a fairly bad faith reading of the interview
| comments. In SC2K you only have so many pixels per building.
| Even the newer sim cities are not proportional, it's not like
| looking at a satellite map.
| CalRobert wrote:
| And if it were a simulation most of the pixels would be
| parking lots instead of buildings.
| Sakos wrote:
| Simcity (originally) was based on problematic books like
| Urban Dynamics
| (https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-
| hid...), which has heavily influenced every other city
| builder ever since. I don't think things like the lack of
| parking are an accident. I wouldn't be surprised if real harm
| caused by social policy/planning could be traced to some
| degree to Simcity.
|
| Further reading: https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Is this the genesis of an OpenSC2K, much like OpenRCT and
| OpenTTD?
| nyberg wrote:
| https://aeplay.org/citybound might be interesting or the talks
| related to it given that (afaik) it simulates traffic better than
| simcity
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I spent a lot of time investigating SC2K.
|
| I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due
| to limitations in the transport simulation.
|
| The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a
| sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other
| types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful.
|
| However, at each junction, the trip _randomly_ selection one of
| the routes.
|
| So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is
| a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea
| where they _should_ get off (this branch leads to industry, for
| example), and some trips just keep going round and round until
| they reach their max travel distance and fail.
|
| You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of
| road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would
| go into this, and never emerge.
|
| In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real
| life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to
| fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.
| tetha wrote:
| Interesting. This is similar to a common optimization in the
| genre of city builders with walkers, like Caesar or Pharaoh. In
| these games, buildings like a market or a temple spawn walkers,
| which walk on roads and distribute services and goods to tents
| and houses they walk past.
|
| An important optimization in these games is to avoid crossroads
| and junctions, because walkers tend to randomly choose a
| direction at junctions. This would make it a coin flip which of
| the two roads would get food or religious services, possibly
| causing all kinds of chaos. One of the best layouts as far as I
| recall was just a big block with a circular road going around
| it, because this forced the walkers to walk past all buildings
| in the block reliably.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Heads up that the Pharaoh remake released today: https://stor
| e.steampowered.com/app/1351080/Pharaoh_A_New_Era...
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| This is what you end up having to do in SC2K.
|
| You must _direct_ the traffic, by not offering junctions.
| mysterydip wrote:
| At least in the original simcity, as a path was made it was
| pushed to a stack. If the route didn't reach a destination, the
| stack was popped and intersections tried again. At least that's
| what I get from these https://lively-
| web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr... Was this
| changed in 2k?
| bombcar wrote:
| The original SimCity has (IIRC) checks to see if services
| were available and ways to estimate traffic load, later ones
| tried to simulate actual trips.
|
| So it went from "can this house reach a job" to "simulate
| this house driving to work" - the difference comes from a
| high density doing one check to doing multiple.
| epups wrote:
| Can you explain this a little bit more? Are you saying that the
| game actually simulates each vehicle trip individually, and
| then decides on a random path at every intersection?
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Mmm. The simulation engine as part of simulation any given
| zone, produces "trips" (I don't know how many or how often)
| from each zone, and figures out where those trips end up -
| successfully reached a useful destination, went too far and
| gave up, etc.
|
| In SC2K the graphics do not depict individual cars or people,
| and I have no idea if in later games there is a correlation
| between individual cars and people and "trips" (or if trips
| are still used as mechanism in later versions - although from
| what people are writing, it seems they are).
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| RollerCoaster Tycoon does the same, guests wander aimlessly
| around park and interact with whatever they come across while
| considering their needs.
|
| The Sims displays the other end of this spectrum, where
| agents path deliberately (while still considering their
| needs), and the difference in simulation scale is immense.
|
| Simple fact is, pathfinding is a performance bottleneck that
| hasn't been solved yet. We are still using algorithms from
| the 1960s, and no hardware acceleration exists.
|
| SimCity has always been more of a spreadsheet with houses on
| top.
| adql wrote:
| >Simple fact is, pathfinding is a performance bottleneck
| that hasn't been solved yet.
|
| But we got thousand times faster CPUs than at Sim City 2000
| times.
|
| And they have multiple cores. And if that is not enough
| there are GPUs with even more compute.
| VMG wrote:
| and better algorithms
| [deleted]
| eru wrote:
| You can do a lot of shortcuts with the pathing, because you
| are doing a lot of pathing on a graph that doesn't change
| much from frame-to-frame.
| chongli wrote:
| Exactly. The only time you should be calculating paths is
| after the player places new roads. Repeatedly calculating
| paths on a fixed graph is a huge waste of time!
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| My graph is changing a lot, my whole environment from
| walls to objects is destructable and contains complex
| logic like access controlled doors.
|
| Maybe _your_ game doesn 't change much. Lack of good
| pathfinding is what's constricting that the most. If good
| pathfinding existed, games in general could become more
| dynamic.
| smcl wrote:
| > no hardware acceleration exists
|
| I'm picturing an alternate history where in addition to
| dedicated graphics cards, we also start building dedicated
| common algorithm cards - NVidia and AMD duking it out over
| whose hardware-accelerated sorting implementation performs
| best, Phoronix benchmarking how each companies' Linux
| drivers handle A* etc :)
| mjburgess wrote:
| I suspect pre-generation caching, game design, multi-core,
| SIMD versions of algs, etc. have evolved a lot.
|
| Real-world performance isn't that determined by the form of
| the time-complexity.
| saberience wrote:
| Are you arguing that a game in 1993 is flawed because it failed
| to accurately simulate a city populated with 100k+ people and
| associated cars and infrastructure?
|
| I think if you assumed such a thing in the first place your
| premise and assumptions were massively flawed.
|
| You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too
| different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who
| arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can
| invade? Or the fact that you can magically position fire
| "trucks" where you want instantly?
| soiler wrote:
| > You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too
| different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who
| arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who
| can invade?
|
| So, all bets are off when a fantastical element is
| introduced? We should no longer expect any internal
| consistency, and the work is entirely above critique?
|
| Why didn't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw the
| walking trees, so I know that anything is possible.
|
| The answer is because we expect internal consistency. Ok, so
| there's a superhero in this game system. Doesn't change the
| fact that it's supposed to simulate traffic, and that this is
| one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon. Oh, it
| doesn't actually simulate traffic? Yes, this is a problem:
| it's a traffic simulation with superheros.
| eska wrote:
| _Why didn 't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw
| the walking trees, so I know that anything is possible._
|
| That's it, no more internet for me today. And I haven't
| even had lunch!
| taink wrote:
| The flaw isn't that it is not realistic enough, but that it
| goes too much against an average human's preconception of how
| a basic traffic system should work.
|
| It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect a 1993 game to
| not choose a random route at a junction; it should use a
| basic pathfinding algorithm (which were well-known, even in
| 1993) to choose the closest one.
|
| Of course it is limited by performance but optimization is
| hardly a good counter-point to intuition in this kind of
| game.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This game was meant to run on a 25mhz 386 and 4mb of RAM.
| Complex pathfinding and over-complicated sub-simulations
| would have drastically limited how large of a city you
| could build before your system just stopped working.
| phkahler wrote:
| What if the flawed routing simply exaggerates flaws with
| the way we _think_ it should be designed?
|
| The number one bottleneck in real traffic is intersections.
| Some people think optimal city design should mix zoning
| types at a finer level.
|
| To your point though, we can't really demonstrate what's
| better when the agents are acting stupidly. I'd like to be
| able to learn what would work in the real world too.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, also it is not clear to me why is that so bad, so
| what that you have a circle line, wouldn't only a
| microscopic fraction of paths get stuck on it after a
| large number of crossroad steps ?
| treeman79 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU
|
| Someone that spent years building an optimized city. Six
| million residences.
| wartron wrote:
| Sounds like art imitating life.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Ultimately it was a game more than sim. Note the lack of
| parking lots.
| lopis wrote:
| > I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed,
| due to limitations in the transport simulation.
|
| Maybe because the game is based on American cities
| smcl wrote:
| This doesn't seem related to the flaw that was described at
| all - it seems like it applies equally to both road and rail.
| So while Sim City is very US-centric ("zoning" felt like just
| a gaming construct to me and I was very surprised it existed
| in real life) it sounds like they just flubbed the
| pathfinding a bit.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Zoning exists outside the USA, sometimes implicit in
| planning permission.
| smcl wrote:
| That's probably right but, at least where I grew up, it's
| not something you'd know about unless you are building
| your own house. And it's a bit more flexible than "this
| bit here is residential, and this separate bit here is
| commercial" - these things can be mixed.
| Sharlin wrote:
| But in the game you're playing a city planner (well, a
| _very_ idealized, pluripotent, undemocratic version of
| one), so surely it should feature concepts fundamentally
| relevant to a city planner's job, even if those concepts
| are not necessarily familiar to a layperson! Games are
| typically meant to educate too, after all.
|
| That said, yes, the lack of mixed zoning is one of the
| more unrealistic parts of city builder games, and one of
| the most often requested features in the Cities: Skylines
| community. However, it should be noted that separation of
| functions is a notion _very_ fundamental to the modernist
| (1930s-) school of urban planning, and this originated
| from the entirely reasonable desire to genuinely improve
| the human condition in cities by separating residential
| areas from a polluting industry.
|
| Because single-use zoning, together with the ideal of a
| single-family house for everyone and the use of personal
| automobiles for transport, turned out to be unsustainable
| in more ways than one, and because polluting industry is
| now relegated to a Someone Else's Problem, mixed use has
| become (or is becoming) fashionable again, with current
| ideals and best practices in planning clearly diverging
| from those of the modernist era.
|
| Another unrealistic idea is, of course, that of a _city
| designed from the ground up_ , which, although there are
| indeed real-world examples of fully planned cities, they
| are very rare. Many players do prefer to start with a
| tabula rasa in these types of games, and it's of course
| much less work for the developers to create maps devoid
| of existing human population. I, for one, would love to
| see more maps where the starting point is an existing
| town, or a group of disjoint villages scattered on the
| map!
|
| Nb. the notion of planning as a profession emerged in the
| West mostly during the 19th century, before which cities
| had, for the most part, grown more or less organically.
| The need for central planning was in many cases
| precipitated by fires which could easily destroy
| neighborhoods or entire towns. Building fire-resistant
| cities in the era of predominantly wooden buildings
| necessitated measures such as firewalls between adjacent
| buildings, streets wider than the alleys of old, and
| separating neighborhoods with wide, tree-lined esplanades
| or boulevards. Conveniently, the destruction left by
| fires also provided the opportunity to realize these
| measures when rebuilding.
| smcl wrote:
| That's totally true that you're playing a City Planner so
| you might end up exposed to concepts usually only a City
| Planner really cares about. However my impression (and I
| might be wrong!) was that Americans were more aware of
| these things than those of us in UK. Like I _literally_
| thought that the light /medium/heavy residential,
| commercial and industrial "zones" were just a thing Will
| Wright came up with to make SimCity work (though I know
| in reality it's more complex than painting a little
| square block blue, green or yellow)
|
| I read the rest of your comment and nodded along
| approvingly, but I don't have anything else to add other
| than that I also liked fiddling with existing towns and
| cities in these games. In SC2k I really loved the
| scenarios, free-form citybuilding is definitely good but
| to have a specific constraint and a goal was a really fun
| challenge.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Your average American is likely to only be familiar with
| zoning as a thing that exists. You can travel about and
| notice that some areas have homes, some areas have
| businesses, and that's about it.
|
| Those who live in rural areas will be a little bit more
| familiar- it is not impossible to buy some farm land
| while working with the local municipality governments to
| re-zone from agrigultural use to residential use, so that
| you can build a home there.
|
| The notion that commercial can be split into "light" or
| "heavy" or that industrial can be split from commercial
| at all probably isn't something the average person has
| much awareness of, even intuitively.
| smcl wrote:
| Interesting, so some awareness of the concept of "zoning"
| but not particularly fine grained. Thanks for clarifying!
| Sharlin wrote:
| I'm not sure if Americans in general are more aware of
| zoning and planning [speaking as a non-American], but
| maybe an intuitive conception of a city as a set of
| functionally separated areas is more prevalent there,
| because many/most of their cities are shaped by modernist
| ideals to a much greater degree than many European cities
| (to an extent that there are essentially _no services_ in
| many suburbs besides a primary school and a gas station,
| and city centers, on the other hand, are largely devoted
| to office buildings).
| nivenkos wrote:
| Yeah, mixed is really common for commercial in Europe for
| example.
|
| But heavy industry is still zoned for sure.
| BinaryRage wrote:
| Same for SimCity 2013, except the flaws extended to every
| agent. I've always thought that's why they limited the city
| size so heavily. Such a shame, because there was so much
| promise there.
|
| Power, water, etc. randomly chose a direction at a junction, so
| even basic grid would make it impossible to power a building on
| the other side of the city, even if the power demand was there
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvq6zAMJfOU.
|
| Traffic and pedestrians were attracted to available
| houses/work, but randomly every day, rather than having a
| defined home/work location. I built a pedestrian heavy city and
| would watch crowds of pedestrians head for the nearest
| available house on a street, before the whole street filled,
| and they turned around for the next nearest. Same for work,
| shopping, despite there being plenty available.
| ptmcc wrote:
| SC 2013 was such a let down after so much hype, for so many
| reasons. As a lifelong Sim-anything fan it was crushing.
|
| Cities Skylines seems like the successor to SimCity, but even
| that has some deep-rooted flaws in traffic management and
| agent flow. Some mods exist to help coax it a bit, but it's
| still just a broken approach at scale.
|
| Traffic and routing is hard, I get that, but there has to be
| a better way. Building a city around the routing flaws is not
| that much fun.
| standardUser wrote:
| Cities Skylines can provide among the best city sim
| experiences to be had if you're willing to invest a day (or
| two) modding it to within inches of its life.
|
| That and 32gb of RAM
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Is there a list somewhere of "Essential" mods?
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| The CitiesSkylines subreddit has a list that contains
| (IMO) a good number of useful and essential mods.
|
| Word of warning: if you're one of those people that likes
| to install a lot of mods keeping everything up to date
| and non-conflicting can be an pain the rear. There is, of
| course, a mod to keep track of which mods are out of date
| or could cause issues, but that's really a band-aid on
| top of a larger problem. The game is old enough now that
| many popular mod authors have long been abandoned their
| projects or otherwise moved on so you end up with things
| like "MyPopular Mod" and "MyPopular Mod UPTODATE" or
| "MyPopular Mod FORKED" or "Use this instead of MyPopular
| Mod".
|
| If I take a few weeks / months between plays this usually
| ends up with me having to take 30 minutes to an hour to
| get the mods up to date and tested. Not a huge amount of
| time, but when your gaming time is limited it's something
| to take into account.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You could just... not update every time you play ?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| They still add updates to the game once or twice a year,
| so you usually want some of the new features. That can
| also lead to the issue of when you finally do decide to
| update 3 years later or whatever, now it's a 4 hour
| ordeal to fix instead of 30 minutes. There's no really
| perfect solution, but it's worth it if you love city
| builders.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If you don't mind video format, I like this person's
| guide. He also has a 2nd video with essential mods for
| "advanced" players.
|
| https://youtu.be/Nr8Wlib4jqE
|
| He also has some fun youtube series' where he builds up a
| region by following a "story" he makes up (or sometimes
| uses viewer polls). So rather than building a super
| optimized city, it gets a very natural layout as he
| pretends to play out rivalries between developers,
| mayoral or policy changes, etc.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Also I seem to remember something silly involving a nuclear
| meltdown if you don't have enough educated workers or if they
| are stuck in traffic long enough (related to the
| aforementioned random house issue). I wonder if there has
| been any fan mods to fix the issues since then. I seem to
| recall they eventually added an offline mode. The always
| online requirement was a bit excessive and plagued with
| issues on launch.
| matzf wrote:
| So these ant-like cars were supposed to be more than just
| decoration?
| dncornholio wrote:
| Does the city really get influenced by what junction a car or
| person would take? Weren't these objects just for visuals?
| casenmgreen wrote:
| In SC2K, you do not see cars or people.
|
| I do not know if in the later versions, there is a
| correlation between visually depicted cars/people and trips
| (or if trips are used at all, although from what people are
| writing here, it seems they are).
| smcl wrote:
| You do see a _representation_ of the traffic, but yeah
| definitely not individual vehicles
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| Are there any SimCity-like games you would recommend? Or any
| comments on Cities: Skylines perhaps?
| albertzeyer wrote:
| In Cities Skylines, each agent, each car actually does
| perform path planning. You can inspect the planned path of
| each car, and also follow it.
| Asooka wrote:
| Cities: Skylines is great, but I do feel it leans a bit too
| strongly on the agent simulation. So much that a lot of the
| game is about traffic planning. You are almost required to
| mod the game (with TMPE) to make the most optimal traffic
| network, which involves manually planning each major
| intersection, micromanaging road lanes and configuring
| timed traffic lights. I've had a lot of fun with it, but I
| wish I could let the computer handle all the road planning
| details and I could get on with designing the city, but
| past a certain size, I feel it forces me to start doing
| road planning more than city planning. Almost wish there
| was a "Traffic Manager AI" mod to do all that for me.
|
| Alternatively, you could use it to build dioramas. With
| enough mods it is one of the best tools for building
| digital city dioramas and best of all, the simulation still
| mostly works, so you get to watch people live in the city.
|
| Overall definitely a fun game, lets you build much more
| natural-looking cities than Sim City, with the only
| downside being that the road network has a greater impact
| on the simulation and requires more micromanaging than I
| would like.
| onli wrote:
| Skylines (which I liked) still has weird simulation errors.
| Like how many ships arrive at ports, which is an ever-
| changing amount and has no or little relation to the real
| transport demand. And the amount of trains using a train
| line depends on the number of stations, meaning outgoing
| train lines always need to be connected to a single one to
| not overflow.
|
| How single agents path is also weird, like how much they
| walk. I think I remember that homes were also not
| persistent?
|
| When separating city blocks completely fires would not get
| extinguished. Either the fire station assigned is random,
| or only a few actually can send cars out. Which breaks down
| in a city not fully connected by streets.
|
| Haven't played for a few years now (last run was with the
| industries dlc), but also haven't read about patches
| adressing such issues.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I tried playing it again recently with mods and kept on
| running into issues where there would be long traffic
| jams on a single lane of a multi lane road. Basically it
| seemed like everyone had an affinity to make the same
| left turn at a this one particular intersection.
|
| In a real city people would just drive around that
| madness and make a left turn at the next block.
| bombcar wrote:
| Biffa has videos on "lane control" which are things you
| can do with mods to help reduce the single lane issues.
| It can be worked around but it's not entirely realistic
| (there are mods that to try).
| brailsafe wrote:
| I ultimately gave up on skylines because I kind of broke
| my city and it got really tiresome to try and repair or
| start over. Tried a few mods to greater or lesser success
| but they just revealed other flaws. For example,
| whichever mod allowed for more realistic population
| densities; you'd have 700 families in a residential
| building or w/e, but no clue where they work, and
| likewise in the reverse. I somehow can't click on an
| office tower and see what the geographic distribution of
| occupants is, only those that are currently commuting.
| I'd also get strange issues like some of my subway lines
| inexplicably being totally vacant no matter what I did.
| It's also an incredibly inefficient game to run.
| bombcar wrote:
| The realistic density mod is one of the most game
| changing and I wouldn't recommend it until you're very
| familiar with the game and how it works/models.
|
| Biffa has some good videos on traffic solving:
| https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCYzO4HZxgXc2UJQD5bIo8AQ
|
| It works _somewhat_ realistically but you have to learn
| the limitations of the simulator if you want mass transit
| besides busses used well.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Oh cool, added a few videos to my watch later. I just
| felt like I wanted more information that would be hacky
| to try and get
| onli wrote:
| Most of the population just is not simulated, I think. So
| the game can't show you that information.
|
| I had a similar reaction, after a city of mine completely
| broke because of simulation errors I gave up on it for a
| while. Then revisited a bit later to write an article
| about all the dlcs. It felt a lot more stable then, but
| that might be because I did not test the edge cases
| again.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Me? no, no clue :-)
| jwmoz wrote:
| Openttd-can download for free on Steam. Works great on a mac!
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