SimCity Traffic and AI is broken, Sims are fake
- Thread starter jambo
- Start date
maniac-kun
Member
If UE4 can handle millions of particles iam sure some million sims shouldnt be the problem.
Again, this is an example of a poorly designed city. The game's traffic has glaring issues, and needs an INSANE amount of extra management (let me pick where stoplights are plz!) but don't blame the game for someones' shitty city off Reddit.
The owner of that image could fix it by replacing the dirty road with an equal-quality avenue, even if he had to demolish some city buildings to do so.
Unfortunately, the AI taking the shortest route possible works against players.
?
The dirt roads aren't even being used. How could they be causing the traffic problems in that image?
DJ Crimson
Banned
For people asking why no one has kickstarted a game similar to Sim City yet. Well look what I just found a minute ago. There's no DRM and they stated that it's moddable. Civitas Kickstarter.
The AI wants to take the shortest path possible, but it can't because it doesn't have a path to. The buses can't go down the dirt road. Add another equal-quality avenue through the city, and the problem would partially fix itself. Another fix is to add more bus stops, ideally not near that avenue.
Of course the best fix would be to not build the lowest quality road next to one of the highest quality roads in the first place.
Basically. Stupid AI plus no tutorial or information on how the roads work (I had to consult a youtube video) equals poorly designed cities that make the AI pathfinding problem even worse.
Hip Hop
Member
Nothing has been able to fully put me satisfied as far as City Sims go.
Nothing will be on the level of Rise of Nations, where it's scenario editor allowed me to have my own country, be the owner of it, have my own army, multiple cities, towns, farms,
and if anybody wanted to mess with me, I''d just show my force by dropping a few nukes.
Nothing will be on the level of Rise of Nations, where it's scenario editor allowed me to have my own country, be the owner of it, have my own army, multiple cities, towns, farms,
and if anybody wanted to mess with me, I''d just show my force by dropping a few nukes.
I played this game once and already noticed that something is seriously wrong. My hospital let people die, despite being close to that person for no good reason. They just never arrived.
I also got to do a little fireworks quest, which causes fire all over the city and was just scratching my head at what the "simulation" is doing, because nothing I saw made any god damn sense.
Just fascinating stuff overall.
I also got to do a little fireworks quest, which causes fire all over the city and was just scratching my head at what the "simulation" is doing, because nothing I saw made any god damn sense.
Just fascinating stuff overall.
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
That's apples to oranges. Particle effects are done on hardware optimized for that type of operation. This is a general purpose computing issue so specialized hardware can't help. I still can't help but feel that things should be running way better than they are but unless I know the architecture I can't really say.
PedroLumpy
Member
Whatever it is about the simulation that's so demanding, I don't think it's worth it.
In their defense, there is some real complexity given the needs/problems each sim is needing to solve have a spatial problem attached to them too, and the environment in which these spatial issues need to be resolved is complex and constantly changing. The size of the database is then less of a problem compared to the amount of interdependencies that are created and the number of checks and cross references that have to be made by the simulation. Memory access speed then starts becoming a limiting factor.
Most games have a lot of smoke and mirrors, and obfuscation of what is really going on. The "sims" are fake in EVERY game, because everything is an artificial agent designed to give the impression of more complex thought behind it than actual computational power will allow. If held up to scrutiny, the veil would fall away in most games once you started deconstructing how they work.
The key, like in stage magic, is to avoid the audience looking too closely. If you maintain the appearance of intelligence, then the player has no reason to question what is going on under the hood. Have your agent do something dumb though, and the facade can break instantly. Some games are much better than others at maintaining a consistent impression.
Chances are if EA hadn't introduced this pathfinding issue, prompting thousands of people to take a very close look at what was going on, then there wouldn't be such strong cries of "the sims are fake!", or at the very least such cries would both not have been as vocal and would have occurred much later into the life of the game. People wouldn't simply have noticed because they mostly wouldn't think to look.
I think it would have still come out because the services model is completely wrong (the lack of connection to where you build services versus how they're used). Also the fact that Maxis basically dared players to follow a sim through their daily life would have made the fakery obvious eventually. This was exposed by Maxis's own hubris.
Exactly, Mario. I bet if the other issues (path-finding and small city size) had been sorted out to begin with, the AI wouldn't really have come under such criticism.
I'm curious as to why a player playing in a private region can't pick how much land each city has. The small city size is by far the biggest issue that plagues the game, and all the other problems are because you have to build around it for no reason.
I'm curious as to why a player playing in a private region can't pick how much land each city has. The small city size is by far the biggest issue that plagues the game, and all the other problems are because you have to build around it for no reason.
Poohblaster
Member
I was joking about Caesar II, Caesar III is a much better game. I've never played Pharoh though.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was working at an earlier stage of development when the simulation was less complex and where generally developers would have been dealing with smaller cities and focusing on individual components, but was just unworkable as more of the game was built out and brought together.
Changing the requirement for a sim to return to "any house" rather than "my house", and "any job" rather than "my job" would be easy and drastically reduce interdependencies and hence the complexity of the simulation and alleviate CPU power/memory access burden.
So, I could see how they might have promised something that got cut in the pressure to ship (assuming it ever worked at all).
I doubt there will be a big change in AI algorithms soon, or at anytime. Any minor change in the AI will have to be tested thoroughly, against many initial conditions, otherwise they will likely make the game worse. Not too mention AI algorithms are usually complex, and probably particularly complex in this game, with many of the game's other features coded around the AI. AI is hard to code and much harder to code efficiently.
I hope I am wrong, though, and the people who bought this game get better AI and thus a better gaming experience.
I hope I am wrong, though, and the people who bought this game get better AI and thus a better gaming experience.
That sounds very likely what happened. It would be strange that they built it out intending to be the under the hood mess it is now. It feels like a game full of compromises.
No it feels like a game full of executive meddling, and by that I mean EA.
BurnOutBrighter
Banned
It's currently $10 for the game and all DLC (including the Modern Times expansion!)
Uh, the people playing a game on Steam are not necessarily the same as the people playing a SimCity game, and I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of SimCity's audience has never heard of Steam.
exmachina64
Banned
And completely worth it.
Haunted
Member
Yes. Though the thing that makes this issue particularly shitty and ridiculous is that when you uncover those smoke and mirrors in other games, you realise how they did what they did and it just kind of lessens the impressiveness of the feat. But here, it actually breaks the internal logic of the in-game world. You're supposed to govern a town full of living people with their own lives, but they have a different job every day and live in a different house every day.
That's beyond having the smoke and mirrors lifted to expose some clever programming trickery, that's just flat-out breaking any sort of in-game logic, immersion and (at least for me) enjoyment I take from seeing these little guys go about their business.
LAUGHTREY
Modesty becomes a woman
Pestilence11
Member
Exactly. A shame really.
beat
Member
And indeed they were talking about doing just that in the Glassbox GDC talk last year: http://www.andrewwillmott.com/talks/inside-glassbox
... I wonder why that didn't make it in.
Theme Park World 2014 - create the theme park of your dreams by building your very own attraction in an always-online social theme park with your friends. Simulate every theme park attendee as they pass through your two hundred square feet of space.
I ran a few tests and I think they are weighted, but only when the car leaves work -- before the traffic existed on that road. Basically the drivers figure out their route when they leave.
If you setup that same city and wait long enough you will see cars created after the traffic on the small road will take the large road.
If you setup that same city and wait long enough you will see cars created after the traffic on the small road will take the large road.
The realist in me wants to say it's bugged, but the cynic in me wants to say it's either bugged or never made it in thanks to EA. :|
beat
Member
Oh, OK.
I imagine that's more a lot more computationally efficient than on-the-fly rerouting, but it's not a very good model for how real-world driving works. At the very least there should be some historical traffic in the weighting calculation (I know, homes and employers might have changed in a day).
SpaceDrake
Member
Just when I think this situation cannot possibly get any worse. I hope people who bought the game are able to get refunds, somehow. You weren't given what you were advertised.
PetriP-TNT
Member
It would be AMAZING if shit worked like this in real world.
"Oh shit, gotta go to work"
"Hilton hotel spa tester: occupied"
"formula driver occupied"
"McD's waitress... shit."
"Welp, time to leave work"
*first available house 500 miles away*
*fuck, 7 kids."
"Oh shit, gotta go to work"
"Hilton hotel spa tester: occupied"
"formula driver occupied"
"McD's waitress... shit."
"Welp, time to leave work"
*first available house 500 miles away*
*fuck, 7 kids."
Garcia
Member
LOL!!
After hours and hours of playing, it still has little annoyances but where the Sims go and what they do, I really don't care about. They do something that makes my city run/burst into flames.
Just wait till Sims City MMO where players build a city and then run it as Sims. If you want to see what virtual pants you should wear to make it a realistic Sim, this could be for you!
Just wait till Sims City MMO where players build a city and then run it as Sims. If you want to see what virtual pants you should wear to make it a realistic Sim, this could be for you!
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
At least the sims stay at the place they're designated to.
The low level detail like following a sim around during their day was one excuse for the lack of scale in the city. If each sim doesn't really have any AI other than 'fill the next empty box', why can we only have tiny towns?
Garcia
Member
Dude, I love you. We need more RoN love around here. <3
beat
Member
Do they have a city simulation engine or the expertise to build one? I skimmed the Kickstarter and it seems like they've got a terrain engine and vague plans for the rest of it. I note some of the KS comments echo my skepticism. This project is long on the hype and short on specifics of how they'll deliver. The Planetary Annihilation KS was also a bit thin but the fact that key members of that team were senior members of the Total Annihilation team gave that project way more credibility than Civitas has now.
I see in the updates that they'll be 'relaunching' the Civitas KS soon to show team member bios, and an updated video. That might alleviate some of my skepticism.
Platinumstorm
Member
I only play in turtle mode with rare exception so I see this all the time. My favorite at the moment are my high school students. When they high school students leave school, they walk about a mile away from the school, turn around and come back to the school to maybe get on the bus.
I am having a blast with the game, but it has as bad of AI as Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 [if you don't remember they never rode the rides and just walked around the entire time, not to mention the problems with their income.... the solution to this was using a peep generator so you had a billion people in your park, but it never felt right like RCT]
Figuring out how to best utilize the atrocious agent system is actually quite fun. Tourism is absolutely broken though.
I first realized these problems on launch day [I was one of the lucky ones who got in easily] when all of my shoppers were conglomerating in the industrial area, nowhere near where they wanted to be.
Maxis claimed all these processes were going to be ran by a central server because our computers "cannot" handle it. There is a potential that it actually works, but that it's completely disabled atm because it would destroy their servers. Maybe it doesn't at all, but the game's going to get some major patching, and it clearly shouldn't have been released.
Another thing that bugged me is the complete illusion of freight being meaningful to the game. Freight is created by industry who get an order from a commercial entity or ploppable. So the asbestos pillow company delivers pillows to the taco place [yes, i can forgive them for that]. Thing is that it doesn't matter at all for the commercial business because goods just appear at different time intervals [watch your commercial map at 6AM]. It only matters for the industry which gains "happiness" from this. Each time you place a ploppable the industry demand shoots sky high, but your residency cannot support it, so your industry demand is always maxed out, but it doesn't even matter in the scope of the game. It's ridiculous. This is why you can have a town with zero industrial buildings.
Broken games can still be fun games, though, while at the same time infuriating [mass transit is infuriating]. I've already lost two communities with my friends to the "processing" issue, haven't been able to log into my main town in 3 days.
I also haven't been able to figure out how to utilize my industry taxes in any meaningful fashion.
I am having a blast with the game, but it has as bad of AI as Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 [if you don't remember they never rode the rides and just walked around the entire time, not to mention the problems with their income.... the solution to this was using a peep generator so you had a billion people in your park, but it never felt right like RCT]
Figuring out how to best utilize the atrocious agent system is actually quite fun. Tourism is absolutely broken though.
I first realized these problems on launch day [I was one of the lucky ones who got in easily] when all of my shoppers were conglomerating in the industrial area, nowhere near where they wanted to be.
Maxis claimed all these processes were going to be ran by a central server because our computers "cannot" handle it. There is a potential that it actually works, but that it's completely disabled atm because it would destroy their servers. Maybe it doesn't at all, but the game's going to get some major patching, and it clearly shouldn't have been released.
Another thing that bugged me is the complete illusion of freight being meaningful to the game. Freight is created by industry who get an order from a commercial entity or ploppable. So the asbestos pillow company delivers pillows to the taco place [yes, i can forgive them for that]. Thing is that it doesn't matter at all for the commercial business because goods just appear at different time intervals [watch your commercial map at 6AM]. It only matters for the industry which gains "happiness" from this. Each time you place a ploppable the industry demand shoots sky high, but your residency cannot support it, so your industry demand is always maxed out, but it doesn't even matter in the scope of the game. It's ridiculous. This is why you can have a town with zero industrial buildings.
Broken games can still be fun games, though, while at the same time infuriating [mass transit is infuriating]. I've already lost two communities with my friends to the "processing" issue, haven't been able to log into my main town in 3 days.
I also haven't been able to figure out how to utilize my industry taxes in any meaningful fashion.