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[Toma]

if the simulation worked the way you guys thought it worked it would never work

especially since we as the controller can destroy entire work spaces and houses

if the game has a sim at work and you destroy their house where do they go after that they would basically end up driving around in circles since when you do create a house its damn enar instantly filled with workers

Nah, there are ways around that. The sim would either take up a new space in a different house OR leave the city completely if no space is left anywhere. Then the job is missing a sim which could be filled up from unemployed sims.

Its definitely not impossible, but it needs more thought, love, attention and work than SimCity 5 has gotten.

 

[RumblingRosco]

if the simulation worked the way you guys thought it worked it would never work

especially since we as the controller can destroy entire work spaces and houses

if the game has a sim at work and you destroy their house where do they go after that they would basically end up driving around in circles since when you do create a house its damn enar instantly filled with workers

if; house#723232=0
then; Sim#723232_delete

 

[Toma]

if; house#723232=0
then; Sim#723232_delete

Thats a possibility too, but they COULD actually simulate that sim easily as I said in the post above.

Just put him in a free apartment or then "delete"/"leave" the city. The Sim could even drive to a free department after work, or if he cant find any, drive out of town. There you go, somewhat believable simulation accomplished.

 

[IISANDERII]

Watch the video again. The street is not completely empty - there is a house at the end of it. By the logic of the game, every single person leaving the group of factories when it's closing time first attempts to go to that house. When the house is full, the factories start sending their agents to the other, large residential area. Every agent that has already been sent still goes to the first house, finds out it's full, then turns around to go back to the large residential area to find the next nearest open house (which will presumably also be full by then, but the fakery would be harder to spot as they'll just move down the road little by little looking for the next open house).

Oh. I thought that was a little graphic for the chart he has displayed.

 

[Confidence Man]

if the simulation worked the way you guys thought it worked it would never work

especially since we as the controller can destroy entire work spaces and houses

if the game has a sim at work and you destroy their house where do they go after that they would basically end up driving around in circles since when you do create a house its damn enar instantly filled with workers

If I remember Tropico right, they become homeless and set up their own little shelters wherever there's room. Maybe they have fewer people to handle, but doesn't SimCity artificially inflate the numbers of citizens anyway?

 

[Gen X]

This game is a PRs nightmare.

The car servers must be down too.

`

Fuck I laughed at this.

 

[strata8]

Doesn't Tropico deal with a lower amount of citizens though? Still, now I want to bust out Tropico 3 Steam Edition, only played it for an hour or so, something always comes in my way when I want to play city builders . Same happened with CivCity Rome lol.

Fucking EA. I'm now pretty certain that Peace-sign city you advertise would be a huge clusterfuck of a city.

Tropico's more like a town builder as opposed to SimCity which is a city planner. Everything is placed manually and there's a lot more micromanagement going on.

It's very fun but substantially different to SimCity in the end. It honestly reminds me of Rollercoaster Tycoon/Theme Park World.

 

[gblues]

It's one thing to visualize mathematical models--that's basically the core of the early SimCity games. It's another thing entirely to individually model 200,000+ people's behavior in real time in a way that doesn't look stupid upon scrutinization.

The problem is that the mathematical models are based on statistical analysis, which on a fundamental level works with aggregate data. Going from specific to aggregate is a one-way function. Maxis is trying to make it go the other way, and as we are seeing, it just doesn't work.

The fundamental mechanics of the new SimCity--AI agents driving emergent behavior--are broken and no amount of AI tweaking is going to fix it. It will need to go back to visualizing mathematical models to meet most fan's expectations for a good SimCity game, and that's not something that will happen in 2-3 weeks.

 

[shandy706]

The fact that they ALL head to the nearest SINGLE empty slot sounds and looks utterly stupid to me. That's not innovative in any way. Why not send every other, or every 5 cars towards random "open slots". That would be 10000000000000000000000000000x more "realistic.

It would at least simulate workers heading in different directions from a workplace.

 

[RobbieH]

RPS and Eurogamer have picked this up. One of the Eurogamer editors said they haven't reviewed it yet because:

We're taking our time, in part so we can make sure we get a good handle on issues exactly like this one - it's not just about the server performance. We had no early access (apart from a couple of days on US public servers) and we've been playing under the same conditions as the general public.

And on early access:

It's not that - oddly, I don't think EA organised any early access in the UK, although there were review events in the US and in some parts of Europe. I don't know why that was.

We likely would have declined if offered though - an always online game really needs to be reviewed from public servers, as this launch has demonstrated so clearly.

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

If I remember Tropico right, they become homeless and set up their own little shelters wherever there's room. Maybe they have fewer people to handle, but doesn't SimCity artificially inflate the numbers of citizens anyway?

EA Forum - "Proof that the game is misleading regarding population count".

There seems to be a fudge factor added to population count when you have over 500 sims.

 

[massoluk]

I bought Anno 2070 and Tropico 4 upon recommendation here during the SimCity fiasco. Anno was kinda... complicated.

Tropico 4, imo, struck just the right balance between micro-management and accessibility. That said, I feel conflicted because before all the gameplay issues in SimCity, I didn't buy it because of online DRM, but Tropico 4 has just that.

 

[Sblargh]

It's one thing to visualize mathematical models--that's basically the core of the early SimCity games. It's another thing entirely to individually model 200,000+ people's behavior in real time in a way that doesn't look stupid upon scrutinization.

The problem is that the mathematical models are based on statistical analysis, which on a fundamental level works with aggregate data. Going from specific to aggregate is a one-way function. Maxis is trying to make it go the other way, and as we are seeing, it just doesn't work.

The fundamental mechanics of the new SimCity--AI agents driving emergent behavior--are broken and no amount of AI tweaking is going to fix it. It will need to go back to visualizing mathematical models to meet most fan's expectations for a good SimCity game, and that's not something that will happen in 2-3 weeks.

That's how I feel, too. If they haven't advertised as one of their main future a move away from the mathematical model of doing things, nobody would have cared. Nobody expected SimCity to work like Tropico, but fuck me if their demonstration videos didn't hyped me because it was Tropico on a grand stage.

I feel cheated, man. Not trying to be dramatic, but that's one popped hype balloon.

 

[BolognaSoup]

Lol at people still defending this.

It can't simulate traffic or pedestrian patterns - highway planning is useless, emergency services are useless, zoning is useless. The fundamentals of designing a city are broken.

I remember in SimCity 2000 seeing crime pop up in a certain area so I'd plop a police department down and crime in that surrounding area would go down, you know like how you'd expect. It looks like in 2013 SC, it doesn't matter where you put your police because of the broken pathing system.

 

[Raticus79]

Also, they seem to lie about the population sizes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/

Holy shit, adding to OP

Check this out - it adds a bit of weight to RPS's anonymous source:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/com...ie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/c8uqv8v

The UI code was leaked a couple days ago. In it you will find a funny little function called GetFudgedPopulation. You can find the raw code here [not sure if it's ok to post the github link here, but you can get it from that comment].

Here's the important part:
if (500 >= a)
return a;

if (40845 < a)
return Math.floor(8.25 * a);

a = Math.pow(a - 500, 1.2) + 500;
return Math.floor(a);

So yup, figures at or under 500 are correct, then a different formula for > 40845 pop, and finally for anything else you get the final formula.

Does that pattern hold up?

Under 500 real pop: shows real population
500-40845: shows 500+(amount over 500 ^ 1.2)
Over 40845 real pop: shows 8.25 times real pop. (this maxes out that 1.2 exponential scaling at the multiplier it reaches at that level, so it doesn't get too ridiculous)

 

[Zuhzuhzombie!!]

I wish it was possible to get a real Simcity game again. Tropico is nice but you're not exactly building cities in it in my experience. More like shoddy looking towns.

Well it is a game about being a third world dictator.

 

[gblues]

I bought Anno 2070 and Tropico 4 upon recommendation here during the SimCity fiasco. Anno was kinda... complicated.

Tropico 4, imo, struck just the right balance between micro-management and accessibility. That said, I feel conflicted because before all the gameplay issues in SimCity, I didn't buy it because of online DRM, but Tropico 4 has just that.

Tropico's just doing a one-time check when you start the game, though.

 

[LuchaShaq]

how did this game get out the door? it's a disaster.

EA knew that clueless reviewers (see the entire staff of polygon defending the game 24/7 on twitter, even parroting the "offline calculations lie from EA) combined with optimistic fans who will defend their purchase like it was their child.

 

[Toma]

Tropico's just doing a one-time check when you start the game, though.

Yeah, that is way less bothersome, although still a tad annoying.

 

[RedNumberFive]

EA knew that clueless reviewers (see the entire staff of polygon defending the game 24/7 on twitter, even parroting the "offline calculations lie from EA) combined with optimistic fans who will defend their purchase like it was their child.

Ice cold, but completely on the mark.

 

[Oneironaut]

When I see a game that looks interesting, I pick a price that I would be willing to pay for that game, and then either buy it at release if I can, or if my price is lower I'll wait for a sale of some sort to bring the game within my price range.

SimCity started out at around $40 because of the DRM, but these new updates every day or so have really been knocking that price down. I might buy the game for $10 now, and even then I would be wary.

 

[Shambles]

Tropico's just doing a one-time check when you start the game, though.

"Well normally I don't eat poison, but if it's just a small amount of poison sure, why not?"

 

[Ultrabum]

I would love to see a youtube of a residential area in the middle of a city, and two roads, one north 9 units, one south 10 units. The north road has 1 factory and the one south has tons of factories. Anyone have a link, sorry if already posted.

 

[Toma]

When I see a game that looks interesting, I pick a price that I would be willing to pay for that game, and then either buy it at release if I can, or if my price is lower I'll wait for a sale of some sort to bring the game within my price range.

SimCity started out at around $40 because of the DRM, but these new updates every day or so have really been knocking that price down. I might buy the game for $10 now, and even then I would be wary.

You know.. I'd really be interested in trying it, if not for the fact that the game is basically already finished. And by that I mean, someone literally ended the game for everyone:

Thats the only way to build an efficient city. Once you know that, its like playing an RPG where the enemies defeat themselves. The gameplay becomes pointless.

"Well normally I don't eat poison, but if it's just a small amount of poison sure, why not?"

The japanese blowfish is prepared as food with a little bit of poison left, so its not like that is uncommon
Besides people smoke, drink alcohol, eat too much sugar etcetc. People just do whatever the fuck is fun to them. The problem is that one kind of DRM severely hinders that fun, while the other one is rarely noticeable.

 

[strata8]

Tropico's just doing a one-time check when you start the game, though.

Least effective DRM ever?

 

[Toma]

Least effective DRM ever?

Why? DRM like that checks the game certification, as in if a single steam account is installed on 2 PC's and then you cant run the game on both at the same time.

 

[Celegus]

I wasn't expecting perfection, but I'm still amazed at how much of a trainwreck SimCity turned out to be. Looks like my best bet is to fire up my SNES cart of the original.

 

[Confidence Man]

Tropico's just doing a one-time check when you start the game, though.

You don't even need to be online, in fact.

Q: Does Kalypso Launcher require an internet connection for activation?
A: Plain and simple: No. You can install and play your games without any kind of internet connection.

http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=7909

 

[Toma]

You don't even need to be online, in fact.



http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=7909

Well then, thats not even an issue.

 

[massoluk]

You don't even need to be online, in fact.



http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=7909

Well, then. That's news to me. Thanks. So the login screen is kinda fake? SimCity has fake sims, Tropico 4 has fake login?

 

[KevinRo]

Don't worry, since the game is always online they'll just patch it!

 

[Toma]

Well, then. That's news to me. Thanks. So the login screen is kinda fake? SimCity has fake sims, Tropico 4 has fake login?

Quote from another forum:

The launcher is pretty benign. It does the patching, it checks for updates, it manages the DLC - think that's about it.

 

[Toma]

Don't worry, since the game is always online they'll just patch it!

Or remove more features. Or just turn off the game servers and posting a "WHY SO SERIOUS?" picture to everyone trying to login.

 

[Thraktor]

I'll preface the following by saying that I haven't actually played the new Sim City yet, but I do plan to pick it up sometime soon (once the server issues are ironed out). I do, however, have some small amount of knowledge of academic economic simulation, so hopefully my input might be worth something.

Firstly, agent-based modeling of economic systems is insanely fucking difficult. Even ignoring the computational restrictions, it's a seriously difficult problem to figure out, and there are plenty of very intelligent people trying to do so.

For those that are working on it, they generally only do so with very low-level simulations, modeling a small number of people making simple, isolated decisions. Even then, and without any computational limitations, it's a huge challenge to create a simulation that produces the expected behavior both on the individual level and on the aggregate level.

Maxis, though, are not only attempting to find solutions to these problems, they're doing so on a larger scale and with more interconnected systems than any academic simulation I've ever heard of. The fact that they've managed to create something of this scale that works at all is absolutely astonishing as far as I'm concerned.

Then we move onto the computational limits. If a group of academics were to work on an agent-based simulation of the scale of Sim City, they wouldn't attempt it on anything less than thousands of cores worth of supercomputer, and wouldn't even attemp to run it in real-time even then. Maxis, however, have managed to do so in a real-time game that runs (afaik) on a Core 2 Duo. Again, the fact that it runs at all is a serious achievement.

When it comes to path-finding for vehicles and the like, the big limit that Maxis are coming up against is the computational power of the average PC. Finding the optimal path over a non-Euclidean graph in minimal computational time is something that has a known and relatively simple solution. The issue is that when you're dealing with a graph as complex as the road network in one of Sim City's cities, and are trying to run the path-finding algorithm for hundreds or thousands of cars simultaneously, you need orders of magnitude more computational power than a home PC is going to provide. The only option you then have is to move to a non-optimal heuristic, which finds a "good guess" as to the optimal route. This is what 99% of games do when it comes to pathfinding, as it's computationally much cheaper and for the most part it produces paths that look pretty good. The issue, though, is that any non-optimal pathfinding heuristic is, by definition, going to throw up imperfect routes every so often. This is an even bigger issue when it comes to routing around traffic in a game like Sim City, as you're then dealing with non-Euclidean graphs, which adds a whole extra level of complexity.

There's simply no way around this when working within the confines of a typical PC. Either you go with an optimal solution and the game starts to chug with more than a couple of cars on the road, or you use a heuristic and end up with the occasional illogical traffic jam. It's a mathematically proveable fact, and there's nothing that Maxis can really do about it.

 

[Kill Your Masters]

You know.. I'd really be interested in trying it, if not for the fact that the game is basically already finished. And by that I mean, someone literally ended the game for everyone:


Thats the only way to build an efficient city. Once you know that, its like playing an RPG where the enemies defeat themselves. The gameplay becomes pointless.



The japanese blowfish is prepared as food with a little bit of poison left, so its not like that is uncommon
Besides people smoke, drink alcohol, eat too much sugar etcetc. People just do whatever the fuck is fun to them. The problem is that one kind of DRM severely hinders that fun, while the other one is rarely noticeable.

Image searching that image gave me this hilarious article/pictures:

http://www.benzinga.com/news/13/03/3405201/here-are-22-of-the-most-insane-bugs-in-simcity-2013

How can you call this game SimCity? I mean I understand you can't have individual AI's for hundreds of thousands of citizens, but why do you need to send out 10 Firetrucks to one House?

 

[MrCompletely]

Man this thread is really depressing. Haven't felt burned on a game in such a long time. Was really excited about SimCity

 

[Toma]

stuff

Yeah, if thats true then they should have probably just stuck with whatever actually works, instead of making a computational experiment for people paying $60 for a game which expect it to WORK, and not just be an admirable effort.

Besides, there are many smaller things they COULD have done, but didnt. (Like having workers go to random free houses, not just the nearest one) to alleviate these kind of traffic problems. Its all pretty apparent that they didnt release the game in a decent state.

 

[Hari Seldon]

<great post>

I think the problem is that they didn't even attempt to do any level of agent based simulation. If the optimal city path is a queue, that is 1992 home pc levels of computational power.

 

[Pociask]

Nope, they announced this in Youtube videos before (see last page). It works exactly as intended.

In case you missed my reply to this, I think it's pretty clear it does not work as intended.

The video also makes it seem like a two part process - it starts off by saying how the factories send out help wanted agents, which go through the residential areas. Then, the residents go to the nearest available job. So you can imagine that this is short-hand for a rather sophisticated simulation - sims are getting word on where jobs are (they don't have perfect knowledge of all factories), and then they pick which job to go to based upon which is nearest. Then, presumably, they return to THEIR home.

Instead, the sims DO have perfect knowledge of the location of every factory. They all head to the nearest one (no help wanted agents?). Then, at the end of the work day, they go back... to the nearest house! So it's not a sim making a decision as to where to work, based upon which job he knows about that is nearest to his home. It's just a way to move sims back and forth between arbitrarily picked home and work locations.

The video at the very least heavily implied a lot of room for emergent behavior, with interaction between two processes 1) agents looking for jobs and 2) factories looking for agents. At the very least, the second process has been eliminated. Also, watching the original video, you'd have no idea that agents don't have permanent residences.

 

[KKRT00]

I think the problem is that they didn't even attempt to do any level of agent based simulation. If the optimal city path is a queue, that is 1992 home pc levels of computational power.

They did, problem is that most of those experiments shows only one road and one bottleneck when system is designed over at least sever routes.
I dont think Maxis system is ideal and shouldnt be tweaked and fixed, it should, especially for firetracks, police and public transportation, which should be priorities by system and have more accurate path-finding algorithms.
But i'm happy that they went with this kind of system that rely on microscale, instead of making SimCity 4 HD, because this is great basis for future, better products, and innovation, even broken one, is always better than crappy evolution.
Now Maxis needs to write BIG dev blog that describe the system, failures and bugs and how they want to expand it and fix in future, but they shouldnt be crucified for the solution they've came up with, because that actually is good part of new Simcity.

-
@Thraktor
Yeah, thats why i want some cpu utilization data to check how intensive higher densitity cities are.
Btw the problem with Simcity for Maxis in general was that its game that caters to very casual market at core, thats why they couldnt set minimum requirements to 3-4 cores processors. And that probably reason why cities are so restricted in size, because of low requirements.

 

[Talamius]

Yeah, if thats true then they should have probably just stuck with whatever actually works, instead of making a computational experiment for people paying $60 for a game which expect it to WORK, and not just be an admirable effort.

Besides, there are many smaller things they COULD have done, but didnt. (Like having workers go to random free houses, not just the nearest one) to alleviate these kind of traffic problems. Its all pretty apparent that they didnt release the game in a decent state.

IMO, calling this an Alpha is being kind. It's forgivable that every Sim is not being simulated individually. The traffic, public transport and service vehicle flaws are not. We'll use fires as an example as how it should be done:

1) Fire breaks out in a building.
2) Game should determine if you have a fire station and the number of trucks available to respond.
3) Game should determine how many trucks are necessary to combat the fire.
4) Game dispatches appropriate number of trucks, sending them on the shortest available path. If gridlock exists, search for a way around, even if it adds to the response time a bit. (Note: The game can ALREADY determine differing levels of gridlock.)
5) Game retains surplus firetrucks at station(s) to be dispatched on other fires.

How it is actually handled:

1) Fire breaks out in a building.
2) Game responds with all available trucks.
3) All other fires burn out of control.

That's gamebreaking, even with small map sizes. You can apply the same thing to all the other service vehicles.

 

[MrCompletely]

so, the reddit thread also discusses that because the population is misrepresented, you will always have a worker shortage if you try to match jobs 1:1 with population.

Couldn't this be solved by expanding the city size? With a large enough plot of land, perhaps the phantom population could be dropped and we could have a true representation of AI agents.

I suppose it would also help if not every AI agent even owned or had access to a car, or a car was only available to specific density/wealth combos. It's probably essential for low density/low wealth to have a car, but not for high density/medium wealth, and for high density/high wealth, its a luxury and those folks can leave town to shop, shop high wealth, or enjoy tourist attractions.

 

[WedgeX]

Umm running MASSIVE, used for the Lord of the Rings AI back in 2001, had these requirements:

Minimum:

• 1 GHz processor
• &#8226; 512 MB of RAM
• &#8226; NVIDIA graphics card

recommended

• &#8226; 2 &#8211; 3 GHz processor
• &#8226; 2 GB of RAM
• &#8226; NVIDIA Quadro FX series graphics card

And does the following:

Massive is a software package developed by Stephen Regelous for the visual effects industry. Its flagship feature is the ability to quickly and easily create thousands (or up to millions with current advances in computer processing power) of agents that all act as individuals as opposed to content creators individually animating or programming the agents by hand. Through the use of fuzzy logic, the software enables every agent to respond individually to its surroundings, including other agents. These reactions affect the agent's behaviour, changing how they act by controlling pre-recorded animation clips, for example by blending between such clips, to create characters that move, act, and react realistically. These pre-recorded animation clips can come from motion-capture sessions, or can be hand-animated in other 3D animation software packages.

In addition to the artificial intelligence abilities of Massive, there are numerous other features, including cloth simulation, rigid body dynamics and graphics processing unit (GPU) based hardware rendering. Massive Software has also created several pre-built agents ready to perform certain tasks, such as stadium crowd agents, rioting 'mayhem' agents and simple agents who walk around and talk to each other.

To say that Maxis, with ten years between main titles, cannot come up with a similar AI that will run on modern computers....actually, one that won't run on their modern server systems since that it what they claimed, is hilarious.

 

[Pagusas]

They did, problem is that most of those experiments shows only one road and one bottleneck when system is designed over at least sever routes.
I dont think Maxis system is ideal and shouldnt be tweaked and fixed, it should, especially for firetracks, police and public transportation, which should be priorities by system and have more accurate path-finding algorithms.
But i'm happy that they went with this kind of system that rely on microscale, instead of making SimCity 4 HD, because this is great basis for future, better products, and innovation, even broken one, is always better than crappy evolution.
Now Maxis needs to write BIG dev blog that describe the system, failures and bugs and how they want to expand it and fix in future, but they shouldnt be crucified for the solution they've came up with, because that actually is good part of new Simcity.

-
@Thraktor
Yeah, thats why i want some cpu utilization data to check how intensive higher densitity cities are.
Btw the problem with Simcity for Maxis in general was that its game that caters to very casual market at core, thats why they couldnt set minimum requirements to 3-4 cores processors. And that probably reason why cities are so restricted in size, because of low requirements.

But isnt that what we are all upset about? It looks like Maxis DIDNT design any systems, they just said they did, marketed like they did, and when push came to shove they just threw in the simplest A to B solution they could and probably didn't expect people to examine it as closely as everyone has. A very stupid miscalculation on there part.

 

[RPG_Fanatic]

Man this is depressing. Glad I didn't get sucked into the hype and buy this game. Picked up Sim City 4 instead and downloaded the suggested mods in the GAF plays: Sim Ciy 4 thread.

 

[Dr.Acula]

[...]

I get that making SimCity5 is hard, but it appears to be less functional as a simulation in every way than SimCity4.

Hey, if SimCity5 evolved from SimCity4... then why we still got SimCity4?

 

[diffusionx]

Umm running MASSIVE, used for the Lord of the Rings AI back in 2001, had these requirements:

Minimum:

• 1 GHz processor
• • 512 MB of RAM
• • NVIDIA graphics card

recommended

• • 2 – 3 GHz processor
• • 2 GB of RAM
• • NVIDIA Quadro FX series graphics card

And does the following:



To say that Maxis, with ten years between main titles, cannot come up with a similar AI that will run on modern computers....actually, one that won't run on their modern server systems since that it what they claimed, is hilarious.

Those requirements are meaningless in this context, as that is not software running on a real time simulation.

 

[VeryGooster]

Slightly off-topic, is there a reason SimCity 3000 isn't available digitally like SC2K? Or is it just a case of "not getting around to it, yet?"

I keep passing up sales of SC4 on Steam, even though I have the physical copy that I bought 10 years ago (minus expansions), and thinking of grabbing SC2K.

 

[Mael]

Those requirements are meaningless in this context, as that is not software running on a real time simulation.

It sheds a light on how much of a hog that part can be in a simulation though.

 

[Dreams-Visions]

I get that making SimCity5 is hard, but it appears to be less functional as a simulation in every way than SimCity4.

Hey, if SimCity5 evolved from SimCity4... then why we still got SimCity4?

My thoughts exactly.

Maxis gets no points for doing something that's hard and failing in a number of product-breaking ways. If you can't make it work well, don't fucking make it that way. It won't make anyone sleep better knowing their game plays like shit but was built on a really cool concept.