This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.
The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper.
Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city with no intersections, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This forces your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.
Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains some semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears zero semblance to any real city, then it has failed.
The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to grossly over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.
I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.
"in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior"
It's actually the opposite, sims always go to the nearest source for whatever it is they need despite traffic or congestion. Some randomness in picking a destination might actually solve the problem without requiring any particular intelligence.
Looks like they didn't even consider using some basic weighted graph algorithms. It would at least look less dumb if the sims wouldnt choose to take a dirt road with heavy traffic jams.
"I have no idea how they let this one out the door..."
End of the quarter is two weeks away. EA needed the revenue bump in the earning report this quarter. It is sad that stock market issues drive release decisions.
IIRC, all these problems where there in SimCity 2000. You had to have police and fire every two blocks and the best possible layout was one long, back and forth winding rail line. Maybe it's in the bug database as "Closed as Feature - Nostalgia".
I agree. While this behavior was apparently known and explained somewhat prior to release, I didn't know about it. I was prepared to give the a game a go once the connectivity issues were taken care of, but with this information I'm not even remotely interested anymore.
An ecellent and entertaining summary. I was looking forward to this game based on the previews but it seems like one big disappointment after another. Guess I'll stick with Netlogo...
It is a problem, in that the game is a lot less sophisticated than EA would have you believe, but does that make it huge ?
I've built agent level simulators and have run gate level simulations on fpga designs and the thing they share is amazing complexity which goes up really really quickly. Does is make SimCity less 'fun' ? Certainly. Does it rise to the level of failure? I'm not sure I agree.
I built a simple action selection mechanism based system for a predator / prey type robot setup. It was pretty simplistic (the prey ate/slept/hid/ran the predator ate/hunted/slept) assuming each of our sims has something like that I can't imagine how you would make that 'real time' unless you had like 100 machines dedicated to each city.
Cost effective web products have anywhere between 1K to 10K users per machine, not .01 user per machine. So the "real" (or real-er) thing would be pretty cost prohibitive as a game I suspect.
I am the guy who builds agent-based models for fun. A lesson you learn quickly is that heterogeneity is your guardian angel - varying the path-finding model a little bit from agent to agent hedges against the resonance structures on display here. Additionally, you periodically check the accumulated micros against a macro model and correct gross deviations. Neither step is computationally strenuous.
If you're the guy that builds agent-based models for fun, why not build an open-source citiy simulation engine? Grafting your simulator with an open-source tile-based graphics engine such as the one used in OpenTTD would make a lot of nerds very happy.
Could you explain a little bit more about how that works - you used words I don't understand :) It seems as though something as simple as a random selection when presented with intersections is better than the behaviour here. I guess there should just be a weight on the streets though, right?
and you absolutely cannot follow a Sim anywhere – once they’ve entered a building, whether residential, commercial or industrial, the game stops following them, and good luck finding them after.
This made me laugh sadly. I remember playing SimTower when it was released in 1994, and you could follow any Sim around as he went about his day. It's now almost 20 years later, with vastly more powerful computers, and the AI engine is actually worse.
Rollercoaster Tycoon has the same mechanic—not only was each person a discrete, persistent individual, they had their own unique mood, stamina, hunger, tolerance for waiting, and individual tastes in amusements, food, etc.
You're comparing apples and oranges. I'm sure the simulation engine in Sim Tower was wildly less complicated than in Sim City 5, or any other Sim City game after the original, for that matter.
Honestly, I don't really care about following individual Sims in a Sim City game. It's out of scope. If anything, they went too far in that direction in the current Sim City game, wasting resources on individual entities as opposed to having a solid macro model. I assume that's why we ended up with these pathetic city sizes.
I wonder about relatively long-lived organizations like Maxis. Do they hold on to old code, or does it just disappear or fade away into obscurity? All of those games, most still playable, and all of that code have to present some value. If two decades later the performance of their new games is worse, however, even in this narrow area, it has to be that they have ignored their past.
Is it the right thing just to throw that old stuff away, or to ignore it? Is there any value in looking back at old successes, and even in reusing some of that technology? The people who wrote that code are probably long gone, but that kind of situation doesn't stop big old companies in other industries from still relying on their ancient COBOL systems, for instance.
The Tropico series also do this pretty neatly (especially 3 and 4) - you can follow your 'tropicans' from their family home to the job, to the market for food, doctor, church etc. A policeman would follow your orders and run after someone you ordered arrested. Traffic path-finding is not perfect though.
But in Tropico, it is rare to have more than a thousand agents at any one time - whereas I think Sim City '13 has to simulate at least a couple orders of magnitude more agents. Not sure about that - I didn't buy the game.
With games you always have to create illusions of complexity in order to get acceptable performance. Smoke isn't real smoke (no real time smoothed particle hydrodynamics) but instead you billboard couple of semi-translucant textures. Bullets don't use real physics, but act as a point mass with specialized collision detection mechanics. Enemy AI is often just a simple state machine and hacked together heuristics. Everything is fake.
With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region. SimCity has to model the economy, happiness, education, water, waste, power, pollution, traffic, industry, and much more. So if you want to do this for 100.000 Sims in real-time you've got to cut many corners. There's just no other way. And the illusion in SimCity 5 is pretty damn good, from what I've seen. Cars drive with purpose from one place to another. Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Air flow affects pollution in a sensible way. Sure, there are a bunch of bugs but in general the illusion holds up. It's really quite impressive.
That's just it though, SimCity 5's problem is that it insisted on agent-based micro-simulation even though technical limitations would require these agents to be lobotomized.
In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a proper simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.
Agent-based simulation is the correct implementation (i.e., closest to reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant far fewer corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent negative agent-agent interactions.
To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even look like smoke anymore.
> With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region.
Actually this does not seem to be the case at all [0]. Some people have figured out that the total population numbers are are either bugged or faked. For a supposed 100,000 pop town, the actual population is around 15,000.
Did you read the article? The congestion makes no sense.
And to the best of my recollection previous versions of SimCity were able to handle traffic just fine. I certainly do not remember them suffering from the congestion problems this version seems to be afflicted by.
There's nothing wrong with creating illusions of complexity, but if you hype up your game for months by saying that the smoke really is real-time smoothed particle hydrodynamics, it had better not turn out to just be a couple of sprites.
The single biggest question on my mind is how this ended up functioning worse than the community-made solutions such as NAM (Network Addon Mod) for Sim City 4. If all they did was monkey-copy that behavior, available for many years now, I would have been more satisfied.
I am reminded of Gabe Newell's recent comment of how “[Valve] can’t compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little, but by a lot.”[1] and am starting to understand what he meant in a more visceral way: My low-bar for the experience, my expectation of quality, was not for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4. My expectation was for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4 Plus Community Content, because to my brain in consumer mode, those last 3 words don't exist, and it all just gets the label "Sim City 4" on the experience.
The response from the community in regards to SimCity is understandable -- but also disturbing.
SimCity isn't unplayable. Quite the opposite. It is an engrossing, beautiful, rich game with plenty of gameplay available. I've played the game for probably forty hours so far, across four different cities -- and the game has only been out for a week. That's amazing. A game hasn't captured my attention like this in quite a while.
And yet, many players seem to believe the game is completely unplayable. The top comment on this thread as I write this says that the game is a 'travesty' and shouldn't have been shipped. That's unreasonable.
I can only begin to imagine what SimCity's developers are feeling right now. They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about how shit it is.
Usually I place the blame at the feet of the developers, but not this time. This time, I think it's the community that needs to get over it. There is a rich, great game here if you just look past your own expectations for half a second.
Every single police car in the entire city will respond to the exact same crime in progress, ignoring all others, creating a traffic black hole, and leaving you with no police.
> They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about how shit it is.
This experience has been true for all game developers of all gamers forever. While many games do have serious flaws and much criticism is valid, my experience is that gamers are the most entitled, fickle, negative audience you can imagine.
You know what else is playable? Simcity 2000, 3000, 4, etc.
Sorry, but "playable" is putting your pants on in the morning, especially in the niche of AAA, DRM'd, persistent, service based gaming markets like this. Nobody pays a premium for incomplete services unless those are some top notch services; not services just billed that way and described in terms of reticulated splines.
Just because corporations now have the rights to buy and sell concepts that should have passed into public domain decades ago doesn't mean that they really "own" the public awareness, emotional investment and their passions. Rights can be bound by laws and recorded on paper, but you can't put a price on 10 million fans and tell them to suck it up and drop their expectations because they are legally owned. When you buy a franchise like this, you're really buying a responsibility, not a cash cow to be milked until a husk. To EA this is just another product reaching the end of it's life cycle and they're trying to stay profitable while keeping the lights on, and it doesn't matter if that means ripping out half the game and replacing it with anti-features and price tags.
I think publishers and "innocent developers just doing what their boss asked" may be the entitled ones here, thinking they deserve a payday because they worked hard bringing you a game that is quite profitable to operate. You know who else worked hard, harder than anyone else? Hitler.
"rather than individual little Simmy lives, they instead operate as an homogeneous mass, distributing themselves like a collection of marbles rolling down a board covered in holes. As they reach a job, whichever job, ignoring their previous day’s job, they take it, until all the jobs are taken. It doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial or industrial job – they just roll until they fall into the next available slot. ... They don’t trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence."
This reads like a terrifying vision of a perfectly optimized post-fordist near-future dystopia.
Maybe the Maxis gang have deeper ideas in mind than we realised...
I've noticed some weirdness with this as well. I'm not sure if this is intentional behavior or not, but I had a Nuclear power plant in my city, which has more than enough capacity for the entire city. However, when you look at the power view which shows how electricity is flowing through the streets, it seems as if the units of electricity travel randomly through the streets and would actually not reach certain streets and just pass by them. This caused blackouts in certain areas of the city, and required me to build a smaller power plant by this area of the city to restore power. Is this correct behavior? Is electricity supposed to have some sort of limit of how far it can travel?
I couldn't figure out why one area of my city kept having brown outs and water shortages, until I read this help article. Then I realized it was my street traffic that was a bottleneck. Yes, busses and cars stacked up at the entrance to my city was preventing power and water from getting to an area, just like real life.
I've found that the biggest problems have actually been in the emergency dispatch stuff. For one, police, ambulances, and fire trucks /get stuck in traffic/. Hugely obnoxious and unrealistic (at least, when there are open lanes on the other side of the road). The other problem is when if you have multiple events in the city at a time, e.g. two fires. Usually all or most of your fire trucks will go to the first building (and get stuck on each other in the process) and ignore the second one until its burned down. It's like there's nothing actually coordinating the vehicles and it's purely first-inferno-first-serve.
Notwithstanding all the bad press SimCity got since launch; I got the game 3 days after it's release.
I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase.
During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected server 'Europe West 6' and started playing.
Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay.
I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend). All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10 of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking great to play!
"This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.
The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper."
Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or denying the initial server problems.
"...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken."
Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.
> Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior.
To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path, no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part.
I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels "cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do about some of the pathfinding issues.
Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such little hoodlums.
[EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post. Whoops.
My impression is that EA has some great creative talent, but that the business management function is entrusted to people who have honesty and competence issues.
One of the big problems with American business is the focus on academic credentials, particularly with regard to "soft skills" (no skills?) in areas such as management. You will not learn management in a classroom. Furthermore, if you can't grasp the fundamentals of what you are supposedly managing, then you are just in the way.
The path ought to be:
Become an engineer -> Become a high-performing engineer -> Get some business education -> Do management
If you can't handle the engineering phases, why on earth should anybody put you in a decision-making position in an engineer endeavor?
While the practice should not be barred, it is unproductive for universities to offer "management" degrees at the undergraduate level, unless such degrees require the demonstration of significant prior work experience. Graduate management programs should not accept twentysomethings arriving straight from undergraduate programs.
If you watch their videos on the glassbox system on youtube you'll find that this is exactly how they billed it. It was users who expected more. Not that it's bad to expect more.
The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra.
In the new Sim City, there's a few components,
There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on the area.
There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power, pollution, profit.
There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to another and carry resources.
There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents.
So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically:
You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction resource is depleted.
A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname.
From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination of the requesting commercial business.
During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way back it will respond to it.
When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens. When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available.
If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents, the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building increments.
Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1 and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun.
It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area, residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle, instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the circle.
In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory.
Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds. Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to increase happiness or education.
I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off when they reevaluate their paths.
The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck, and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge into another congested road on the other side anyways.
The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to find an opening in a residential building.
If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights.
I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game. However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once.
Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm not sure about that.
If EA thinks that the vocal minority is worth saving, they need a hero. They need to hire somebody popular and smart that can say "hey everybody, EA asked for my help, I'm helping them figure out how to solve this. The server issues are mostly resolved now and we thank you for your patience. Over the next few weeks I'll blog about Sims behavior and modeling, and what changes you can expect to see. SimCity is already simulating an incredible amount of detail but many of you noticed situations where we didn't do so well. Expect to see improvements over the next few months that will address these problems."
We've already heard EA's leadership say there's nothing wrong with the game. Even if they admit to any problems, they have little trust with the community.
I have to admit to some schadenfreude about this whole fiasco. On the surface it is a very pretty game, it'll be interesting to see how EA addresses the community discontent.
As a network engineer who spends his days routing packets around the internets I find this hilarious.
What if every intersection were to function as a sort of router with each road leading from it as a link? Then distribute routes between intersections and calculate shortest path using the Dijkstra algorithm(OSPF). They could even implement congestion control by having clogged intersections stop advertising routes periodically.
Have a problem with cops, fire trucks and ambulances not getting through? Put them in a different QOS queue that prioritizes them.
This is a solved problem in so many ways. They could literally buy these algorithms from people with decades of experience working on this class of problems.
EA should just hire Toady one from dwarf fortress to do the Sim simulation. Dwarf fortress has very complex and very accurate path-finding as well as excellent creature simulation.
That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a lot of resources, like EA.
Dwarf Fortress can also bring my 1 year old quad core computer to a crawl.
I also seem to remember that once he left debugging symbols in a build and people managed to use it to determine that all path-finding is done twice for some reason.
Not the person I think that could help EA with performance problems :p
[+] [-] potatolicious|13 years ago|reply
The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper.
Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city with no intersections, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This forces your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.
Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains some semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears zero semblance to any real city, then it has failed.
The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to grossly over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.
I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.
[+] [-] ChrisLTD|13 years ago|reply
It's actually the opposite, sims always go to the nearest source for whatever it is they need despite traffic or congestion. Some randomness in picking a destination might actually solve the problem without requiring any particular intelligence.
[+] [-] jfoutz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberich|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vvector|13 years ago|reply
End of the quarter is two weeks away. EA needed the revenue bump in the earning report this quarter. It is sad that stock market issues drive release decisions.
[+] [-] jpalioto|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HelloMcFly|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
I've built agent level simulators and have run gate level simulations on fpga designs and the thing they share is amazing complexity which goes up really really quickly. Does is make SimCity less 'fun' ? Certainly. Does it rise to the level of failure? I'm not sure I agree.
I built a simple action selection mechanism based system for a predator / prey type robot setup. It was pretty simplistic (the prey ate/slept/hid/ran the predator ate/hunted/slept) assuming each of our sims has something like that I can't imagine how you would make that 'real time' unless you had like 100 machines dedicated to each city.
Cost effective web products have anywhere between 1K to 10K users per machine, not .01 user per machine. So the "real" (or real-er) thing would be pretty cost prohibitive as a game I suspect.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempaccount9473|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidos|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] addlepate|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JustARandomGuy|13 years ago|reply
This made me laugh sadly. I remember playing SimTower when it was released in 1994, and you could follow any Sim around as he went about his day. It's now almost 20 years later, with vastly more powerful computers, and the AI engine is actually worse.
[+] [-] mikepurvis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morsch|13 years ago|reply
Honestly, I don't really care about following individual Sims in a Sim City game. It's out of scope. If anything, they went too far in that direction in the current Sim City game, wasting resources on individual entities as opposed to having a solid macro model. I assume that's why we ended up with these pathetic city sizes.
[+] [-] legutierr|13 years ago|reply
Is it the right thing just to throw that old stuff away, or to ignore it? Is there any value in looking back at old successes, and even in reusing some of that technology? The people who wrote that code are probably long gone, but that kind of situation doesn't stop big old companies in other industries from still relying on their ancient COBOL systems, for instance.
[+] [-] nickolai|13 years ago|reply
But in Tropico, it is rare to have more than a thousand agents at any one time - whereas I think Sim City '13 has to simulate at least a couple orders of magnitude more agents. Not sure about that - I didn't buy the game.
[+] [-] gizmo|13 years ago|reply
With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region. SimCity has to model the economy, happiness, education, water, waste, power, pollution, traffic, industry, and much more. So if you want to do this for 100.000 Sims in real-time you've got to cut many corners. There's just no other way. And the illusion in SimCity 5 is pretty damn good, from what I've seen. Cars drive with purpose from one place to another. Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Air flow affects pollution in a sensible way. Sure, there are a bunch of bugs but in general the illusion holds up. It's really quite impressive.
[+] [-] potatolicious|13 years ago|reply
In previous SimCity games simulation was performed on the macro scale - not on each citizen. Any micro-scale view was just a visualization of the macro simulation. This meant you couldn't follow a sim's car from home to work and back, but it also meant scalability and the freedom to have a proper simulation model rather than a grossly dumbed-down one.
Agent-based simulation is the correct implementation (i.e., closest to reality) technically, but only in a world where we have infinite CPU power. A macro-simulation like previous SimCity games would have meant far fewer corners cut and a much less buggy behavior that are the result of emergent negative agent-agent interactions.
To take your analogy - SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 use billboards and textures for fake smoke. SimCity 5 tries to go all-in and simulate the hydrodynamics of each particle - but has to cut so many corners to run that it doesn't even look like smoke anymore.
[+] [-] etcet|13 years ago|reply
Actually this does not seem to be the case at all [0]. Some people have figured out that the total population numbers are are either bugged or faked. For a supposed 100,000 pop town, the actual population is around 15,000.
[0] http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9359265.page
[+] [-] revscat|13 years ago|reply
Did you read the article? The congestion makes no sense.
And to the best of my recollection previous versions of SimCity were able to handle traffic just fine. I certainly do not remember them suffering from the congestion problems this version seems to be afflicted by.
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
Or you can just suck it up and create real complexity, which can be awesome!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress
[+] [-] darkarmani|13 years ago|reply
Like down a dead end street to one house? Did you read the article?
[+] [-] mikeash|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chao-|13 years ago|reply
I am reminded of Gabe Newell's recent comment of how “[Valve] can’t compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little, but by a lot.”[1] and am starting to understand what he meant in a more visceral way: My low-bar for the experience, my expectation of quality, was not for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4. My expectation was for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4 Plus Community Content, because to my brain in consumer mode, those last 3 words don't exist, and it all just gets the label "Sim City 4" on the experience.
[1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-ne...
[+] [-] methodover|13 years ago|reply
SimCity isn't unplayable. Quite the opposite. It is an engrossing, beautiful, rich game with plenty of gameplay available. I've played the game for probably forty hours so far, across four different cities -- and the game has only been out for a week. That's amazing. A game hasn't captured my attention like this in quite a while.
And yet, many players seem to believe the game is completely unplayable. The top comment on this thread as I write this says that the game is a 'travesty' and shouldn't have been shipped. That's unreasonable.
I can only begin to imagine what SimCity's developers are feeling right now. They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about how shit it is.
Usually I place the blame at the feet of the developers, but not this time. This time, I think it's the community that needs to get over it. There is a rich, great game here if you just look past your own expectations for half a second.
[+] [-] benjarrell|13 years ago|reply
Every single police car in the entire city will respond to the exact same crime in progress, ignoring all others, creating a traffic black hole, and leaving you with no police.
[+] [-] joshdotsmith|13 years ago|reply
1) Pathing. Once you reach a certain city size, there's not much you can do that helps resolve this issue.
2) Numbers don't add up. Again, once you reach a certain city size, you can't keep services in line with your population.
No matter how much else I may love about the game, these make it a broken experience for me.
[+] [-] munificent|13 years ago|reply
This experience has been true for all game developers of all gamers forever. While many games do have serious flaws and much criticism is valid, my experience is that gamers are the most entitled, fickle, negative audience you can imagine.
[+] [-] IheartApplesDix|13 years ago|reply
Sorry, but "playable" is putting your pants on in the morning, especially in the niche of AAA, DRM'd, persistent, service based gaming markets like this. Nobody pays a premium for incomplete services unless those are some top notch services; not services just billed that way and described in terms of reticulated splines.
Just because corporations now have the rights to buy and sell concepts that should have passed into public domain decades ago doesn't mean that they really "own" the public awareness, emotional investment and their passions. Rights can be bound by laws and recorded on paper, but you can't put a price on 10 million fans and tell them to suck it up and drop their expectations because they are legally owned. When you buy a franchise like this, you're really buying a responsibility, not a cash cow to be milked until a husk. To EA this is just another product reaching the end of it's life cycle and they're trying to stay profitable while keeping the lights on, and it doesn't matter if that means ripping out half the game and replacing it with anti-features and price tags.
I think publishers and "innocent developers just doing what their boss asked" may be the entitled ones here, thinking they deserve a payday because they worked hard bringing you a game that is quite profitable to operate. You know who else worked hard, harder than anyone else? Hitler.
[+] [-] JonnieCache|13 years ago|reply
This reads like a terrifying vision of a perfectly optimized post-fordist near-future dystopia.
Maybe the Maxis gang have deeper ideas in mind than we realised...
[+] [-] cmelbye|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ry0ohki|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|13 years ago|reply
But the electrons don't do stuff like bypass entire streets...
[+] [-] nanodeath|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3dptz|13 years ago|reply
I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase.
During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected server 'Europe West 6' and started playing.
Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay.
I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend). All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10 of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking great to play!
"This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.
The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper."
Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or denying the initial server problems.
"...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken."
Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.
[+] [-] dyselon|13 years ago|reply
To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path, no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part.
I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels "cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do about some of the pathfinding issues.
Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such little hoodlums.
[EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post. Whoops.
[+] [-] Goronmon|13 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_...
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|13 years ago|reply
Strangely enough, I can relate.
[+] [-] arkitaip|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matterhorn|13 years ago|reply
One of the big problems with American business is the focus on academic credentials, particularly with regard to "soft skills" (no skills?) in areas such as management. You will not learn management in a classroom. Furthermore, if you can't grasp the fundamentals of what you are supposedly managing, then you are just in the way.
The path ought to be:
Become an engineer -> Become a high-performing engineer -> Get some business education -> Do management
If you can't handle the engineering phases, why on earth should anybody put you in a decision-making position in an engineer endeavor?
While the practice should not be barred, it is unproductive for universities to offer "management" degrees at the undergraduate level, unless such degrees require the demonstration of significant prior work experience. Graduate management programs should not accept twentysomethings arriving straight from undergraduate programs.
Less fluff, more umpf.
[+] [-] zeidrich|13 years ago|reply
The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra.
In the new Sim City, there's a few components,
There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on the area.
There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power, pollution, profit.
There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to another and carry resources.
There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents.
So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically:
You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction resource is depleted.
A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname.
From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination of the requesting commercial business.
During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way back it will respond to it.
When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens. When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available.
If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents, the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building increments.
Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1 and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun.
It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area, residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle, instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the circle.
In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory.
Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds. Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to increase happiness or education.
I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off when they reevaluate their paths.
The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck, and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge into another congested road on the other side anyways.
The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to find an opening in a residential building.
If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights.
I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game. However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once.
Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm not sure about that.
[+] [-] bentcorner|13 years ago|reply
We've already heard EA's leadership say there's nothing wrong with the game. Even if they admit to any problems, they have little trust with the community.
I have to admit to some schadenfreude about this whole fiasco. On the surface it is a very pretty game, it'll be interesting to see how EA addresses the community discontent.
[+] [-] smutticus|13 years ago|reply
What if every intersection were to function as a sort of router with each road leading from it as a link? Then distribute routes between intersections and calculate shortest path using the Dijkstra algorithm(OSPF). They could even implement congestion control by having clogged intersections stop advertising routes periodically.
Have a problem with cops, fire trucks and ambulances not getting through? Put them in a different QOS queue that prioritizes them.
This is a solved problem in so many ways. They could literally buy these algorithms from people with decades of experience working on this class of problems.
[+] [-] ics|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiglionabbit|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ry0ohki|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hristov|13 years ago|reply
That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a lot of resources, like EA.
[+] [-] rurounijones|13 years ago|reply
I also seem to remember that once he left debugging symbols in a build and people managed to use it to determine that all path-finding is done twice for some reason.
Not the person I think that could help EA with performance problems :p