Sim City 5

[Wyndru]

I saw that, and I think it was a misconception from what EA/Maxis was saying that was then perpetrated across the internet. Everything I saw from EA/Maxis made it clear (at least to me) that it was the regional interactions that were being computed by the server, and everything within your city limits is handled by your own PC. Where the idea arose that the simulation of the city itself was farmed out to a server is unknown, but I saw that misconception everywhere I looked.

Maybe because of quotes like this, where they basically said your PC can't handle it.

Well, Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw has responded to this DRM food fight, sort of. Earlier comments on the always-on connection attributed it to the fact Maxis is building what it considers to be a multiplayer game. To this, Bradshaw adds the always-on connection is necessary because there's an enormous amount of cloud computing required to power this game, billed as the most advanced in SimCity's history. It's not something your individual PC will be able to handle on its own, not when the cloud servers are handling up to 100,000 Sims inside each city.

http://kotaku.com/5971235/cloud-com...ity-needs-an-always+on-connection-studio-says

I think many people took information like this to mean that a lot of the simulation was done online, even though it was just a poorly worded way of saying region simulation is done on the cloud.

Regarding the traffic simulation, SC4 had a ton of pathfinding issues that were never fixed also, so this is nothing new. And the NAM pack only was a bandaid fix. The authors of that even admitted that it fixed the issues, but a lot of the methods used were kind of a brute force approach (i.e. shortening commute times, increasing allowed distances for sims, doubling transit capacity, etc...). The NAM made it more realistic, but it really needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. It's too bad that with this version they didn't build off their mistakes.

 

[Punter]

Again, the problem with SimCity that will still be present after all the bugs are fixed and servers are stabilized, is that the GlassBox engine is a terrible simulation engine for a city.

Here's a picture of my test setup.

Picture shows the layout of my test city. I have all work areas in one location in the southeast corner of the city, 99% of my residential area a good distance away, and a single 6-person low-income home at the end of a dead end street that is at 5/6 residents. At the end of the shift (6AM), every car that is created with a worker on his/her way home picks the closest open residential home, which happens to be the one at the end of that dead end. Even after the slot is filled, cars that have already been created still head up the dead-end street. Only newly created cars after that slot had been filled go directly to the larger residential area. The cars that didn't must reach their destination (the house at the end of the street) before realizing it is full, and then heading to the next closest residential plot which is in the main section of town.

Youtube video showing the problem.

You are right on the money. Here is a link to someone else who reached the same conclusion:
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellane...y-services-and-traffic-are-broken/td-p/737060

 

[Wyndru]

Again, the problem with SimCity that will still be present after all the bugs are fixed and servers are stabilized, is that the GlassBox engine is a terrible simulation engine for a city.

Here's a picture of my test setup.

Picture shows the layout of my test city. I have all work areas in one location in the southeast corner of the city, 99% of my residential area a good distance away, and a single 6-person low-income home at the end of a dead end street that is at 5/6 residents. At the end of the shift (6AM), every car that is created with a worker on his/her way home picks the closest open residential home, which happens to be the one at the end of that dead end. Even after the slot is filled, cars that have already been created still head up the dead-end street. Only newly created cars after that slot had been filled go directly to the larger residential area. The cars that didn't must reach their destination (the house at the end of the street) before realizing it is full, and then heading to the next closest residential plot which is in the main section of town.

Youtube video showing the problem.

You are right on the money. Here is a link to someone else who reached the same conclusion:
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellane...y-services-and-traffic-are-broken/td-p/737060

Ultimately, the problem is that the developers have decided to handle sims like they handle any "mindless" power-agent. This results in mindless sims, and mindless services. Mindless services reduce the actual quality of the simulation. Since no sim actually owns a house, they don't REALLY care what ammenities are built around it. THIS is why it is nearly impossible to have distinct districts of each wealth level... A low-wealth agent may very well end up in a high-wealth house at the end of the day. Why? Because it was the closest open house. The next morning, that agent sets out to find "high-wealth" work. Then after work, may end up in a medium-wealth home with 2 kids! There's no rhyme or reason for the way they behave, OTHER than just taking the shortest (not quickest) path to the nearest open space.

Wow, I understood the Sims picking the closest businesses to work at being a little buggy, but they even pick the closest houses on the way home? That is messed up. This basically breaks the ability to have designated wealth areas, which I loved about SC4. If they don't fix this, I am definitely not interested.

Is there at least any way to force the wealth levels, like SC4 lets you do by taxing high and medium wealth so you could get low wealth buildings? That's how I set up different tiles in SC4, so I could have some ghettos, middle class areas and high wealth towers (for res and CBD).

And on a side note, does this game have different "tilesets" where you can choose a style/era of building to be built or are you stuck with a default set?

 

[Phobic9]

And on a side note, does this game have different "tilesets" where you can choose a style/era of building to be built or are you stuck with a default set?

Yes, but it's DLC unless you get the Deluxe Digital Edition ($80). There's currently German, French, and British "packs" that are $10 each.

 

[Wyndru]

Yes, but it's DLC unless you get the Deluxe Digital Edition ($80). There's currently German, French, and British "packs" that are $10 each.

Nice. Hopefully they release another building architect tool for this game too. They said early on that they would be supporting the modding community, but I'm worried that if there is money to be made on DLC they might consider otherwise.

 

[Regs]

Nice. Hopefully they release another building architect tool for this game too. They said early on that they would be supporting the modding community, but I'm worried that if there is money to be made on DLC they might consider otherwise.

Creative Assembly for the Total War series has been supporting the mod community and making DLC alike. I imagine ,though, EA will segregate the mod servers from the regular servers when the time comes.

 

[JTsyo]

Now that people have been playing for a bit, would you say the social aspects of the regions was worth the lower city size and server side calculations?

 

[Phobic9]

Now that people have been playing for a bit, would you say the social aspects of the regions was worth the lower city size and server side calculations?

Apparently, the server really isn't calculating all that much outside of the region trading (which includes the global market I'd assume). You can read more about that here, though it's blocked at work for me.

I'd chalk most of the issues people are having with the game are they way it was advertised versus the reality of what we ended up with. I know I am a little more disappointed the more I play with the game.

To answer your original question, the region stuff is nice but I'm begining to think that it could have been incorporated into a game that still allowed for larger cities.

 

[Jeff7]

Again, the problem with SimCity that will still be present after all the bugs are fixed and servers are stabilized, is that the GlassBox engine is a terrible simulation engine for a city.

Here's a picture of my test setup.

Picture shows the layout of my test city. I have all work areas in one location in the southeast corner of the city, 99% of my residential area a good distance away, and a single 6-person low-income home at the end of a dead end street that is at 5/6 residents. At the end of the shift (6AM), every car that is created with a worker on his/her way home picks the closest open residential home, which happens to be the one at the end of that dead end. Even after the slot is filled, cars that have already been created still head up the dead-end street. Only newly created cars after that slot had been filled go directly to the larger residential area. The cars that didn't must reach their destination (the house at the end of the street) before realizing it is full, and then heading to the next closest residential plot which is in the main section of town.

Youtube video showing the problem.

What the hell?
I think they did something like that in SC4, where each morning, the Sims in a building would look for a new job and then go there. Rush Hour changed that, such that the Sims would find and keep a job over time, until some external pressure caused them to change, such as an increase in transit time, or the destruction of a road (= a long transit time), or the destruction or loss of the workplace itself. I don't think it did this on an individual basis, but it was still a bit more realistic than finding a new job every morning, and certainly more realistic than each resident trying to find a new house at the end of a shift at work.
Or if they're going to do that anyway, yes, at least have some manner of "dibs" system, as someone else here put it.



Maybe they've all just adopted a "shared car" mentality for houses, except there's no website for it, and no one at workplaces ever talks to each other to arrange who's sleeping where that night.

Their spousal arrangements must be quite interesting as well. :hmm:

 

[Dominato3r]

What the hell?
I think they did something like that in SC4, where each morning, the Sims in a building would look for a new job and then go there. Rush Hour changed that, such that the Sims would find and keep a job over time, until some external pressure caused them to change, such as an increase in transit time, or the destruction of a road (= a long transit time), or the destruction or loss of the workplace itself. I don't think it did this on an individual basis, but it was still a bit more realistic than finding a new job every morning, and certainly more realistic than each resident trying to find a new house at the end of a shift at work.
Or if they're going to do that anyway, yes, at least have some manner of "dibs" system, as someone else here put it.



Maybe they've all just adopted a "shared car" mentality for houses, except there's no website for it, and no one at workplaces ever talks to each other to arrange who's sleeping where that night.

Their spousal arrangements must be quite interesting as well. :hmm:

I'd be fine with sims finding a new job/house everyday, but because traffic is actually simulated this time, it breaks the game. Everything just gets congested and at peak hours around 6-8AM its just gridlock, I've had my coal powerplant fail 3 or 4 times because it wouldnt get its coal delivery. And that cascades into water treatment plants and factories failing because of power.

They need fix traffic asap, its just stupid the way it is right now

 

[CPA]

Wow, I understood the Sims picking the closest businesses to work at being a little buggy, but they even pick the closest houses on the way home? That is messed up. This basically breaks the ability to have designated wealth areas, which I loved about SC4. If they don't fix this, I am definitely not interested.

Is there at least any way to force the wealth levels, like SC4 lets you do by taxing high and medium wealth so you could get low wealth buildings? That's how I set up different tiles in SC4, so I could have some ghettos, middle class areas and high wealth towers (for res and CBD).

And on a side note, does this game have different "tilesets" where you can choose a style/era of building to be built or are you stuck with a default set?

I want to get this game now that the servers have been "fixed", but it's crap like this that has me holding off.

 

[Arsinek]

So does this game work now?

 

[Anonemous]

Couldn't they have solved this traffic problem with cloud computing or was it just lazy code?

 

[techie81]

So does this game work now?

I would say no.

 

[Farmer]

WTF did they do to SimCity?

 

[techie81]

The game as is right now, is a catastrophe.

 

[DrunkenSano]

WTF did they do to SimCity?

They EA'd it.

 

[CPA]

LMAO, the pathfinding issues have made it to Foxnews.com

Pathfinding issues go beyond sims going home or finding a job:

Several players have noted that the characters in the game don’t actually have any permanent jobs or homes. They simply walk to the nearest available open job or a suitable home at certain times, a simplification that creates major headaches in city planning. Sims that start walking don’t switch to mass transit if they don’t find a job nearby; kids don’t get to schools easily; all cops go to a single crime scene even if police stations are carefully spread in different parts of the city.

Yeah, this sounds realistic, lol:

One popular emerging strategy is to construct a city with one long, single street winding back and forth like a snake. This enables players to reduce the problems of having school buses that cannot find students and fire trucks that refuse to go where they are supposed to. One way to avoid suffocating traffic jams is to fill the city with wide avenues, resulting in weird maps where normal streets are used as sparsely as possible.

Is this the real answer to city-size limitations:

The lame pathfinding algorithms may explain one of the biggest mysteries surrounding this new SimCity iteration; why is the city size limited so drastically? Many early reviews cited claustrophobia as the number one complaint even before the server problems surfaced, including the exhaustive Ars Technica piece

. It now seems likely that the strict size limitation may have been necessary to avoid complete gridlock.

 

[Genx87]

Haha wow. This may explain why a building becomes abandoned or a business closes its doors. But after demolition it springs right back up and is filled. It may also explain why my fire station with a hazmat truck didnt dispatch that truck to the industrial building across the street that was burning.

This is the best they could come up with in 10 years? Seriously?

 

[JTsyo]

I'd be fine with sims finding a new job/house everyday, but because traffic is actually simulated this time, it breaks the game. Everything just gets congested and at peak hours around 6-8AM its just gridlock, I've had my coal powerplant fail 3 or 4 times because it wouldnt get its coal delivery. And that cascades into water treatment plants and factories failing because of power.

They need fix traffic asap, its just stupid the way it is right now

I'm surprised things like this doesn't get caught in beta. Did no one build over 100K pop? Did they realize it was a problem but had no solution for it?

 

[BigDH01]

I'm surprised things like this doesn't get caught in beta. Did no one build over 100K pop? Did they realize it was a problem but had no solution for it?

I think all signs point to the fact that they did try to solve it:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5133829#file-simcityui-js-L8510

This appears to be the leaked source code for calculating population sizes.

simcity.GetFudgedPopulation = function (a) {
a = "undefined" !== typeof a ? a : simcity.gGlobalUIHandler.mLastPopulation;
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 for anyone with a city size above 40845 really only has a city with about 1/8th of that population. We also had artificially small city sizes imposed. I used to think that the city sizes were small to force a DLC purchase, but I now think it's more likely that EA/Maxis were aware of the traffic issues and knew that larger city sizes would only make the issue worse. Same logic follows to lying to you about city size so the actual number of agents were far less than your reported population and why you only have one connection between regions. Just like Civ 5 is basically build around 1UPT, it looks like SimCity is a game built around Glassbox. The worst part about Glassbox, however, is that your sims aren't really sims. They get a new job everyday and live in a new home. Really, they are just wrappers around travel "agents" that really don't do travel well at all. So it's really Sim-dumb-as-a-rock-traffic-sewage-power-agent-City.

 

[Genx87]

I'm surprised things like this doesn't get caught in beta. Did no one build over 100K pop? Did they realize it was a problem but had no solution for it?

Beta consisted of 1 hour increments. How many people were able to grow a city to over 100K in that time frame? My guess is not many. And anybody who did probably didnt have the time to truely analyze it.

It is like EA didnt want us to know. Or they didnt want to know. Like a bad movie not getting a showing to critics before release.

 

[HarvardAce]

Couldn't they have solved this traffic problem with cloud computing or was it just lazy code?

I think it is a pretty safe guess that the capacity of their cloud servers per peak concurrent user is less than the power of the computer you are using to play the game.

 

[HarvardAce]

Beta consisted of 1 hour increments. How many people were able to grow a city to over 100K in that time frame? My guess is not many. And anybody who did probably didnt have the time to truely analyze it.

It is like EA didnt want us to know. Or they didnt want to know. Like a bad movie not getting a showing to critics before release.

Not only that, but the beta didn't allow you to plop high-density roads so you could never get maximum density buildings which is when the sewage hits the outflow pipe, so to speak.

 

[Subyman]

I think all signs point to the fact that they did try to solve it:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5133829#file-simcityui-js-L8510

This appears to be the leaked source code for calculating population sizes.

simcity.GetFudgedPopulation = function (a) {
a = "undefined" !== typeof a ? a : simcity.gGlobalUIHandler.mLastPopulation;
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 for anyone with a city size above 40845 really only has a city with about 1/8th of that population. We also had artificially small city sizes imposed. I used to think that the city sizes were small to force a DLC purchase, but I now think it's more likely that EA/Maxis were aware of the traffic issues and knew that larger city sizes would only make the issue worse. Same logic follows to lying to you about city size so the actual number of agents were far less than your reported population and why you only have one connection between regions. Just like Civ 5 is basically build around 1UPT, it looks like SimCity is a game built around Glassbox. The worst part about Glassbox, however, is that your sims aren't really sims. They get a new job everyday and live in a new home. Really, they are just wrappers around travel "agents" that really don't do travel well at all. So it's really Sim-dumb-as-a-rock-traffic-sewage-power-agent-City.

Wow, so the game shows an on-screen population much higher than what its simulating. I'm sure there are tons of cut corners, but this seems a bit drastic. I wonder if they simply clone eight sims for every "true" sim, then vary the location of where that sim is. They do this in most crowds like you would see in baseball/football games. That would kind of make sense why the pathfinding is screwed up and why you have all your police show up at one crime scene. Say you have 80 police in the city, well the game is only running the ai on 10 police. So for every 1 ai policeman, 8 show up.