Our current simulation is agents and roads. That is it.
I think of it as buildings and roads. The agents/sims are just one manifestation of the buildings interacting with each other (power/water/sewage/freight/etc). The roads are the means by why they do so.
buildings are holes in a table. Roads are what agents actually travel on. That is the simulation.
Can you explain how the simulation in SC4 worked then?
For starters not everything was tied to roads in SC4. Your power agents, water, trains, subways, etc were not tied to roads. In a way the new Simcity's simplification of this makes sense because when you think about a real city usually things like power, water, and sewage all follow roads for the most part. Also I'm not necessarily bashing our current simulation setup but it has some flaws. That agents don't run rules is simply not going to work. It is lazy and it does not reflect an accurate simulation of a city from our lives. For example emergency services do not stop and wait at red lights. You cannot bust a u-turn at any and every intersection you feel like. If our simulation is going to consist of agents, holes, and roads we're going to have to assign certain rules to certain agents.
That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
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For people bulldozing their city to start over, a bit of warning. Past experience has led me to believe that bulldozing service buildings (like police, fire stations, clinics) while their service agents are running around leads to very bad consequences.
I had a earlier city where I paused and bulldozed the entire city. Later, as I rebuilt the city I notice none of my service buildings were working. Further analysis shows that none of them had any service agents. So I had police, fire stations, clinics, and garbage dumps that did nothing. The garages of each of those buildings were empty, and buying more just gave me empty garages... up to a point. I had to build 12+ police cars until I finally saw a police agent in the parking lot. Reloading and rebuilding those services did not help, and that city had to buy many extra garages for every service to be working. This bug affected everything from school buses to trade depots.
The best way to avoid this is to shut down the service, wait until all the vehicles are parked, and all the workers have left, then bulldoze it. Speaking of which, I am currently bulldozing a city (very slowly) because I got tired of the infinitely increasing commuter bug I am experience (up to 60k shoppers commuting to visit my... 10 commercial buildings) and supposed 600k visitors. The end result is pretty humorous, I have all these shoppers wandering around trying to get homes that no longer exist. Swarms of these people all around the empty roads until eventually they all left the city, but they stuck around for a very long time. So now my city is pretty much empty, but the visitor/commuter bug is still there sigh
This explains why my Recycling Center doesn't work. I accidentally bulldozed it while still active. I've rebuilt it 3 times, and it still won't work. I wonder if I build 2 at once if once of them will take?
Is it a known problem for trade ports connected to water or railroad tracks not to properly sell the freight with a boat or railroad car?
I've had trade ports stop working at one point or another on almost every map I've made that had them. I can only assume it's due to the crappy global market not working properly. Or bugs with the regions. Either way, my strong suspicion is that something server-related is to blame.
Our current simulation is agents and roads. That is it.
I think of it as buildings and roads. The agents/sims are just one manifestation of the buildings interacting with each other (power/water/sewage/freight/etc). The roads are the means by why they do so.
buildings are holes in a table. Roads are what agents actually travel on. That is the simulation.
Can you explain how the simulation in SC4 worked then?
For starters not everything was tied to roads in SC4. Your power agents, water, trains, subways, etc were not tied to roads. In a way the new Simcity's simplification of this makes sense because when you think about a real city usually things like power, water, and sewage all follow roads for the most part. Also I'm not necessarily bashing our current simulation setup but it has some flaws. That agents don't run rules is simply not going to work. It is lazy and it does not reflect an accurate simulation of a city from our lives. For example emergency services do not stop and wait at red lights. You cannot bust a u-turn at any and every intersection you feel like. If our simulation is going to consist of agents, holes, and roads we're going to have to assign certain rules to certain agents.
That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
It took me 3-4 years of struggling with SC4 to discover the sliding bar to control an individual service's budget so I'm the wrong person to ask. Truthfully, the two really cannot be compared. SC4 did not even have "agents" to speak of. The entire simulation was spreadsheets. I think comparing their respective simulations together is misleading because of how different they are. For example traffic in SC4 as it appeared on the road was just a visualization of a number in a table. No two pieces of road are actually interacting like we see in Glassbox where the roads are an inherent key piece of the simulation.
edit: for what its worth at this point I could never, ever go back to simcity 4. Just being able to have my friends essentially playing next to me at the same time is so cool.
Our current simulation is agents and roads. That is it.
I think of it as buildings and roads. The agents/sims are just one manifestation of the buildings interacting with each other (power/water/sewage/freight/etc). The roads are the means by why they do so.
buildings are holes in a table. Roads are what agents actually travel on. That is the simulation.
Can you explain how the simulation in SC4 worked then?
For starters not everything was tied to roads in SC4. Your power agents, water, trains, subways, etc were not tied to roads. In a way the new Simcity's simplification of this makes sense because when you think about a real city usually things like power, water, and sewage all follow roads for the most part. Also I'm not necessarily bashing our current simulation setup but it has some flaws. That agents don't run rules is simply not going to work. It is lazy and it does not reflect an accurate simulation of a city from our lives. For example emergency services do not stop and wait at red lights. You cannot bust a u-turn at any and every intersection you feel like. If our simulation is going to consist of agents, holes, and roads we're going to have to assign certain rules to certain agents.
That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
It would be a huge wall of text to get into the specifics. But SC4 was more top down, the visuals you saw on the screen? Those were (for the most part) just a representation of what was being computed in the algorithms. You know how people call EVE "spreadsheets in space"? Well SC4 was "algorithms in a city". You would zone and set things up, then the simulation would process all the info available about your city and show you what it was computing was happening.
In SC4 cars on the roads weren't actually tied to any agent or person or car object. They were simply a representation of the computed traffic levels of that road.
SC5 is a bottom up approach, where the objects that the player sees and interacts with are real representations (or for the most part are) of the things being computed. When you see cars on the road, they aren't just a representation of what the simulation has determined the traffic level on that road is. Rather, the traffic levels you see are a RESULT of actual car objects / people objects running their little AI algos and running around the city.
This is an EXTREMELY simple explanation.
So question back at you guys. I've been at SXSW for work and haven't played the game yet... I know people in the gaming sphere can get really upset about things, and freak out about stuff... this one seems different yeah? Is this thing really that fucked up and broken? I was expecting to read an article a few days into SXSW about how "oh they got everything cleared up and people are enjoying it". Something akin to what you see in MMO launches etc. But... this seems... out of the ordinary for game launches. This seems legitimately bad... like I don't know how they are gonna fix this bad. AGAIN, I haven't played yet (in an airport now) and I know forums/news sites obviously blow things out of proportion sometimes, but this seems quite exceptional.
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A lot of people are disappointed that now that they've had a full week to play, they have pretty much found out how shallow the game is.
The game IS fun, but I'm going to be hard pressed to play much of it later on. I was very excited to play, and you all saw how I defended the game last week, but I'm really starting to see what I couldn't when I had just started playing.
SimCity is a pretty good game. It is not a good city simulator. I'm okay with that.
That's a really sad statement I'm glad people are liking it, but as a huge SimCity and other Sim game fan, its' a bummer to hear someone say "it's not a good city simulator"
king awesome on
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So question back at you guys. I've been at SXSW for work and haven't played the game yet... I know people in the gaming sphere can get really upset about things, and freak out about stuff... this one seems different yeah? Is this thing really that fucked up and broken? I was expecting to read an article a few days into SXSW about how "oh they got everything cleared up and people are enjoying it". Something akin to what you see in MMO launches etc. But... this seems... out of the ordinary for game launches. This seems legitimately bad... like I don't know how they are gonna fix this bad. AGAIN, I haven't played yet (in an airport now) and I know forums/news sites obviously blow things out of proportion sometimes, but this seems quite exceptional.
The server thing was pretty bad for a few days there and pretty frustrating, but really not a surprise for a massive online-only launch.
The simulation stuff, wherein we're discovering some flaws in the game itself, is frustrating but fixable (I think). I think the pathfinding behavior (for both the population and the services vehicles)is by far the biggest issue and would alleviate a lot of frustration if/when it improves. There are also bugs, but nothing utterly game-breaking that I'm aware of.
It's still a pretty fun game, and should get better assuming we don't burn down EA/Maxis in the near future.
Our current simulation is agents and roads. That is it.
I think of it as buildings and roads. The agents/sims are just one manifestation of the buildings interacting with each other (power/water/sewage/freight/etc). The roads are the means by why they do so.
buildings are holes in a table. Roads are what agents actually travel on. That is the simulation.
Can you explain how the simulation in SC4 worked then?
For starters not everything was tied to roads in SC4. Your power agents, water, trains, subways, etc were not tied to roads. In a way the new Simcity's simplification of this makes sense because when you think about a real city usually things like power, water, and sewage all follow roads for the most part. Also I'm not necessarily bashing our current simulation setup but it has some flaws. That agents don't run rules is simply not going to work. It is lazy and it does not reflect an accurate simulation of a city from our lives. For example emergency services do not stop and wait at red lights. You cannot bust a u-turn at any and every intersection you feel like. If our simulation is going to consist of agents, holes, and roads we're going to have to assign certain rules to certain agents.
That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
It would be a huge wall of text to get into the specifics. But SC4 was more top down, the visuals you saw on the screen? Those were (for the most part) just a representation of what was being computed in the algorithms. You know how people call EVE "spreadsheets in space"? Well SC4 was "algorithms in a city". You would zone and set things up, then the simulation would process all the info available about your city and show you what it was computing was happening.
In SC4 cars on the roads weren't actually tied to any agent or person or car object. They were simply a representation of the computed traffic levels of that road.
SC5 is a bottom up approach, where the objects that the player sees and interacts with are real representations (or for the most part are) of the things being computed. When you see cars on the road, they aren't just a representation of what the simulation has determined the traffic level on that road is. Rather, the traffic levels you see are a RESULT of actual car objects / people objects running their little AI algos and running around the city.
This is an EXTREMELY simple explanation.
So question back at you guys. I've been at SXSW for work and haven't played the game yet... I know people in the gaming sphere can get really upset about things, and freak out about stuff... this one seems different yeah? Is this thing really that fucked up and broken? I was expecting to read an article a few days into SXSW about how "oh they got everything cleared up and people are enjoying it". Something akin to what you see in MMO launches etc. But... this seems... out of the ordinary for game launches. This seems legitimately bad... like I don't know how they are gonna fix this bad. AGAIN, I haven't played yet (in an airport now) and I know forums/news sites obviously blow things out of proportion sometimes, but this seems quite exceptional.
Honestly it's really not that exceptional in term of launch problems. It is however more publicized (mostly I theorize because it is a game targeted at non gamers)
There are absolutely bugs, and there are server issues (much less so than before). However in general I think the main reason people are upset is because when it works, it is a lot of fun, and it's frustrating when it doesn't and you are no longer having fun.
I do agree with whoever said that they should have just named the game "SimCity Online" and a good chunk of the outrage would have never happened.
The problem is that you have a perfect storm:
You have a popular franchise (Everyone has heard of SimCity and has probably played some version in their past)
You have EA (Every one hates EA already)
You have online DRM (Everyone hates DRM, moreso online DRM)
You have a departure from the "tried and true" setup of the previous games in the series (Hardcore fans of old hate the game without ever trying it)
(Already you have a recipe for disaster, god forbid anything goes wrong at this point)
Then:
You have day one server issues (people HATE this with a passion)
You have bugs (Most of the time people don't mind bugs TOO much, but on top of everything else it becomes an unforgiveable sin)
Now if you have one or two of those things in your launch it's not so bad, people get over it so long as they game is fun. But once you add them altogether you create this situation where honestly it doesn't matter what happens because people will hate you. Every piece of information that is released becomes another strike against the game creators (even stuff known about well in advance, suddenly shows up again as "newly discovered" info).
On top of that you add in major social sites like Reddit, and Twitter, which add fuel to the fire and suddenly it becomes a "thing" which basically builds on itself far out of proportion to the actual issues at hand.
In fact my theory is that the only reason this is being reported as a launch worse than D3 is because in general people like Blizzard and hate EA, which compounds any actual issues that arise for this game vs D3.
Back in the real world the game itself is a lot of fun and most people who actually play it enjoy it quite a bit. The current discussion is about the "depth of the simulation" which is more about the backend stuff than anything, there are currently issues with traffic flow that are apparently being worked on successfully, and if they can get prioritization down for emergency vehicles and squash a few bugs in how the game handles bulldozing and population resolution most of the major issues will be gone.
For the most part though if you want to jump in and make a neat city, you can do that and it's a lot of fun. Doubly so when you are playing with friends.
Delphinidaes on
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Wait, wait, wait. Just reading over some posts I missed... Are these 130,000 mysterious visitors in my city actually the ghosts of the city that I levelled? God I hope that isn't the case.
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
Them working on the traffic optimization gives me a lot of hope too. I'm not asking that it be a perfect city simulator but sometimes adding a cross street or intersection should reduce traffic.
Allowing the units to optimize for time and not necessarily distance, and maybe having random targets (instead of always going to the nearest) should help out a lot.
Wait, wait, wait. Just reading over some posts I missed... Are these 130,000 mysterious visitors in my city actually the ghosts of the city that I levelled? God I hope that isn't the case.
Our current simulation is agents and roads. That is it.
I think of it as buildings and roads. The agents/sims are just one manifestation of the buildings interacting with each other (power/water/sewage/freight/etc). The roads are the means by why they do so.
buildings are holes in a table. Roads are what agents actually travel on. That is the simulation.
Can you explain how the simulation in SC4 worked then?
For starters not everything was tied to roads in SC4. Your power agents, water, trains, subways, etc were not tied to roads. In a way the new Simcity's simplification of this makes sense because when you think about a real city usually things like power, water, and sewage all follow roads for the most part. Also I'm not necessarily bashing our current simulation setup but it has some flaws. That agents don't run rules is simply not going to work. It is lazy and it does not reflect an accurate simulation of a city from our lives. For example emergency services do not stop and wait at red lights. You cannot bust a u-turn at any and every intersection you feel like. If our simulation is going to consist of agents, holes, and roads we're going to have to assign certain rules to certain agents.
That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
It would be a huge wall of text to get into the specifics. But SC4 was more top down, the visuals you saw on the screen? Those were (for the most part) just a representation of what was being computed in the algorithms. You know how people call EVE "spreadsheets in space"? Well SC4 was "algorithms in a city". You would zone and set things up, then the simulation would process all the info available about your city and show you what it was computing was happening.
In SC4 cars on the roads weren't actually tied to any agent or person or car object. They were simply a representation of the computed traffic levels of that road.
SC5 is a bottom up approach, where the objects that the player sees and interacts with are real representations (or for the most part are) of the things being computed. When you see cars on the road, they aren't just a representation of what the simulation has determined the traffic level on that road is. Rather, the traffic levels you see are a RESULT of actual car objects / people objects running their little AI algos and running around the city.
This is an EXTREMELY simple explanation.
So question back at you guys. I've been at SXSW for work and haven't played the game yet... I know people in the gaming sphere can get really upset about things, and freak out about stuff... this one seems different yeah? Is this thing really that fucked up and broken? I was expecting to read an article a few days into SXSW about how "oh they got everything cleared up and people are enjoying it". Something akin to what you see in MMO launches etc. But... this seems... out of the ordinary for game launches. This seems legitimately bad... like I don't know how they are gonna fix this bad. AGAIN, I haven't played yet (in an airport now) and I know forums/news sites obviously blow things out of proportion sometimes, but this seems quite exceptional.
Honestly it's really not that exceptional in term of launch problems. It is however more publicized (mostly I theorize because it is a game targeted at non gamers)
There are absolutely bugs, and there are server issues (much less so than before). However in general I think the main reason people are upset is because when it works, it is a lot of fun, and it's frustrating when it doesn't and you are no longer having fun.
I do agree with whoever said that they should have just named the game "SimCity Online" and a good chunk of the outrage would have never happened.
The problem is that you have a perfect storm:
You have a popular franchise (Everyone has heard of SimCity and has probably played some version in their past)
You have EA (Every one hates EA already)
You have online DRM (Everyone hates DRM, moreso online DRM)
You have a departure from the "tried and true" setup of the previous games in the series (Hardcore fans of old hate the game without ever trying it)
(Already you have a recipe for disaster, god forbid anything goes wrong at this point)
Then:
You have day one server issues (people HATE this with a passion)
You have bugs (Most of the time people don't mind bugs TOO much, but on top of everything else it becomes an unforgiveable sin)
Now if you have one or two of those things in your launch it's not so bad, people get over it so long as they game is fun. But once you add them altogether you create this situation where honestly it doesn't matter what happens because people will hate you. Every piece of information that is released becomes another strike against the game creators (even stuff known about well in advance, suddenly shows up again as "newly discovered" info).
On top of that you add in major social sites like Reddit, and Twitter, which add fuel to the fire and suddenly it becomes a "thing" which basically builds on itself far out of proportion to the actual issues at hand.
In fact my theory is that the only reason this is being reported as a launch worse than D3 is because in general people like Blizzard and hate EA, which compounds any actual issues that arise for this game vs D3.
Back in the real world the game itself is a lot of fun and most people who actually play it enjoy it quite a bit. The current discussion is about the "depth of the simulation" which is more about the backend stuff than anything, there are currently issues with traffic flow that are apparently being worked on successfully, and if they can get prioritization down for emergency vehicles and squash a few bugs in how the game handles bulldozing and population resolution most of the major issues will be gone.
For the most part though if you want to jump in and make a neat city, you can do that and it's a lot of fun. Doubly so when you are playing with friends.
Pretty much everything Delph says. I think it's fun, but it's also broken in a few ways. Once the game gets cheetah speed, leaderboards, the global market, and acceptable region play up and running (basically, everything that should have been working at launch), it will be pretty awesome. I think the latest patch improved region play a bit? Or did it just improve the response time of gifts.
SimCity is a pretty good game. It is not a good city simulator. I'm okay with that.
That's a really sad statement I'm glad people are liking it, but as a huge SimCity and other Sim game fan, its' a bummer to hear someone say "it's not a good city simulator"
Probably hugely depends on what you wanted from it. I don't like it, because it's not a good city simulator. It's an abstract puzzle that you have to solve with some rote answers, rather than a living feeling city that you're trying to support with urban planning.
Which trucks deliver the coal and metal to smelter plants, the trade port trucks or the smelter plant trucks?
I want to say the Trade port trucks, but i'm not 100% on that. I think the smelter ones deliver the finished product back to the Trade port.
Trade trucks (if the goods are in storage at the trade depot/port) and trucks that are garaged at coal/metal mines will deliver to smelter plants. Kind of like how coal mines will deliver Coal to Coal power plants.
Wait, wait, wait. Just reading over some posts I missed... Are these 130,000 mysterious visitors in my city actually the ghosts of the city that I levelled? God I hope that isn't the case.
Your city is HAUNTED!!!
Either that or you just gave your city a high background count. I'd be pissed if I were a magic user.
SimCity is a pretty good game. It is not a good city simulator. I'm okay with that.
That's a really sad statement I'm glad people are liking it, but as a huge SimCity and other Sim game fan, its' a bummer to hear someone say "it's not a good city simulator"
Probably hugely depends on what you wanted from it. I don't like it, because it's not a good city simulator. It's an abstract puzzle that you have to solve with some rote answers, rather than a living feeling city that you're trying to support with urban planning.
I admit I was hoping for SimCity 5, then I started playing and expected SimCity 4+. But it's SimCity. Some of the changes they've made, hell just the visuals, are certainly worth the price of admission, but as king awesome said, going from top-down to bottom-up changed the game. Trying to visualize as much as possible from point A to point B changed the game. Not being able to terraform your plot before starting changed the game. And having other people play at the same time as you are changed the game. It's just different, but still pretty darn good for what it is.
I think it's worth it just for the curvy roads though, but I got it for half-off because of the non in-game related screwups.
Delphinidaes I noticed that you haven't played SC4, which explains why you don't seem to notice what's lacking... That's not a dig or anything, but for me it's like they hit a triple instead of an in-the-park home run?
SimCity is a pretty good game. It is not a good city simulator. I'm okay with that.
That's a really sad statement I'm glad people are liking it, but as a huge SimCity and other Sim game fan, its' a bummer to hear someone say "it's not a good city simulator"
Probably hugely depends on what you wanted from it. I don't like it, because it's not a good city simulator. It's an abstract puzzle that you have to solve with some rote answers, rather than a living feeling city that you're trying to support with urban planning.
I admit I was hoping for SimCity 5, then I started playing and expected SimCity 4+. But it's SimCity. Some of the changes they've made, hell just the visuals, are certainly worth the price of admission, but as king awesome said, going from top-down to bottom-up changed the game. Trying to visualize as much as possible from point A to point B changed the game. It's just different, but still pretty darn good for what it is.
I think it's worth it just for the curvy roads though, but I got it for half-off because of the non in-game related screwups.
Delphinidaes I noticed that you haven't played SC4, which explains why you don't seem to notice what's lacking...
Most likely, which seems to have worked out for the better. Then again from what I've heard of SimCity 4 the core game was riddled with issues that the playerbase fixed into the game that people actually enjoy. So there's that.
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Finally did my first successful manufacturing city. The other ones either got killed by traffic or bugged out. I am just doing alloy making right now to make enough money to bulldoze everything and do electronics manufacturing.
Has anybody done a pure industrial city? Neighboring cities can fill up to 50 percent of jobs, which sounds like enough to keep the city going.
0
SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
I've played SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4, but have only played 4 for a few hours. I concede that maybe I didn't play 4 enough to really get it and appreciate the underlying simulation but I still prefer the new game's presentation to 4's. Despite the abstractions the new game uses it still feels more real than 4 did to me.
Our current simulation is agents and roads. That is it.
I think of it as buildings and roads. The agents/sims are just one manifestation of the buildings interacting with each other (power/water/sewage/freight/etc). The roads are the means by why they do so.
buildings are holes in a table. Roads are what agents actually travel on. That is the simulation.
Can you explain how the simulation in SC4 worked then?
For starters not everything was tied to roads in SC4. Your power agents, water, trains, subways, etc were not tied to roads. In a way the new Simcity's simplification of this makes sense because when you think about a real city usually things like power, water, and sewage all follow roads for the most part. Also I'm not necessarily bashing our current simulation setup but it has some flaws. That agents don't run rules is simply not going to work. It is lazy and it does not reflect an accurate simulation of a city from our lives. For example emergency services do not stop and wait at red lights. You cannot bust a u-turn at any and every intersection you feel like. If our simulation is going to consist of agents, holes, and roads we're going to have to assign certain rules to certain agents.
That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
It would be a huge wall of text to get into the specifics. But SC4 was more top down, the visuals you saw on the screen? Those were (for the most part) just a representation of what was being computed in the algorithms. You know how people call EVE "spreadsheets in space"? Well SC4 was "algorithms in a city". You would zone and set things up, then the simulation would process all the info available about your city and show you what it was computing was happening.
In SC4 cars on the roads weren't actually tied to any agent or person or car object. They were simply a representation of the computed traffic levels of that road.
SC5 is a bottom up approach, where the objects that the player sees and interacts with are real representations (or for the most part are) of the things being computed. When you see cars on the road, they aren't just a representation of what the simulation has determined the traffic level on that road is. Rather, the traffic levels you see are a RESULT of actual car objects / people objects running their little AI algos and running around the city.
This is an EXTREMELY simple explanation.
So question back at you guys. I've been at SXSW for work and haven't played the game yet... I know people in the gaming sphere can get really upset about things, and freak out about stuff... this one seems different yeah? Is this thing really that fucked up and broken? I was expecting to read an article a few days into SXSW about how "oh they got everything cleared up and people are enjoying it". Something akin to what you see in MMO launches etc. But... this seems... out of the ordinary for game launches. This seems legitimately bad... like I don't know how they are gonna fix this bad. AGAIN, I haven't played yet (in an airport now) and I know forums/news sites obviously blow things out of proportion sometimes, but this seems quite exceptional.
Finally did my first successful manufacturing city. The other ones either got killed by traffic or bugged out. I am just doing alloy making right now to make enough money to bulldoze everything and do electronics manufacturing.
Has anybody done a pure industrial city? Neighboring cities can fill up to 50 percent of jobs, which sounds like enough to keep the city going.
You can pretty much get rid of everything and only leave the manufacturing plants.
0
scherbchenAsgard (it is dead)Registered Userregular
Wait, wait, wait. Just reading over some posts I missed... Are these 130,000 mysterious visitors in my city actually the ghosts of the city that I levelled? God I hope that isn't the case.
Finally did my first successful manufacturing city. The other ones either got killed by traffic or bugged out. I am just doing alloy making right now to make enough money to bulldoze everything and do electronics manufacturing.
Has anybody done a pure industrial city? Neighboring cities can fill up to 50 percent of jobs, which sounds like enough to keep the city going.
This is my thought as well, my next big project is a major industrial town (actually just industrial though, I'm going to try and go without manufacturing)
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0 population for six months, still the graph shows I have 120k visitors a month, and 17,000 visiting right now. The map is literally empty, all roads and structures bulldozed, reset to it's original state. 4265 workers commuting into a fucking empty zone, and 12932 shoppers.
Despite having literally no structure or road in place, I am at a deficit of power (-28.5), sewage (-12.1) and water (-23).
Despite having 0 population, I have 59 criminals, 0/2918 trash collection, and 0/3660 recycling.
Going to leave my empty city and hope it fixes itself when I load it back up sometime later.
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That tells us what the Simcity 4 simulation doesn't do and how the Simcity 5 simulation doesn't quite emulate real life. For some of us who haven't played Simcity 4, I think we were looking for more of an explanation as to how the Simcity 4 simulation engine actually worked.
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This explains why my Recycling Center doesn't work. I accidentally bulldozed it while still active. I've rebuilt it 3 times, and it still won't work. I wonder if I build 2 at once if once of them will take?
Some lucky people have jobs where they can play AT WORK
they are coming to point at you and to laugh at your misery! sims are dicks....
I've had trade ports stop working at one point or another on almost every map I've made that had them. I can only assume it's due to the crappy global market not working properly. Or bugs with the regions. Either way, my strong suspicion is that something server-related is to blame.
It took me 3-4 years of struggling with SC4 to discover the sliding bar to control an individual service's budget so I'm the wrong person to ask. Truthfully, the two really cannot be compared. SC4 did not even have "agents" to speak of. The entire simulation was spreadsheets. I think comparing their respective simulations together is misleading because of how different they are. For example traffic in SC4 as it appeared on the road was just a visualization of a number in a table. No two pieces of road are actually interacting like we see in Glassbox where the roads are an inherent key piece of the simulation.
edit: for what its worth at this point I could never, ever go back to simcity 4. Just being able to have my friends essentially playing next to me at the same time is so cool.
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It would be a huge wall of text to get into the specifics. But SC4 was more top down, the visuals you saw on the screen? Those were (for the most part) just a representation of what was being computed in the algorithms. You know how people call EVE "spreadsheets in space"? Well SC4 was "algorithms in a city". You would zone and set things up, then the simulation would process all the info available about your city and show you what it was computing was happening.
In SC4 cars on the roads weren't actually tied to any agent or person or car object. They were simply a representation of the computed traffic levels of that road.
SC5 is a bottom up approach, where the objects that the player sees and interacts with are real representations (or for the most part are) of the things being computed. When you see cars on the road, they aren't just a representation of what the simulation has determined the traffic level on that road is. Rather, the traffic levels you see are a RESULT of actual car objects / people objects running their little AI algos and running around the city.
This is an EXTREMELY simple explanation.
So question back at you guys. I've been at SXSW for work and haven't played the game yet... I know people in the gaming sphere can get really upset about things, and freak out about stuff... this one seems different yeah? Is this thing really that fucked up and broken? I was expecting to read an article a few days into SXSW about how "oh they got everything cleared up and people are enjoying it". Something akin to what you see in MMO launches etc. But... this seems... out of the ordinary for game launches. This seems legitimately bad... like I don't know how they are gonna fix this bad. AGAIN, I haven't played yet (in an airport now) and I know forums/news sites obviously blow things out of proportion sometimes, but this seems quite exceptional.
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The game IS fun, but I'm going to be hard pressed to play much of it later on. I was very excited to play, and you all saw how I defended the game last week, but I'm really starting to see what I couldn't when I had just started playing.
That's a really sad statement
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The server thing was pretty bad for a few days there and pretty frustrating, but really not a surprise for a massive online-only launch.
The simulation stuff, wherein we're discovering some flaws in the game itself, is frustrating but fixable (I think). I think the pathfinding behavior (for both the population and the services vehicles)is by far the biggest issue and would alleviate a lot of frustration if/when it improves. There are also bugs, but nothing utterly game-breaking that I'm aware of.
It's still a pretty fun game, and should get better assuming we don't burn down EA/Maxis in the near future.
I'd love to have this problem.
I bulldozed and then rebuilt all my tourist attractions to make room for a stadium, then everyone stopped coming to the city.
Everything is back guys, I promise I won't destroy the buildings you're in anymore!
Honestly it's really not that exceptional in term of launch problems. It is however more publicized (mostly I theorize because it is a game targeted at non gamers)
There are absolutely bugs, and there are server issues (much less so than before). However in general I think the main reason people are upset is because when it works, it is a lot of fun, and it's frustrating when it doesn't and you are no longer having fun.
I do agree with whoever said that they should have just named the game "SimCity Online" and a good chunk of the outrage would have never happened.
The problem is that you have a perfect storm:
You have a popular franchise (Everyone has heard of SimCity and has probably played some version in their past)
You have EA (Every one hates EA already)
You have online DRM (Everyone hates DRM, moreso online DRM)
You have a departure from the "tried and true" setup of the previous games in the series (Hardcore fans of old hate the game without ever trying it)
(Already you have a recipe for disaster, god forbid anything goes wrong at this point)
Then:
You have day one server issues (people HATE this with a passion)
You have bugs (Most of the time people don't mind bugs TOO much, but on top of everything else it becomes an unforgiveable sin)
Now if you have one or two of those things in your launch it's not so bad, people get over it so long as they game is fun. But once you add them altogether you create this situation where honestly it doesn't matter what happens because people will hate you. Every piece of information that is released becomes another strike against the game creators (even stuff known about well in advance, suddenly shows up again as "newly discovered" info).
On top of that you add in major social sites like Reddit, and Twitter, which add fuel to the fire and suddenly it becomes a "thing" which basically builds on itself far out of proportion to the actual issues at hand.
In fact my theory is that the only reason this is being reported as a launch worse than D3 is because in general people like Blizzard and hate EA, which compounds any actual issues that arise for this game vs D3.
Back in the real world the game itself is a lot of fun and most people who actually play it enjoy it quite a bit. The current discussion is about the "depth of the simulation" which is more about the backend stuff than anything, there are currently issues with traffic flow that are apparently being worked on successfully, and if they can get prioritization down for emergency vehicles and squash a few bugs in how the game handles bulldozing and population resolution most of the major issues will be gone.
For the most part though if you want to jump in and make a neat city, you can do that and it's a lot of fun. Doubly so when you are playing with friends.
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Allowing the units to optimize for time and not necessarily distance, and maybe having random targets (instead of always going to the nearest) should help out a lot.
Your city is HAUNTED!!!
I want to say the Trade port trucks, but i'm not 100% on that. I think the smelter ones deliver the finished product back to the Trade port.
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Pretty much everything Delph says. I think it's fun, but it's also broken in a few ways. Once the game gets cheetah speed, leaderboards, the global market, and acceptable region play up and running (basically, everything that should have been working at launch), it will be pretty awesome. I think the latest patch improved region play a bit? Or did it just improve the response time of gifts.
Probably hugely depends on what you wanted from it. I don't like it, because it's not a good city simulator. It's an abstract puzzle that you have to solve with some rote answers, rather than a living feeling city that you're trying to support with urban planning.
Trade trucks (if the goods are in storage at the trade depot/port) and trucks that are garaged at coal/metal mines will deliver to smelter plants. Kind of like how coal mines will deliver Coal to Coal power plants.
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/modder-proves-simcity-can-run-offline-indefinitely-20130314/
Holy cow.
This does make Maxis look pretty bad. It sounds like debug mode is the way to play.
"login is closed at this time, please try again later"
This is the best login simulator yet.
Either that or you just gave your city a high background count. I'd be pissed if I were a magic user.
I admit I was hoping for SimCity 5, then I started playing and expected SimCity 4+. But it's SimCity. Some of the changes they've made, hell just the visuals, are certainly worth the price of admission, but as king awesome said, going from top-down to bottom-up changed the game. Trying to visualize as much as possible from point A to point B changed the game. Not being able to terraform your plot before starting changed the game. And having other people play at the same time as you are changed the game. It's just different, but still pretty darn good for what it is.
I think it's worth it just for the curvy roads though, but I got it for half-off because of the non in-game related screwups.
Delphinidaes I noticed that you haven't played SC4, which explains why you don't seem to notice what's lacking... That's not a dig or anything, but for me it's like they hit a triple instead of an in-the-park home run?
Most likely, which seems to have worked out for the better. Then again from what I've heard of SimCity 4 the core game was riddled with issues that the playerbase fixed into the game that people actually enjoy. So there's that.
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Has anybody done a pure industrial city? Neighboring cities can fill up to 50 percent of jobs, which sounds like enough to keep the city going.
Hey.... guy....
Nice avatar.
You can pretty much get rid of everything and only leave the manufacturing plants.
I see dead sims.... all the time!
This is my thought as well, my next big project is a major industrial town (actually just industrial though, I'm going to try and go without manufacturing)
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Despite having literally no structure or road in place, I am at a deficit of power (-28.5), sewage (-12.1) and water (-23).
Despite having 0 population, I have 59 criminals, 0/2918 trash collection, and 0/3660 recycling.
Going to leave my empty city and hope it fixes itself when I load it back up sometime later.