The servers only handle the region stuff and the saves when synced.
So if I turn off all the services in my city, but leave my power and water on to sell to people in my region, then log off, my city will be fine and I'd make a whole lot of money, right? And when you spectate someone else's city, is their city still paused, or are you essentially driving their simulation by spectating it?
Again, could you watch someone's city that had no trash pickup and no fire dept burn to the ground while you spectated? Or would it be fine when that person returned, because they had paused "their" simulation?
The servers only handle the region stuff and the saves when synced.
So if I turn off all the services in my city, but leave my power and water on to sell to people in my region, then log off, my city will be fine and I'd make a whole lot of money, right? And when you spectate someone else's city, is their city still paused, or are you essentially driving their simulation by spectating it?
Again, could you watch someone's city that had no trash pickup and no fire dept burn to the ground while you spectated? Or would it be fine when that person returned, because they had paused "their" simulation?
From my play experience, you seem to pick up exactly where you left off. So I think it pauses locally.
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.
Uh, I don't recall D3 leaving me with any "wtfbbq" bugs, like buildings just stop working, or infinite people flooding into a building, or invisible people who won't ever leave, etc,
There's also the part where it'd be fucking easy to do a lot better than they're currently doing. I mean, the traffic AI is literally just as dumb as rocks. It's the sort of childish model I'd expect from a first-year CS student. Actually, last term, we made our first-year CS students do an assignment with pathfinding and trucks that "claimed" locations to visit and still used shortest-path pathfinding. So to be clear, if you were to ask my first-year CS students on how to implement SimCity, they'd come up with a superior model.
Seriously. I could not in good conscience give a CS degree to someone who thought that was an appropriate traffic simulation model.
Actually, the pathfinding in SimCity is a bit smarter than that from what I've read, but it has some oddities which actually inhibit it from the standpoint of simulating a city.
It's not just "find the closest x", like commonly assumed. Instead it starts with the sinks and weights them by their current size, so say a huge factory will have a stronger pull on wokers than a tiny shop. And then it goes through and generates a graph with edges that are weighted by distance and can have additional weighting for congestion, and starts setting each node with a direction to the sink with the best weight. Then it will periodically update the graph to point in the best direction as the sinks are filled and reduced in strength, and whether there are changes in the edge weighting or not.
The biggest problem with this sort of thing is when you have a lot of slow moving agents dumped all at once in the same place, without spreading them out or giving them different options that are close together. So they are like flies all heading towards the brightest light (which is not necessarily the closest), and the light only dims when the first of the slow moving flies gets there, by then it can be too late for the slow flies behind them to properly adjust and head for a better brighter light in time.
So I'm guessing the earlier video about the sims adjusting to congestion to take a less longer and less congested path is actually the same or similar pathfinding as the game had out of the box. It's just that it updated the edges of the dirt road portion of the graph to be undesirable only after traffic was piled up there, and in a lot of cases in a bigger city in the game by then you'll already have gridlock and it will be too late. The game actually gives you a visual representation of its congestion weighting if you select the roads button, with green for a smaller amount of traffic, through red when it is completely locked up. They should probably add some foresight that the higher density roads get a bit better weighting before any traffic shows up, but that seems like the sort of thing that would be really easy to change (though not necessarily easy to balance).
The thing that still bugs me about this setup is that I'm not seeing how you could easily add a reservation system to this sort of pathfinding algorithm without a large overhaul. The agents don't even really know where they are going until they actually get there, they just go down the road and get messages saying "best path this way, turn right", or "best path that way, go left", or "whoopsie, you went a bad direction, uturn". However, it does seem like knowing this allows you to create a strategy and layout that solves the puzzle, so to speak.
Edit: one easy improvement I can think of is to make the decisionmaking for which direction to go at a node more probabilistic and random. So say there are weights at an intersection of x to go in one direction, and y in another, each agent will have an f(x/(x+y)) probability of heading in the x direction, and 1-f(x/(x+y)) to go in the other. There are a variety of standard types functions they could play around with to see which works best, not just making it directly proportional to weight (which would be most straightforward).
Edit 2: actually that random idea might not work to well if it causes agents to be too indecisive and waffle between which direction to take, and it may force them to make a bunch of even stupider looking uturns. The probability function would have to make it so there is only a small chance of going in the lower weighted direction, and barely random at all. It might just be a better idea for them to spread out the ending and starting of shifts more so less agents are dumped all at the same time heading in the same direction.
Savant on
0
SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
I don't disbelieve that you know what you're talking about, I'm just saying, is Maxis being idiots really the best reason for why they didn't implement this? I really don't like shit-talking game devs so I give them the benefit of the doubt. This works in my favor too because if I think there might be mitigating circumstances it makes me less annoyed, and I like not being annoyed.
Edit: It's like when somebody cuts you off in traffic, what if they really had to poop?
Hell, I dunno why they didn't do it. I'm just saying, this is an unnecessarily inferior product. Tropico 4 can officially handle 2000 agents with homes, jobs, and dynamic real-time shortest-path pathfinding. OpenTTD can handle ... at least 15000 vehicles with user-specified destinations using dynamic, real-time shortest-path pathfinding using, I think, a modified version of A* search, and also has to deal with train signals. Note that OpenTTD caps at 15000 because they're of the belief that nobody would ever use more than 15000 vehicles, not because that's a system-imposed maximum, and this is an open-source project (i.e. FREE).
It's just mind-boggling as a computer scientist. I mean, this is the sort of thing we daydream about as students, how would we build SimCity if we grew up to be game developers... and what was delivered, at least in terms of traffic design, is way way dumber than what we conceived of even as undergrads.
Giving me a run-down on the algorithms is one thing, and it's convincing, but holding up your computer scientist ID card is less convincing. I'm a CS major (first year), but I don't share your perspective on this. The daydreaming part is especially confusing. I'm used to CS people being more entrepreneurial!
edit: I should edit in a :P because as I re-read this it seems more confrontational than I am meaning. I understand where you're coming from hippofant, I just think we have two different perspectives on this
We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.
We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values it to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.
We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.
...
SO what about 100 percent capacity?
Couscous on
0
mojojoeoA block off the park, living the dream.Registered Userregular
So modded to play offline with no issues... Modded to where the whole region is playable space...
This officially is a debacle?
I vote yes.
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.
We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values it to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.
We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.
...
That is less streamlining and more bug fixing but whatever.
Eh I actually thought the blocking of the services with traffic was fine. It made sense to me that if you placed them on a street that constantly had traffic issues that they would by extension have issues getting on the road. It's why we have stuff like "Keep clear" sections of road and such which causes traffic to back up even further. But since they didn't have those the service vehicles would get stuck.
It certainly seemed more intentional than bugged to me and I always designed my service placement based on that and never put them on an avenue or other high traffic area.
That is certainly a matter of opinion though, I can easily see why it would be seen as a bug, I just didn't view it that way.
Now prioritizing emergency vehicles so they don't all rush to one alarm seems more like a bug to me.
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
+1
SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
It certainly could have gone better.
0
CarbonFireSee youin the countryRegistered Userregular
So modded to play offline with no issues... Modded to where the whole region is playable space...
This officially is a debacle?
I vote yes.
AFAIK, you can only place roads/freeways/rail outside of the region with that mod. And I fully expect EA/Maxis to put the Kibosh on such mods once the server stability isn't their most pressing issue.
So modded to play offline with no issues... Modded to where the whole region is playable space...
This officially is a debacle?
I vote yes.
AFAIK, you can only place roads/freeways/rail outside of the region with that mod. And I fully expect EA/Maxis to put the Kibosh on such mods once the server stability isn't their most pressing issue.
Still a debacle though, for sure.
Still.... Roads are placeable out there...
Ea says modding equals ban.
Silliness.
Chief Wiggum: "Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine."
We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.
We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values it to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.
We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.
...
SO what about 100 percent capacity?
Yes, they clearly didn't think about it. This is exactly what that means.
We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.
We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values it to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.
We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.
...
SO what about 100 percent capacity?
Heh, you just posted this right after I mentioned the congestion weighting, but 100% congestion would be in the same bucket as 75% congestion. It seems like there are four levels of traffic that adjust the edge weighting for roads: effectively empty (0-25%, display of nothing on the road view), light traffic (25%-50%, green on the road view), heavy traffic (50%-75%, yellow on road view), and gridlock (75%-100%, red on the road view). Presumably they can tweak the weighting for the desirability of each congestion level of the road in pathfinding individually, but it still only happens after the fact when you've been hit with traffic jams. They should probably add some slightly preferable weights to avenues versus low density streets off the bat.
Savant on
0
CarbonFireSee youin the countryRegistered Userregular
So modded to play offline with no issues... Modded to where the whole region is playable space...
This officially is a debacle?
I vote yes.
AFAIK, you can only place roads/freeways/rail outside of the region with that mod. And I fully expect EA/Maxis to put the Kibosh on such mods once the server stability isn't their most pressing issue.
Still a debacle though, for sure.
Still.... Roads are placeable out there...
Ea says modding equals ban.
Silliness.
Speaking of which, did you see his other video, showing him editing other people's public maps in debug mode? He says he's not syncing the changes, but that it might be theoretically possible to spoof the server into letting you sync the changes.
Heh, the fact that they let the debug mode code into the release build is hilarious.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
That only appears to work for a while for me, and I need a shitload of water for industry. I guess I will try bulldozing part of town down to make sure that the pumps are exactly a square away from the sewage treatment plant. I really shouldn't have to rely on creating a perpetual motion machine for water needs.
So how does the water, sewage, and power pathing work? The sewage seems to all go towards one outflow or processing plant until that one is full. The water and power, however, I have no fucking clue.
Buying services from neighbors doesn't work because the game doesn't give you an excess amount of the utility. Because of this, it can take a long time for each node to get to the right place.
Someone made an imgur album taken from slides of a glassbox presentation slideshow that explains how the pathfinding works.
The pathfinding for all the agents seems to be the same thing as for the people agents, its just that most of them don't have any collision or traffic competition. So all of them head in the direction that is currently weighted best at that moment for finding the closest, strongest sink, with the weighting and the updates being what determines the tradeoff between closeness and strength of the sink.
One thing I just realized about the "dogpile all in one direction" phenomena it might not matter so much how many sinks are down one of the paths, only how strong and close the best weighted sink is. So the workers might be much less attracted to head towards a neighborhood of trailer parks than a tenement of the same population. Should probably test to see if that is what is actually happening.
Really, the problem from what I can tell isn't that the pathfinding algorithm is too straightforward. On the contrary, D* lite a rather complicated algorithm that is more often used for robotic pathfinding. It's just the way it is set up right now causes problems in the game, and some of the implications are not entirely obvious. Maybe it just needs a few tweaks, or maybe some of the other particular parts of the system (like emergency vehicles) should use a more straightforward algorithm tailored to their particular desired behavior.
Savant on
0
ShogunHair long; money long; me and broke wizards we don't get alongRegistered Userregular
Has anyone tried taking their university's pedestrian path thing and gridding it across the city? Really curious if you could encourage a ton of pedestrian traffic with that.
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.
Until they patch it im afraid your city will permanately count those visitors. The same thing is occuring in my city, completely bulldozed yet every month it thinks i have 600k visitors and 60k commuting shoppers.
I also noticed an invisible object telling me it needs a road connection when I have the road menu up and I could not figure out what it was until I randomly saw some bush thing in the middle of the sky
I have the invisible object problem too. Can't quite figure out how to get rid of it. Hopefully when I grow my city out that far again it'll fix itself...
I’ve been playing with new congestion avoidance tuning in @simcity today, what do you guys think? …
(video)
That looks quite promising. I was playing around in sandbox today and the traffic situation he's showing there is the big one... the game reacts well enough when you have a traffic flow with a left or right choice that goes to the same place, but if one of the choices is straight and the other is a turn they'll currently never take it, unlike what's shown in that video.
And that debug mode video, very interesting. Didn't look like he was able to place zones or other actual functional buildings outside the city area (I expect the city bounds are currently hard-coded, or at least tied to the "city plot" that would be placed when they built the regions), but that highway placement is pretty fleshed out for debug tools. I imagine that the developers wanted to have region editing at some phase of the design. I also expect that the next patch will be removing the debug code, since it bypasses the online requirement.
This is the first time I've felt compelled to 'boycott' a game on principle, and yet despite the shitshow I still find myself tempted.
But if I buy it at this point, am I any better than a Sim joining an absurdist traffic jam?
people who take the train walk pretty far. Maybe you can get by without buses for a non residential city
"Wait" he says... do I look like a waiter?
0
SpectrumArcher of InfernoChaldea Rec RoomRegistered Userregular
Trying to buy power/water/sewage from another city will never give me enough. I swear there is a bottleneck on how much they can send you no matter how much is available and it seems to be at the same amount.
Although, truthfully, buying sewage isn't wise, because it doesn't account well for the periodic jumps in sewage you get.
Ocean Quigley Ocean Quigley ?@oceanquigley @hubelebad R needs C for shopping. I needs C as an output. The game stalled too much when we made C need I, too.
The solution shouldn't be to make C pretty pointless at high play levels.
Ocean Quigley Ocean Quigley ?@oceanquigley @hubelebad R needs C for shopping. I needs C as an output. The game stalled too much when we made C need I, too.
The solution shouldn't be to make C pretty pointless at high play levels.
It's not if you build industry, or if you focus on residential and aren't abusing parks.
I mean to put it in perspective I can build an entire city without a single industrial building. It just depends on what you want to do.
Delphinidaes on
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Ocean Quigley Ocean Quigley ?@oceanquigley @hubelebad R needs C for shopping. I needs C as an output. The game stalled too much when we made C need I, too.
The solution shouldn't be to make C pretty pointless at high play levels.
It's not if you build industry, or if you focus on residential and aren't abusing parks.
I mean to put it in perspective I can build an entire city without a single industrial building. It just depends on what you want to do.
Doh. I meant I as in industry. Sorry. I guess you can count all the specializations as industries, but for the most part any industry building as in one the game builds in the yellow zone becomes vestigial and more a sign of not being able to put something more useful there.
This is the first time I've felt compelled to 'boycott' a game on principle, and yet despite the shitshow I still find myself tempted.
But if I buy it at this point, am I any better than a Sim joining an absurdist traffic jam?
Well it wouldn't really be you buying the game. Your house would send you to the commercial district with some money, where you would enter a store, and come back out with less money but more happiness. You'd then return to the nearest house with your happiness, which you would give to it and possibly make it more dense.
Ocean Quigley Ocean Quigley ?@oceanquigley @hubelebad R needs C for shopping. I needs C as an output. The game stalled too much when we made C need I, too.
The solution shouldn't be to make C pretty pointless at high play levels.
It's not if you build industry, or if you focus on residential and aren't abusing parks.
I mean to put it in perspective I can build an entire city without a single industrial building. It just depends on what you want to do.
Doh. I meant I as in industry. Sorry. I guess you can count all the specializations as industries, but for the most part any industry building as in one the game builds in the yellow zone becomes vestigial and more a sign of not being able to put something more useful there.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I don't think that's a bad thing, it just depends on what sort of city you want to run. It doesn't make much sense to have industry if you want to specialize in tourism or gambling for example. Just about the only "required" thing is residential. You can get by without commercial with libraries and parks, you can get by without industry so long as your workers are employed in commercial and special buildings.
But you have to have people, so residential is a must
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Ocean Quigley Ocean Quigley ?@oceanquigley @hubelebad R needs C for shopping. I needs C as an output. The game stalled too much when we made C need I, too.
The solution shouldn't be to make C pretty pointless at high play levels.
It's not if you build industry, or if you focus on residential and aren't abusing parks.
I mean to put it in perspective I can build an entire city without a single industrial building. It just depends on what you want to do.
Doh. I meant I as in industry. Sorry. I guess you can count all the specializations as industries, but for the most part any industry building as in one the game builds in the yellow zone becomes vestigial and more a sign of not being able to put something more useful there.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I don't think that's a bad thing, it just depends on what sort of city you want to run. It doesn't make much sense to have industry if you want to specialize in tourism or gambling for example. Just about the only "required" thing is residential. You can get by without commercial with libraries and parks, you can get by without industry so long as your workers are employed in commercial and special buildings.
But you have to have people, so residential is a must
Industry is valuable in a tourism city if you have jobs to spare because it generates Texas$ compared to your usual zoning. It's stable income to tide you over between retarded tourism fluctuations.
Ocean Quigley Ocean Quigley ?@oceanquigley @hubelebad R needs C for shopping. I needs C as an output. The game stalled too much when we made C need I, too.
The solution shouldn't be to make C pretty pointless at high play levels.
It's not if you build industry, or if you focus on residential and aren't abusing parks.
I mean to put it in perspective I can build an entire city without a single industrial building. It just depends on what you want to do.
Doh. I meant I as in industry. Sorry. I guess you can count all the specializations as industries, but for the most part any industry building as in one the game builds in the yellow zone becomes vestigial and more a sign of not being able to put something more useful there.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I don't think that's a bad thing, it just depends on what sort of city you want to run. It doesn't make much sense to have industry if you want to specialize in tourism or gambling for example. Just about the only "required" thing is residential. You can get by without commercial with libraries and parks, you can get by without industry so long as your workers are employed in commercial and special buildings.
But you have to have people, so residential is a must
Industry is valuable in a tourism city if you have jobs to spare because it generates Texas$ compared to your usual zoning. It's stable income to tide you over between retarded tourism fluctuations.
True, but you can get by without it if you want.
NNID: delphinidaes Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Posts
So if I turn off all the services in my city, but leave my power and water on to sell to people in my region, then log off, my city will be fine and I'd make a whole lot of money, right? And when you spectate someone else's city, is their city still paused, or are you essentially driving their simulation by spectating it?
Again, could you watch someone's city that had no trash pickup and no fire dept burn to the ground while you spectated? Or would it be fine when that person returned, because they had paused "their" simulation?
From my play experience, you seem to pick up exactly where you left off. So I think it pauses locally.
Actually, the pathfinding in SimCity is a bit smarter than that from what I've read, but it has some oddities which actually inhibit it from the standpoint of simulating a city.
It's not just "find the closest x", like commonly assumed. Instead it starts with the sinks and weights them by their current size, so say a huge factory will have a stronger pull on wokers than a tiny shop. And then it goes through and generates a graph with edges that are weighted by distance and can have additional weighting for congestion, and starts setting each node with a direction to the sink with the best weight. Then it will periodically update the graph to point in the best direction as the sinks are filled and reduced in strength, and whether there are changes in the edge weighting or not.
The biggest problem with this sort of thing is when you have a lot of slow moving agents dumped all at once in the same place, without spreading them out or giving them different options that are close together. So they are like flies all heading towards the brightest light (which is not necessarily the closest), and the light only dims when the first of the slow moving flies gets there, by then it can be too late for the slow flies behind them to properly adjust and head for a better brighter light in time.
So I'm guessing the earlier video about the sims adjusting to congestion to take a less longer and less congested path is actually the same or similar pathfinding as the game had out of the box. It's just that it updated the edges of the dirt road portion of the graph to be undesirable only after traffic was piled up there, and in a lot of cases in a bigger city in the game by then you'll already have gridlock and it will be too late. The game actually gives you a visual representation of its congestion weighting if you select the roads button, with green for a smaller amount of traffic, through red when it is completely locked up. They should probably add some foresight that the higher density roads get a bit better weighting before any traffic shows up, but that seems like the sort of thing that would be really easy to change (though not necessarily easy to balance).
The thing that still bugs me about this setup is that I'm not seeing how you could easily add a reservation system to this sort of pathfinding algorithm without a large overhaul. The agents don't even really know where they are going until they actually get there, they just go down the road and get messages saying "best path this way, turn right", or "best path that way, go left", or "whoopsie, you went a bad direction, uturn". However, it does seem like knowing this allows you to create a strategy and layout that solves the puzzle, so to speak.
Edit: one easy improvement I can think of is to make the decisionmaking for which direction to go at a node more probabilistic and random. So say there are weights at an intersection of x to go in one direction, and y in another, each agent will have an f(x/(x+y)) probability of heading in the x direction, and 1-f(x/(x+y)) to go in the other. There are a variety of standard types functions they could play around with to see which works best, not just making it directly proportional to weight (which would be most straightforward).
Edit 2: actually that random idea might not work to well if it causes agents to be too indecisive and waffle between which direction to take, and it may force them to make a bunch of even stupider looking uturns. The probability function would have to make it so there is only a small chance of going in the lower weighted direction, and barely random at all. It might just be a better idea for them to spread out the ending and starting of shifts more so less agents are dumped all at the same time heading in the same direction.
Giving me a run-down on the algorithms is one thing, and it's convincing, but holding up your computer scientist ID card is less convincing. I'm a CS major (first year), but I don't share your perspective on this. The daydreaming part is especially confusing. I'm used to CS people being more entrepreneurial!
edit: I should edit in a :P because as I re-read this it seems more confrontational than I am meaning. I understand where you're coming from hippofant, I just think we have two different perspectives on this
This officially is a debacle?
I vote yes.
Eh I actually thought the blocking of the services with traffic was fine. It made sense to me that if you placed them on a street that constantly had traffic issues that they would by extension have issues getting on the road. It's why we have stuff like "Keep clear" sections of road and such which causes traffic to back up even further. But since they didn't have those the service vehicles would get stuck.
It certainly seemed more intentional than bugged to me and I always designed my service placement based on that and never put them on an avenue or other high traffic area.
That is certainly a matter of opinion though, I can easily see why it would be seen as a bug, I just didn't view it that way.
Now prioritizing emergency vehicles so they don't all rush to one alarm seems more like a bug to me.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
AFAIK, you can only place roads/freeways/rail outside of the region with that mod. And I fully expect EA/Maxis to put the Kibosh on such mods once the server stability isn't their most pressing issue.
Still a debacle though, for sure.
Still.... Roads are placeable out there...
Ea says modding equals ban.
Silliness.
Yes, they clearly didn't think about it. This is exactly what that means.
Heh, you just posted this right after I mentioned the congestion weighting, but 100% congestion would be in the same bucket as 75% congestion. It seems like there are four levels of traffic that adjust the edge weighting for roads: effectively empty (0-25%, display of nothing on the road view), light traffic (25%-50%, green on the road view), heavy traffic (50%-75%, yellow on road view), and gridlock (75%-100%, red on the road view). Presumably they can tweak the weighting for the desirability of each congestion level of the road in pathfinding individually, but it still only happens after the fact when you've been hit with traffic jams. They should probably add some slightly preferable weights to avenues versus low density streets off the bat.
Speaking of which, did you see his other video, showing him editing other people's public maps in debug mode? He says he's not syncing the changes, but that it might be theoretically possible to spoof the server into letting you sync the changes.
If someone more nefarious does figure this out....it will be a bloodbath.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Never used a cheat code for any game from 1980 to 2008, have you?
(It happens all the time. Check out some of the speed runs of Legend of Zelda, there's a debug mode in that.)
Dead. Island.
FFXIV - Milliardo Beoulve/Sargatanas
Why even bother?
Right now the only problem my city has is the stupid water system. I can put the pumps right next to water and it still dries up.
Build your pumps next to your water treatment plant, problem fixed
Someone made an imgur album taken from slides of a glassbox presentation slideshow that explains how the pathfinding works.
The pathfinding for all the agents seems to be the same thing as for the people agents, its just that most of them don't have any collision or traffic competition. So all of them head in the direction that is currently weighted best at that moment for finding the closest, strongest sink, with the weighting and the updates being what determines the tradeoff between closeness and strength of the sink.
One thing I just realized about the "dogpile all in one direction" phenomena it might not matter so much how many sinks are down one of the paths, only how strong and close the best weighted sink is. So the workers might be much less attracted to head towards a neighborhood of trailer parks than a tenement of the same population. Should probably test to see if that is what is actually happening.
Really, the problem from what I can tell isn't that the pathfinding algorithm is too straightforward. On the contrary, D* lite a rather complicated algorithm that is more often used for robotic pathfinding. It's just the way it is set up right now causes problems in the game, and some of the implications are not entirely obvious. Maybe it just needs a few tweaks, or maybe some of the other particular parts of the system (like emergency vehicles) should use a more straightforward algorithm tailored to their particular desired behavior.
Shogun Streams Vidya
I have the invisible object problem too. Can't quite figure out how to get rid of it. Hopefully when I grow my city out that far again it'll fix itself...
That looks quite promising. I was playing around in sandbox today and the traffic situation he's showing there is the big one... the game reacts well enough when you have a traffic flow with a left or right choice that goes to the same place, but if one of the choices is straight and the other is a turn they'll currently never take it, unlike what's shown in that video.
And that debug mode video, very interesting. Didn't look like he was able to place zones or other actual functional buildings outside the city area (I expect the city bounds are currently hard-coded, or at least tied to the "city plot" that would be placed when they built the regions), but that highway placement is pretty fleshed out for debug tools. I imagine that the developers wanted to have region editing at some phase of the design. I also expect that the next patch will be removing the debug code, since it bypasses the online requirement.
But if I buy it at this point, am I any better than a Sim joining an absurdist traffic jam?
Although, truthfully, buying sewage isn't wise, because it doesn't account well for the periodic jumps in sewage you get.
It's not if you build industry, or if you focus on residential and aren't abusing parks.
I mean to put it in perspective I can build an entire city without a single industrial building. It just depends on what you want to do.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
Well it wouldn't really be you buying the game. Your house would send you to the commercial district with some money, where you would enter a store, and come back out with less money but more happiness. You'd then return to the nearest house with your happiness, which you would give to it and possibly make it more dense.
Oh yeah absolutely, but I don't think that's a bad thing, it just depends on what sort of city you want to run. It doesn't make much sense to have industry if you want to specialize in tourism or gambling for example. Just about the only "required" thing is residential. You can get by without commercial with libraries and parks, you can get by without industry so long as your workers are employed in commercial and special buildings.
But you have to have people, so residential is a must
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
You mean how they need to be happy to grow?
It gives incentive to keep your sims happy for one, and it makes it so it's not just a road density + time = growth thing.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!
True, but you can get by without it if you want.
Official PA Forums FFXIV:ARR Free Company <GHOST> gitl.enjin.com Join us on Sargatanas!