Videos show path finding inherently "broken"

[GNadezda 1]

Aren't problems like these what the $19.99 "Streets and Rails" addon that you just know will be coming will allegedly remedy?

That's how EA will pay for the servers they are forcing everyone to use.

[CaptRobau 2]

Wow, wouldn't have expected such pathfinding, especially after so many years and all the agent stuff. It shouldn't be impossible to fix in terms of complexity (modders did it for SC4), but it might be difficult to not have it memory intensive.

[Rian Gray 12]

These kind of problems make me VERY nostalgic. I loved Simcity 4 for variety of reasons: beauty of simulation, reality in financials(no mercy!), and marvelously done programming. I know it sounds nerdy, but modern computers still cannot process the total sets of numbers for one single city. I know a lot of people believe computers are way past the point where real math (what we call optimization in general) can make differences, but it still does. To give you bigger picture here, not a lot of researchers have "proper" access to mainframe computers, ones we call super computers; and, not a lot of researchers know how to program their codes, slowing down the process all over again. Whichever way you want to see it, that might have been too technical. 

 

From what I understand, Simcity 4 was the simulation based on statistics unlike from the new Simcity. Some people might call it a slack-off, but in reality, reports mayors get to read is not real-time simulation of his/her city. It is a statistics. IMO, it was a witty plan. Along with the fact that not many computers can actually handle real-time simulation of every single vehicles in 2x2km city. (medium size?) No wonder why EA is having trouble with servers.

 

Simply put, the current system is simply witless. Why would you ever want to keep track of every single vehicles in the city, unless actual story(an event or a quest, perhaps) is involved? I've never put any serious attention to everyday worker/shopper/student sims in my city.

[Big Goldenski 3]

Buses are even worse. Just follow them for a few minutes. At times I got 10 buses attempting to pick up people from one stop. They go in circles and neglect other bus stops. It gets to the point where hundreds of people wait for buses in other parts of the city. And many times buses get stuck at bus stops for no reason. I kept adding more buses to reduce waiting times, but the buses kept traveling in packs taking crazy routs. Unplayable. Transportation networks are key for me. I can wait for bigger city sizes, but if simple buses act crazy then it ruins my experience.

[croxis 150]

My impression is that all agents are using the same pathfinding code. Remember that an agent is anything from a person walking, to a car, truck, power, water, and sewage.If this is the case then the best bet would be split vehicular pathfinding as a separate function with a slightly more advanced algorithm.

 

 

Here is the link to EA's GDC presentation on glassbox on agent and pathfinding

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I agree they should put weights on which roads commuters/vehicles travel on. It should not be too hard and should be possible to fix in a patch. --Ocram

[City Planner 121]

I've got the same thing, I've got a corner of high density road that looks like a L and then I cut across it diagonally.  The result is that the sims always take that diagonal cut off no matter that the other part of the L is absolutely vacant of cars.  it's obvious to me that they don't have the AI to try to figure out which is the fastest route, only the AI to find the shortest distance route.  At least thats the way it's been playing out in my game.

 

Oh if not yet mentioned, different results on this video:

[MiamiHurricane 2]

Business idea...what if they just take these issues and give a DLC on upgrades...like the dump gets a radio tower for its trucks to coordinate better. Cars just get a GPS update so they always know the true better route. Just tweak the system then cover the mistakes with my idea...bam!

[Board_Marshal 104]

My impression is that all agents are using the same pathfinding code. Remember that an agent is anything from a person walking, to a car, truck, power, water, and sewage.If this is the case then the best bet would be split vehicular pathfinding as a separate function with a slightly more advanced algorithm.

 

 

Here is the link to EA's GDC presentation on glassbox on agent and pathfinding

 

If your impression is correct then I'm totally blown away.  How could vehicles not have a separate pathfinding algorithm?  Call me naive but I have to believe this all worked at some point.  Perhaps it is WAD but the players are simply don't understand it yet.  If that's the case then how does this square those who claim this to be a "simplified" SimCity if something as quintessential as street design/layout and traffic management is so unintuitive and obscure?

[john2218 8]

Its actually MUCH worse than them just taking the shortest route, they also have no memory of where the live or where they work so they all are trying to take the most direct route to the closest available house (or job ect)  Once that fills they all take the most direct route to the next available un occupied house.  I confirmed this by building 2 residential areas, one a bit close to my industry and one a bit further.  Every day all the cars would go to the first and when it all filled the would U turn and go toward the second.  This is why all the busses follow each other, they are all trying to get to the same place.

[Charizard 284]

Its actually MUCH worse than them just taking the shortest route, they also have no memory of where the live or where they work so they all are trying to take the most direct route to the closest available house (or job ect)  Once that fills they all take the most direct route to the next available un occupied house.  I confirmed this by building 2 residential areas, one a bit close to my industry and one a bit further.  Every day all the cars would go to the first and when it all filled the would U turn and go toward the second.  This is why all the busses follow each other, they are all trying to get to the same place.

 

So the Sims live and work at different places each day? That's extremely realistic.....

[Sunfighter 186]

Its actually MUCH worse than them just taking the shortest route, they also have no memory of where the live or where they work so they all are trying to take the most direct route to the closest available house (or job ect)  Once that fills they all take the most direct route to the next available un occupied house.  I confirmed this by building 2 residential areas, one a bit close to my industry and one a bit further.  Every day all the cars would go to the first and when it all filled the would U turn and go toward the second.  This is why all the busses follow each other, they are all trying to get to the same place.

 

So the Sims live and work at different places each day? That's extremely realistic.....

 

Its efficient, the only problem is they never taught the agents to communicate with each other. So you get this massive herding instinct. As each agent leaving a certain property (be it home, factory, school etc) is all trying to get to the nearest goal. You saw it in my Jude thread. Due to that lack of agent communication, the ideal of keeping zones separate from each other is actually a very bad thing. As the longer the herd is in the streets, the worse the traffic (foot traffic included) gets as herds run into other herds and it just builds and builds.  (you can see this effect very easy by watching an elementary school let out, as the walking school kids all head to the closest house, then ping pong house to house till the mob of kids is devoured by houses). I guess agent communication just took too much processing power..i dunno.

 

I tested this out by trying to have a mixed zone city, as well balanced as I could (its hard to guess the populations needed exactly, due to not knowing exact pop,job, sales needed figures for each city. My mixed city is by far and way the most stable city I have, and one of the happiest. In fact the city is running at near 100 happiness whatever the heck that is. Though it was somewhat difficult early on with air pollution from mixed factories, but that stopped once I was able to get higher tech industry. Oh yea..and the city has next to nothing traffic wise.

[john2218 8]

 

Its actually MUCH worse than them just taking the shortest route, they also have no memory of where the live or where they work so they all are trying to take the most direct route to the closest available house (or job ect)  Once that fills they all take the most direct route to the next available un occupied house.  I confirmed this by building 2 residential areas, one a bit close to my industry and one a bit further.  Every day all the cars would go to the first and when it all filled the would U turn and go toward the second.  This is why all the busses follow each other, they are all trying to get to the same place.

 

So the Sims live and work at different places each day? That's extremely realistic.....

 

Its efficient, the only problem is they never taught the agents to communicate with each other. So you get this massive herding instinct. As each agent leaving a certain property (be it home, factory, school etc) is all trying to get to the nearest goal. You saw it in my Jude thread. Due to that lack of agent communication, the ideal of keeping zones separate from each other is actually a very bad thing. As the longer the herd is in the streets, the worse the traffic (foot traffic included) gets as herds run into other herds and it just builds and builds.  (you can see this effect very easy by watching an elementary school let out, as the walking school kids all head to the closest house, then ping pong house to house till the mob of kids is devoured by houses). I guess agent communication just took too much processing power..i dunno.

I think it was done for memory reasons, to have each sim remember their house and jobs location would take alot of memory(I think, I am not a programmer so maybe it would not, in which case it was just a stupid decision)  The thing is they did it in simcity4 which makes me think they could have done it now, especially considering the cities are so much smaller. 

 

As far as the communication goes yes, they could have done it in many cases pretty easily.

 

For fire fighters and police just do this 

1.Is there a crime  Y or no

2. Is there an available responder? Y or N

3. If there is send closest responder  

Thats not hard, and is super obvious, they didnt do it that way do to stubborness on someone in the design team I am guessing.

 

For busses it would be more complex but first bus could tell the others where it was going and so therefore no demand would be left so now figure out what your new closest spot with demand would be and on down the line. 

 

The thing is they used "Individual actors" in situations where individual actors dont exist, busses have routes, police and fire have dispatchers, power is either connected or not, no matter the distance from the source...  Why use a system that was designed for traffic (Poorly but thats not my point here) for things that do not behave like traffic??

[ifurkend 0]

I think it was done for memory reasons, to have each sim remember their house and jobs location would take alot of memory(I think, I am not a programmer so maybe it would not, in which case it was just a stupid decision)  The thing is they did it in simcity4 which makes me think they could have done it now, especially considering the cities are so much smaller. 

 

As far as the communication goes yes, they could have done it in many cases pretty easily.

 

For fire fighters and police just do this 

1.Is there a crime  Y or no

2. Is there an available responder? Y or N

3. If there is send closest responder  

Thats not hard, and is super obvious, they didnt do it that way do to stubborness on someone in the design team I am guessing.

 

For busses it would be more complex but first bus could tell the others where it was going and so therefore no demand would be left so now figure out what your new closest spot with demand would be and on down the line. 

 

The thing is they used "Individual actors" in situations where individual actors dont exist, busses have routes, police and fire have dispatchers, power is either connected or not, no matter the distance from the source...  Why use a system that was designed for traffic (Poorly but thats not my point here) for things that do not behave like traffic??

If memory is a major concern, I don't think the sim changing job every day matters much in a game, as long as they stick to their education level.

 

Regarding using agent simulation on things which don't need it, I suspect at least power, water and sewage data are all statistics-based instead of agent-based in the final version. The visual presentation we see in the game COULD be all merely cosmetic. But public transport, police car, firetruck and ambulance still need it because they share the same layer of network with other agents and it looks awkward if these vehicles just pass through others quantumesquely.

[john2218 8]

Power, water and sewage all use agents, which why even if you have plenty you will still have areas without them sometimes.  Seems like the patch made it much better in that regard. (Although I still lost power a couple times even though I had capacity which in real life is not possible if I am on the grid)

 

As far as police fire and busses I was talking about how they decide to go to a place, not how they actually get there.  Right now individually each one looks for the nearest thing to do (Put out a fire, nab a criminal ect) rather than going to the next place it is needed, this is why all the fire trucks and police respond to the same event even if you have 20 others occuring elsewhere.  Another solution would be to have them ignore a fire if it is already being fought.

[WIbigdog 3]

What is surprising to me that they didn't do, is with their finding the closest place to go, i.e. from home to work or home to a shop etc is why they didn't have the places fill-up as an agent routed to them.  Say for example, you take your low tech-low density industrial that supplies the 20 or so low tech jobs.  When a Sim leaves in the morning for work, why does this sim not send out a "ping" of sorts along the road to find the closest open job and then figure out a route there.  And when he does that it fills up one job in the factory.  So when 20 workers leaving their homes to go to work have pinged that factory and filled up the spots, it will effectively become invisible to the next ping that hits it.  To then handle if more than one person leaves at the same time, and to kind of make it more realistic in that not everyone always has a job at the closest place to them, have it assign a ping order randomly to the commuting Sims   So that way someone in the middle of a block could potentially receive the job closest to the residential area.  Using this system in opinion would be a very good way of giving a sim an actual fixed destination when he leaves for work and not a dynamic destination that causes him and the 40 cars behind him to u-turn at the end of the street cause the last job got filled up.  And it really would not take very much memory at all, because you're going on a per building status and not per sim (Although I think my 16gigs of RAM could handle remembering where all of my 220k sims live and work if they would let me )

 

And all this is even before worrying about the actual path-finding to these locations (which is an entirely different beast).

 

This pinging system could also work for garbage agents (maybe as an entire side of a street instead of individual cans, as you may still get a similar effect to what we have now), police, fire, medical and mass transit agents could all use the same sort of "ping and reserve" system.  That would solve a lot of the traffic issues, which can usually be attributed to the herd mentality of all going to the nearest job no matter what.

 

In the end I would be cool with sims not having a memory of where they live or work, I just want a game that allows me to build a realistic town, not a town that has to game the system in order to even achieve basic functionality.

 

TLDR:adding a destination reserving function for sims searching for a destination would help a lot.

[drdru7029 52]

Seems like they developed Glassbox just enough to become a gimmicky advertisement to promote the game.  And then spent most of the rest of the time making things look big, bright and pretty.  

[loerelau 5]

The (school) busses are indeed a joke. Also, they did not separate the busses for low and middle education, they just rush with 20 busses at the same time to the same busstop....

[T Wrecks 10,210]

And I thought the Sims in SimCity 4 were stupid, but this is just another disappointment about the game. I'd rather have a good statistical based simulator rather than a dumb agent-based simulator.

If the agent simulation was done correctly it would be a benchmark for the next-gen simulation game which handles massive interactive individual data in real-time, much better than the traditional statistics-based simulation. Seems the plan was bit too ambitious or it was EA's order to reduce the complexity of agent algorithm so older computer could run the game/engine smoothly also.

Yes, a "benchmark for the next-gen simulation game" perhaps. But would it have translated into actual playing value? That's the question I have been asking myself and others ever since the first facts about the GlassBox engine were released. It appears to be a great visualization engine, but is it a good game engine? IMO, from a gameplaying point of view, GlassBox is resource-hogging oversimulation without much added value (except nice visualization), whereas absolutely and immediately gameplay-related simulation features such as pathfinding are really bad and hamper the playing experience.

[azxcvbnm321 17]

The pathfinding was never solved in SimCIty4 by EA.  Modders had to step in and after many years, managed to create a system based on shortest time, not shortest route with NAM.  This was such a big issue in SimCity4 that it's absolutely inexcusable.  The whole basis for Glass Box as I understood it was that each sim would have a reason to go somewhere and that would be tracked.  The small map sizes was to make Glass Box functional since we were told it used a lot of computing power.  But where's this computer power?  If each sim isn't finding the quickest route, then why even have Glass Box other than for the graphics, which are far far less important than good pathfinding in a game like this.  Epic fail.  

 

And given EA's track record with DLCs and expansions, I seriously doubt that it will be fixed.  They usually focus on adding more broken stuff rather than fixing the flaws.  Sims3 is a great example, without the modding community the game would be unplayable by the 3rd generation.  The vast majority of fixes and all the important ones have come from the community, not from EA, the last patch being an exception where they fixed a lot of broken stuff from previous expansions to the absolute shock of everyone.  SimCity2013 might have to be written off.

[Wiimeiser 452]

And given EA's track record with DLCs and expansions, I seriously doubt that it will be fixed.  They usually focus on adding more broken stuff rather than fixing the flaws.  Sims3 is a great example, without the modding community the game would be unplayable by the 3rd generation.  The vast majority of fixes and all the important ones have come from the community, not from EA, the last patch being an exception where they fixed a lot of broken stuff from previous expansions to the absolute shock of everyone.  SimCity2013 might have to be written off.

 

 

QFT. Could someone do a LP of Tuatha's Garden just to see if it's still doable with Pets installed?

 

And why does deleting the first letter in a quote delete the quote? Why?

[loerelau 5]

They are not always taking the shortest route (just found this on a Dutch website):

http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/6532238/0e3cc013/ik_loop_de_hele_dag_rondjes.html

[Hellken 1,658]

So much was compromised. So many features taken out. I hate "judging a book by its cover" but the video evidence is undeniable at this point. If the growing feedback from players who have played the game is true, then the Glassbox simulation was a marketing gimmick and not something "revolutionary" as we were led to believe. The agent based simulation is a resource sucking simulation which does not add much gameplay - value except for visualizations. 

 

This is extremely disappointing. Think of all the stuff that was taken away in the name of Glassbox. My goodness, one of the reasons why this game was always - online was so that the servers could help calculate the agent based simulation. 

 

 

EA, why?

[GenXisT 127]

I really hope people are sending these videos to Maxis/EA and not just posting them here or other forums.  It's great that we know this happens, but we aren't working on the project and thus cannot fix the issues.  It almost seems to me that the "agent" gets a destination and then gets blinders on.  "I must get to point B"  and that's it.  No other information is garnered between where the "agent" currently is on the map and where they want to be.  So if they start on the highway insert and they need to get to the somewhere... they get the info for the destination, it's the closet route,  and they stick to it, no ifs and or buts.  literally.

 

It's really quite sad to watch this happening.  The garbage truck video does my head in.  The agents have  one goal, pick up trash.  That's it.  They should "know" where the trash is and how to get there.  And that means the should know where the trash is NOT  and to NOT go there.  It's really rather stupid.

 

And please tell me I'm not the only one that noticed this:

 

 

 

That's an indictment if I do say so myself... 

[dhuffer 2]

That is not good at all but funny to say the least......  I am sure they will fix it but it will be an add-on like someone already said

[MandelSoft 2,775]

And I thought the Sims in SimCity 4 were stupid, but this is just another disappointment about the game. I'd rather have a good statistical based simulator rather than a dumb agent-based simulator.

If the agent simulation was done correctly it would be a benchmark for the next-gen simulation game which handles massive interactive individual data in real-time, much better than the traditional statistics-based simulation. Seems the plan was bit too ambitious or it was EA's order to reduce the complexity of agent algorithm so older computer could run the game/engine smoothly also.

Yes, a "benchmark for the next-gen simulation game" perhaps. But would it have translated into actual playing value? That's the question I have been asking myself and others ever since the first facts about the GlassBox engine were released. It appears to be a great visualization engine, but is it a good game engine? IMO, from a gameplaying point of view, GlassBox is resource-hogging oversimulation without much added value (except nice visualization), whereas absolutely and immediately gameplay-related simulation features such as pathfinding are really bad and hamper the playing experience.

Actually, when I come to think of it: real professional traffic simulators (yes, the ones you pay thousands of dollars for to buy them) also rely in sequential, statistical simulation. True, they are not completely accurate, but at least they offer a very good estimation. Note that in order to get these results, you need to simplify things (reduce apartment blocks to a single unit, convert back streets to a set amount of access points, set an Origin-Destiny-matrix, insert variables for the transport mode choice and preferences and let the simulator run for hours and hours to calculate an entire city through. But not only traffic is calculated through this way; also other complex simulations, like fluid flows, are calculated through this way. It just saves a lot of resources (and time!), and it allows you to tackle really large systems...

Now, agent based simulators do exist, but their scope is different. They often handle a small stretch of a road and often don't offer much complexity. Besides, agent based simulation is resource intensive...

SimCity 2013 seems to use the latter one in complex situations, and that's where agent-based simulator fails. You really have to dumb down the simulator in order to make it work at all at a decent rate. And that makes the sims more stupid than they ever were. In the end, statistical simulators still simulate things better in such large systems than agent-based simulations...

Best,

Maarten

[snwboardn 18]

That is absolutely ridiculous... The fact that each agent technically finds a new job every day, and a new house for that matter... That is definitely not what Maxis had us sold on when they touted their shiny new glassbox engine. That is what it really boils down to, this Glassbox IS NOT what they made it out to be, and quite frankly I would rather go back to a statistical model with a larger tile size and updated graphics. I was really excited at first about simulating every person and was willing to overlook the small cities for new innovation, but this is like handing in a term paper that you copy and pasted off of Wikipedia. 

[Board_Marshal 104]

^^" The fact that each agent technically finds a new job every day, and a new house for that matter..."

 

If this is true I guess I can put up with a Sim pathing his or her way to a new job everyday (much to my dismay, seems like a critical aspect of the game to have such as rudimentary algorithm in place) but going to a new residence (the nearest open residence?) every day, come on!  My heart can only take so much. /facepalm

 

Wouldn't a Sim finding a new residence every day really screw up the education system?

[Djohaal 121]

The fickleness of many simulation aspects are another issue with the agent based approach. In order to do a simulation that runs on a domestic computer (even if it had a Nvidia Titan GPU, which has more processing power than humanity at 1990 if my math is right), you need to decrease your agent count.

Less agents mean less sampling of the phenomenon you are simulating (the city, traffic, garbage collection, etc), which in turn lead to a greater signal-to-noise, and you get jittery statistics, traffic, and such. 

Other times, agents might be just dumb, like the transit simulation as it is. 

If you froze your city and let the agents run for say, 100 cycles (or 1000), their average would be closer to the expected reality, but individual agents can have excessive noise, and when the simulation is based on a single run and not the average... yeah you get my point.

[donpost 17]

I knew there would be server issues on launch and I was willing to put up with that. But reading this thread, and seeing that even the underlying ENGINE and gameplay are a mess too - that's really sad  

This stuff sounds so fundamental and wide reaching, I'm not entirely confident it will get fixed.