More AI atrocities

[donpost 17]

I assume we are all aware that resident's don't have permenant homes/jobs, and will instead goto the first job/home they find. It's annoying not to have a feature that even vanilla Simcity 4 had, but I can live with it.

 

However, it leads to more problems on the streets. I tried an experiment:

 

I built one long road across the map, and added some jobs in the form of a coal power plant and some industry about 3/4 of the way along the road. I then built a small bit of residential at the end closest to the jobs, and a large amount of residential at the end of the road FURTHEST from the jobs.

 

When 6am/pm rolls around it's commute time. Roughly half of all the people at work will leave instantly, with the rest leaving gradually after that. The problem is that when all these people leave work they all head for the closest house with space for them, which happens to be the small residential area. So you have 100s of workers heading for a few houses which fill up instantly, leaving the rest of the people to drive all that way for nothing and have to head all the way down the other end of the city back through all of the traffic where the larger residential zone is.

 

This is half the reason why there is so many traffic problems in larger cities. Surely this is an easy fix? You don't have to tie every person to one house and one job, just have some code that prevents 100s of workers all heading to the same house.

 

 

The same issue affects shoppers, although shoppers tend to leave home gradually rather than all at once so it's no so much of a problem.

 

 

So now when it comes to bad AI we have:

 

• Terrible pathfinding (shortest route chosen rather than fastest route based on road density, or even fastest route based on road density and traffic)
   
• Drunken city service vehicles that cannot navigate to their destination (everything from buses and trams to ambulances and garbage trucks)
   
• The first-come first-served rush (noted above)
   
• Junction AI?

 

What are the chances of all this being fixed do we think? Have I missed out any other AI brainfarts?

[snwboardn 18]

I really am not sure... You would think something like this would have been fixed if it was simply able to be patched... I am afraid that it might be a deeper problem with the engine itself. I just cannot imagine how they got away with this... I mean all of these developers who had behind the scenes access had to have seen this. Either all the guys who wrote on here with their discussion on preview builds were about as deep as console kiddies or they were playing with a different build. I hope that it is the latter, but at this point time will only tell. 

 

It is hard not to think that the reason there was only a 1 hour demo/beta was because they knew their product was crap and they didn't want people to figure out how crappy it really was. 

[elavery 1,013]

These errors are just unforgivable.  I am still wondering what this glassbox has brought us yet, other than a glass ceiling of limitations.

[GenXisT 127]

I really am not sure... You would think something like this would have been fixed if it was simply able to be patched... I am afraid that it might be a deeper problem with the engine itself. I just cannot imagine how they got away with this... I mean all of these developers who had behind the scenes access had to have seen this. Either all the guys who wrote on here with their discussion on preview builds were about as deep as console kiddies or they were playing with a different build. I hope that it is the latter, but at this point time will only tell. 

 

It is hard not to think that the reason there was only a 1 hour demo/beta was because they knew their product was crap and they didn't want people to figure out how crappy it really was. 

 

you know, that might not be far off.  I mean, they HAD to have known this stuff was broken.  2 hours play time and you can plainly see something isn't right.  so any beta tester (programmers) would've noted this. Which means that EA probably forced Maxis to release the game prematurely.  This should have been pushed back to summer or end of summer (northern hemisphere, lol) and no one would've complained.  Especially if we had gotten a product with even a fraction less of the problems that it has had since last tuesday.

[Buggi 684]

I find it rather shocking that sims don't have a permanent home. This is another nail in the SC coffin.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I just had to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming... they did what?

 

I mean, I can understand if they have to cut some corners to make a game work. For example, in SC4 there were no actual bus lines, but instead every Sim could enter his own "instant bus". And yet, it was still a better love story than Twil-... err, still better than what I read here.

 

The superior precision and depth of agent-based simulation? Yeah, right. The concept of a statistically simulated building that sends out its inhabitants to jobs that the pathfinder finds (and blocks for other residents) and receives its inhabitants back after work sounds much more convincing to me.

[reputationZed 4]

I was just reading an article in the Chicago Tribune were the Maxis developers were bragging that this version of SC is the first one that is truly a simulation. They spoke of previous versions as simulations of simulations. It don't see modeling erratic behavior such as this as being a true simulatoon

[simcopops 37]

Can someone please tell me if I have read this correct? The game sends out sims to work who return to RANDOM empty houses and not the one they left? I.e each sim is effectively a squatter? Oh my the problems just keep piling up. Glassbox? Don't make me laugh Ocean you find a pretty name for a glass of crap.

[donpost 17]

Can someone please tell me if I have read this correct? The game sends out sims to work who return to RANDOM empty houses and not the one they left? I.e each sim is effectively a squatter? Oh my the problems just keep piling up. Glassbox? Don't make me laugh Ocean you find a pretty name for a glass of crap.

 

Yes that it correct.

 

And although a resident who has left a high wealth household will look for a high wealth job, the opposite is not true i.e. a high wealth worker will leave work and could potentially go home to a low wealth property if that's what happens to be closest.

[TURDxSANDWICH 6]

I think you guys are missing the point here.  I'm not going to sit here and argue that this is the most advanced, complex, and true-to-life city/city dweller simulation engine ever created.  What I am going to argue is that this engine is based on very simple principles that when applied to a large number of agents, actually produces very complex systems.

 

I don't think the "shortest path" pathfinding is a bug, its the design.  The Sims constantly finding new jobs and new homes everyday, isnt a bug, its the design.  Again, it isnt the most realistic design, but allowing for those gross oversimplifications allows Maxis to develop phenomenally complex cities.

 

I would suggest you try to open up your minds and flip the situation around.  Instead of designing cities based on your ideals of a perfect simulation and being frustrated its not a perfect simulation, try designing cities around what we know to be true of this simulation engine.  I think you'll find there is a very satisfying experience available to you in this game if you can just find away to get past yourselves.

[Sunfighter 186]

I think Libraries may be bugged as well. Sim shoppers without money are supposed to go to the Library or at least thats what the description says, yet when i plopped one down, i ended up with MASSIVE traffic problems the next day because every shopper WITH $ decided the library was the place to go. This caused a massive queue in my tiny tiny city. I had to demolish the library to save the town, afterwords each $ person ended up with the message couldnt find X shopping and all angry text...yet....its horsecrap, it has to be because my zoning is like 60%R to 40% C, there is no way they couldnt find shopping.

 

I really dont understand what is going on..other then I hate libraries now...

 

The Public Library....THE place to be....

 

[ETK 14]

A reality check for the complainers and a small defense for Glassbox: No computer could handle the pathfinding computations required for every single vehicle in the city to find the optimal path from A to B. There is no other option than to have simplifications to cope for the massive amount of agents in the network.

 

It's interesting info though, how the simulation works. Have to keep it in mind when planning cities.

[kgpurrs 107]

First, this is completely and totally NOT true.

 

I have clicked on my Sim as she left work on the south side of town in the skyscraper Commercial district.  Her home was in the center of the city.  She began by driving south on the avenue, and instead of a U-Turn and driving up the avenue to her residence, she took the longest possible route, with no traffic.  She eventually made 3 right turns passing many residence along the way until she finally got home.

 

If you make a ridiculous simulation like you just did, you will get ridiculous results.  It's entirely possible that Glassbox was designed to optimally have the workers first in their car be the closest to their residence.  

 

If path-finding is bad in your city it's probably because you designed your roads wrong.

 

Complaining about bus and tram routes?  You have full control of these routes, design them better, you have full micro control over this as well as your roads, stop plopping them anywhere the roads turn green.

[simcopops 37]

I Just watched a youtube video of hundreds of sims running around to a trailer house all cramming up the stairs then when it was full running away from it to find the next house. Are you guys defending this system seriously trying to tell me this is what we have waited for? Computers are more than powerful enough nowadays to remember sim X lives at Y and works at Z goes to and from work using route calculation etc etc.

[Ombedor 23]

I think Libraries may be bugged as well. Sim shoppers without money are supposed to go to the Library or at least thats what the description says, yet when i plopped one down, i ended up with MASSIVE traffic problems the next day because every shopper WITH $ decided the library was the place to go. This caused a massive queue in my tiny tiny city. I had to demolish the library to save the town, afterwords each $ person ended up with the message couldnt find X shopping and all angry text...yet....its horsecrap, it has to be because my zoning is like 60%R to 40% C, there is no way they couldnt find shopping.

 

I really dont understand what is going on..other then I hate libraries now...

 

The Public Library....THE place to be....

 

Do you have enough industry to keep your shops supplied with goods to sell?

[Sunfighter 186]

I think Libraries may be bugged as well. Sim shoppers without money are supposed to go to the Library or at least thats what the description says, yet when i plopped one down, i ended up with MASSIVE traffic problems the next day because every shopper WITH $ decided the library was the place to go. This caused a massive queue in my tiny tiny city. I had to demolish the library to save the town, afterwords each $ person ended up with the message couldnt find X shopping and all angry text...yet....its horsecrap, it has to be because my zoning is like 60%R to 40% C, there is no way they couldnt find shopping.

 

I really dont understand what is going on..other then I hate libraries now...

 

The Public Library....THE place to be....

 

Do you have enough industry to keep your shops supplied with goods to sell?

 

Freight doesnt matter. They disabled the I to C relationship. C functions fine without freight orders for some reason. There have been a ton of threads on this on reddit and simcity forums.  http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9358082.page  <--- one of the larger threads on it.

[Jahnri 21]

The way I look at it is its like Simcity 4. Its taken us ages to get NAM where it is. Fundamentally having the little sims have a AI isnt bad. The coding for them is. Given time, I imagine Simcity is capable of so much more. The problem is, will the devs develop it? Without moding.. this is a serious issue.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

Not that SimCity 4 was any better about this, but I'm disappointed to see that Maxis still has to cut so many corners.  We all hoped that in the 22 years this game series has been around, they'd be able to come up with some efficient way to simulate the workforce of a city.  I guess we just haven't appreciated how daunting a task it is.

 

And someone remind me to come back and +1 T Wrecks's post when the rep system comes back up.

[Sunfighter 186]

The way I look at it is its like Simcity 4. Its taken us ages to get NAM where it is. Fundamentally having the little sims have a AI isnt bad. The coding for them is. Given time, I imagine Simcity is capable of so much more. The problem is, will the devs develop it? Without moding.. this is a serious issue.

 

I hope so. Im still scratching my head about why on T-intersections with 3 ways stops that one side will decide to not go at all till traffic has completely cleared on the cross street. This is causing moderate back-ups. And Ive checked the roads, they clearly show a 3 way stop sign, yet the AI seems to get confused and the intersecting road will come to a complete halt till all traffic has gone from the cross street. While the cross street continues to treat the intersection as a 3 way stop. So they will stop and go, sometimes if enough traffic is built up on the cross street, the intersecting road wont move for hours.

[TURDxSANDWICH 6]

I Just watched a youtube video of hundreds of sims running around to a trailer house all cramming up the stairs then when it was full running away from it to find the next house. Are you guys defending this system seriously trying to tell me this is what we have waited for? Computers are more than powerful enough nowadays to remember sim X lives at Y and works at Z goes to and from work using route calculation etc etc. 

 

 

This is a game.  If you approach it as trying to design cities to "beat" the simulation as it exists, it can still be lots of fun.  So, yes, I am defending the game engine as it is designed.

[Jokurr 175]

I’ll admit that I’ve been critical of SC 2013 for a long time for multiple reasons such as tile size, lack of terraforming, lack of contiguous regions, etc. but I always thought that the glassbox engine looked awesome. After seeing this thread and the others like it with all sorts of AI nightmares, I can say I’m honestly stunned. I thought that they would have at least done better than this. I already questioned if glassbox was really worth it after learning that glassbox was the reason for small city tiles, but now it’s incredibly obvious to me that it is not worth it if this is the type of simulation that it comes up with. My goodness.

[magicrobbie 77]

A reality check for the complainers and a small defense for Glassbox: No computer could handle the pathfinding computations required for every single vehicle in the city to find the optimal path from A to B. There is no other option than to have simplifications to cope for the massive amount of agents in the network.

It's interesting info though, how the simulation works. Have to keep it in mind when planning cities.

Dear ETK, we are not talking about a few minor compromises due to limited available processing power. We are talking about MAJOR flaws in Glassbox. An agent-based simulation doesn't make any sense if agents fail to complete basic tasks in a meaningful manner.

[nashville nelson 51]

I think the agents don't get deleted when they find what they are looking for. The 'empty house' agent finds a worker and another worker,..., and every worker is heading to this one house. This could also be responsible for all the other traffic bugs. When there is a burning house, the 'find a firetruck' agents are send on their ways but when one agent arrives at the fire station the others won't be deleted. So all firetrucks are on their way to this one house and the 'find a firetruck' agents who are leftover are cruising along the streets until they find the same firetrucks allready sent to this house. The leftover agents are coming from a different direction so the fireman are circling around the block until newer / more agents from the house are arriving. So basically the pathfinding agents don't talk to each other.

[Drengs 18]

Add this to the list: Industry is completely useless!
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9358082.page

The whole economic system of producing and selling is broken.
This is ridiculous!

[Sunfighter 186]

Add this to the list: Industry is completely useless!

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9358082.page

The whole economic system of producing and selling is broken.

This is ridiculous!

 

I honestly think they removed the C relying on I relationship because well lets face it, the maps are so tiny. To get a perfect 1 to 1 ratio of industry making goods, sending it to C, C selling it..and R to work and buy...youd need a fairly large map...or accept the fact youll have a very tiny area for residential and low residential numbers. So they disabled C relying on goods made by I. This allowed I to be pretty much unneeded. giving room for larger populations. Coupled with inflated numbers of high density buildings, youll get reasonable population numbers in the tiny maps provided.

[Dennislp3 2]

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/248767/page/2

 

It’s important to note in previous interviews, Maxis has stated that sims don’t live in a specific home, work a specific job, but they go through the moves (leave home, go to a random job they qualify for, shop at locations that meet their social status, then go to a random home that they can live in).

 

just thought I would throw that in there since people were confused about the detail of where people live and work in relation to travel. As for where this was actually stated? I am not sure.

[Marla_Singer 46]

This video posted on another thread actually shows how much the game is affected by these problems:

 

Those aren't some minor glitches only a geek could find out, they are the fundamental basis of the simulation. Considering we've been told the depth of the simulation was the biggest strength of the game, we can decently be disappointed.

 

So if I've got it well, we have micro-cities which can't even be freely connected to other contiguous neighbouring cities so that the powerful glassbox engine could make sims searching for the first empty house once leaving work? Seriously I can't figure out what game designers had in mind when making things this way. And I really try to be soft here.

[Board_Marshal 104]

Add this to the list: Industry is completely useless!

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9358082.page

The whole economic system of producing and selling is broken.

This is ridiculous!

 

I'll take a broken I to C relationship before no relationship so I hope they put something in, even if its broken.  I'd rather have to overcome some bull poo of a system than have no system at all.  No system =  no challenge = no longer playing (BOO).  Broke system = some type of challenge = still playing (maybe not having fun but at least something for my money).  Making lemonade out of lemons I guess.

[mastorofpuppetz 199]

A reality check for the complainers and a small defense for Glassbox: No computer could handle the pathfinding computations required for every single vehicle in the city to find the optimal path from A to B. There is no other option than to have simplifications to cope for the massive amount of agents in the network.

 

It's interesting info though, how the simulation works. Have to keep it in mind when planning cities.

Hogwash LMAO its not that hard nor complex...please.

[WIbigdog 3]

First, this is completely and totally NOT true.

 

I have clicked on my Sim as she left work on the south side of town in the skyscraper Commercial district.  Her home was in the center of the city.  She began by driving south on the avenue, and instead of a U-Turn and driving up the avenue to her residence, she took the longest possible route, with no traffic.  She eventually made 3 right turns passing many residence along the way until she finally got home.

 

If you make a ridiculous simulation like you just did, you will get ridiculous results.  It's entirely possible that Glassbox was designed to optimally have the workers first in their car be the closest to their residence.  

 

If path-finding is bad in your city it's probably because you designed your roads like an idiot.  It's your fault, not the game.

 

Complaining about bus and tram routes?  You have full control of these routes, design them better, you have full micro control over this as well as your roads, stop being a monkey and plopping them anywhere the roads turn green.  This again, is your fault, not the game's fault.

I am having a hard time figuring out if you 1. Don't own the game 2. Are inconceivably stupid 3. Are a great troll or 4. An EA/Maxis employee.  So which one is it, because what you just said goes against what 99% of other people know.  Just because you have a city of 10k without traffic problems doesn't make you an expert.  Show me your city with 150k+ people that doesn't have traffic problems and isn't just a giant snaking avenue, I dare you.  And I know you can't show me it because you don't have one, because it's not possible with the current state of the game.