Sims (Agents) will always act as they do now.

[Titan 8]

So, I find this particularly troubling.

 

Ocean tweeted on the 27th of March that the sims (agents) will not act any differently in the future. They will always play follow the leader.

 

This means that your traffic problems will likely never be fixed. I had a shred of hope for this game until I read this. This basically means that no patch in the future will change how the agents get to and from work. Period.

 

Lovely.

 

 

[Eriseley 4]

Well, that statement only seems to rule out possession of homes/jobs. I think there are other methods available to get agents to stagger their destinations a bit while still utilizing the communal "sink" behavior.

[utmaddog86 0]

I'm not sure that's how I interpret that twitter message.

 

I do interpret it to mean that within this game that there will never be persistent Sims, only agents created at the beginning of the day who go to work, and agents who at the end of the work day go find a home.  Now I'm not a programmer, but I don't see why this has to mean that traffic will always be bad or that they can't improve agent behavior.  Giving them a random-walk behavior or randomly a preference to travel to a slightly further away hose would generate (i.e. simulate) traffic that behaved more realistically.  Say they did the exact same thing with preference for what house to travel to that they have done with roads, giving them a weighting system to help reroute the agents (avoid x road y% of the time if it has z traffic and so on).

 

I personally was at first disappointed with the fact that persistent Sims do not exist, but this series we are playing is a simulation, not a recreation or a duplication of the world.  Abstractions are always needed in simulations.  I mean there are lots of real-world behavior from people I don't want in my SimCity... I hardly want terrorism for instance.

 

Now the simulation itself has elements that need to be reworked and of course a few inexcusable bugs as well.  The recycling bug is the one that is my number one enemy. 

 

At the same time compare this game to any of the other SimCity games and explain how this agent behavior (non-persistence) breaks your immersion more than cars represented as colored dots (1/2000) or cars that disappear in the middle of the road (3000/4).

[Rian Gray 12]

As a computer nerd, I find it hardly possible to run the movements of, say, 100k population of sims/agents every second. At least it is not a workload the modern day consumer computer can handle.

 

But then again, wasn't that the whole idea and reasoning behind of having why simcity had to be "alway-on" game? Consumer computers can't handle it, that was why EA was supposedly running thousands of servers on cloud to ease the workload. This tweet simply implies, "there is no cloud, only DRM." I really don't get why is Ocean saying it isn't feasible. Because, to be frank, it was never feasible to begin with, running full-time, full-scale simulation of a small city. And that was why I found Simcity 4 so witty and perfect game.

 

edit: typo

[NovaBlazer 10]

Build a small town... maybe 20 homes.

Put in a full recycle center with max trucks

Put in a full garbage dump with max trucks

 

Wait for 6am.  Watch the silliness.

 

They literally play leap frog as they all rush to the 20 homes to get the 20 cans. They get into a long line and block traffic for about 3 hours.

 

This is the kind of agent behavior that needs change. 

 

I can care less about sims having the same home/job each day.

[Diragi 0]

As a computer nerd, I find it hardly possible to run the movements of, say, 100k population of sims/agents every second. At least it is not a workload the modern day consumer computer can handle.

 

I would have thought that having having predefined homes and work would actually reduce the number of calcuations for traffic / rerouting.

[Titan 8]

Here's the problem....

 

SimCity 4 never had constant sims moving about, going from place to place with any accuracy. SimCity 4 handled sims completely different. Sims would pop on the screen, and after a short time they would be gone. There was no real time sims. The simulation itself focused on city development, not the sims themselves (except for gimicky things like rush hour quests).

 

SimCity (2013) has a completely different system in place. Maxis wanted us to believe that sims had lives. They wanted us to be able to follow them and watch what they do and interact with them, as well as being able to manage a city. That was the entire point of the game. If this was intended from the very beginning, why wouldn't they focus on making it work properly?

 

To me, this is a core mechanic of SimCity. This is what this new version of the game is all about. Sure, the main premise was a total city simulator, but a lot of the focus was on the sims themselves. If the sims were never intended to be a functional part of the core game, they would have simply created SimCity 4.5. That's not what we were sold. That's not what was advertised.

 

Do I care that sims don't have their own home or their own unique workplace? No. Of course not. I do care, however, that the core simulation is borked to the point where it is causing massive traffic issues. In my honest opinion these traffic issues will never go away with the current AI implementation. The sims will always play follow the leader to the next empty house or job and this causes traffic problems that cannot be solved unless some clever work-arounds are put in place.

 

For example, they could split up the amount of sims taking one direction to an empty home or workplace. Instead of having them play follow the leader, why not have the sims randomly pick houses that are empty? I don't believe it would be hard to implement code that would tell random sims to pick random houses spread all over the city. This way the sims still pile into the houses until they are full, but not one house after the other. Still, this can create other problems as well.

 

I just feel that this game had so much potential and this one issue is the cause for a lot of other issues. I feel that it was a poor implementation of an engine that had so many possibilities.

[Rian Gray 12]

 

As a computer nerd, I find it hardly possible to run the movements of, say, 100k population of sims/agents every second. At least it is not a workload the modern day consumer computer can handle.

 

I would have thought that having having predefined homes and work would actually reduce the number of calcuations for traffic / rerouting.

 

It would still be tricky thing to achieve. I am not sure will making it all predefined reduce the amount of calculation or not; but, we are talking about traffic routing of 100k sims/agents with a definite origin and destination. Basically what it means is, computer needs to keep the records of the origins (house) and destination (work), while simultaneously run the maths of routes they would take every morning and evening.

 

One thing I can tell for sure is, when the civil engineers do one of these kinds of math, they don't expect their computers to simulate real-time, everyday difference of traffic. One-full simulation by itself takes days to finish on the heavy-duty mainframe, and that simulation, if simulated 100% correctly, would only represent the traffic of a single day. I can't believe EA thought they can pull this off without having a proper cloud system.

 

disclaimer: of course there is a way to get statistics of how the traffic will change in the given time, like how it worked in Simcity 4, that way they can use the same simulation more than a just day. 

[Zpike 79]

... the core simulation is borked to the point where it is causing massive traffic issues. In my honest opinion these traffic issues will never go away with the current AI implementation....

 

If you are having traffic issues it's not the games fault as I, and others, can build cities with no traffic issues at all.  It's easy to do if you know what you are doing.

[Eriseley 4]

 

As a computer nerd, I find it hardly possible to run the movements of, say, 100k population of sims/agents every second. At least it is not a workload the modern day consumer computer can handle.

 

I would have thought that having having predefined homes and work would actually reduce the number of calcuations for traffic / rerouting.

 

I doubt it. You'd be storing, accessing and changing data for and propagating each individual's routine, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if GlassBox handles things by point/building if possible and tells x number of agents to all do the same thing, so it only needs to calculate the route once (well, until they mob a building to capacity) for that grouping and store far less information (a few flags about whether they have money or whatever for each agent). Even if you blindly had each individual do their routine it'd probably require a lot more work, and you can't do that anyway because it would only work in a completely static city. So now you add constant checks to make sure work/home and route are still valid...and if your city is changing a lot you're needing a lot of individual "find new work" and so on operations.

[morriswalters 16]

They were lazy, and that is being polite.  Utilities never had to be an agent behavior, they fell fell in love with agents at the cost of thinking.  Neither did buses.  Streetcars are the obvious example, buses could have been set on routes, all buses.  The caveat being the fact that they wanted the appearance of intercity buses.  They didn't see the forest for the trees. 

 

Take water, there is no direct way to throttle the water tower pumps.  What they did was use the capacity of the area where you set the pump as the rate at which they calculated depletion and use.  If however you set the water tower art a place where there isn't much water it will only draw at the rate of that spot.  For a test city I'm using the tower draws 3 kgal of water, and I am using .8 kgal.  If I place it in a high density area it draws 1000 kgals and depletes the water table even though it only uses .3 kgals.

 

The agent behavior is a random walk routine of some kind.  I you watch abandonment under controlled conditions distance counts.  The further from where the agents shop and work the more likely to abandon.  Complexity also factors in.  The rule is time.  Build to reduce transit times.  But no matter what you do, because the agent behavior is a random walk you will always have abandonment in different random spots.  And the more complex the path the harder to control.  In my test city even though I have more jobs then sims, and even though their is only one path to industry and one path to retail, I still have homeless and abandonment due to no more money.  In a city with 1042.  Here is my test city.

[Eriseley 4]

Is your abandonment happening in the farthest houses? For sims the routing tends to be shortest point, and your closest houses will absorb most of your shoppers and workers, the outer will miss out. You don't want any place to be too many iterations down the "okay next closest destination" chain or it will struggle.

[morriswalters 16]

@Eriseley

Yes I know, but that isn't the whole story  Pure random chance will cause a lot of failures.  In the setup I could have done it with branches instead of a closed cube.  When you do it with a central road as oppose to what I showed you you can use higher capacity roads close to the entrance decreasing as you go back.  They tend to be evenly successful front to back.  This particular setup is as close to even as I can get it.  I'm moving the power and trash to be part of my industrial.    Limiting the pathing even more.

 

They have evidently changed the sim to abandon if you don't have water, also crime has been fooled with.  in a town of 1073 I have 26 arrests a day.  Pretty bad crime rate, considering the Police station I have.

[VanGioRobNelli 29]

If Maxis wanted us to believe that these SIMS have lives... then I WOULD PLAY THE SIMS!!!!  THIS IS A CITY SIMULATION GAME!!!!  I think most of us could really care less about the 200K population and their "next task"... most of us bought this game for the building/development aspect, not controlling Sims.    

[Eriseley 4]

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if buildings are what track and issue point to point behavior which the agents march to as they go from building to building, simply informing it what kind of agent they are when they arrive.

[morriswalters 16]

This is what Maxis thinks a small uneducated rural town might look like, this make me more than a little angry.  I think I count 17 homicides.  This from no schools.

 

[Rian Gray 12]

In terms of programming, it is actually easier to have every single one of agent running, as long as there are infinite number of resources (horsepower for calculation). That's why we have the process called optimization; it takes more work to take things realistically. As to Zpike's claim of "complainers," uhm, truth is if EA did what EA said on ads, we would've been the perfect game in the history of universe. It's just, practically speaking, none of the computer on earth can possibly handle such calculation real-time.

 

And that was why I bought the EA's argument of, always-on is required for computation's sake. We need external horse power to run this game, and EA decided to shrink the city tile instead of building Cloud system.

 

edit: typo again! gotta hate my hands

[Titan 8]

I don't think anyone expected it to run perfectly on day one. Games have bugs, and as more and more complex code is introduced into said games, more and more bugs will present themselves. No one is arguing against that.

 

What I'm upset about (and many others) is the fact that the core simulation has some serious issues that affect the end game.

 

Your argument is that I should LTP (as you put it) because I have traffic issues and that so many others out there do not. While this may be the case, no two cities are alike. You cannot simply state that one is "doing it wrong" when each city is completely unique. Unless two cities are carbon copies of each other, one city may have issues while the other does not.

 

It's a well documented fact that this simulation has traffic problems inherent to the games design. Even Maxis has admitted it. Why on earth would they work on patches that attempt to rectify (or reduce) the problems if none existed?

 

You may not have traffic problems because you built your city in such a way that traffic is not an issue. What if I don't want my city to look like yours?

 

Or course there will be cases where certain designs will cause more traffic than others. That's obvious and shouldn't even be considered an argument. If you want proof that traffic isn't unique to just my city, I suggest you visit YouTube and watch the countless users that have run into multiple similar situations with cities that look nothing like mine. In fact, these videos document very well the problems that are rooted to the games very core.

 

We can argue all day long about specific traffic patterns and street/road/highway designs that work and designs that don't. That still doesn't change the fact that there are flaws in the game that need to be addressed. Flaws that should have been addressed long before release. And I'm not speaking about bugs. Bugs are a completely different animal and will always happen when you have multiple people working on the same codes/scripts. That's inevitable.

 

Maxis engineers are making changes to their core simulation that alter traffic behavior. I suppose Maxis should just LTP their own game...

[Board_Marshal 104]

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if buildings are what track and issue point to point behavior which the agents march to as they go from building to building, simply informing it what kind of agent they are when they arrive.

If I recall correctly it has been discussed before that it is more so the buildings themselves that matter and not the "agents".  On screen the "agent" may be a Sim on foot, a car, a yellow or blue blip following the roads, etc. so it doesn't matter the "image" you see the agents take.  The are simply delivery mechanisms for the shuttling of units of power, water, trash, happiness, and income from building to building.  The buildings act as repositories or "sinks" as the devs call them.  Basically you want to fill all of your buildings with the things they want and empty them of the things they don't want.  You never even have to consider the "Sims" themselves since they aren't persistent, only what they carry.  It's the buildings that are persistent.  If you fill a building with what it needs it stays or "lives" while if it doesn't get what it wants it abandons and must be destroyed, i.e., "dies".

[AlexMBrennan 11]

I really don't get why is Ocean saying it isn't feasible

Because server farms cost money, duh, in particular if the purpose is to hand calculations that quadcore i7 processors can't handle. You cannot provide servers which cost $30 a month to rent for a one-off purchase of $60.

As for agents, the problem could be much improved if they tracked sink capacity to any extent (if 15t of garbage need collecting then dispatch only 3 trucks, and dispatch them to randomise their destination)

[morriswalters 16]

Exactly how would you do that?  I would guess, and that's all anyone can do, that they don't keep track of the trash per se.  The buildings report it for the displays but garbage trucks just go everywhere.  So there is no stat, "there is 20 tons of garbage"  The only point for the agents is that they don't have to poll each entity and say do you need us.  You just send out the garbage men and go everywhere.  If they don't get there one day they will find it the next. No routing. And no way to localize it without breaking it.  Buses and school buses could be hand routed to stops, but with the city changing all the time you couldn't have point to point routing for garbage trucks or recycling trucks.

[Rian Gray 12]

 

I really don't get why is Ocean saying it isn't feasible

Because server farms cost money, duh, in particular if the purpose is to hand calculations that quadcore i7 processors can't handle. You cannot provide servers which cost $30 a month to rent for a one-off purchase of $60.

As for agents, the problem could be much improved if they tracked sink capacity to any extent (if 15t of garbage need collecting then dispatch only 3 trucks, and dispatch them to randomise their destination)

 

Which was followed by: "because, to be frank, it was never feasible to begin with."

 

I'm sure majority of people know, one way or the other, setting up the gigantic cloud system just for one game is not exactly the most favored thing to do as a company, except the fact that EA has been saying that's exactly what they were trying to achieve. It was impossible to begin with, and I really don't see the point of Ocean telling someone else as if it is not feasible anymore. It was never feasible, at least that's my opinion.