Ombedor

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

Listen carefully to the narrator in Buildings are simulation units which contain resources, like "coal and workers". When a sim is at home or work they are a resource in that building. Simulation units run rules. One rule might require that the building contain a minimum number of workers in order to be active. Another rule might multiply the number of sims present by a consumption factor to control how much water the building needs. Later in that video the narrator says, "Agents are simulation entities that carry resources from one unit to another." A vehicle is an agent that carries sims from one building to another. A walking sim is also an agent, but when they arrive at their destination they revert to being just a resource. Agents are special because they move. Agents need to do path-finding. Path-finding is more CPU intensive than running rules. Glassbox can probably handle a lot more resources than agents. Resources just consume memory and wait for rules to run, agents need constant attention to move them and update the path-finding as the roads change and especially as other agents get in their way or get out of their way. Saying that Glassbox can support X number of agents is saying that it can have that many things moving around the road network (and other networks) at the same time. Things that aren't moving are not agents and put a much lower strain on the CPU.

I don't have any special knowledge about the inner workings of the new game, but I do have some experience with developing software that uses some of the same ideas. I suspect that keeping the cities farther apart and limiting the number of direct transit connection between them helps keep minimize the amount of simulation state that needs to cross city boundaries and therefore dramatically reduces problems caused by the asynchronous nature of multi-player online play. Maybe we can hope for future region layouts that are designed specifically for play by a single person or a smaller number of players where each one gets a small cluster of contiguous tiles.

They could create a "mod store" and let modders sell their mods with Maxis taking a cut in the same way that app stores, or even the Diablo III auction house works. Although I don't get the feeling that they are headed this way.

Yes, it id a difficult question, but I'm not sure the challenge is solely getting access to save files. I think he is implying that mods in a multi-player game face additional challenges of fairness, scope, compatibility, and distribution that are simply not a consideration when modding a single player game. - A mod shouldn't give a specific player advantages or disadvantages when it comes to interacting with other players in the region or on the global market. - Should mods be installed in individual cities, regions, or globally? In other words, what is the correct scope for a mod, and who controls which mods get installed at each scope? - Installing different mods on cities in the same region could be the source of compatibility nightmares for the simulator acting on agents from neighboring cities. - Will I have the right mods installed to view one of my neighbor's cities? If not, how does the system distribute those mods to my computer? How do mods get disabled when I go back to my city? How can this be done a seamlessly as possible? Should we require all cities in a region have the same mods to reduce load delays?

Are you sure that all shops are treated the same? I thought the original glassbox slides implied that complex resource chains were supported. So even if you only have one type of commercial zone, that doesn't mean that all the businesses that grow on them have to be the same type. Perhaps businesses grow based on trying to fulfill supply and demand within the overall economy of the region.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/Community-Interviews-Maxis-Part-1

Course, if your playing private mode you'd wonder why they would need you to be always online. They have not just dodged but outright ignored this question. I believe that private mode simply means that nobody other than the region creator can create or play cities in the region. So you play it just like a multi-player game in which the same person is playing all of the cities. Why is this mode still online? Because they have designed it so that the server is managing all of the other cities that you are not currently playing and feeding in the information about resource pricing from the online market. Obviously they could have designed it differently, but there is a design elegance to having the private mode work exactly like multi-player mode. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could have two of your private cities running simultaneously if you had access to multiple computers. I am not advocating for the design decisions that they have made, but I think I understand why they made them.

GlassBox is the new feature of this game. Whenever I read the griping on this site about the game not looking realistic or not being a city builder or not having some obscure "must have" feature it always seems to me that people are forgetting that the name of the game is SimCity. This game is not called CityArchitect or CityPainter, but SimCity. I have played most of the games in the series going back to the original on the Amiga. I helped investigate the path finding behavior here when RH first came out. Clearly SC4 w/ RH and the NAM is the best SimCIty to date, but let's face it, the simulation engine left much to be desired. If you filled up a large map the engine had problems with slow routing updates that transformed the city into a game of abandonment whack-a-mole. Such problems always broke the illusion for me. I am excited about GlassBox and the simulation fidelity that the new SimCity promises. If that means we are limited to smaller maps (for now?), so be it. I would much rather play with a detailed and transparent simulation than have those disappointing Wizard of Oz moments from earlier editions of the game.

I play the SimCity games primarily for the simulation and emergent behavior aspects. I am very excited about the simulation depth that the GlassBox engine will provide, but I have a feeling that the smaller size of the city tiles may disappoint. I am also concerned that I may really like the game only to be very disappointed when the servers are taken down before I'm done with the game.

IT DOESN'T... Period. I would rather have a cartoonish representation of a rich simulation that a rich representation of a cartoonish simulation. Almost saying the same thing again, but ok...? Yeah, I should have explicitly stated that I agree with your post. Sorry for the confusion.

IT DOESN'T... Period. I would rather have a cartoonish representation of a rich simulation that a rich representation of a cartoonish simulation.

You do realize that this isn't Youtube's comment section, don't you? He's Kip Katsarelis, the Lead Producer for the game, and a veteran of Maxis. Ahhh... My apologies, I thought this was YouTube..... Apart from that comment in stating the obvious, the awards were well deserved. I'm surprised it's getting the attention of the White House and Mayor of LA. I don't think it is surprising. Keep in mind that a lot of people that work at the White House are in the age range that grew up with the original SimCity. I don't expect the POTUS to be spending his time checking out SimCity (he's obviously got more important stuff to do), but lower level White House staffers are a perfect demographic, especially when you consider the topic of the game.

In the top intersection, the first tile off of the main road is also a road tile, the rest are streets. In the bottom intersection, the first tile off of the main road is a street, as are all the others. You can tell by hovering the query tool (either one) over the road/street tiles in question. Since road tiles have higher capacity and faster travel speeds, it will have a slight effect on commute times and congestion. The best reason for using the top style is that capacities are lower in and near intersections. As traffic volume increases at an all street intersection you will notice that congestion first becomes a problem at the intersection and the first two tiles away from it. Rather than upgrade all of the streets to roads to solve this problem, some mayors may only upgrade the intersection and a couple tiles in either direction. Later, if the rest of the street tiles get over crowded, it may become necessary to upgrade them as well, however.

I would say that yes, it is a bug. In my opinion it violates the principle of least surprise. Most SC4 players seem to be caught off guard by this unexpected behavior. Everywhere else an avenue has a U-turn at the end, except at neighbor connections. This one exceptional case surprises most people.

Yes, now that we have the screen shots, I concur. The problem was not the residential zones near the map edge, but the commercial zones. Sims couldn't get home from the commercial zones. It just so happens that the nearby residential zones were the ones trying to work at those jobs (because that's how the job finding engine works).

---------------- On 10/8/2003 1:43:40 PM AlexPi wrote:But I thought sims don't work at SimNation, only at connected cities. These two particular connections were SimNation connections. As far as I understand, SN connections are for cap relief only, no one actually drives there. ---------------- Hmmm. That may be true, I don't remember. If you are right, then my theory is invalid. Maybe you could try to verify what's going on by replacing the avenue neighbor connection with a road neighbor connection and using the route query tool to see where sims in that corner commute to. Then replace the road with an avenue once again and see if they revert to NJZ again.

I understand what you're saying redlotus, but I think your example is a little different. In AlexPi's example the sims were working in the neighbor, not at a business on the edge of the map. I was speculating that perhaps they couldn't get to the neighbor connection due to a problem turning left from the roads onto the avenue. Once he destroyed the neighbor connection, the job finding engine located new jobs for the sims within the local city, and now they could commute to work by turning right onto the avenue.

Could this have been a problem with sims not being able to turn left on avenues? If the job finding engine identified the top SimNation connection as the "workplace" for the neighborhood, and they couldn't turn left to get on the avenue, then they would get NJZ. Just a theory. the7trumpets has posted a modd to fix the left-turn bug, maybe that would fix the problem as well.

A few things t7t. First, I'm pretty sure that congestion is not just the morning commute doubled, but actually morning + evening, which makes a difference when the two commutes use different paths. Second, just to clarify, the extra 8 tiles in the upper connector were roads in my test, so that will affect your speed calculation. Since they are roads, however, they never became congested. Third, yes I can do more tests on this with the heuristic set low. I set the heuristic to zero. Basically the behavior is similar, but the top connector starts getting traffic sooner and the distribution more even. Here are a few data points. Lower / Upper 7 / 0 48 / 0 73 / 8 88 / 66 90 / 71 123 / 119 146 / 139 176 / 143 240 / 143 528 / 143 844 / 150 1154 / 146 1724 / 167 2037 / 144

Ok, as promissed. Here is the setup: This city is designed to grow fast. It has a bunch of medium density residential on the left and industry on the right. The grid network is entirely roads so that there won't be any congestion in either of the two zoned sections. The two connectors, however, are lowly streets and all the traffic must use one of the two to get to work. Furthermore the top connector is guaranteed to be a longer path than the lower connector for all residents. Like I said, this city was designed for exactly the test you are talking about DarkMatter. If the engine always does shortest path then the top connector should never see any traffic. If the7trumpets is right, then the top connector should start seeing traffic once the bottom one is too busy. Now let's see what happens when we let the simulation run on an unmodded copy of RH. Following are a sequence of images just showing the traffic on the two connectors at key moments as time progresses. Initially all the traffic goes to the lower connector. Note that even though we are below 100 cars on the street that we are already seeing a lot of orange on the congestion display. I think that's because when you add in the evening commute there are really 190 trips crossing that street each day, which puts the street at 190% of capacity, making it run at about 68.5% of normal speed. The next two pictures show that traffic will take the upper connector. Both shots were taken while the game was paused at the same moment in time. So, you get the idea of how I'm doing this test. Rather than posting a ton of screenies, I'll just post a table showing the rest of my results as I let the city develop and the roads become more congested. Lower usage / Upper usage 124 / 16 125 / 47 123 / 72 189 / 136 834 / 139 1366 / 138 2194 / 143 At this point it seems like the lower connector is taking all new traffic and the upper connector is stuck at around 140 vehicles for the morning commute, or 280 vehicles / day. If my theory about the congestion level being the sum of the morning and evening commute (which these tests seem to validate) is true, then the upper street is just slightly below the maximum congestion level of 300% at which point there are no further penalties to travel speed. The lower connector is clearly way past saturation no matter how you count cars. Even though traffic is moving slightly faster on the upper connecter, it is a slightly longer path. So at the end the two paths were probably about equal in terms of travel time, but travel distance seems to take over at that point and all additional traffic takes the more direct route. Summary (for an unmodified copy of RH): Given two uncongested streets the shortest path was always taken. Once the shortest path reached a high enough level of congestion to affect travel time, new traffic took the less congested alternative. However, once both streets reached the saturation point (the point where additional traffic no longer affects travel time), all additional traffic took the shortest route.

---------------- On 9/26/2003 2:58:47 AM DarkMatter wrote: So if a road is congested above its limit, and 6 tiles away is a road thats not congested, the pathfinding engine will take that into account and use the less-congested road? ---------------- I happen to have a test city perfectly suited to testing this, and I've been working on putting together some screen shots over the last few mintues. Look for something soon. What I'm finding is very interesting.

Remember that bus stations normally provide two jobs. The two people driving to the bus station are the two people that work there. Anyone that wants to pick up a bus at the bus stop has to walk to the bus stop, or drive to a parking garage and then walk to the bus stop from there.

Yes, Washington has three major (commercial) airports, one of which it shares with Baltimore. The biggest of these is Dulles International, which owns 11,000 acres of land, 5,000 of which are used for aircraft operations. 5,000 acres is HUGE in SimCity terms. That corresponds to 20 million square meters, or 79,040 SimCity tiles (16 meters per side). That means that if you wanted to plop down an airport on the scale of Dulles International in SC4, you would need a square of tiles measuring 281 tiles on a side. If my memory is correct, that's larger than an entire large city map, and that's only enough for aircraft operations, which is less than half the property owned by the airport. On the flip side, Dulles served 17.2 million passengers last year. Ombedor