Sinfest

[CTrees]

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060[

Looks like there's even more wrong with SimCity than expected. Also, it makes me sad that my first thought on reading was, "I can't believe that guy hasn't been banned for that post."
_________________
“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”
yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

[DeD CHiKn]

Boo, Gearbox had a bug yesterday that drastically upped the chance of legendaries dropping in Borderlands 2. People were getting 20 in a 15 minute game for example.

They came out and said it was intended but fixed it soon after.

Whether or not it was intentional or not is to be debated, I like to think it was a bug and they went with it because it didn't hurt anyone really. I think that makes me happier then thinking they did it by choice while I was working, on purpose no doubt.
_________________
I have a face, with a mustache.

[Sam]

Sim City isn't a city simulator. It's a crappy AI tileset management generator.

Sims don't stay in the same house or the same job. they just go to the nearest available house when work gets out, for instance. and if someone fills it up first, they still go there and try it anyway, before driving somewhere else.

traffic's fucked

game doesn't even need commercial or industrial, just parks

game's fucked

[Sam]

"the characters in the game don’t actually have any permanent jobs or homes. They simply walk to the nearest available open job or a suitable home at certain times, a simplification that creates major headaches in city planning. Sims that start walking don’t switch to mass transit if they don’t find a job nearby; kids don’t get to schools easily; all cops go to a single crime scene even if police stations are carefully spread in different parts of the city. School buses, fire trucks and tourist hordes all seem to have trouble finding obvious routes to their goals. As a result, designing a functional city may mean planning a street grid and placement of different facilities in a deeply counterintuitive way. Players have to design their cities to suit bad algorithms, not realistic goals.

One popular emerging strategy is to construct a city with one long, single street winding back and forth like a snake. This enables players to reduce the problems of having school buses that cannot find students and fire trucks that refuse to go where they are supposed to. One way to avoid suffocating traffic jams is to fill the city with wide avenues, resulting in weird maps where normal streets are used as sparsely as possible.

The lame pathfinding algorithms may explain one of the biggest mysteries surrounding this new SimCity iteration; why is the city size limited so drastically? Many early reviews cited claustrophobia as the number one complaint even before the server problems surfaced, including the exhaustive Ars Technica piece. It now seems likely that the strict size limitation may have been necessary to avoid complete gridlock.

The ambitious goal of having SimCity populated by “real people” may thus be backfiring quite spectacularly — partly because the Sims don’t act rationally, but also because of the complications of trying to find the shortest route to nearest job, home or school in the most rudimentary way. This can translate to inability to deal with a traffic jam by opting for a parallel street. It’s also backfiring because populating the cities with foolish agents with no memory or permanent roles has capped the city size to a level that deeply annoys most franchise fans."

[WheelsOfConfusion]

And yet EA still has enough fat stored away to weather this crap until people get totally used to buying nothing but crappy games, and buying those games as a service instead of a product.

[Arc Tempest]

For some hilarious examples of the AI at work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zcEaHT9mt-Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g418BSF6XBQ
_________________
The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.

[WheelsOfConfusion]

They're just... they're just taking the shortest path regardless of its "bandwidth." Oh my God, EA built the new SimCity pathfinding around Rip1 while promising OSPF!

[Arc Tempest]

Also: Two Saiyans Play Sim City.

It goes about as well as you'd expect.
_________________
The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.

[CTrees]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/14/modder-runs-simcity-offline-maxis-remains-silent/

Yep, SimCity has successfully been modded to run offline.

Also, apparently the population numbers are fudged - for instance, a population of one million will only have 100,000 agents. This is not a bug - from the people mucking about in the source code, the function is literally simcity.GetFudgedPopulation ()
_________________
“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”
yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

[sporko]

who's playing neverwinter here?
_________________

[Sam]

friends have had entire cities completely ruined by the fact that left turn lanes don't exist in the sim universe, so if enough outbound traffic in one direction exists, it prevents one car from turning left indefinitely. so ALL TRAFFIC is now trapped cyclically from moving forward, behind the first car that wants to turn left. It will wait indefinitely.

all specialty vehicles, including busses, trash trucks, cops, and fire trucks, are not only subject to being completely rendered useless, but have no intelligent pathing at all, so your school buses and shit just kind of meander about unintelligently * http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ebpWgWm1TU4 * to whichever bus stop had the most people waiting at the time they reached any bus stop at all, so mass transit fails and dies, and schools can't get kids in time, and education doesn't work, and garbage trucks drive in circles rather than collect trash, and what wow ok i guess you can hack the game to save freeways everywhere, even outside of your play boundary

the best part though is that

uhh

well okay i lied, there is no best part.

[Arc Tempest]

Not true, the best part is watching this slow motion implosion / train wreck from a safe distance.
_________________
The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.

[CTrees]

So in further "SimCity is fundamentally broken" news:

-The need to balance residential, commercial, and industrial zones? Not so much. That's a 100% residential town. Even though there are no jobs, everyone still has money and people keep moving in. High density buildings are created, etc.

-Another day, another hack, this one bringing PVP to SimCity. That's right, you can destroy your friends' town, permanently (remember, no saves to revert to!). And they couldn't've done it without EA's always-online requirement.
_________________
“Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation”
yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

[fritterdonut]

I remember back when traffic was just a variable that want up or down depending on how much mass transit, roads, and highways you had. And then sooner or later your transport minister would yell in your ear that you're an idiot and should build some more bus stops.

Those were the good old days.
_________________
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country did to you

[WheelsOfConfusion]

You mean back when simulations had to be considered somewhat realistic and related to their own underlying mechanics? Pffft, who needs that? Just gets in the way of our multiplayer DLC-out-the-ass rush job.

Seriously though, it's like the actual game mechanics were hashed out by a bunch of MBAs who wanted to maximize the nickel-and-diming, then the plan was handed off to a programmer a week before launch with a Post-It that said "Make it happen OR ELSE" on the front. There is no other excuse for traffic that only cares about the shortest route.