6 ms·

I'd love to see more work on real-world city simulations that allow normal people to play around with them as well. Most realistic simulations right now are onl

by dbish 6y ago

I'd love to see more work on real-world city simulations that allow normal people to play around with them as well. Most realistic simulations right now are only accessible to experts (and even those don't tend to be at a scale to try to simulate an entire city or more). Anyone aware of others?

egfx 6y ago
Yes. Check out Cities Skylines https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/
- hinkley 6y ago
  I haven't opened it for a while. Is it still gonna make my laptop into a jet engine or did they dial down the processing intensity a bit?
  - the_gipsy 6y ago
    No, tried the other way, impossible to play even on lowest settings. Try Factorio, it's 2D and runs smooth as butter on my laptop.
    - cwkoss 6y ago
      I highly recommend the factorio dev blog for anyone interested in game development - they do some amazing stuff to performantly simulate millions of discrete particles simultaneously. My 10 year old macbook can run ~10k autonomous robots before I start seeing any slowdown.
  - simulo 6y ago
    Bigger cities need booth more in-game electricity and real-world electricity, it seems.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      I don't know how often I've looked at combinatorics and yet I still harbor a secret belief that you can pre-calculate a hell of a lot more than we do and just use the result when the time comes. Its like part of my brain lives in an alternate universe where some entire field of dynamic programming has flourished that we don't (or categorically couldn't) have here. When I think of the fan spinning in Skylines I am transported to a memory of staring at an empty chunk of ground, watching the trees blow in the wind, and wondering if they really needed to be calculating this just right now. There are tricks you can do with animation cycles where if all cycles are relatively prime, then the pattern only repeats every few minutes, hours, centuries. It's part of why we have 13 and 17 year cicadas. They align on a frequency of over 2 centuries, and they have near misses (appearing in successive years) around every 50 years (with a conspicuous 118 year respite in the middle that has me wondering about how public policy and cicadas work...)
      - zamfi 6y ago
        I don't think it's the animations in cities: skylines that makes it a CPU-hog, I think it's the actual simulation of the various agents pathfinding, etc.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > There are tricks you can do with animation cycles where if all cycles are relatively prime, then the pattern only repeats every few minutes, hours, centuries. It's part of why we have 13 and 17 year cicadas. They align on a frequency of over 2 centuries, and they have near misses (appearing in successive years) around every 50 years You didn't explain how this observation fit into the rest of your comment, but if you're saying that putting two things on simple cycles is good enough to look acyclic to players, I don't think that's true. If you have an oak tree and a fir tree next to each other, animated in 13 second and 17 second cycles, and it takes four full minutes for the oak+fir system to repeat itself... people will still notice that the oak tree is on a 13 second cycle, and the fir tree is on a 17-second cycle. There's no rule that says you can only consider things in the context of everything else that might happen to be nearby.
maxbond 6y ago
You may be interested in the CityBound project. It's fairly early on, but it's a multiplayer SimCity like game. One of the express goals is to simulate individual people/families on up to markets and such. I think the project's ideals will resonate with you; the developer wanted a game where people could cooperate to manage a complex system, and learn about system dynamics through play, which is (I presume) the role SimCity played in their life. https://github.com/citybound/citybound https://github.com/citybound/citybound Demo video: https://youtu.be/rJpTulYwAZc https://youtu.be/rJpTulYwAZc It's architecture is also pretty interesting. tl;dr they use an actor architecture to seamless transitions between single and multiplayer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr9GTTST_Dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr9GTTST_Dk
dabreegster 6y ago
I'm working on https://abstreet.org https://abstreet.org, just for the transportation aspect of city sim. My goal is to make something in between VisSim (proprietary, hard to use, but industry standard) and Skylines (not based on real places or meant to model trade-offs like parking spaces and lane usage). I gave a long talk recently to the Seattle Rust meetup if you want lots of gory details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chYd5I-5oyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chYd5I-5oyc
- petepete 6y ago
  This looks fantastic, definitely going to have a go when I've got a spare hour. Thanks!
drkstr 6y ago
I have gotten many years of enjoyment out of SC4 and the NAM Traffic Simulator [1] There is (or was, I suppose) a vibrant and diverse community of SC4 modders. Really cool stuff to be found there. [1] https://sc4devotion.com/namdoc/feature-guides/traffic-sim/traffic-sim.html https://sc4devotion.com/namdoc/feature-guides/traffic-sim/tr...
- drkstr 6y ago
  Sorry to double post, but I'm amazed that I seem to be the only one here who knows of this gem. I mean, just look into the level of detail he puts into his writeup on the pathfinding algos [1]. SC4 is a whole region simulator with multi-city economics in play. Runs in Linux on Wine. Best damned $20 I ever spent. [1] https://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=10261.0 https://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=10261.0
bloaf 6y ago
I second the motion. I would love for more realistic simulation to make its way into games. I've often thought that if my current petro-modeling job doesn't work out, I should take my domain knowledge and plug it into an educational/entertaining refinery sim game.

by dbish 6y ago

egfx 6y ago

Yes. Check out Cities Skylines https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/

hinkley 6y ago
I haven't opened it for a while. Is it still gonna make my laptop into a jet engine or did they dial down the processing intensity a bit?
- the_gipsy 6y ago
  No, tried the other way, impossible to play even on lowest settings. Try Factorio, it's 2D and runs smooth as butter on my laptop.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    I highly recommend the factorio dev blog for anyone interested in game development - they do some amazing stuff to performantly simulate millions of discrete particles simultaneously. My 10 year old macbook can run ~10k autonomous robots before I start seeing any slowdown.
- simulo 6y ago
  Bigger cities need booth more in-game electricity and real-world electricity, it seems.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I don't know how often I've looked at combinatorics and yet I still harbor a secret belief that you can pre-calculate a hell of a lot more than we do and just use the result when the time comes. Its like part of my brain lives in an alternate universe where some entire field of dynamic programming has flourished that we don't (or categorically couldn't) have here. When I think of the fan spinning in Skylines I am transported to a memory of staring at an empty chunk of ground, watching the trees blow in the wind, and wondering if they really needed to be calculating this just right now. There are tricks you can do with animation cycles where if all cycles are relatively prime, then the pattern only repeats every few minutes, hours, centuries. It's part of why we have 13 and 17 year cicadas. They align on a frequency of over 2 centuries, and they have near misses (appearing in successive years) around every 50 years (with a conspicuous 118 year respite in the middle that has me wondering about how public policy and cicadas work...)
    - zamfi 6y ago
      I don't think it's the animations in cities: skylines that makes it a CPU-hog, I think it's the actual simulation of the various agents pathfinding, etc.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > There are tricks you can do with animation cycles where if all cycles are relatively prime, then the pattern only repeats every few minutes, hours, centuries. It's part of why we have 13 and 17 year cicadas. They align on a frequency of over 2 centuries, and they have near misses (appearing in successive years) around every 50 years You didn't explain how this observation fit into the rest of your comment, but if you're saying that putting two things on simple cycles is good enough to look acyclic to players, I don't think that's true. If you have an oak tree and a fir tree next to each other, animated in 13 second and 17 second cycles, and it takes four full minutes for the oak+fir system to repeat itself... people will still notice that the oak tree is on a 13 second cycle, and the fir tree is on a 17-second cycle. There's no rule that says you can only consider things in the context of everything else that might happen to be nearby.

maxbond 6y ago

You may be interested in the CityBound project. It's fairly early on, but it's a multiplayer SimCity like game. One of the express goals is to simulate individual people/families on up to markets and such. I think the project's ideals will resonate with you; the developer wanted a game where people could cooperate to manage a complex system, and learn about system dynamics through play, which is (I presume) the role SimCity played in their life. https://github.com/citybound/citybound https://github.com/citybound/citybound Demo video: https://youtu.be/rJpTulYwAZc https://youtu.be/rJpTulYwAZc It's architecture is also pretty interesting. tl;dr they use an actor architecture to seamless transitions between single and multiplayer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr9GTTST_Dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr9GTTST_Dk

dabreegster 6y ago

I'm working on https://abstreet.org https://abstreet.org, just for the transportation aspect of city sim. My goal is to make something in between VisSim (proprietary, hard to use, but industry standard) and Skylines (not based on real places or meant to model trade-offs like parking spaces and lane usage). I gave a long talk recently to the Seattle Rust meetup if you want lots of gory details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chYd5I-5oyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chYd5I-5oyc

petepete 6y ago
This looks fantastic, definitely going to have a go when I've got a spare hour. Thanks!

drkstr 6y ago

I have gotten many years of enjoyment out of SC4 and the NAM Traffic Simulator [1] There is (or was, I suppose) a vibrant and diverse community of SC4 modders. Really cool stuff to be found there. [1] https://sc4devotion.com/namdoc/feature-guides/traffic-sim/traffic-sim.html https://sc4devotion.com/namdoc/feature-guides/traffic-sim/tr...

drkstr 6y ago
Sorry to double post, but I'm amazed that I seem to be the only one here who knows of this gem. I mean, just look into the level of detail he puts into his writeup on the pathfinding algos [1]. SC4 is a whole region simulator with multi-city economics in play. Runs in Linux on Wine. Best damned $20 I ever spent. [1] https://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=10261.0 https://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=10261.0

bloaf 6y ago

I second the motion. I would love for more realistic simulation to make its way into games. I've often thought that if my current petro-modeling job doesn't work out, I should take my domain knowledge and plug it into an educational/entertaining refinery sim game.