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SimRefinery Recovered
- totetsu 6y agoHow much of your credits do you have to spend on media outreach to challenge the science of climate change?
- DonHopkins 6y agoYou can hire lots of cracker-jack PR people from cigarette companies to beef up your social media platform!
- qbaqbaqba 6y agoNone, just sell some natural gas and produce some "green" hydrogen.
- ameyamk 6y agoGreat work! Is there a place I can checkout for good quality non spammy "business simulation" games?
- adventured 6y agoI'll refer one that I don't see mentioned very often, that is my favorite business simulation game: Capitalism / Capitalism Lab (latest version). It has been around for about 25 years, the author keeps working on the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism_(video_game) https://www.capitalismlab.com/ https://www.capitalismlab.com/
- stupidcar 6y agoThis is a really amazing sim, and I'm surprised how under-the-radar it is. It's kind of Dwarf-Fortress-esque in how it has this slightly antiquated presentation, but hiding behind it is an incredibly deep sim, where the author keeps on adding new features.
- mcrae 6y agoMy favourite is AirWay Sim [0], a massively-multiplayer online airline simulation. Incredibly detailed business sim financially — with full financial statement generation - as well as operationally. One must decide on hubs, airplane types, fuel hedging, scheduling.. the list is endless. I’ve spent a non-trivial portion of my free time in university building airlines in this game. Highly recommended. [0] https://www.airwaysim.com/ https://www.airwaysim.com/
- robbs 6y agoI really enjoyed the Aerobiz games on SNES.
- pncnmnp 6y agoHere are some interesting business simulation games from MIT Sloan: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/LearningEdge/simulations/Pages/Overview.aspx https://mitsloan.mit.edu/LearningEdge/simulations/Pages/Over... My personal favorite is: Platform Wars (https://mitsloan.mit.edu/LearningEdge/simulations/platform-wars/Pages/default.aspx https://mitsloan.mit.edu/LearningEdge/simulations/platform-w...)
- glaberficken 6y agoThanks! Platform Wars is excellent. Took a few runs to beat my competitor
- aasasd 6y agoI asked a similar question on the previous thread about SimRefinery. For my criterion of a ‘more serious’ simulation, the answers were Capsim and Capitalism Plus. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241152
- ludamad 6y agoVery neat, although I very much wanted the lets-play
- freeone3000 6y agoThere's actually not a terrible amount of game - there's a screen with all the bits moving, and some reports with filler info, but it doesn't seem to actually play - only one of the editing controls, make new thing, is selectable, and it doesn't seem to work.
- DonHopkins 6y agoYeah, none of the map editing tools work -- they just pop up a "This button is not implemented" error. I love how it uses the original SimCity helicopter, train, and a lot of the same tiles. https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryHelicopterAndTrain.png https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryHelicopterAndT... There is more stuff actually implemented or at least sketched out wireframes in the menus. Stuff like Refinery => Operating Plan => Blender Recipes => Gasoline => R32 that pops up a "Blender Recipe" dialog with a lot of numbers and petrolium techno-babel in it. https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryBlenderRecipe.png https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryBlenderRecipe.... https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryFeedstockAvailabilityAndCosts.png https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryFeedstockAvail... There's some more interesting stuff in the interlinked windows you get from Windows => Unit => [bunch of different stuff], that brings up dialogs like "Crude Unit" or "Asphalt plant" that shows the graphics and inputs and outputs of the unit, along with some inexplicable tables and diagrams and measurements, and squares that you can click on to link to other windows showing all the different inputs and outputs. And the unit windows all even have "Help" buttons that pop up a blurb describing them. https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryCrudeUnit.png https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefineryCrudeUnit.png https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefinerySulferPlantUnit.png https://donhopkins.com/home/images/SimRefinerySulferPlantUni... It implies there's some kind of a data flow model going on, but I guess it's probably mostly just wireframe examples of what it would look like if there was really a simulation going on.
- jugg1es 6y agoDid Maxis just lose the game? Why didn't the company have a copy of their own game.
- ludamad 6y agoIt was commissioned, it might have been owned by Chevron, with no protocol for keeping a game stored indefinitely
- teruakohatu 6y agoIt's was a niche project for a client that didn't want it developed further. Not nearly as outrageous as the BBC taping over their archives to save buying new tapes. They have a page listing all the justifications, some of which are quite weak: https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/bbc-archives--wiped-missing-and-lost/z4nkvk7 https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/bbc-archives--wiped-missing-an...
- jugg1es 6y agowell that escalated quickly lol
- skissane 6y agoI remember reading a certain company (not my current employer)'s data retention policy issued by their legal department. It had a schedule for destroying all business records. Product source code was in there as a business record – to be destroyed N years after end of support. Made me want to cry. I hope they don't actually do what their legal department tells them to.
- londons_explore 6y agoIf hypothetically, someone were to take a copy of that code just before the business destroyed it, they could do almost whatever they liked with it, because the original business wouldn't be able to prove it was stolen from them.
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- EFruit 6y agoInteresting! The game reminds me a bit of another industrial simulation game called "Oakflat", a nuclear power plant operations simulator for MS-DOS (and later Windows). The DOS version can be played on archive.org, but I'm not sure if it's possible to get the Windows version anymore. https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oakflat_Nuclear_Power_Plant_Simulator_The_1992 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oakflat_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
- eru 6y agoTo drift further off, there was also a container shipping simulation called Ports of Call. https://archive.org/details/PortsOfCall https://archive.org/details/PortsOfCall
- cbanek 6y agoThis is so cool that someone recovered it. Reminds me of all the crazy burned CDs I have with random software from the days of yore. Here's the previous discussion where it was shown / talked about but thought to be lost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236132
- LoSboccacc 6y ago> all the crazy burned CDs I have lucky you, mine all became unreadable with time. I didn't know/think of refreshing them periodically on newer cds, and now they're gone for. most of the games wouldn't run on modern hardware anyway, but a lot of first gen digital photos are lost in there.
- suddencoma 6y agoYeah, CD/DVD media degrades over time, often on the time span of a decade they become unreadable. They are a bad choice for long term storage.
- Sembiance 6y agoYou should rip the CDs and upload em to archive. It’s possible that there is unique content on them that doesn’t exist anywhere else :)
- DonHopkins 6y agoI remember but have never found a copy of an Apple ][ program I got from a pirated software collection, temptingly called "SUPER HIRES CHESS", which was actually not a chess game, but a puzzle game in the form of a computer virus: It pretended to be a BASIC game with a bug in it, and when you ran it, it would break with an error message. Then it would intercept the keyboard input vector, watch what you typed, and play all kinds of tricks on you, like when you typed "LIST" and hit return, it replaced it with "LSIT" and beeped syntax error, to drive you crazy! Eventually it would start giving you more hints that your computer had been taken over by a virus, and you had to figure out some puzzles to disable it. I've scoured the Apple ][ archives but never found it. But as long as people keep uploading and sharing their old collections, maybe "SUPER HIRES CHESS" will show up some day!
- 0x0 6y agoA weird error happens if I try to run the embedded javascript dosbox emulator on iOS Mobile Safari. It launches the PKSFX INSTALL.EXE but most (but not all) files fail to extract with a CRC error. Emulation bug or a flaw in Mobile Safari's javascript engine? It seems strange that it can interpret the entire pksfx x86 code without crashing while still yielding corrupted CRCs? If there are bitflips or miscalculations you would think the interpreted x86 cpu would crash long before even printing the pksfx banner. On a different computer, unzip -t validates the INSTALL.EXE zip contents.
- mattigames 6y agoI bet the installer is using the storage JS API or something related but the pksfx x86 code does not and such API is buggy or limited on Safari mobile.
- 0x0 6y agoThe only thing I can think of is running out of virtual disk space because the storage JS API quota is filled. But I would assume PKSFX calculates the CRC based on the in-memory decompressed stream, not a read-back copy of what's written. Or it would print some sort of "out of disk space" error, but maybe dosbox does not have that. So I wonder if there is a sneaky data corruption bug hiding in the iOS version of Safari's JS/JIT engine here..? If the .zip file embedded in the PKSFX INSTALL.EXE was incomplete, then I would think it would fail early with a missing end-of-archive TOC?
- jhoechtl 6y agoWondering about the cheats in this game :)
- nnx 6y agoI wonder if it supports negative oil prices.
- Paperweight 6y agoWhere's the disaster menu?
- DonHopkins 6y agoIn the German version that's the Schadenfreude menu.
- sushshshsh 6y agoInterestingly enough, in the article it does confirm that Chevron encouraged new users of the system to change certain input values to produce explosions andnl disasters right as they were first learning how to play, so that they could learn what does what in real life.
- cm2187 6y agoFor those who wondered like me who this software was built for, the answer is in the full article: > The operators at the refinery sometimes had trouble getting a big picture for what was happening at the plant beyond their particular area of focus. “The whole goal if this was to teach operators that they are part of a bigger system,” Skidmore said. “Their concern at the time was that operators tended to be very focused on their one plant, and their one thing they do, and so [they] weren’t keeping in mind that what they do affected other parts of the plant. So they wanted a training tool that allowed operators to manipulate inputs and outputs of the various pieces of the refinery process to see how they impact.” > The non-technical staff at the Richmond refinery needed to know how it worked too. The people in human resources and accounting weren’t chemical engineers, but it would help their work to see how the different areas of the plant were networked together, how one department affected another department. https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/ https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
- JCharante 6y agoJust recently there was this article on the front page of HN that covered SimRefinery. Here's the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236132 I'm really glad to hear that the game was recovered because of this!
- wodenokoto 6y agoIn business school you’re told similar stories about (in my case at least it was) Nike factories moving workers around so that they regularly work at each station and appreciate that what happens at one station affects other people’s work
- jdhawk 6y agoAnd how everyone who works at Lincoln Electric starts out welding.
- Moru 6y agoYes, this actually happens in real life now and then too. As long as there is no special drivers license or education involved ofcourse. Nothing more mind numbing than to stand at the same machine year after year.
- wiz21c 6y agoDoes it simulate Hubbert peak ? :-)
- xxcbvc 6y agoOk
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- KlimYadrintsev 6y agoInteresting how some assets are never released to the public.
- anewdirection 6y ago*most
- SeanDav 6y agoWhile on the subject of old games, does anyone have access to a working version of "Vogon Poetry"? This was a shoot-em-up game bundled with Sidekick Plus. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/03/21/software-firm-offers-new-version-of-sidekick-program/fc1ee721-f3ec-4a8b-985e-567f4cd8b936/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/03/21/s...
- coldpie 6y agoI tried googling for this and about the only result I found was this post[1]... written by you, exactly six years ago, asking the same question. Good hunting, SeanDav :) (I did find some download links for various things labeled as "borland sidekick", but I'm going to guess you've been down this road already.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857137
- SeanDav 6y ago>"I did find some download links for various things labeled as "borland sidekick", but I'm going to guess you've been down this road already" Thanks for your efforts! Yes I did go down that route, but not with much success.
- aasasd 6y agoI'm frequently using Wikipedia and similar sources as entry points for old games. E.g. recently I finally recovered a bunch of small DOS games that were bundled on some demo disc—since I was particularly interested in a Pong clone, I went through the list of Pong clones on Wikipedia and spotted the familiar company name. So if you remember any metadata apart from the Sidekick connection, you might want to try those angles. (The game itself, ‘PLBM Pong’, had settings for many parameters, e.g. the initial speed and acceleration on each turn—so you could start at a crawl pace and proceed to test your reaction speed. PLBM turned out to be a one-man operation.)
- aasasd 6y agoTo add on the methods: categories on Wikipedia are pretty useful for such digging. However, there's an annoyance that, although lots of pages have uniform infoboxes, you can't just ‘query’ pages in a category by an infobox field, or sort them by one—like the release year for games. At least I haven't found such a service, and Wikidata has less info. However you can rig something up with the API: e.g. the wptools package for Python parses infoboxes before you even ask it specifically.
- battery423 6y agoAwesome! Now i only need to find out what game i have played. It was also a Simulation, one person in a house and you were able to buy a tv and something with insurance was also happening.
- akling 6y agoJust a hunch, but was it perhaps Sierra’s “Jones in the Fast Lane”?
- battery423 6y agoMh that doesn't look familiar. It also looks quite colorful. That pc also had ibms ally cat installed.
- vnxli 6y agoThere's still a huge pursuit around this in most of manufacturing. Operational engineering groups are pushing for high fidelity digital twins to test out process control code before it hits the physical plant. The merge between simulation games and simulations gets even more blurred now that some software companies are replicating the entire plant in a 3d "game engine" and using VR goggles for immersion for operator training
- KineticLensman 6y agoA company I used to work for built a large sim for an Australian mining company, using a commercial game engine and a large 'igloo' type structure as the interaction environment. This was chosen over VR because it was believed to be easier to have groups of trainees in the same environment. The trainees were equipped with physical 'torches' that were geometrically paired with the virtual environment so you could actually shine a pointer on objects. The main training tasks were spatial orientation in the large 3D maze that was the mine, as well as hazard recognition and safety /;emergency training. E.g. knowing which way to go if an explosion occurred and how to avoid being crushed by the large vehicles that moved through the mine. The main unexpected development cost turned out to be the high degree of customisation required of the virtual assets, in particular the signage. Every tunnel and shaft had individual location and safety info on signs, and these had to be correct or the training value was lost.
- vnxli 6y agoThe high-fidelity replication is much easier for things like industrial control systems (ICS)because all that needs to be replicated is the operator interfaces. Those interfaces are usually intentionally bland and typically dated - meaning really simple, standardized graphical assets I can imagine a complete mine recreation would be a huge development effort - especially with how huge they get. Is that something that like a camera drone could scan? i guess it could get the topology figured out with some special software, but could it get the signs and landmarks too? Can drones fly effectively in a mine?
- 6y ago
- jslakro 6y agoSome of the best strategic sims: Sim City -> Theme Hospital -> Game Dev Tycoon -> Kerbal Space Program -> Factorio
- kortex 6y agoFactorio has genuinely taught me lessons about software design. - learn where in your stack it's worth optimizing vs just let it chug along inefficiently. - Unintuitively, often a simple, inefficient, unmaintainable automation slapped together is better than something well-written, especially in the domain of ML/data munging - feedback is essential. When I started, I didn't spend much time in the plots windows. This is your QA dash. Pushed me heavily into using integrated CI pipelines - don't be afraid of rewrites. But do have ample tests. - CSP rocks It's even pushed me from a "pythonic" dynamic style to writing much more golang and python that feels a bit like go.
- darzu 6y agoCSP?
- kortex 6y agoCommunicating Sequential Processing. It's a multithreading/processing model which as the name suggests, leans more on communication, less on sharing memory. It's not as efficient for some types of computing, like doing tons of operations on the same buffer, but it scales horizontally very nicely.
- lucb1e 6y agoWith formatting: """ - learn where in your stack it's worth optimizing vs just let it chug along inefficiently. - Unintuitively, often a simple, inefficient, unmaintainable automation slapped together is better than something well-written, especially in the domain of ML/data munging - feedback is essential. When I started, I didn't spend much time in the plots windows. This is your QA dash. Pushed me heavily into using integrated CI pipelines - don't be afraid of rewrites. But do have ample tests. - CSP rocks
- octygen 6y agoWhat they built feels like the business simulation holy grail where it transcends to being fun as opposed to setting triangle distributions in Arena (example of an old-school business sim software we used at some point to simulate ambulance times). Now if only there was interest for other types of simulations like: SimClimate, SimSociety, SimPandemic.
- bauc 6y agoDidn't take long but LGR has just released a video of him playing it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs
- dehrmann 6y agoClinging through to the Archive.org link... Not sure if it's nostalgia, but the Maxis logo still looks really good. It doesn't scream 1992.
- malka 6y agoIt was litteraly developped by the BS division. >From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/ https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/