13 ms·

Documentation related to the implementation of SimCity 2000

242 points by Lammy 4y ago

everyone 4y ago
Tangentially related but interesting imo... https://youtu.be/_51_YJQpeg0 https://youtu.be/_51_YJQpeg0
- snac 4y ago
  This could be interesting paired with the documentation posted: https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/simulation%20spec.md#crime-model https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/simulation%2... In the video you posted, the host talks about Magnasanti a project to create the perfect city (in the eyes of the game). There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or traffic. A population of 6 million with no hospitals, and no public funding except mass transit and police. Ultimately we can see that the game does not reward citizen happiness, but industry. The "black box" nature of the simulation within SimCity is fascinating, thank you for the rabbit hole.
  - adql 4y ago
    That's kinda the problem with some actual city planning, running it as business instead of service
- nirvgorilla 4y ago
  [flagged]
mysterydip 4y ago
> The newspaper specification is considered a work in progress as it can parse all of the text, but very little around how stories are composed has been determined. This is the part I was most interested in seeing how it worked, unfortunately not developed much yet.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Has anybody asked Wil Wright to explain it to us?
casenmgreen 4y ago
I spent a lot of time investigating SC2K. I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due to limitations in the transport simulation. The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful. However, at each junction, the trip randomly selection one of the routes. So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea where they should get off (this branch leads to industry, for example), and some trips just keep going round and round until they reach their max travel distance and fail. You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would go into this, and never emerge. In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.
- lopis 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - smcl 4y ago
    This doesn't seem related to the flaw that was described at all - it seems like it applies equally to both road and rail. So while Sim City is very US-centric ("zoning" felt like just a gaming construct to me and I was very surprised it existed in real life) it sounds like they just flubbed the pathfinding a bit.
    - nivenkos 4y ago
      Zoning exists outside the USA, sometimes implicit in planning permission.
      - smcl 4y ago
        That's probably right but, at least where I grew up, it's not something you'd know about unless you are building your own house. And it's a bit more flexible than "this bit here is residential, and this separate bit here is commercial" - these things can be mixed.
cloudmike 4y ago
A friend of mine is making a new city-builder called Metropolis 1998 [1]. If you're into SimCity 2000 specifics, you might also enjoy his dev updates where he posts about his pixel graphics engine, custom pathfinding for agents/cars, etc. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/ (his subreddit is called Archapolis but he recently changed the name)
- jwmoz 4y ago
  That looks like a really cool project to work on. The name is great.
- YesBox 4y ago
  Thanks for linking me! :) SimCity 2000 was the first simulation game I've ever played. I had a neighbor friend who had a copy and I watched him play a couple times before I was hooked.
mdtrooper 4y ago
There was a good wiki about file format and other things of games: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097508 But it is offline (more or less two years): https://web.archive.org/web/20180127174342/http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/wiki/Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20180127174342/http://rewiki.reg...
CalRobert 4y ago
People might be interested in this - ever notice there's no parking in sim city? https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...
- rendaw 4y ago
  > In other words: SimCity deliberately misleads players about parking because if they showed parking in its true dimensions, it might make dysfunctional land use patterns look (and act) dysfunctional. > And we can't have that. That seems like a fairly bad faith reading of the interview comments. In SC2K you only have so many pixels per building. Even the newer sim cities are not proportional, it's not like looking at a satellite map.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    Simcity (originally) was based on problematic books like Urban Dynamics (https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hidden-politics-ideology-urban-dynamics https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...), which has heavily influenced every other city builder ever since. I don't think things like the lack of parking are an accident. I wouldn't be surprised if real harm caused by social policy/planning could be traced to some degree to Simcity. Further reading: https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/ https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    And if it were a simulation most of the pixels would be parking lots instead of buildings.
- walrus01 4y ago
  For a good example, the red shading here is what portion of downtown Edmonton, AB is dedicated to parking: https://i.redd.it/p7fofu76ols91.jpg https://i.redd.it/p7fofu76ols91.jpg
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
nyberg 4y ago
https://aeplay.org/citybound https://aeplay.org/citybound might be interesting or the talks related to it given that (afaik) it simulates traffic better than simcity
elevaet 4y ago
Which is the best SimCity (by whatever criteria you find important)? The only one I ever tried was the OG, which I absolutely loved at the time.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  I loved SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. The modding for SimCity 4 in particular was (is?) out of this world.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- izacus 4y ago
  Cities: Skylines is probably the best SimCity these days.
  - goodoldneon 4y ago
    I've played a lot of Skylines but it doesn't quite feel like a SimCity. I think it has a dearth of quirkiness (e.g. it has 0 llamas)
    - massysett 4y ago
      The quirkiness is in the building art, the Twitter clone, and the radio stations. My favorite is the radio commercial for "The Law Accounting".
      - db48x 4y ago
        Personally turn off the stupid twitter clone and radio stations. The fake commercials and radio DJs and stuff are ok once, but you’ll hear each of those clips far, far too often. Just play your favorite music in the background. But I agree that SimCity had a unique character that Cities: Skylines doesn’t try to replicate. Instead of trying to clone SimCity they went their own direction, which is on the whole a good thing.
- 4y ago
scrlk 4y ago
Unrelated to SC2k, but I hope someone decides to kick off an "OpenSimCity4" project in the future, in a similar vein to OpenTTD or OpenRCT2. IMO SC4 is still the peak of the genre, good depth to the simulation and a pleasing style of graphics. Sadly I never got on with Cities Skylines.
- spongeb00b 4y ago
  SC4 also has an impressive modding community still adding new features.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I have a lot of love for SC4 but once I “got onboard” with the smaller cities in Skylines (and computers got better) with mods it’s not super bad.
TapamN 4y ago
I did a bit of work on re-implementing SC2K years ago (it was going to be called "21st Century Micropolis") that never got much further than creating asset rippers, a city viewer, and researching into how the simulation works. Nothing playable. I did discover a semi-easter egg in the newspaper. One paper has an opinions section, and there are two possible lines that have fixed names (both are in the list of tax complaints): -fred Haslam: "I just *[0x7f] to say, property taxes are primitive, repressive and regressive. only barbaric societies continues to tax the rich." -pat Mullanney: "you bet I mind! I feel like the *mo's got a gun to my side, robbing me of MY *[0xb9]." Fred Haslam was a programmer on SC2K, and was also credited for being one of the newspaper writers. I'm not sure who Pat Mullanney is.
HeckFeck 4y ago
Is this the genesis of an OpenSC2K, much like OpenRCT and OpenTTD?
antifa 4y ago
City Skylines is great, but if it's not SC2K enough for you, checkout Theotown which is on steam and android/iOS.

242 points by Lammy 4y ago

everyone 4y ago

Tangentially related but interesting imo... https://youtu.be/_51_YJQpeg0 https://youtu.be/_51_YJQpeg0

snac 4y ago
This could be interesting paired with the documentation posted: https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/simulation%20spec.md#crime-model https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/simulation%2... In the video you posted, the host talks about Magnasanti a project to create the perfect city (in the eyes of the game). There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or traffic. A population of 6 million with no hospitals, and no public funding except mass transit and police. Ultimately we can see that the game does not reward citizen happiness, but industry. The "black box" nature of the simulation within SimCity is fascinating, thank you for the rabbit hole.
- adql 4y ago
  That's kinda the problem with some actual city planning, running it as business instead of service
nirvgorilla 4y ago
[flagged]

mysterydip 4y ago

> The newspaper specification is considered a work in progress as it can parse all of the text, but very little around how stories are composed has been determined. This is the part I was most interested in seeing how it worked, unfortunately not developed much yet.

aliqot 4y ago
Has anybody asked Wil Wright to explain it to us?

casenmgreen 4y ago

I spent a lot of time investigating SC2K. I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due to limitations in the transport simulation. The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful. However, at each junction, the trip randomly selection one of the routes. So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea where they should get off (this branch leads to industry, for example), and some trips just keep going round and round until they reach their max travel distance and fail. You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would go into this, and never emerge. In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.

lopis 4y ago
[flagged]
- smcl 4y ago
  This doesn't seem related to the flaw that was described at all - it seems like it applies equally to both road and rail. So while Sim City is very US-centric ("zoning" felt like just a gaming construct to me and I was very surprised it existed in real life) it sounds like they just flubbed the pathfinding a bit.
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    Zoning exists outside the USA, sometimes implicit in planning permission.
    - smcl 4y ago
      That's probably right but, at least where I grew up, it's not something you'd know about unless you are building your own house. And it's a bit more flexible than "this bit here is residential, and this separate bit here is commercial" - these things can be mixed.

cloudmike 4y ago

A friend of mine is making a new city-builder called Metropolis 1998 [1]. If you're into SimCity 2000 specifics, you might also enjoy his dev updates where he posts about his pixel graphics engine, custom pathfinding for agents/cars, etc. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/ (his subreddit is called Archapolis but he recently changed the name)

jwmoz 4y ago
That looks like a really cool project to work on. The name is great.
YesBox 4y ago
Thanks for linking me! :) SimCity 2000 was the first simulation game I've ever played. I had a neighbor friend who had a copy and I watched him play a couple times before I was hooked.

mdtrooper 4y ago

There was a good wiki about file format and other things of games: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097508 But it is offline (more or less two years): https://web.archive.org/web/20180127174342/http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/wiki/Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20180127174342/http://rewiki.reg...

CalRobert 4y ago

People might be interested in this - ever notice there's no parking in sim city? https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

rendaw 4y ago
> In other words: SimCity deliberately misleads players about parking because if they showed parking in its true dimensions, it might make dysfunctional land use patterns look (and act) dysfunctional. > And we can't have that. That seems like a fairly bad faith reading of the interview comments. In SC2K you only have so many pixels per building. Even the newer sim cities are not proportional, it's not like looking at a satellite map.
- Sakos 4y ago
  Simcity (originally) was based on problematic books like Urban Dynamics (https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hidden-politics-ideology-urban-dynamics https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...), which has heavily influenced every other city builder ever since. I don't think things like the lack of parking are an accident. I wouldn't be surprised if real harm caused by social policy/planning could be traced to some degree to Simcity. Further reading: https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/ https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/
- CalRobert 4y ago
  And if it were a simulation most of the pixels would be parking lots instead of buildings.
walrus01 4y ago
For a good example, the red shading here is what portion of downtown Edmonton, AB is dedicated to parking: https://i.redd.it/p7fofu76ols91.jpg https://i.redd.it/p7fofu76ols91.jpg
- thrdbndndn 4y ago

nyberg 4y ago

https://aeplay.org/citybound https://aeplay.org/citybound might be interesting or the talks related to it given that (afaik) it simulates traffic better than simcity

elevaet 4y ago

Which is the best SimCity (by whatever criteria you find important)? The only one I ever tried was the OG, which I absolutely loved at the time.

Dalewyn 4y ago
I loved SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. The modding for SimCity 4 in particular was (is?) out of this world.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
izacus 4y ago
Cities: Skylines is probably the best SimCity these days.
- goodoldneon 4y ago
  I've played a lot of Skylines but it doesn't quite feel like a SimCity. I think it has a dearth of quirkiness (e.g. it has 0 llamas)
  - massysett 4y ago
    The quirkiness is in the building art, the Twitter clone, and the radio stations. My favorite is the radio commercial for "The Law Accounting".
    - db48x 4y ago
      Personally turn off the stupid twitter clone and radio stations. The fake commercials and radio DJs and stuff are ok once, but you’ll hear each of those clips far, far too often. Just play your favorite music in the background. But I agree that SimCity had a unique character that Cities: Skylines doesn’t try to replicate. Instead of trying to clone SimCity they went their own direction, which is on the whole a good thing.
4y ago

scrlk 4y ago

Unrelated to SC2k, but I hope someone decides to kick off an "OpenSimCity4" project in the future, in a similar vein to OpenTTD or OpenRCT2. IMO SC4 is still the peak of the genre, good depth to the simulation and a pleasing style of graphics. Sadly I never got on with Cities Skylines.

spongeb00b 4y ago
SC4 also has an impressive modding community still adding new features.
bombcar 4y ago
I have a lot of love for SC4 but once I “got onboard” with the smaller cities in Skylines (and computers got better) with mods it’s not super bad.

TapamN 4y ago

I did a bit of work on re-implementing SC2K years ago (it was going to be called "21st Century Micropolis") that never got much further than creating asset rippers, a city viewer, and researching into how the simulation works. Nothing playable. I did discover a semi-easter egg in the newspaper. One paper has an opinions section, and there are two possible lines that have fixed names (both are in the list of tax complaints): -fred Haslam: "I just *[0x7f] to say, property taxes are primitive, repressive and regressive. only barbaric societies continues to tax the rich." -pat Mullanney: "you bet I mind! I feel like the *mo's got a gun to my side, robbing me of MY *[0xb9]." Fred Haslam was a programmer on SC2K, and was also credited for being one of the newspaper writers. I'm not sure who Pat Mullanney is.

HeckFeck 4y ago

Is this the genesis of an OpenSC2K, much like OpenRCT and OpenTTD?

antifa 4y ago

City Skylines is great, but if it's not SC2K enough for you, checkout Theotown which is on steam and android/iOS.