12 ms·

SimCity’s Sims Don’t Seem That Smart After All

247 points by webjunkie 14y ago

arkitaip 14y ago
How wasn't this discovered in beta? Why didn't reviewers catch any of this?
- Avalaxy 14y ago
  Probably because most people playing a beta just see it as an opportunity to play the game before it's released. Most people don't understand that they should be _testing_ the game. That's the whole point of a beta test right?
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    I was in the beta - from the get-go it was clear that EA was interested in using the beta to test their backend, not the game itself. There was no built-in mechanism for feedback or suggestions. It was a server-stress-test beta (heh, fat good it did), not a gameplay beta. Also, the beta is time-limited to one hour of play, and almost all buildings were locked out. There was not enough time for anyone to play enough to actually expose these problems (that come about only after your city has grown to some size).
    - Avalaxy 14y ago
      Ah, ok. Didn't play the Simcity beta, but that was just my experience with other games.
  - ersii 14y ago
    I was in the SimCity Beta1 and tested it thoroughly in the very limited time that was given. It was very hard to test different concepts and parts of the game - none the less, a lot of bugs and a lot of serious issues were found. I reported 10 separate issues with detailed specifications of my hardware and software setup - with detailed observed behaviour and actions that I could remember were related to the issues. There was an forum for the SimCity Beta1. There was plenty of individually reported issues discussed and tested by different persons, and there was good creative discussions going on as well. The forum had the functionality where you could click "I've had this too!" to a main post in the Bugs/Issues sub-forum. Then again, it was pretty obvious that we weren't supposed to test the game all that thoroughly - because of the limited game time and very restricted game play in general. It was basically a quick demo play. And that in itself is alright I guess. EA is large and has a lot of QA/Testers - not sure about the Maxis sub-division though.
- inerte 14y ago
  It was discovered, but someone decided it was worth the risk to release with the known bugs. This is becoming quite common with games, on PC or consoles. You just patch it later. Some games even have patches available on release day.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    I don't really see a problem with releasing patches on release day. If you need some lead time to get all your DVDs pressed and manuals printed and whatever, why not take advantage of that time to also polish the game in parallel? However, going any further is just not right. If the game is hopelessly buggy after release and needs to be patched later just to make it playable, well, what are people paying for?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - bryans 14y ago
    It makes perfect sense for there to be a patch on release day. There is a non-trivial amount of time between the completion of a game and when the discs are pressed, packaged and shipped to retailers in preparation for a release. There are bound to be both discoveries and opportunities to fix them during that period. That said, it's absolutely absurd to ship a game with universal bugs affecting core mechanics.
  - pseudonym 14y ago
    I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like Microsoft and Sony is a long process that can go for weeks (or much longer, if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and hope that you allocated your development time properly. Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office. *Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".
- netrus 14y ago
  And why did they get great marks from the press? They should have noticed, if it really affects the gameplay (I haven't played it).
  - OGC 14y ago
    Ha, independent gaming press. Good one.
  - kristofferR 14y ago
    It's still really fun, even with all its flaws. I've actually been watching hours of gameplay on Twitch and even that has been really entertaining. I can't play myself since I just have an "old" Macbook Air and a shitty net connection, since I'm travelling - but I really wish I could. http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/SimCity http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/SimCity
  - stonemetal 14y ago
    Typically the press is given a pre-release build so that they have a couple of weeks to play it before release and before the magazine hits the stand. They understand that getting early copies entails some work left to be done.
- simias 14y ago
  Well there seems to be several things in this article: the pathfinding issue seems quite glaring, but maybe it only occurs in certain corner cases. Working around pathfinding issues is also a classic in videogame history :). The first point (each sim not actually having its own "life") seems harder to catch, however in my opinion that is the main issue here. They can (and probably will) fix or at least improve pathfinding in following patches. However having the glassbox engine simulating individual "sims" instead of using heuristics and statistics to create traffic jams and the like was something that was advertised early on. It was also one of the major improvements over simcity 4 (which also had pathfinding issues by the way). I believe it was also the reason why they only allowed smaller cities that what was possible in simcity 4, simulating a huge number of citizen was supposedly too demanding. But if they don't do it properly in the end, what's the point anyway? Might as well go back to what 2003's simcity was doing.
  - clhodapp 14y ago
    I suspect that it occurs all the time, but usually manifests as "wtf, I keep adding and improving roads, but the traffic jams aren't going away".
potatolicious 14y ago
This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM. The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper. Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city with no intersections, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This forces your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one. Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains some semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears zero semblance to any real city, then it has failed. The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to grossly over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random. I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.
- HelloMcFly 14y ago
  I agree. While this behavior was apparently known and explained somewhat prior to release, I didn't know about it. I was prepared to give the a game a go once the connectivity issues were taken care of, but with this information I'm not even remotely interested anymore.
- jfoutz 14y ago
  Luckily, All of this calculation is done on the server, so you won't even need to download a patch when the fix the pathfinding. /snark
  - fidz 14y ago
    Could you confirm this?
gizmo 14y ago
With games you always have to create illusions of complexity in order to get acceptable performance. Smoke isn't real smoke (no real time smoothed particle hydrodynamics) but instead you billboard couple of semi-translucant textures. Bullets don't use real physics, but act as a point mass with specialized collision detection mechanics. Enemy AI is often just a simple state machine and hacked together heuristics. Everything is fake. With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region. SimCity has to model the economy, happiness, education, water, waste, power, pollution, traffic, industry, and much more. So if you want to do this for 100.000 Sims in real-time you've got to cut many corners. There's just no other way. And the illusion in SimCity 5 is pretty damn good, from what I've seen. Cars drive with purpose from one place to another. Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Air flow affects pollution in a sensible way. Sure, there are a bunch of bugs but in general the illusion holds up. It's really quite impressive.
- mikeash 14y ago
  There's nothing wrong with creating illusions of complexity, but if you hype up your game for months by saying that the smoke really is real-time smoothed particle hydrodynamics, it had better not turn out to just be a couple of sprites.
- revscat 14y ago
  > Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Did you read the article? The congestion makes no sense. And to the best of my recollection previous versions of SimCity were able to handle traffic just fine. I certainly do not remember them suffering from the congestion problems this version seems to be afflicted by.
  - Fargren 14y ago
    Sim City 4, which I think was the only previous one that actually modeled traffic, had some congestion issues. I don't remember them being as bad as this, however.
    - potatolicious 14y ago
Goronmon 14y ago
RPS already knew this is how it worked prior to release. http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_dont_seem_that_smart_after_all/c8uux82 http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_...
- kitsune_ 14y ago
  This was clear to anyone that followed the development of the game. It was made clear in many developers interviews and videos about the GlassBox engine. Hell, there are official developer videos that describe the GlassBox engine in detail dating back to early 2012. RPS knew about this behavior before the release of the game, to act surprised now is rather disingenuous and malevolent.
  - nextstep 14y ago
    You mean "disingenuous".
    - kitsune_ 14y ago
      Thanks, I'm a bit tired and English isn't my native language. I've edited the post.
- theg2 14y ago
  Of course they did, they're on the SimCity / EA hate bandwagon for page views. There aren't really any surprises in the game if you had been even cursorily following the development the past few years/months. They've learned the best way to get impressions is to act shocked and angry to mimic reddit.
JustARandomGuy 14y ago
and you absolutely cannot follow a Sim anywhere – once they’ve entered a building, whether residential, commercial or industrial, the game stops following them, and good luck finding them after. This made me laugh sadly. I remember playing SimTower when it was released in 1994, and you could follow any Sim around as he went about his day. It's now almost 20 years later, with vastly more powerful computers, and the AI engine is actually worse.
- mikepurvis 14y ago
  Rollercoaster Tycoon has the same mechanic—not only was each person a discrete, persistent individual, they had their own unique mood, stamina, hunger, tolerance for waiting, and individual tastes in amusements, food, etc.
  - stickydink 14y ago
    Until you picked them up and dropped them 10 tiles from the path, then they got a little lost ;)
    - milliams 14y ago
      It was built in Assembly though.
    - laumars 14y ago
      To be fair, I'd be quite disorientated too if a huge magic hand came down from the sky and transported me to another location. ;-) In all seriousness, I can forgive that kind of bug because it's the players manipulating the game in a non-realistic manner. If you don't push the sims about manually then mechanics were quite well done. In this, however, we're talking basic AI failing which is central to the game.
- legutierr 14y ago
  I wonder about relatively long-lived organizations like Maxis. Do they hold on to old code, or does it just disappear or fade away into obscurity? All of those games, most still playable, and all of that code have to present some value. If two decades later the performance of their new games is worse, however, even in this narrow area, it has to be that they have ignored their past. Is it the right thing just to throw that old stuff away, or to ignore it? Is there any value in looking back at old successes, and even in reusing some of that technology? The people who wrote that code are probably long gone, but that kind of situation doesn't stop big old companies in other industries from still relying on their ancient COBOL systems, for instance.
nanodeath 14y ago
I've found that the biggest problems have actually been in the emergency dispatch stuff. For one, police, ambulances, and fire trucks /get stuck in traffic/. Hugely obnoxious and unrealistic (at least, when there are open lanes on the other side of the road). The other problem is when if you have multiple events in the city at a time, e.g. two fires. Usually all or most of your fire trucks will go to the first building (and get stuck on each other in the process) and ignore the second one until its burned down. It's like there's nothing actually coordinating the vehicles and it's purely first-inferno-first-serve.
ics 14y ago
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU
- ry0ohki 14y ago
  This is key, the behavior is clearly by design.
- tiglionabbit 14y ago
  It would be nice to be able to see the invisible agents so you could find out what craziness is afoot when people start walking around in circles.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
I am the guy who builds agent-based models for fun. A lesson you learn quickly is that heterogeneity is your guardian angel - varying the path-finding model a little bit from agent to agent hedges against the resonance structures on display here. Additionally, you periodically check the accumulated micros against a macro model and correct gross deviations. Neither step is computationally strenuous.
- addlepate 14y ago
  It would seem that in order to take these steps one would have to give a crap, but no "giving a crap" has yet been on display WRT this game. What a disaster.
- aidos 14y ago
  Could you explain a little bit more about how that works - you used words I don't understand :) It seems as though something as simple as a random selection when presented with intersections is better than the behaviour here. I guess there should just be a weight on the streets though, right?
  - carlob 14y ago
    Let me translate this to physics talk for you: when you use a greedy algorithm with no interaction between agents and no randomness, it's effectively like bosons at zero temperature, they will all fall in the lowest energy state and form a Bose-Einstein condensate. This can be avoided in one of two ways, make them aware of each other, so that they can't all be in the same state (like fermions) or raise the temperature, i.e. add randomness. Probably you'll need to do both and find an energy function that's less retarded than choose the first branch you see…
    - skore 14y ago
      Apologies for going meta, but - Only on Hacker News will you see a "simpler" explanation involve the mention of Bose-Einstein condensate.
  - 14y ago
swartzrock 14y ago
I love these videos! You could almost teach a class on graph theory and AI with enough of them, and they look great!
drcode 14y ago
I feel like my latest HTML5 website is somehow pertinent to this discussion: http://lisperati.com/nfc/ http://lisperati.com/nfc/
- rivd 14y ago
  i dont know why you are downvoted, i see the link and think it's pretty cool. almost feel bad i dont live near the meetups :) maybe you should submit it to the frontpage ?
  - ars 14y ago
    It's cool, and he's proud of his work. But it really doesn't have anything to do with the discussion.
dyselon 14y ago
> Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path, no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part. I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels "cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do about some of the pathfinding issues. Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such little hoodlums. [EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post. Whoops.
JonnieCache 14y ago
"rather than individual little Simmy lives, they instead operate as an homogeneous mass, distributing themselves like a collection of marbles rolling down a board covered in holes. As they reach a job, whichever job, ignoring their previous day’s job, they take it, until all the jobs are taken. It doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial or industrial job – they just roll until they fall into the next available slot. ... They don’t trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence." This reads like a terrifying vision of a perfectly optimized post-fordist near-future dystopia. Maybe the Maxis gang have deeper ideas in mind than we realised...
cmelbye 14y ago
I've noticed some weirdness with this as well. I'm not sure if this is intentional behavior or not, but I had a Nuclear power plant in my city, which has more than enough capacity for the entire city. However, when you look at the power view which shows how electricity is flowing through the streets, it seems as if the units of electricity travel randomly through the streets and would actually not reach certain streets and just pass by them. This caused blackouts in certain areas of the city, and required me to build a smaller power plant by this area of the city to restore power. Is this correct behavior? Is electricity supposed to have some sort of limit of how far it can travel?
- ry0ohki 14y ago
  I couldn't figure out why one area of my city kept having brown outs and water shortages, until I read this help article. Then I realized it was my street traffic that was a bottleneck. Yes, busses and cars stacked up at the entrance to my city was preventing power and water from getting to an area, just like real life.
- chiph 14y ago
  There are transmission losses when moving electricity along wires (I seem to recall it's up to 10-12% on long-distance lines in the US). But the electrons don't do stuff like bypass entire streets...
  - cmelbye 14y ago
    Yeah I mean certainly power can't travel forever in long distance wires, but the "electrons" we're passing right by a side street when they got to an intersection. There was no issue in other cities when I starting exporting that extra power to them.
cmelbye 14y ago
No big deal, obviously all they need to do is push out a server update since all of the calculations are being done there.
chao- 14y ago
The single biggest question on my mind is how this ended up functioning worse than the community-made solutions such as NAM (Network Addon Mod) for Sim City 4. If all they did was monkey-copy that behavior, available for many years now, I would have been more satisfied. I am reminded of Gabe Newell's recent comment of how “[Valve] can’t compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little, but by a lot.”[1] and am starting to understand what he meant in a more visceral way: My low-bar for the experience, my expectation of quality, was not for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4. My expectation was for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4 Plus Community Content, because to my brain in consumer mode, those last 3 words don't exist, and it all just gets the label "Sim City 4" on the experience. [1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-newell-claims-users-have-defeated-valve-created-content-and-thats-a-go http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-ne...
josscrowcroft 14y ago
"They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence." Strangely enough, I can relate.
methodover 14y ago
The response from the community in regards to SimCity is understandable -- but also disturbing. SimCity isn't unplayable. Quite the opposite. It is an engrossing, beautiful, rich game with plenty of gameplay available. I've played the game for probably forty hours so far, across four different cities -- and the game has only been out for a week. That's amazing. A game hasn't captured my attention like this in quite a while. And yet, many players seem to believe the game is completely unplayable. The top comment on this thread as I write this says that the game is a 'travesty' and shouldn't have been shipped. That's unreasonable. I can only begin to imagine what SimCity's developers are feeling right now. They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about how shit it is. Usually I place the blame at the feet of the developers, but not this time. This time, I think it's the community that needs to get over it. There is a rich, great game here if you just look past your own expectations for half a second.
- benjarrell 14y ago
  It is broken when things such as this happen all to regularly: http://i.imgur.com/7cd6VZV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7cd6VZV.jpg Every single police car in the entire city will respond to the exact same crime in progress, ignoring all others, creating a traffic black hole, and leaving you with no police.
  - jellicle 14y ago
    Things like that could not help but have been noticed. Somewhere there is a bug report: "All police cars respond to every crime". It is marked something like "WONTFIX - by design" or "WONTFIX - no time before release" or "WISHLIST". That is all anyone needs to know about the game to judge it.
- IheartApplesDix 14y ago
  You know what else is playable? Simcity 2000, 3000, 4, etc. Sorry, but "playable" is putting your pants on in the morning, especially in the niche of AAA, DRM'd, persistent, service based gaming markets like this. Nobody pays a premium for incomplete services unless those are some top notch services; not services just billed that way and described in terms of reticulated splines. Just because corporations now have the rights to buy and sell concepts that should have passed into public domain decades ago doesn't mean that they really "own" the public awareness, emotional investment and their passions. Rights can be bound by laws and recorded on paper, but you can't put a price on 10 million fans and tell them to suck it up and drop their expectations because they are legally owned. When you buy a franchise like this, you're really buying a responsibility, not a cash cow to be milked until a husk. To EA this is just another product reaching the end of it's life cycle and they're trying to stay profitable while keeping the lights on, and it doesn't matter if that means ripping out half the game and replacing it with anti-features and price tags. I think publishers and "innocent developers just doing what their boss asked" may be the entitled ones here, thinking they deserve a payday because they worked hard bringing you a game that is quite profitable to operate. You know who else worked hard, harder than anyone else? Hitler.
agentultra 14y ago
After purchasing the game and enduring the mess that is forced logins, I thought the game was pretty good. I haven't encountered any of the path finding issues discussed or demonstrated in the article. However I haven't put that much time in to it and haven't bothered to look. As a casual player it seems like a pretty rock-solid game so far. I'm curious how the alternatives stack up. I'm not terribly pleased with Sim City 5 due to the online-only component. Has anyone tried CitiesXL Platinum for example? Are there others?
zeidrich 14y ago
If you watch their videos on the glassbox system on youtube you'll find that this is exactly how they billed it. It was users who expected more. Not that it's bad to expect more. The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra. In the new Sim City, there's a few components, There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on the area. There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power, pollution, profit. There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to another and carry resources. There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents. So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically: You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction resource is depleted. A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname. From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination of the requesting commercial business. During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way back it will respond to it. When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens. When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available. If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents, the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building increments. Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1 and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun. It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area, residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle, instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the circle. In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory. Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds. Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to increase happiness or education. I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off when they reevaluate their paths. The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck, and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge into another congested road on the other side anyways. The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to find an opening in a residential building. If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights. I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game. However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once. Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm not sure about that.
matterhorn 14y ago
My impression is that EA has some great creative talent, but that the business management function is entrusted to people who have honesty and competence issues. One of the big problems with American business is the focus on academic credentials, particularly with regard to "soft skills" (no skills?) in areas such as management. You will not learn management in a classroom. Furthermore, if you can't grasp the fundamentals of what you are supposedly managing, then you are just in the way. The path ought to be: Become an engineer -> Become a high-performing engineer -> Get some business education -> Do management If you can't handle the engineering phases, why on earth should anybody put you in a decision-making position in an engineer endeavor? While the practice should not be barred, it is unproductive for universities to offer "management" degrees at the undergraduate level, unless such degrees require the demonstration of significant prior work experience. Graduate management programs should not accept twentysomethings arriving straight from undergraduate programs. Less fluff, more umpf.
- EvanKelly 14y ago
  It seems your experience in the business/corporate engineering world is vastly different than mine. The problem with your path to management is that many engineers have no desire to manage, and anecdotally, those who do, end up being ill-suited for management. The best managers I've had are not top engineers, rather they're managers that are willing to understand and listen to their top performing engineers. Google/Microsoft/etc. offer PM positions to students directly out of undergrad. From my experience, the skillset between a top-performing engineer is vastly different from that of a top-performing and well liked PM.
  - sirclueless 14y ago
    They still hire people from engineering and math backgrounds. People who you know have the competence to understand any technical problem you throw at them, at least at a shallow operational level. The prerequisite is deep mathematical, rational and process-oriented thinking. You can get that lots of ways, but an MBA alone won't give it to you.
    - 14y ago
bentcorner 14y ago
If EA thinks that the vocal minority is worth saving, they need a hero. They need to hire somebody popular and smart that can say "hey everybody, EA asked for my help, I'm helping them figure out how to solve this. The server issues are mostly resolved now and we thank you for your patience. Over the next few weeks I'll blog about Sims behavior and modeling, and what changes you can expect to see. SimCity is already simulating an incredible amount of detail but many of you noticed situations where we didn't do so well. Expect to see improvements over the next few months that will address these problems." We've already heard EA's leadership say there's nothing wrong with the game. Even if they admit to any problems, they have little trust with the community. I have to admit to some schadenfreude about this whole fiasco. On the surface it is a very pretty game, it'll be interesting to see how EA addresses the community discontent.
3dptz 14y ago
Notwithstanding all the bad press SimCity got since launch; I got the game 3 days after it's release. I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase. During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected server 'Europe West 6' and started playing. Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay. I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend). All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10 of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking great to play! "This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM. The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper." Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or denying the initial server problems. "...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken." Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.
- saraid216 14y ago
  You've only been on HN a month, but give it a year. You'll get used to the wild hyperbole, especially in the top comment. It's how people get attention.
- webjunkie 14y ago
  Sure it's fun in the beginning. But please report back if you still find the game challenging and rewarding after a week.
eps 14y ago
Makes you wonder if the backend issues were geniune or if it was a way to buy more time for finishing the game (and to release something on a promised date).
10thfloor 14y ago
Will somebody please write a positive review of this game and put an end to the incessant trolling ... For example, the attention to detail in the design is astonishing. It is truly the best, and most 'realistic' Simcity to date...
10thfloor 14y ago
Will somebody please write a positive review of this game and put an end to the incessant trolling ... For example, the attention to detail in the design is astonishing. It is truly the best, and most 'realistic' Simcity to date...
ghshephard 14y ago
What's disappointing to me is that, unlike Settlers 7, Caesar 3, or Stronghold - we don't have 100% intelligent agent simulation creating emergent properties and markets. I used to spend hours, with all three of those products, watching agents go about their various chores and skills, and be either gated on another agent's behavior or resources, or have a clear pipeline stocked up for them to perform. Sounds like I'll get sub-optimal non-intelligent behavior from SimCity, which is sad. I rather have a smaller environment, that was 100% intelligent agent based.
bane 14y ago
man...and all I wanted was basically SC4 in 3d with mixed-use zoning, curved roads and a more robust transport network. I would have thrown money at them for that game.
hristov 14y ago
EA should just hire Toady one from dwarf fortress to do the Sim simulation. Dwarf fortress has very complex and very accurate path-finding as well as excellent creature simulation. That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a lot of resources, like EA.
- rurounijones 14y ago
  Dwarf Fortress can also bring my 1 year old quad core computer to a crawl. I also seem to remember that once he left debugging symbols in a build and people managed to use it to determine that all path-finding is done twice for some reason. Not the person I think that could help EA with performance problems :p
  - mbetter 14y ago
    You ever misplace something and have to retrace your steps to find it? Dwarves are pretty dumb so they have to do that all the time.
jasonlingx 14y ago
They should call it SimCity Lemmings :)
smutticus 14y ago
As a network engineer who spends his days routing packets around the internets I find this hilarious. What if every intersection were to function as a sort of router with each road leading from it as a link? Then distribute routes between intersections and calculate shortest path using the Dijkstra algorithm(OSPF). They could even implement congestion control by having clogged intersections stop advertising routes periodically. Have a problem with cops, fire trucks and ambulances not getting through? Put them in a different QOS queue that prioritizes them. This is a solved problem in so many ways. They could literally buy these algorithms from people with decades of experience working on this class of problems.

247 points by webjunkie 14y ago

arkitaip 14y ago

How wasn't this discovered in beta? Why didn't reviewers catch any of this?

Avalaxy 14y ago
Probably because most people playing a beta just see it as an opportunity to play the game before it's released. Most people don't understand that they should be _testing_ the game. That's the whole point of a beta test right?
- potatolicious 14y ago
  I was in the beta - from the get-go it was clear that EA was interested in using the beta to test their backend, not the game itself. There was no built-in mechanism for feedback or suggestions. It was a server-stress-test beta (heh, fat good it did), not a gameplay beta. Also, the beta is time-limited to one hour of play, and almost all buildings were locked out. There was not enough time for anyone to play enough to actually expose these problems (that come about only after your city has grown to some size).
  - Avalaxy 14y ago
    Ah, ok. Didn't play the Simcity beta, but that was just my experience with other games.
- ersii 14y ago
  I was in the SimCity Beta1 and tested it thoroughly in the very limited time that was given. It was very hard to test different concepts and parts of the game - none the less, a lot of bugs and a lot of serious issues were found. I reported 10 separate issues with detailed specifications of my hardware and software setup - with detailed observed behaviour and actions that I could remember were related to the issues. There was an forum for the SimCity Beta1. There was plenty of individually reported issues discussed and tested by different persons, and there was good creative discussions going on as well. The forum had the functionality where you could click "I've had this too!" to a main post in the Bugs/Issues sub-forum. Then again, it was pretty obvious that we weren't supposed to test the game all that thoroughly - because of the limited game time and very restricted game play in general. It was basically a quick demo play. And that in itself is alright I guess. EA is large and has a lot of QA/Testers - not sure about the Maxis sub-division though.
inerte 14y ago
It was discovered, but someone decided it was worth the risk to release with the known bugs. This is becoming quite common with games, on PC or consoles. You just patch it later. Some games even have patches available on release day.
- mikeash 14y ago
  I don't really see a problem with releasing patches on release day. If you need some lead time to get all your DVDs pressed and manuals printed and whatever, why not take advantage of that time to also polish the game in parallel? However, going any further is just not right. If the game is hopelessly buggy after release and needs to be patched later just to make it playable, well, what are people paying for?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- bryans 14y ago
  It makes perfect sense for there to be a patch on release day. There is a non-trivial amount of time between the completion of a game and when the discs are pressed, packaged and shipped to retailers in preparation for a release. There are bound to be both discoveries and opportunities to fix them during that period. That said, it's absolutely absurd to ship a game with universal bugs affecting core mechanics.
- pseudonym 14y ago
  I used to rag on the whole "patches on release day" thing, but you have to compare that to the idea that getting a "final" build through 1st parties like Microsoft and Sony is a long process that can go for weeks (or much longer, if you're actually doing a physical disc). If you wait until you have an actually final gold master version of the game, you then have developers working on "Day 1 DLC" (which gets quite a lot of flak as it is), or sitting on their hands. So what you actually do is ship your version 0.98 with the bugs that you expect to be able to fix within your window, start both the process for submitting the game and the process for submitting a patch, and hope that you allocated your development time properly. Needless to say, this comes back and bites a lot of people in the ass, but for a lot of small game studios a 2-6 week delay in a game ship can be the difference between solvency and firing everyone in the office. *Needless to say, this is probably a completely inappropriate workflow for someone like EA/Maxis, who probably had some suits that said said "well, other people do it, so we should do it too".
netrus 14y ago
And why did they get great marks from the press? They should have noticed, if it really affects the gameplay (I haven't played it).
- OGC 14y ago
  Ha, independent gaming press. Good one.
- kristofferR 14y ago
  It's still really fun, even with all its flaws. I've actually been watching hours of gameplay on Twitch and even that has been really entertaining. I can't play myself since I just have an "old" Macbook Air and a shitty net connection, since I'm travelling - but I really wish I could. http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/SimCity http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/SimCity
- stonemetal 14y ago
  Typically the press is given a pre-release build so that they have a couple of weeks to play it before release and before the magazine hits the stand. They understand that getting early copies entails some work left to be done.
simias 14y ago
Well there seems to be several things in this article: the pathfinding issue seems quite glaring, but maybe it only occurs in certain corner cases. Working around pathfinding issues is also a classic in videogame history :). The first point (each sim not actually having its own "life") seems harder to catch, however in my opinion that is the main issue here. They can (and probably will) fix or at least improve pathfinding in following patches. However having the glassbox engine simulating individual "sims" instead of using heuristics and statistics to create traffic jams and the like was something that was advertised early on. It was also one of the major improvements over simcity 4 (which also had pathfinding issues by the way). I believe it was also the reason why they only allowed smaller cities that what was possible in simcity 4, simulating a huge number of citizen was supposedly too demanding. But if they don't do it properly in the end, what's the point anyway? Might as well go back to what 2003's simcity was doing.
- clhodapp 14y ago
  I suspect that it occurs all the time, but usually manifests as "wtf, I keep adding and improving roads, but the traffic jams aren't going away".

potatolicious 14y ago

This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM. The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper. Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city with no intersections, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This forces your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one. Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains some semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears zero semblance to any real city, then it has failed. The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to grossly over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random. I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.

HelloMcFly 14y ago
I agree. While this behavior was apparently known and explained somewhat prior to release, I didn't know about it. I was prepared to give the a game a go once the connectivity issues were taken care of, but with this information I'm not even remotely interested anymore.
jfoutz 14y ago
Luckily, All of this calculation is done on the server, so you won't even need to download a patch when the fix the pathfinding. /snark
- fidz 14y ago
  Could you confirm this?

gizmo 14y ago

With games you always have to create illusions of complexity in order to get acceptable performance. Smoke isn't real smoke (no real time smoothed particle hydrodynamics) but instead you billboard couple of semi-translucant textures. Bullets don't use real physics, but act as a point mass with specialized collision detection mechanics. Enemy AI is often just a simple state machine and hacked together heuristics. Everything is fake. With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region. SimCity has to model the economy, happiness, education, water, waste, power, pollution, traffic, industry, and much more. So if you want to do this for 100.000 Sims in real-time you've got to cut many corners. There's just no other way. And the illusion in SimCity 5 is pretty damn good, from what I've seen. Cars drive with purpose from one place to another. Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Air flow affects pollution in a sensible way. Sure, there are a bunch of bugs but in general the illusion holds up. It's really quite impressive.

mikeash 14y ago
There's nothing wrong with creating illusions of complexity, but if you hype up your game for months by saying that the smoke really is real-time smoothed particle hydrodynamics, it had better not turn out to just be a couple of sprites.
revscat 14y ago
> Traffic congestion seems to make sense. Did you read the article? The congestion makes no sense. And to the best of my recollection previous versions of SimCity were able to handle traffic just fine. I certainly do not remember them suffering from the congestion problems this version seems to be afflicted by.
- Fargren 14y ago
  Sim City 4, which I think was the only previous one that actually modeled traffic, had some congestion issues. I don't remember them being as bad as this, however.
  - potatolicious 14y ago

Goronmon 14y ago

RPS already knew this is how it worked prior to release. http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_dont_seem_that_smart_after_all/c8uux82 http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a7tat/simcitys_sims_...

kitsune_ 14y ago
This was clear to anyone that followed the development of the game. It was made clear in many developers interviews and videos about the GlassBox engine. Hell, there are official developer videos that describe the GlassBox engine in detail dating back to early 2012. RPS knew about this behavior before the release of the game, to act surprised now is rather disingenuous and malevolent.
- nextstep 14y ago
  You mean "disingenuous".
  - kitsune_ 14y ago
    Thanks, I'm a bit tired and English isn't my native language. I've edited the post.
theg2 14y ago
Of course they did, they're on the SimCity / EA hate bandwagon for page views. There aren't really any surprises in the game if you had been even cursorily following the development the past few years/months. They've learned the best way to get impressions is to act shocked and angry to mimic reddit.

JustARandomGuy 14y ago

and you absolutely cannot follow a Sim anywhere – once they’ve entered a building, whether residential, commercial or industrial, the game stops following them, and good luck finding them after. This made me laugh sadly. I remember playing SimTower when it was released in 1994, and you could follow any Sim around as he went about his day. It's now almost 20 years later, with vastly more powerful computers, and the AI engine is actually worse.

mikepurvis 14y ago
Rollercoaster Tycoon has the same mechanic—not only was each person a discrete, persistent individual, they had their own unique mood, stamina, hunger, tolerance for waiting, and individual tastes in amusements, food, etc.
- stickydink 14y ago
  Until you picked them up and dropped them 10 tiles from the path, then they got a little lost ;)
  - milliams 14y ago
    It was built in Assembly though.
  - laumars 14y ago
    To be fair, I'd be quite disorientated too if a huge magic hand came down from the sky and transported me to another location. ;-) In all seriousness, I can forgive that kind of bug because it's the players manipulating the game in a non-realistic manner. If you don't push the sims about manually then mechanics were quite well done. In this, however, we're talking basic AI failing which is central to the game.
legutierr 14y ago
I wonder about relatively long-lived organizations like Maxis. Do they hold on to old code, or does it just disappear or fade away into obscurity? All of those games, most still playable, and all of that code have to present some value. If two decades later the performance of their new games is worse, however, even in this narrow area, it has to be that they have ignored their past. Is it the right thing just to throw that old stuff away, or to ignore it? Is there any value in looking back at old successes, and even in reusing some of that technology? The people who wrote that code are probably long gone, but that kind of situation doesn't stop big old companies in other industries from still relying on their ancient COBOL systems, for instance.

nanodeath 14y ago

I've found that the biggest problems have actually been in the emergency dispatch stuff. For one, police, ambulances, and fire trucks /get stuck in traffic/. Hugely obnoxious and unrealistic (at least, when there are open lanes on the other side of the road). The other problem is when if you have multiple events in the city at a time, e.g. two fires. Usually all or most of your fire trucks will go to the first building (and get stuck on each other in the process) and ignore the second one until its burned down. It's like there's nothing actually coordinating the vehicles and it's purely first-inferno-first-serve.

ics 14y ago

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU

ry0ohki 14y ago
This is key, the behavior is clearly by design.
tiglionabbit 14y ago
It would be nice to be able to see the invisible agents so you could find out what craziness is afoot when people start walking around in circles.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

I am the guy who builds agent-based models for fun. A lesson you learn quickly is that heterogeneity is your guardian angel - varying the path-finding model a little bit from agent to agent hedges against the resonance structures on display here. Additionally, you periodically check the accumulated micros against a macro model and correct gross deviations. Neither step is computationally strenuous.

addlepate 14y ago
It would seem that in order to take these steps one would have to give a crap, but no "giving a crap" has yet been on display WRT this game. What a disaster.
aidos 14y ago
Could you explain a little bit more about how that works - you used words I don't understand :) It seems as though something as simple as a random selection when presented with intersections is better than the behaviour here. I guess there should just be a weight on the streets though, right?
- carlob 14y ago
  Let me translate this to physics talk for you: when you use a greedy algorithm with no interaction between agents and no randomness, it's effectively like bosons at zero temperature, they will all fall in the lowest energy state and form a Bose-Einstein condensate. This can be avoided in one of two ways, make them aware of each other, so that they can't all be in the same state (like fermions) or raise the temperature, i.e. add randomness. Probably you'll need to do both and find an energy function that's less retarded than choose the first branch you see…
  - skore 14y ago
    Apologies for going meta, but - Only on Hacker News will you see a "simpler" explanation involve the mention of Bose-Einstein condensate.
- 14y ago

swartzrock 14y ago

I love these videos! You could almost teach a class on graph theory and AI with enough of them, and they look great!

drcode 14y ago

I feel like my latest HTML5 website is somehow pertinent to this discussion: http://lisperati.com/nfc/ http://lisperati.com/nfc/

rivd 14y ago
i dont know why you are downvoted, i see the link and think it's pretty cool. almost feel bad i dont live near the meetups :) maybe you should submit it to the frontpage ?
- ars 14y ago
  It's cool, and he's proud of his work. But it really doesn't have anything to do with the discussion.

dyselon 14y ago

> Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. To be fair, this was also the case with SimCity 4's "always the shortest path, no matter how congested it is" pathfinding, until fans fixed that part. I actually found that part kind of fun! I do think that the cycle of gaining deeper understanding about how the simulation works, then redesigning your cities to work around it is pretty fun in a general sense. Really, the only problem with 2013 is that a) redesigning your city around 2013's pathfinding issues makes you end up with dumb, intersectionless cities, which feels "cheap", and b) even in the extreme case, there's only so much you can do about some of the pathfinding issues. Last night, I had 3 school busses going to the same 2 stops over and over again, ignoring the rest of the city. No wonder my city's children are such little hoodlums. [EDIT] I originally intended this to be a reply to potatolicious' post. Whoops.

JonnieCache 14y ago

"rather than individual little Simmy lives, they instead operate as an homogeneous mass, distributing themselves like a collection of marbles rolling down a board covered in holes. As they reach a job, whichever job, ignoring their previous day’s job, they take it, until all the jobs are taken. It doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial or industrial job – they just roll until they fall into the next available slot. ... They don’t trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence." This reads like a terrifying vision of a perfectly optimized post-fordist near-future dystopia. Maybe the Maxis gang have deeper ideas in mind than we realised...

cmelbye 14y ago

I've noticed some weirdness with this as well. I'm not sure if this is intentional behavior or not, but I had a Nuclear power plant in my city, which has more than enough capacity for the entire city. However, when you look at the power view which shows how electricity is flowing through the streets, it seems as if the units of electricity travel randomly through the streets and would actually not reach certain streets and just pass by them. This caused blackouts in certain areas of the city, and required me to build a smaller power plant by this area of the city to restore power. Is this correct behavior? Is electricity supposed to have some sort of limit of how far it can travel?

ry0ohki 14y ago
I couldn't figure out why one area of my city kept having brown outs and water shortages, until I read this help article. Then I realized it was my street traffic that was a bottleneck. Yes, busses and cars stacked up at the entrance to my city was preventing power and water from getting to an area, just like real life.
chiph 14y ago
There are transmission losses when moving electricity along wires (I seem to recall it's up to 10-12% on long-distance lines in the US). But the electrons don't do stuff like bypass entire streets...
- cmelbye 14y ago
  Yeah I mean certainly power can't travel forever in long distance wires, but the "electrons" we're passing right by a side street when they got to an intersection. There was no issue in other cities when I starting exporting that extra power to them.

cmelbye 14y ago

No big deal, obviously all they need to do is push out a server update since all of the calculations are being done there.

chao- 14y ago

The single biggest question on my mind is how this ended up functioning worse than the community-made solutions such as NAM (Network Addon Mod) for Sim City 4. If all they did was monkey-copy that behavior, available for many years now, I would have been more satisfied. I am reminded of Gabe Newell's recent comment of how “[Valve] can’t compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little, but by a lot.”[1] and am starting to understand what he meant in a more visceral way: My low-bar for the experience, my expectation of quality, was not for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4. My expectation was for Sim City 5 to outperform Sim City 4 Plus Community Content, because to my brain in consumer mode, those last 3 words don't exist, and it all just gets the label "Sim City 4" on the experience. [1] http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-newell-claims-users-have-defeated-valve-created-content-and-thats-a-go http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/gabe-ne...

josscrowcroft 14y ago

"They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence." Strangely enough, I can relate.

methodover 14y ago

The response from the community in regards to SimCity is understandable -- but also disturbing. SimCity isn't unplayable. Quite the opposite. It is an engrossing, beautiful, rich game with plenty of gameplay available. I've played the game for probably forty hours so far, across four different cities -- and the game has only been out for a week. That's amazing. A game hasn't captured my attention like this in quite a while. And yet, many players seem to believe the game is completely unplayable. The top comment on this thread as I write this says that the game is a 'travesty' and shouldn't have been shipped. That's unreasonable. I can only begin to imagine what SimCity's developers are feeling right now. They built this beautiful, different, rich product that is objectively amazing. And yet the players they wanted to please can't stop talking about how shit it is. Usually I place the blame at the feet of the developers, but not this time. This time, I think it's the community that needs to get over it. There is a rich, great game here if you just look past your own expectations for half a second.

benjarrell 14y ago
It is broken when things such as this happen all to regularly: http://i.imgur.com/7cd6VZV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7cd6VZV.jpg Every single police car in the entire city will respond to the exact same crime in progress, ignoring all others, creating a traffic black hole, and leaving you with no police.
- jellicle 14y ago
  Things like that could not help but have been noticed. Somewhere there is a bug report: "All police cars respond to every crime". It is marked something like "WONTFIX - by design" or "WONTFIX - no time before release" or "WISHLIST". That is all anyone needs to know about the game to judge it.
IheartApplesDix 14y ago
You know what else is playable? Simcity 2000, 3000, 4, etc. Sorry, but "playable" is putting your pants on in the morning, especially in the niche of AAA, DRM'd, persistent, service based gaming markets like this. Nobody pays a premium for incomplete services unless those are some top notch services; not services just billed that way and described in terms of reticulated splines. Just because corporations now have the rights to buy and sell concepts that should have passed into public domain decades ago doesn't mean that they really "own" the public awareness, emotional investment and their passions. Rights can be bound by laws and recorded on paper, but you can't put a price on 10 million fans and tell them to suck it up and drop their expectations because they are legally owned. When you buy a franchise like this, you're really buying a responsibility, not a cash cow to be milked until a husk. To EA this is just another product reaching the end of it's life cycle and they're trying to stay profitable while keeping the lights on, and it doesn't matter if that means ripping out half the game and replacing it with anti-features and price tags. I think publishers and "innocent developers just doing what their boss asked" may be the entitled ones here, thinking they deserve a payday because they worked hard bringing you a game that is quite profitable to operate. You know who else worked hard, harder than anyone else? Hitler.

agentultra 14y ago

After purchasing the game and enduring the mess that is forced logins, I thought the game was pretty good. I haven't encountered any of the path finding issues discussed or demonstrated in the article. However I haven't put that much time in to it and haven't bothered to look. As a casual player it seems like a pretty rock-solid game so far. I'm curious how the alternatives stack up. I'm not terribly pleased with Sim City 5 due to the online-only component. Has anyone tried CitiesXL Platinum for example? Are there others?

zeidrich 14y ago

If you watch their videos on the glassbox system on youtube you'll find that this is exactly how they billed it. It was users who expected more. Not that it's bad to expect more. The thing that the new sim city does that all previous sim cities didn't do was it models every agent visibly. Most previous sim city's simulations were based on locality, there was a radius of effect around buildings and that modified properties. In sim city 4 for instance, if you look at the roads you'll see cars appearing and disappearing because there was no "car" on the road, there was an area of high traffic density based on some linear algebra. In the new Sim City, there's a few components, There's areas, which tell things like pollution levels, crime impact, property value, water tables, natural resources, etc. These areas change the rate of certain events, trigger certain events and limit buildings that are build on the area. There's resources, that's things like simoleans, happiness, water, power, pollution, profit. There's agents, agents are things like people, power transmission, water transmission, garbage trucks, fire trucks, etc. Agents go from one building to another and carry resources. There's buildings, and buildings have resources and release and accept agents. So the simulation at it's simplest level is basically: You build a residential zone, the residential zone sends a notifier agent to the highway saying "I'm here and I'm empty" the highway sends a construction vehicle agent to the residential zone. The construction vehicle has building material resources which deplete when it builds the house. If it still has building materials, and another request for building reaches the vehicle it will travel to that building and create a house there until its construction resource is depleted. A built house will be empty, and it will send a notifier agent again to the highway, from there a new tenant agent will be sent to the building. This will occupy the building. Note that even a building that can hold 100 population will be fully populated by a single tenant from the highway. None of the names of the people in the building are recorded. Low density buildings will have names, like "Smith Residence" and people agents generated from "Smith Residence" will likely have Smith as a surname. From there, at periodic times of day, buildings will send notifier requests along the roads looking for workers. A commercial building will for instance send a request at 6:00 AM. If the notifier reaches a residential building with a resident resource available, the building will generate a worker agent and decrement its resident count by 1. That worker agent will have a destination of the requesting commercial business. During the night, the commercial business sends requests for goods along the roads. If an industrial building with goods intercepts one of these requests and it has available delivery vehicle resources, it will deploy a delivery vehicle agent, decrease it's deliver vehicle resource by 1, increase the goods resource by 45 on the delivery vehicle and decrease the goods resource at the factory by 45. The vehicle will travel to the commercial building and unload some goods. If the vehicle intercepts another request for goods on its way back it will respond to it. When the worker count at the commercial business is not 0, the business opens. When the commercial business has enough goods, it puts out souvenirs and begins to make items to sell. Once there are goods to sell, the commercial business sends out notifier agents saying they have goods available. If the notifier agents reach residential buildings with money and residents, the residential building creates a shopper agent and puts one unit of money on them. The shopper agent goes to the commercial building that notified it. Once the agent arrives there, the shoppers value of the commercial building increments. Periodically, when the commercial building has shoppers, it will decrement the number of shoppers, increment profit and decrement goods. It will put a resident agent on the street and they will travel to the nearest unoccupied residential building. Once there they will increase the residents count by 1 and wait for a job or an opportunity to spend money or have fun. It's an interesting simulation, but you have to treat it as that sort of simulation. For instance, if you have a highly concentrated commercial area, residents from all over will go to the shops there. When they return they will have different names. They will have no memory of their home. They will go from door to door, to the closest unoccupied residence. When you have a flock of people it gets worse, because they are all playing follow the leader as they all want to take the shortest path to the closest unoccupied house. As soon as the leader fills that house they all choose to go to the next closest unoccupied house. They don't communicate together and spread out. If you had a circle of houses and you dropped 10 sims just left of center in the circle, instead of each sim picking a house and heading there, they would all head to the leftmost house, and then they would slowly work their way around the circle. In terms of gameplay, once you recognize this behavior it can be kind of fun to play. You do things like put your commercial properties sort of like a hub with residential spokes around it, you keep commercial density as low as it needs to be to effectively service nearby residents. The further the commercial property draws residents from, the less efficiently they can return home. Industry is less important because industrial work has longer shifts. A sim might like to shop multiple times during the day if given the money and the opportunity, but they are consumed for much longer working at a factory. Ultimately, the game is about increasing density, density is increased by increasing happiness or profit. Happiness is most easily earned by spending money and not having negative effects like no power or no water. Once density is increased the only thing you might care about is education, education is increased on a per-building basis, it's a resource that the building holds. Either students going to school, or residents going to libraries increase education. Residents will go to commercial buildings with money to increase happiness, but if they are out of money they might go to parks or libraries to increase happiness or education. I'm pretty sure they do take traffic into account, it's just that the traffic happens spontaneously. 30 sims decide to take the same route because it's not congested -- now it's congested, but they can't take a u-turn. If you have another path to the same destination that's more efficient some will break off when they reevaluate their paths. The problem is mostly when a lot of sims manage to get on a highly congested road with no way off. Then they're stuck. The "major roads" example is that way because they don't think ahead, once they're on that road, they're stuck, and they don't choose the other path because they'd end up having to merge into another congested road on the other side anyways. The Intersection trap is probably due to something like a ton of sims being dropped off by mass transit after work and then having their connection to residential areas demolished. Another thing that might happen is a high density residential buidling that was available before burns down or gets demolished. Then they have nowhere to go, and they just circle while trying to find an opening in a residential building. If you notice the last pathfinding experiment, the congestion on the main road doesn't really let up when the one-way street is demolished. It does initially but starts to back up again because of the traffic lights. I'm not trying to be an apologist. It's a better simulation than the previous version, but the people don't act like people and the city doesn't act like a city. Even ants have more things they can react to than the sims in this game. However, the simulation is pretty consistent and it can make a reasonably fun game if you try to play the game instead of build a city. The simulations in previous games were probably better at building a city, and while there was mystical teleportation and individuals weren't generally modeled, those abstractions mean that the city can make more sense without needing to do really complex modeling for 100,000 units at once. Once you start to notice these limitations and play within those bounds, it can be a fun puzzle game; maybe even strategy game. But city simulation? I'm not sure about that.

matterhorn 14y ago

My impression is that EA has some great creative talent, but that the business management function is entrusted to people who have honesty and competence issues. One of the big problems with American business is the focus on academic credentials, particularly with regard to "soft skills" (no skills?) in areas such as management. You will not learn management in a classroom. Furthermore, if you can't grasp the fundamentals of what you are supposedly managing, then you are just in the way. The path ought to be: Become an engineer -> Become a high-performing engineer -> Get some business education -> Do management If you can't handle the engineering phases, why on earth should anybody put you in a decision-making position in an engineer endeavor? While the practice should not be barred, it is unproductive for universities to offer "management" degrees at the undergraduate level, unless such degrees require the demonstration of significant prior work experience. Graduate management programs should not accept twentysomethings arriving straight from undergraduate programs. Less fluff, more umpf.

EvanKelly 14y ago
It seems your experience in the business/corporate engineering world is vastly different than mine. The problem with your path to management is that many engineers have no desire to manage, and anecdotally, those who do, end up being ill-suited for management. The best managers I've had are not top engineers, rather they're managers that are willing to understand and listen to their top performing engineers. Google/Microsoft/etc. offer PM positions to students directly out of undergrad. From my experience, the skillset between a top-performing engineer is vastly different from that of a top-performing and well liked PM.
- sirclueless 14y ago
  They still hire people from engineering and math backgrounds. People who you know have the competence to understand any technical problem you throw at them, at least at a shallow operational level. The prerequisite is deep mathematical, rational and process-oriented thinking. You can get that lots of ways, but an MBA alone won't give it to you.
  - 14y ago

bentcorner 14y ago

If EA thinks that the vocal minority is worth saving, they need a hero. They need to hire somebody popular and smart that can say "hey everybody, EA asked for my help, I'm helping them figure out how to solve this. The server issues are mostly resolved now and we thank you for your patience. Over the next few weeks I'll blog about Sims behavior and modeling, and what changes you can expect to see. SimCity is already simulating an incredible amount of detail but many of you noticed situations where we didn't do so well. Expect to see improvements over the next few months that will address these problems." We've already heard EA's leadership say there's nothing wrong with the game. Even if they admit to any problems, they have little trust with the community. I have to admit to some schadenfreude about this whole fiasco. On the surface it is a very pretty game, it'll be interesting to see how EA addresses the community discontent.

3dptz 14y ago

Notwithstanding all the bad press SimCity got since launch; I got the game 3 days after it's release. I had seen one or two beta gameplay videos and was seriously impressed by the stunning graphics and seemingly awesome gameplay. Reasoning any of the initial server issues would be resolved sooner rather than later made the purchase. During the installation and initial launch I was rather curious, as the plenitude of bad reviews would have you believe that the game could explode any instant now. Nothing happened. I connected to the by default selected server 'Europe West 6' and started playing. Since the first launch I have not experienced any of the initial server related issues. Yeah, that's right, NONE at all. Once or twice I got a message that connection to the server was lost but the message never lasted longer than 5 seconds. What's more those messages had zero impact on the gameplay. I have played the game for about 15 to 20 hours (I was sick over the weekend). All I can say : It's great!. Sure I have noticed the flaws in the AI when 10 of you 12 dump trucks keep going back and forth on a single street and leave the rest of the city piling with garbage. Yeah that are a few bugs with the snapping and routing of buildings and streets, but the game is still freaking great to play! "This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM. The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper." Comments like these are as bad, if not worse than EA/Maxis explaining or denying the initial server problems. "...- but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken." Seriously? A travesty? If that's your opinion I think you are either a fanatical SimCity gamer who's deeply disappointed at the unforgiving decline in quality. Or you are too closely related to the gaming industry and have very high expectations. Or most likely have a very biased perspective.

saraid216 14y ago
You've only been on HN a month, but give it a year. You'll get used to the wild hyperbole, especially in the top comment. It's how people get attention.
webjunkie 14y ago
Sure it's fun in the beginning. But please report back if you still find the game challenging and rewarding after a week.

eps 14y ago

Makes you wonder if the backend issues were geniune or if it was a way to buy more time for finishing the game (and to release something on a promised date).

10thfloor 14y ago

Will somebody please write a positive review of this game and put an end to the incessant trolling ... For example, the attention to detail in the design is astonishing. It is truly the best, and most 'realistic' Simcity to date...

10thfloor 14y ago

ghshephard 14y ago

What's disappointing to me is that, unlike Settlers 7, Caesar 3, or Stronghold - we don't have 100% intelligent agent simulation creating emergent properties and markets. I used to spend hours, with all three of those products, watching agents go about their various chores and skills, and be either gated on another agent's behavior or resources, or have a clear pipeline stocked up for them to perform. Sounds like I'll get sub-optimal non-intelligent behavior from SimCity, which is sad. I rather have a smaller environment, that was 100% intelligent agent based.

bane 14y ago

man...and all I wanted was basically SC4 in 3d with mixed-use zoning, curved roads and a more robust transport network. I would have thrown money at them for that game.

hristov 14y ago

EA should just hire Toady one from dwarf fortress to do the Sim simulation. Dwarf fortress has very complex and very accurate path-finding as well as excellent creature simulation. That model can be simplified and used in Sim City. Of course some performance improvements may be necessary, but that can be done by a large company with a lot of resources, like EA.

rurounijones 14y ago
Dwarf Fortress can also bring my 1 year old quad core computer to a crawl. I also seem to remember that once he left debugging symbols in a build and people managed to use it to determine that all path-finding is done twice for some reason. Not the person I think that could help EA with performance problems :p
- mbetter 14y ago
  You ever misplace something and have to retrace your steps to find it? Dwarves are pretty dumb so they have to do that all the time.

jasonlingx 14y ago

They should call it SimCity Lemmings :)

smutticus 14y ago

As a network engineer who spends his days routing packets around the internets I find this hilarious. What if every intersection were to function as a sort of router with each road leading from it as a link? Then distribute routes between intersections and calculate shortest path using the Dijkstra algorithm(OSPF). They could even implement congestion control by having clogged intersections stop advertising routes periodically. Have a problem with cops, fire trucks and ambulances not getting through? Put them in a different QOS queue that prioritizes them. This is a solved problem in so many ways. They could literally buy these algorithms from people with decades of experience working on this class of problems.