The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook | Hacker News Reader

The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook

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124 pointsTiktaalik79 comments

I plaid a lot to SimCity when I was a kid but, having been raised in a European city, I always thought that my cities in the game could never look like a "real" city.

About 15 years after, I found myself in a plane about to land in LA for the first time, with my face pressed to the window and thinking to myself: "LA is like the f* SimCity!!"

That is one of the first things my now-wife said to me when we picked her up from the airport the first time she came to the US. "It's just like SimCity!"

That was my exact thought when flying into Phoenix for the first time.

I really want to try out this radial city though!!

Having grown up in Vermont and lived only in big coastal cities thereafter, I always felt the cities didn't look right. Then I moved to China and realized the same!

Which part of Europe? A lot of cities in Italy (and most of Europe) were Roman encampments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castra) and they have a very square, ordinary layout I have always found boring.

I have always been fascinated by other cities when a road starts to curve or a square pops out of nowhere. Walking through London is much more interesting than it was in Milan.

I've never been there, but I heard there's a lot of planning in medieval italian city layout.

In particular Siena, which has detailed squares for trade, politics, full of simbolic features (e.g. the City Hall tower was built much higher than the church's to assure the government is perceived as superior).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena#/media/File:PiazzadelCam...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siena

AFAIK, Romans built their cities with streets following the N-S and E-W axes (Cardus and Decumanus) but, after, no medieval city continued with this style. Specially, in walled cities, the streets were appearing in a chaotic way.

My home city is Barcelona where, actually, a big part is designed as an orthogonal grid.... but it's still not the same. I think I would have enjoyed the game more if I knew how my cities were supposed to look like.

which cities in Italy/Europe you consider to have a very square, ordinary layout?

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a single city with a square structure, or where castrum and decuman still exist[0].

[0] i.e. Manchester https://www.google.hu/maps/place/Manchester,+UK/@53.479099,-... does not look square at all, even though the "-chester" part derives from "castrum" and there is something resembling a cross in part of it.

I'm not sure if it has anything to do with Romans, but look at La Valetta, Malta: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Valletta,+Malta/@35.899060...

La Valetta is a planned fortified city built by Francisco Laparelli[0] for the Order of St John in the 16th century.

Nothing to do with the romans, or with normal maltese city architecture (which is much more organic)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Laparelli

I agree, it's the exception

Mannheim comes to mind: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/49.4877/8.4640

Karlsruhe is listed as an example in the Book, although considerably less regular than most US cities I've been to: http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/62518#map=15/49.0064/8...

Piacenza has the roman squared city center intact in layout[1], lots of other small towns as well, but the fact is the old town parts are likely too small to actually matter when you look at the whole city layout - hard to notice from just looking at the urban map!

then you have places like Turin that were built with a ruler [2]

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Camillo+Benso+Cavour,+3...

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Turin,+Metropolitan+City+of...

edit: some more samples, with cardo/decumano marked when known

naples https://www.google.it/maps/place/Naples,+Metropolitan+City+o...

parma (barely visible, linked plaza was the old forum) https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+Giuseppe+Garibaldi,+...

verona https://www.google.it/maps/place/Via+Rosa,+7,+37121+Verona+V...

firenze, you can even see the old walls

https://www.google.it/maps/place/Piazza+della+Repubblica,+10...

you are probably right, the old town parts probably get lost in the largest map.

But as far as I know naples is not even a roman city, so I don't know what is going on there :)

my bad, I mixed up generic squared block in cities (turin, naples) with old roman squared blocks arrangements that survived today (the others)

A dead straight road in Europe is either (i) really old and from the Romans or (ii) really new.

Well, New Town in Edinburgh was laid out on a grid in the 1760s. There are a few exceptions. :)

They probably call that "really new".

Architecturally, I'd say "really new" is since ~1970 (i.e., post-Brutalism), "new" is since ~1918 (i.e., post-WW1).

In terms of town planning, I'd probably call anything 20th century "really new", and "new" being anything from the Industrial Revolution onwards.

Therefore, I'd claim New Town isn't new, yet alone really new.

Although Milan has a circular layout that gravitates around the Cathedral, and the streets - especially in the center of the city - sometimes start to curve randomly or a square pops out of nowhere, just like you described :)

Maybe you where referring to Turin? (that has this exact square layout that makes me mad and lost sometimes - because nearby streets all seem the same)

The maximum tax rate is much below what many real world European places charge.

Really? What is it?

I live in one of the high-tax places, earn well above average and do no tax planning. Yet, what the taxman actually charges me is only half the nominal maximum.

Our council tax in the UK, which would be the equivalent to SimCity town tax, is somewhere about 3-5%. It is actually a regressive tax, fixed based on almost made-up property prices, but you seem to be confusing national taxes with local taxes.

Although some of the national tax goes back to the councils and some of the national taxes pay for the infrastructure, so it's a bit more complicated than that.

This is so true. Where I grew up the roads are rarely exactly parallel, and the coastline is hard to replicate. There's highways and flyovers that weren't like the ones in the games.

When I came to the US, particularly the towns that aren't by the coast, I thought SimCity! Apart from things being on a grid, there's also quite a lot of repetitive architecture. Schools look similar, utilities look similar, neighbourhoods are filled with the same houses. And all the big box stores are exact copies.

Tangentially related at best, but when I first visited Miami I kept thinking I had been there before. I had, sort of, in GTA: Vice City.

We could argue that modern town planning is in fact infected with a Sim City spirit (or Sim City captured that existing spirit): artificial separation between "commercial" and "residential areas" with miles and miles of separation between them, and car-centric in the extreme.

The Sim City world is one where you have to ask permission for everything. Development is prohibited by law unless the benevolent town planner opens up an area with little colored rectangles. But you can only build one type of building and can't mix & match because the top-down view of the planner blurs out the complexity at the ground level.

Sim City does have a redeeming feature, favoring urban density. Traditional planning is more aligned with creating loose, low-density, detached abodes, with great separation and height restriction and far away from any semblance of economic activity: shops, factories and commercial space.

Having to support an infrastructure (necessarily a car infrastructure) in these forms is tremendously inefficient and can be considered as a great cost on societies that found out about planning before most cities got established (early 20th century).

It's long been hip to blame SimCity for creating bad urban design. However: SimCity reflects ideas as much as it plants ideas: zoning existed before SimCity. SimCity promoted intermingled Commercial and Residential zones (traffic was lighter if they were nearer) with pollutant Industrial zones far away from the rest, and SimCity highly promoted mass transit over cars.

Most SimCity games indirectly went against mass transit, or at least the idea of building it up in phases, based on its traffic model.

A Sim's route was defined as a path from point A to point B, and a maximum time. If the maximum time was reached, the route was a failure and would reflect as increased congestion. If a Sim encountered mass transit along its route, it would attempt to take it using the same pathing algorithm as car travel. However, if the route failed while using mass transit, it would never try it again, even as mass transit service expanded and new bus and subway lines/stations were added.

The most recent SimCity was supposed to be more realistic in its route planning and simulation by giving each Sim a home, a workplace, etc., and repeating routes on a daily basis instead of a random sampling of routes, but this didn't make it into the final game.

From what I understand, haven't read up on it in a while though, they even went with a random sampling of housing for each Sim as well. The house they stayed in last night may not be the house the stay at tonight.

The 'modern town planning' you talk about is so called Euclidan zoning (named so from the town of Euclid in US where it was supposedly first introduced - as a way to segregate rich from poor in an indirect way). Not all areas/countries use such laws. Some time ago this link hit the front page of HN: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html - it is really an interesting read (other articels on the site as well)

If you're interested in the history of this sort of thing Lewis Mumford's 'The City In History' is a fantastic read. Brilliantly researched and presented in a very non-dry way.

Wow, I wish they had something like this for the more modern SimCities. I was playing SimCity 3 or 4 and built a road going to a beach and to this day haven't figured out why no-one drove on it.

It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations.

> It's hard to play a game that approximates reality enough that instruction manuals aren't provided, but differs just slightly enough to foil expectations.

Agreed. For instance, it takes a while to find out that the "right" way to build a successful city in SimCity (and not necessarily in reality) is to never build a single tile of roadway, and instead construct an exclusively rail-based grid.

On the other hand, some of its city planning lessons work very well: for instance, interleave residential and commercial every other 9x9 block (3x3 set of 3x3 zones, with a non-RCI zone in the middle), rather than separating residential and commercial, to avoid creating huge commutes. (Meanwhile, keep industrial far away from everything so it doesn't bother anyone.)

Ideas of "right" in open-ended games where the goal is merely to keep going are always weird to me. I know exactly what you meant by putting it in quotes.

"Right" as in "more optimal", not "only correct solution".

More optimal only in the context of the game's engine and ruleset, which is what danharaj was saying deserved the quotes around "right".

Actually, I meant "right" in a weirder sense: The only goal of Sim City and many other games is to endure and persist. Any strategy that survives is a strategy that 'wins' Sim City. In what sense are some strategies more optimal than others? Usually they maximize some other measure of fitness, like land usage or average commute time.

That's cool. I think it's perfectly reasonable to call efficient strategies 'right'. But calling something right means you know something is wrong, and the 'wrong' that comes with this 'right' includes strategies that survive. Clearly, there's room for more than one right.

It would be great if future versions of SimCity and Cities:Skylines would embed more direct urban planning lessons in their games. This way players would learn what makes a city work properly.

A problem is that most peoples' only knowledge of urban planning comes from looking around at their own town, and unfortunately most towns in North America are incredibly poorly designed. A SimCity player that bases their city on a typical North American one will often wind up with a dysfunctional and gridlocked town, just like real life.

Cities: Skylines is an absolutely amazing game, but yeah, I wish there was more lessons. I keep discovering new things that I can do with it that, honestly, should have been taught to me early on.

reading the article, actually made me think of SimCity 4 & the game seems to be still following whatever the article / guide says... So I'm guessing the simulation just got better from time to time (except for that SimCity 2013) to reflect the real world, in which some gamers complain SimCity 4 is a bit too hard

SimCity and Cities: Skylines are still half stuck in 1950s era car oriented urban planning so they're not totally representative of the real world and modern urban planning. In these games public transportation options are limited, walkable public spaces such as pedestrian only streets and squares are not possible, and bike lanes do not exist. Additionally zoning is either residential, commercial or industrial, so there's no concept of mixed-use zoning (ie. commercial on the bottom of a building, residential on top) which you see everywhere.

I'd love to see a smaller scale game that really focuses on these details. SimCity 4 and other games went in the other direction, building systems around how a metropolitan region of multiple cities would interact.

SimTower sort of did this, within the context of a single skyscraper. I'm not sure if it is on GOG or anywhere else legitimate these days - odds are it might not be a simple matter to run on modern Windows, unless you want to spin up an XP VM.

I spent way too many hours playing SimTower as a kid. It was pretty fun, especially if you took advantage of the infinite money cheat involving building a specific type of room in one certain place on the bottom of the level... Not bad for a game that was built around an elevator simulator http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130563/the_designers_n...

I've very much enjoyed playing SimTower, and I still have a legitimate exe of it sitting around. But the game is a Win16 game, and my latest experience running it in WINE was crap (it became very easy to completely lock up X). Possibly it might make more sense running in Windows 3.1 in dosbox.

Incidentally, this is a motivation for why I'm playing a bit with statically recompiling x86-16 code to run on x86-32.

It's actually available on iPad under it's Japanese release name: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yoot-tower/id379197311?mt=8

Yoot Tower was actually the sequel to SimTower, not the Japanese name for it.

Cities: Skylines has pedestrian paths which affect whether they drive or walk to their destination, and the public transport options (Bus, Metro-train, Rail-train) will get used if they're more efficient than driving (although it compares against optimistic road travel times, without regard for traffic)

I don't mean to sound rude, but have you actually played Cities: Skylines?

Cities: Skylines, more than any other city simulator I've ever seen, drastically encourages public transit use. The game is made by developers that got their start designing european-style mass transit simulators - http://www.citiesinmotion2.com/ And with the exception of mixed-use zoning, everything your asking for they already have done / just finished, and heavily encourage, in the game.

>In these games public transportation options are limited

There's lots of public transit in the game (Busses, Trains, Subway). Each with custom tracks, bridges, tunnels, etc. And you can completely customize the exact lines and routes of busses and subways (literally down to how often each stop is hit, and in what order). There's also "unmanaged" / "privatized" mass transit (Ferries / Harbours and Airports).

The simulation is exceptionally forgiving about public transit too. People will always choose to take transit, if it's even remotely competitive with driving. People will wait for buses even if they are overwhelmingly overcrowded, etc.

> walkable public spaces such as pedestrian only streets and squares are not possible

This has existed since day one. Click "Parks/Greenery" -> "Paths". You can place paved pedestrian-only streets, or gravel pedestrian-only paths. You can elevate them over/under roads or build pedestrian-only bridges, for instance.

You could recreate nearly the entire Minneapolis walking/bicycle trail network with these tools. And the game rewards you for doing this. (Pedestrian-only walkways generate less noise than full roads do)

> Bike lanes do not exist

They're adding them this month (September, 2015) along with dedicated bus-only lanes - https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines-after-dark

I put in about 5-8 hours into Cities: Skylines before I got distracted by something else and put it aside. Enough time to put in a pretty great small town bus system. Cities: Skylines has great transportation options, much better than Sim City, but it still has a few things it needs to add if one wanted to build modern cities using modern urbanist thinking (eg. Copenhagen).

I noticed when I was playing that you could build pedestrian paths, but it seemed like they were in the context of a park path, not a pedestrian only commercial district. From some Googling it seems that this is the case, that you can't really build for example a downtown commercial core that would be pedestrian only.

The bus system in Skylines is great, and I didn't play long enough to experiment with subways, but I noticed that there didn't seem to be streetcars. I've been to a lot of cities that mix pedestrian streets and street cars and it works very well. That's something I'd really like to see in the game.

I'm glad to see they are adding bike lanes. They're an essential part of the transportation system.

Even though I'm complaining about it, I do want to underline that Cities: Skylines is a great game and a big step forward for SimCity type games. I'm really glad Paradox is continuing to improve the game.

There is a HUGE emphasis on public transport in Cities: Skylines.

Neglecting it in any way is a sure way to cause traffic nightmares that are difficult toi rectify.

Yes Cities is really good, but it can do better. It's more SimCity 4 & 2013 that was really stuck in the past. I'm hoping for a lot more improvements to transit in Skylines with the inevitable sequel.

Thanks to this book, I actually received college credit for playing SimCity. (Or actually for writing a paper about the simulator, which was a cinch because the way to 'beat' the game was to build an elitist suburb.)

I have fond memories of the Simcity 2000 manual as well... I ended up reading the whole thing obsessively while waiting for a new computer that had the minimum specs. (VESA BIOS extensions.)

(VESA BIOS extensions.)

Was your video card not supported by univbe.exe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE

Ahh, UniVBE, fixing weird VGA cards since forever. Funny how some of the most obscure parts of my childhood pop up.

"UniVBE (short for Universal VESA BIOS Extensions) is a software driver that allows DOS applications written to the VESA BIOS standard to run on almost any display device made in the last 15 years or so."

I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)

I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)

That line is in the very first revision of the page, from 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=4989...

Interesting article. I was interested in views on the newer simcities and found these articles interesting:

http://planyourcity.net/2013/09/20/sim-city-through-the-eyes...

- this city planer concludes that there are a lot of options and the mechanics are interesting but it oversimplifies things and gives the player god-like powers

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681515/using-the-new-sim-city-6-...

-this was a "tournament" between various urban think tanks and journalists and points out how all of them took the short term benefits with casinos, oil and sewage over sustainable livable cities that they advocate.

http://todigra.org/index.php/todigra/article/view/31/36 - this a scientific article compares the rules in Simcity Societies to the work of controversial urban theorist Richard Florida

I think one point that doesn't really make sense to me is the strict separation of R/C/I zones and the land plot pricing curve for them. Surely nowadays nobody wants to live exactly in the city center? And it makes no sense to put industrial zones in the city center either. Most rich people obviously live in suburbs and downtown areas are not very safe in any sense.

Also the strict separation of industry being external-orientated and commerce being internal-oriented seems way too simplistic and childish. Surely many industrial products also sell to the city itself, and many commerces are nationwide even international ones? Unless you restrict the definition of "commerce" to "things like local restaurants".

I'd say the notions of the game are maybe a kind of too old, and seriously any of these "reality simulation" games for extremely complex systems are bound to miss the reality by some distance. The same goes for Football Manager etc. Playing them for fun is OK, but taking them too seriously is bound to disappoint and frustrate you to no end.

I love how dense some older games were. I still like the original Victoria by Paradox Studios, though that might be because I never quite have the video card to play Victoria II.

Anyone remember SimEarth? Loved that stuff.

Here's some more SimCity documentation and reference material: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

And various SimCity source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

Damn, the one really cheap used copy on Amazon Marketplace is gone now… I was thinking about buying it two hours ago.

But then again, I already have more books on my "to read" stack than I could possibly read 2015/2016. And it's not exactly a necessary book.

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