Documentation related to the implementation of SimCity 2000
github.com
github.com
I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due to limitations in the transport simulation.
The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful.
However, at each junction, the trip randomly selection one of the routes.
So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea where they should get off (this branch leads to industry, for example), and some trips just keep going round and round until they reach their max travel distance and fail.
You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would go into this, and never emerge.
In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.
Power, water, etc. randomly chose a direction at a junction, so even basic grid would make it impossible to power a building on the other side of the city, even if the power demand was there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvq6zAMJfOU.
Traffic and pedestrians were attracted to available houses/work, but randomly every day, rather than having a defined home/work location. I built a pedestrian heavy city and would watch crowds of pedestrians head for the nearest available house on a street, before the whole street filled, and they turned around for the next nearest. Same for work, shopping, despite there being plenty available.
Cities Skylines seems like the successor to SimCity, but even that has some deep-rooted flaws in traffic management and agent flow. Some mods exist to help coax it a bit, but it's still just a broken approach at scale.
Traffic and routing is hard, I get that, but there has to be a better way. Building a city around the routing flaws is not that much fun.
That and 32gb of RAM
Word of warning: if you're one of those people that likes to install a lot of mods keeping everything up to date and non-conflicting can be an pain the rear. There is, of course, a mod to keep track of which mods are out of date or could cause issues, but that's really a band-aid on top of a larger problem. The game is old enough now that many popular mod authors have long been abandoned their projects or otherwise moved on so you end up with things like "MyPopular Mod" and "MyPopular Mod UPTODATE" or "MyPopular Mod FORKED" or "Use this instead of MyPopular Mod".
If I take a few weeks / months between plays this usually ends up with me having to take 30 minutes to an hour to get the mods up to date and tested. Not a huge amount of time, but when your gaming time is limited it's something to take into account.
(Don't use Steam.)
He also has some fun youtube series' where he builds up a region by following a "story" he makes up (or sometimes uses viewer polls). So rather than building a super optimized city, it gets a very natural layout as he pretends to play out rivalries between developers, mayoral or policy changes, etc.
I think if you assumed such a thing in the first place your premise and assumptions were massively flawed.
You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can invade? Or the fact that you can magically position fire "trucks" where you want instantly?
It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect a 1993 game to not choose a random route at a junction; it should use a basic pathfinding algorithm (which were well-known, even in 1993) to choose the closest one.
Of course it is limited by performance but optimization is hardly a good counter-point to intuition in this kind of game.
The number one bottleneck in real traffic is intersections. Some people think optimal city design should mix zoning types at a finer level.
To your point though, we can't really demonstrate what's better when the agents are acting stupidly. I'd like to be able to learn what would work in the real world too.
So, all bets are off when a fantastical element is introduced? We should no longer expect any internal consistency, and the work is entirely above critique?
Why didn't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw the walking trees, so I know that anything is possible.
The answer is because we expect internal consistency. Ok, so there's a superhero in this game system. Doesn't change the fact that it's supposed to simulate traffic, and that this is one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon. Oh, it doesn't actually simulate traffic? Yes, this is a problem: it's a traffic simulation with superheros.
That’s it, no more internet for me today. And I haven’t even had lunch!
No it isn't. Traffic played basically zero part in the game and certainly didn't influence "success" or "failure." Traffic was 99% for visual effect. When I played Sim City 2000 I never put any work into optimizing for traffic and my cities were effectively "perfect" in terms of crime, life expectancy, citizen happiness etc.
An important optimization in these games is to avoid crossroads and junctions, because walkers tend to randomly choose a direction at junctions. This would make it a coin flip which of the two roads would get food or religious services, possibly causing all kinds of chaos. One of the best layouts as far as I recall was just a big block with a circular road going around it, because this forced the walkers to walk past all buildings in the block reliably.
This is what you end up having to do in SC2K.
You must direct the traffic, by not offering junctions.
How single agents path is also weird, like how much they walk. I think I remember that homes were also not persistent?
When separating city blocks completely fires would not get extinguished. Either the fire station assigned is random, or only a few actually can send cars out. Which breaks down in a city not fully connected by streets.
Haven't played for a few years now (last run was with the industries dlc), but also haven't read about patches adressing such issues.
The built–in tools are also somewhat hit and miss, and that is partly driven by what information the game holds on to and what it throws away for increased efficiency. Agents know their destination and chosen route, but they don’t remember where they are coming from. Thus, when you click on a building to show the associated traffic routes it can only show routes with that building as a destination.
The exception is service buildings like fire or police; each one supplies a fixed number of vehicles, and in theory the tool could show what all of those vehicles are doing. It still just shows the routes that end at the building though, so you end up seeing just those service vehicles that are going home and people who are going to work at the service building. In principle, mods can fix some of these oversights. I use one that shows what each service vehicle is doing, for example. Another mod that I really like allows you to select a stop on a mass–transit vehicle route (a bus stop or a metro station or a ferry station or whatever) and see where everyone who is currently waiting at that stop is going. Very useful.
That said, I think Cities: Skylines is the best SimCity we’ve ever had. It is everything that SimCity 2013 should have been. I recommend it to everyone, but especially people who ever enjoyed a game of SimCity, or has enjoyed any city builder of any stripe, or who think that games are only for children.
Biffa has some good videos on traffic solving: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCYzO4HZxgXc2UJQD5bIo8AQ
It works somewhat realistically but you have to learn the limitations of the simulator if you want mass transit besides busses used well.
I also really liked CityPlannerPlays - quite educational but more on actual city design.
I had a similar reaction, after a city of mine completely broke because of simulation errors I gave up on it for a while. Then revisited a bit later to write an article about all the dlcs. It felt a lot more stable then, but that might be because I did not test the edge cases again.
In a real city people would just drive around that madness and make a left turn at the next block.
Alternatively, you could use it to build dioramas. With enough mods it is one of the best tools for building digital city dioramas and best of all, the simulation still mostly works, so you get to watch people live in the city.
Overall definitely a fun game, lets you build much more natural-looking cities than Sim City, with the only downside being that the road network has a greater impact on the simulation and requires more micromanaging than I would like.
Someone that spent years building an optimized city. Six million residences.
In SC2K the graphics do not depict individual cars or people, and I have no idea if in later games there is a correlation between individual cars and people and "trips" (or if trips are still used as mechanism in later versions - although from what people are writing, it seems they are).
The Sims displays the other end of this spectrum, where agents path deliberately (while still considering their needs), and the difference in simulation scale is immense.
Simple fact is, pathfinding is a performance bottleneck that hasn't been solved yet. We are still using algorithms from the 1960s, and no hardware acceleration exists.
SimCity has always been more of a spreadsheet with houses on top.
But we got thousand times faster CPUs than at Sim City 2000 times.
And they have multiple cores. And if that is not enough there are GPUs with even more compute.
I'm picturing an alternate history where in addition to dedicated graphics cards, we also start building dedicated common algorithm cards - NVidia and AMD duking it out over whose hardware-accelerated sorting implementation performs best, Phoronix benchmarking how each companies' Linux drivers handle A* etc :)
Maybe your game doesn't change much. Lack of good pathfinding is what's constricting that the most. If good pathfinding existed, games in general could become more dynamic.
Especially if the moving entities in your game aren't supposed to be omniscient. They could gradually learn about what good enough paths are.
Real-world performance isn't that determined by the form of the time-complexity.
So it went from “can this house reach a job” to “simulate this house driving to work” - the difference comes from a high density doing one check to doing multiple.
I do not know if in the later versions, there is a correlation between visually depicted cars/people and trips (or if trips are used at all, although from what people are writing here, it seems they are).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/
(his subreddit is called Archapolis but he recently changed the name)
SimCity 2000 was the first simulation game I've ever played. I had a neighbor friend who had a copy and I watched him play a couple times before I was hooked.
- Destruction of the nuclear power plant spreads radiation tiles that persist for 10+ thousand in-game-years.
- All power plants are automatically destroyed at the end of their design life, so if you forget to manually replace your nuclear power plant every 50 years you get radiation.
- All power plants will catch on fire and eventually be destroyed when overloaded, and there is no option to choose load-shedding / brownouts, so if you overbuild you get radiation.
- The "Nuclear-Free Zone" is the only in-game ordinance that costs no money, earns no money, and basically only exists to make a statement.
> And we can't have that.
That seems like a fairly bad faith reading of the interview comments. In SC2K you only have so many pixels per building. Even the newer sim cities are not proportional, it's not like looking at a satellite map.
Further reading: https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/
So I feel like I could give an example about other parts of the world, just for perspective. In summary -- man, I wish my city is half this good so I can actually park in peace.
I live in China, a relatively large size city (pop around 8M to 10M, not too special within China) and we have what I would say "good" public transit system (hundreds of bus lines, 8 metro lines and increasing), not to mention millions of people just commute in e-bikes.
But the thing is, people still need to drive from time to time. (So traffic is as bad). How do we solve the parking issue without building enough parking places? Well, we kinda of don't. For most of public places, you just park everywhere that you can squeeze in. On Roads, on sidewalks, you name it. You better be instantly good at parallel parking and reversing, otherwise you won't survive.
Residential locations are much better nowadays since most new communities now build with parking in mind, but public locations are still a nightmare (an exception is large malls, which usually have underground parking). Everytime I want to go somewhere the first thing I need to do is to plan how to park once I were there. It's awful.
Anyway, my point isn't that "the US is fine as soon as other places are worse", just that "it's complicated" I guess. I lived in the US for years including some large cities. While I really wish there is better public transit (especially when I were traveling), at least parking is bearable thanks to enforced parking lot requirement.
I’d say it’s a fair requirement: if you want to carry a big machine around, you are responsible for leaving it somewhere adequate.
Enforced parking lot requirement is just obliging other people to reserve mostly unproductive land in their properties, and that has very negative effects, such as creating big distances between destinations and, as a consequence, making public transportation less efficient and walking more difficult. It usually (always?) makes cities worse.
They do change things but not as much as some urbanists would hope ;)
Should You Use TM:PE Enhanced "Parking AI" in Cities Skylines?
I did discover a semi-easter egg in the newspaper. One paper has an opinions section, and there are two possible lines that have fixed names (both are in the list of tax complaints):
-fred Haslam: "I just *[0x7f] to say, property taxes are primitive, repressive and regressive. only barbaric societies continues to tax the rich."
-pat Mullanney: "you bet I mind! I feel like the *mo's got a gun to my side, robbing me of MY *[0xb9]."
This is the part I was most interested in seeing how it worked, unfortunately not developed much yet.
IMO SC4 is still the peak of the genre, good depth to the simulation and a pleasing style of graphics. Sadly I never got on with Cities Skylines.
In the video you posted, the host talks about Magnasanti a project to create the perfect city (in the eyes of the game). There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or traffic. A population of 6 million with no hospitals, and no public funding except mass transit and police. Ultimately we can see that the game does not reward citizen happiness, but industry.
The "black box" nature of the simulation within SimCity is fascinating, thank you for the rabbit hole.
But it is offline (more or less two years): https://web.archive.org/web/20180127174342/http://rewiki.reg...
Cities Skylines isn’t a SimCity but it’s a very very good modern game.
But I agree that SimCity had a unique character that Cities: Skylines doesn’t try to replicate. Instead of trying to clone SimCity they went their own direction, which is on the whole a good thing.