Hacker News Reader

Comment by etcet | Hacker News Reader

> With SimCity 5 you can easily have over 100.000 Sims in one city region.

Actually this does not seem to be the case at all [0]. Some people have figured out that the total population numbers are are either bugged or faked. For a supposed 100,000 pop town, the actual population is around 15,000.

[0] http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9359265.page

View on HN

Yup. And this is supported by the supposedly leaked piece of GUI code that appeared on Gist 2 days ago. If that code leak is authentic and reasonably up to date (there are references to an alpha version), then it means that this is happening at the GUI layer.

    simcity.GetFudgedPopulation = function (a) {
      a = "undefined" !== typeof a ? a : simcity.gGlobalUIHandler.mLastPopulation;
      if (500 >= a)
        return a;
      if (40845 < a)
        return Math.floor(8.25 * a);
      a = Math.pow(a - 500, 1.2) + 500;
      return Math.floor(a)
    };

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5133829#file-simcityui-js-...

Is it just me or are these 'yoda conditions' (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...) confusing and difficult to read? They make sense but it's so jarring to see that I have to read the condition twice to be sure I understand it.

Major code smell for me as well, but I've seen some rather big projects do them, so I always file it under "tabs vs. spaces".

To stop people from upvoting me: I'm in the tabs camp. There, I've said it.

It's just you. Once you're used to them they're just as easy to read as "normal" conditionals, if not easier.

No, it's not just him. Yoda conditions are hard to read, because they don't follow the natural language. You don't say "If 5 dollars is more than what I have...", instead you say "If I have less than 5 dollars ...".

This is a result of the code being transpiled from their scripting language and run through Google's Closure Compiler. You'll get the same behavior on conditions if you try it out (http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home).

Javascript? I haven't been tracking the details of this game at all, but is the GUI really done in Javascript? Are they using a custom engine of some sort? How can that possibly be performant?

That looks correct, the population starts fudging as soon as you pass 500 pop

http://np.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a6oeo/proof_that_th...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com