The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
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For example if you have a 6-lane, one-way, road with intersections cars will get into the right/left lanes as soon as they get on the road, even if that's on the other side of the map from where they're turning. Causing the middle lanes to become useless and the others to be backed up (admittedly this isn't totally unrealistic though). I remember Sim City had similar problems and I'm sure it's a tough one to solve. Especially on a big game world with hundreds, or thousands, of intersections and tens of thousands of cars being simulated at once. Even if they don't solve it I'll still be burning my weekends on this game for a long time.
However, I have no faith that the game itself will ever be finished. It's the epitome of "perfect is the enemy of good", they spend so much time getting little things absolutely perfect. At least it makes for an interesting blog.
http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/2zfx70/if_yo...
I wonder how regular GPS use has changed real-world traffic patterns?
It's not selfish to use the road to its full potential. We should all be merging at the last moment, and using zipper merging to allow smooth traffic flow.
Merge at the last moment when your lane ends. Do not merge at the last moment when you need to get into a turn lane. These are different scenarios.
The first change was the addition of dedicated bus lanes (right-most lane, painted reddish), complete with violation cameras and automated ticketing. This reduced competition among buses and cars -- in favor of buses, leading to somewhat better bus throughput. Cars now had five lanes -- although with parking in at least the left-most lane, and delivery trucks double-parked adjacent to the cars, more like three.
Then came the big bike lane initiative. In the book Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt, some of the takeaways are that parked cars can form a buffer between flowing traffic and bike lanes, and that narrowing roads at intersections through the addition of islands with trees on them increases pedestrian safety (in no small part by reducing the speed of turning cars at intersections). To varying degrees they've applied these ideas -- the left-most lane is now entirely a bike lane (painted green, complete with its own traffic signals). Next to that is a dedicated parking lane -- yes, in lane two -- often buffered by concrete islands at intersections, with a tree or two. You can see this here [1]
Cars now have three or perhaps four lanes for general travel. For left turns, the bike and parking lanes are cut by a dedicated left-turn waiting lane [2] (usually with its own left turn signal, so left turners are not fighting pedestrians in the crosswalk).
On some avenues they then added "Select Buses", which work on a "trust-but-verify" honor system so riders can enter and exit quickly through any of three wide doors without queueing to dip a Metrocard.
Finally, they cut the city-wide speed limit to 25 miles per hour, adjusting the timing of avenue traffic signals accordingly.
The result of all this has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but as a whole it's made the city substantially better for bikers and pedestrians, and in many cases left turns are much easier for drivers.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.771088,-73.9538,3a,75y,53.97...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.771088,-73.9538,3a,65.7y,194...
[Edit: clarity]
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9770719,-77.3149885,438m/dat...
But it doesn't look comical, because the roads are proportionately much more slender and the transitions more gradual.
I haven't played the game, but it sounds like it ended up being accurate here!
Not that any of these things are completely unrealistic but it is occasionally annoying when your traffic is backed up solely because they're ignoring the adjacent lane.
All games have failings, how many failings, and the degree people are willing to forgive them is the thing that changes.
I think after the anger of simcity 5, people are willing to forgive a lot of foibles, and despite that, Skylines doesn't seem to have many, it's pretty solid.
(Spring break week traffic has been awesome. Next week: Back to 40 minute commutes.)
Sounds like a good reflection of reality.
I agree! I found this game on Steam last weekend and spent 5-6 hours building a city. It really is the next SimCity city building fans have been waiting for.
They later updated the algorithm, apparently, to do path cost routing, making it far more preferable to take avenues over dirt roads, but until then the only way your city could work at all was to create it entirely out of cul-de-sacs.
There was also an issue with the train service, where, when a commuter train came to an intersection, it would randomly choose which direction to take. This meant that if you had a grid of avenues, some of your sims would be waiting for hours for a train, because the train is bouncing randomly around your downtown instead of dropping anyone off.
Moving to a system where there were literally no intersections at all for your trains was the only way to make your mass transit system a benefit and not a liability.
So even if you had a single long train track with no intersections, but multiple train stations, some train stations would receive more traffic than others.
It was incredibly dumb.
Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)
I think it's a result in AAA development in general being in a slump.
If anything, I'd say Ubisoft (outside of one or two lone bright spots like Rayman) has been worse than EA the last few years, with the rotten cherry of Uplay on top.
After Activision purchased blizzard it has not been the same company.
Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.
You're conflating the battle.net platform that they have built, which is the launcher, the updater, etc. with concerns that people had over matchmaking and chat support.
Uplay is a horrendous piece of junk that feels like a horrendous piece of junk that's horrible DRM. Nobody talks about chat channels and clan support in Uplay, because the only function Uplay has is to sell you games and stop you from pirating games.
Battle.net serves the same purpose, but it serves it much more gracefully. Apart from some complaints about no offline only mode for Diablo and Starcraft, it's been a pretty quiet system. Even with the new launcher it's pretty respectful to players.
I think it's pretty telling that you talk about specific functions like clan support and how Diablo 3 was a cash grab. It means you're talking about gameplay features, and not about the Battle.net platform at all.
The fact is, Battle.net is pretty quiet from a DRM perspective. You don't feel violated by installing the launcher like I did when I loaded Uplay. It feels like a tool for interoperability across Blizzard instead of an attempt to outsteam steam while screwing you over trying to lock down your games.
Battle.net's launcher got me playing hearthstone, it got me playing HOTS, it let me reconnect with people that I forgot I had on my friends list from when I played WoW. It was a useful tool. This is regardless of how long it took them to get clan support in SC2 or global chat channels or matchmaking concerns or whatever else your pet issue might be. Whatever the case, I didn't feel cheated just by installing it. Whether the games are good or not are different question.
And this doesn't even factor in all the mistakes that EA has made.
And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric.
Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)
Need for Speed: Rivals was similar. It was a neat concept, but it revolved entirely around online play that was generally just completely terrible. You get dumped in a map with 1-7 other people, and then you drive around aimlessly hoping that you eventually run into them, which you don't. In the meantime, you're listening to every idiot with a Playstation Camera screaming at their moms for another PB&J, or some jackass swearing the entire time because he thinks he's alone in his room, because there's no way to turn off voice chat in the game whatsoever.
Congratulations, your game is both online (but you can't really tell) and social (but it's actually antisocial).
Simcity is the same way. What if you could play online against other people? I mean… with other people. You could build neighbouring towns. Except you're actually building neighbourhoods because realistically sized cities would take too much server resources. And then you can interact with other cities! By buying or selling resources like garbage pickup, recycling, and power.
Except that the servers didn't work, so online only meant offline always. And the social idea was cool, until some jackass dropped into your region and built a zone that was entirely coal power plants and industrial zones, and polluted the whole region. Or built a city with nothing but power plants, provided power to everyone else in the region, then one day bulldozed everything, pulling the rug out from under everyone else and sending their cities into chaos.
I really hope that Cities: Skylines is successful. It already seems like a far more interesting game than any previous Simcity was, and it has a lot more potential as well. I love the idea of being able to ease congestion by 'work from home' incentives, and it would be cool if they (or modders) could implement that.
For example,
Affinity-omega-to-beta = affinity-beta-to-omega * k1 + (landvalue-total - landvalue-beta) * k2
and,
landvalue(tile) = super.landvalue(tile) + sum-over(all-tiles, (another-tile) -> affinity(race-living-at(another-tile) ) * distance-between(tile, another-tile) )
Or, in colloquial terms, I like you if you like me or if you bring up the land value of my house. And the land value of my house is equal to however they used to calculate land value, and how much I like the race of my neighbors.
It would be amazing (and probably instructive) to see how much gentrification, segregation, and whatnot evolves out of this. Would we see all the races converge to harmony as race becomes a non-factor in calculating land value (because the affinities converge to 1 number)? Or will we see cycles of alpha race at times increasing land value, and at times decreasing it? Or will we see high rates of crime due to increasing population in sectors of eta race? Or will we see long-term oppression where omega race always increases land-value and beta race always decreases land value?
I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.
I liked proper expansions where you got a good proportion of a whole game's extra content. I hate DLC where you are encouraged to buy large numbers of small items, because it's a 'death by a thousand cuts' model of sucking way more money out of the player with far less dev effort.
I never buy DLC for any game, on principle. If a game has a lot, I'll reconsider buying the game at all.
All these games had flaws in their respective models but worked well nonetheless. SimCity 5 is a success IMO; for venturing into a much realistic simulation that you could connect with. Though we all love to complain about the map size.
Cities: Skylines had the advantage of picking up the good pieces of each of these games! On the other hand, the last good game was SimCity 4 in 2003, more than a decade! We badly needed Cities: Skylines.
It's also very elating to see the support the team is giving to us! The Map Editor, the Asset Editor, the water dynamics, a mixture of agent and other simulation models (as they call it - "complex"). Though this game has its own share of flaws, they're quite tiny; except for the traffic (which is being fixed)!
It's also been stated that this game has, by default, a very "easy" gameplay which may have contributed to siding to being a bit less realistic but sufficiently real for playing and having fun.
The traffic is a mess, true. They'll patch it up with a better algorithm hopefully. It's still fun though. I recently had a couple of industrial buildings burn to ashes because the firetrucks were caught up in a jam! Now that's quite possible!
Like the above poster said, the agent model may have been intended to be more realistic, but in practice you couldn't follow a single sim and see a facsimile of reality: they would go to the nearest workplaces and return to the nearest house even if it wasn't 'theirs'.
So where did Sim City 5 succeed that no others have?
It irks me how SimCity 5 is praised for that. The Caesar series had pure agent-based simulations in the 1990s, and somehow had none of the agent routing bugs SimCity 5 had. How can being worse than your competition 20 years ago be considered an accomplishment?
I could see the contrusction workers actually working, moving vans with families, kids boarding coming out of the house, boarding the school bus (actually walking/climbing), going to the school, playing on the swings, the sand, the slides, people actually walking in the park, a car actually owned by a sim being parked at work, etc. SC5 is praised for this level of detail in its model.
It's similar for other games of the time, like Settlers II. Only in the 2000s the detail level was massively cut down.
TL;DR: There were a lot of decisions SimCity made that directly increased the number of agents required. This in turn directly impacted the #1 issue about the game: City size.
SC5 might have been really pretty, but the agent simulation was entry level CS at best. As others have noted, sims woke up and drove to the closest available job regardless of past behavior for example.
Caesar 3 basically had delivery "serfs" that would move stuff from one place to another. Each building had it's own unit to get supplies (materials to do it's thing), and it would simply retrieve it from the relevant store, so it had to path-find across a very simple road network to get to the destination, then back.
As for the other "agents", they were simply "roamers" that would randomly walk out of their "base" building, and go straight until they hit an intersection, and pick one at random.
There were no "dwellers" that would go to work. You simply had population, and buildings got magically filled with workers if they head dwellings nearby.
#Edit. Forgot to mention, you could have as many "agents" on the same road tile as needed. There were no collision checks, nor were sections of the road uni-directional.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_%28video_game%29
wow - didn't even realize there was one after Pharaoh. Might check that out...
Tropico, on the other hand, does have every employee individually modeled.
And I believe Children of the Nile, which is something of a spiritual sequel to Pharaoh, also tracked individual citizens as agents.
Thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I played those games. Now I'm all nostalgic and hankering to play them all over again.
I absolutely love what I have seen of Skylines so far, but it seems to be missing the SimCity charm — that urban soundtrack, the way the buildings light up at night, the unique architecture and art style. I'm hoping mods will fill in all these areas.
It had some pretty graphics, for sure, but I think most people view that as fluff.
You should hear me gush about factorio, and it looks like this: https://www.google.ca/search?q=factorio&tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr,s...
edit: ok, apparently not. apparently people really really really care that their games look pretty, color me surprised.
The graphical art style in C:S is pretty neat, overall. There's a mod in progress that'll bring night views. But I also noticed a lack of charm -- I can't quite grasp why that is. It's still a worthy successor to SC4, at last.
I'm very excited to play Skylines, the gameplay seems a million times better in every way. But the screenshots just aren't as satisfying to look at, and as silly as that may be, that's a big part of SimCity to me.
HOLY SH*^%
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?845038-de...
The one downside is it gets a bit boring after you have made your city. On Sim City you could at least trigger some disasters to destroy your city in interesting ways, I find myself missing that feature sometimes.
When you get further along you can create districts and set policies that affect the evolution of your city. I think the late game is way more interesting as there's an endless amount of things you can tweak.
I'm really looking forward to seeing more mods that affect how districts work, I'd love to create a china town or little italy with specialized assets. I think these things are all possible and will make fully realized cities much more fun to tinker with.
I am hoping that with some future updates this game gets to the point that it replaces the Sim City franchise completely for me, but it's off to a great start.
I particularly love that I can have curved streets and named districts, and that I can rename individual shops, people, and even cars. Makes the city seem more like a character than a simulation.
Do you mind elaborating?
Edit: You're right, Paradox is only the publisher in this case, not the developer as well.
Who are you seeing as the 'not-Paradox' developer for CK2?
EU4 and CK2 are made by PDS, part of Paradox Interactive, a Swedish company.
The confusion was because the thread is actually about Cities: Skylines. That's the game that's only distributed by Paradox, not also made by them, and the one I was confused about.
It's also sad how a large company can lose track of what made its previous products so great. EA tried to "innovate" SimCity 5, except they were "innovating" the game for themselves (e.g. get users online to make it easier to buy upgrades), not the end-user. Gamers did not want a multiplayer-based city simulation with limited scale and broken mechanics.
And even more amazing, for me, is they did it in Unity as well!
I feel like they could definitely summarize important counters for you so you don't always have to click 10 times to get all the information on your city. This is especially true early game when your city is expanding by leaps and bounds and you keep hitting electricity/water supply issues.
The hardest part of modding Skylines right now is using its non-documented UI system; styling the panel is all I have left and it's taken days. Watch /r/CitiesSkylinesModding or /r/CitiesSkylines, that's where I'll be posting upon release.
Transparency and minimize/maximize buttons coming in an update tonight.
Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics 4000
VRAM (Dynamic, Max): 1024 MB...that retails for $30 (can get it for less on sites like greenmangaming.com). That part blows my mind.
EA is still selling Sim City 4 for $20, despite it being old enough to be in middle school by now.
Additionally, there are so many users testing these mods that I doubt any serious malware could be put on Steam without being caught by the community.
I personally have bought skylines and find it great, but I am really wary about downloading mods for it as things stand now unfortunately.
There are no restrictions on what your mod can do - modders just have to figure out how to do it.
1. I bet hobbyists could come up with some garden city plans that would be genuinely pleasant places for real people to live, and perhaps city planners might take inspiration from them.
2. I wonder whether a game like this could produce a file format that could be used as input for a racing game or a game like Grand Theft Auto.
I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.
That is a brave statement these days. No doubt they have to tread carefully lest someone accuse them of infringing the SimCity IP.