Hacker News Reader

Comment by creshal | Hacker News Reader

> 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre.

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?

View on HN

I think you guys make it sound a whole lot more glamorous than it really is. I played those city-building games back then (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus). And do note, I absolutely loved them.

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.

Technically, there was a walker that went from the place of employment searching for an occupied dwelling to source employees from. But you are correct that there weren't agents that tracked where each individual citizen was at any given moment.

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.

> "Technically, there was a walker that went from the place of employment searching for an occupied dwelling to source employees from."

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'm surprised the Tropico series isn't getting much love here, I discovered it on personal recommendation after the disappointment of SimCity 5 and it's really a fantastic substitute.

I found the games to be not challenging enough, and they seem to crank out sequels far too quickly with too little changes to justify the price tag. This just rubs me off wrong, with sim titles like that I expect to sink several years into them.

Funny you mention "serfs"... wondering if you were referring to Serf City[1], which predated Caesar 3 by five years but had the same agent system of serfs carrying goods between waypoints. I'd completely forgotten about the game until you mentioned "serfs", but I spent a good chunk of 1995-96 playing it on a (barely capable) Tandy 1000 RL in my basement.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Settlers_%28video_game%29

> (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus)

wow - didn't even realize there was one after Pharaoh. Might check that out...

Ah but the level of detail and graphics?

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.

Except that workers did not go to the same job every day, nor did they return to the same house when they were done. No sim has a history; every move was to the first available location that an invisible "seeker" agent found. So, by not having history, more agents had to be used in order to find available locations. Not to mention that water and electricity were basically implemented as "wandering" agents that just randomly walked the grid and "deposited" at every location they passed until depleted. Which, in turn, meant even more agents, because they had to be populous enough that the random walking would ensure visiting the entire grid.

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.

Take a look at Caesar 3. It's "only" hand-drawn, high-resolution 2D, but the amount of detail is impressive. People enter the map carrying their belongings on hand-drawn carts, erect tents, go to work, walk around on the streets, the building slowly grow all the way up to small palaces… or a mob with torches and pitchforks assembles and razes everything, only to be mauled by the local amphitheatre's lions (or wild wolves). Kids run through the streets, food is carried from the farms to the silos, to markets, to homes, …

It's similar for other games of the time, like Settlers II. Only in the 2000s the detail level was massively cut down.

Games like Pharoah (a direct descendant of the Caesar series) also had agent modeling in the late 90's where you could see what the agents were doing. That said, the computing power and storage capacities of the time limited the set of possible animations. The LOD and graphics are incremental improvements on a feature that has existed for decades (not to say they aren't welcome improvements).

The art department just makes things pretty. They don't have much to do with the simulations folks, aside from being asked for assets for specific actions (car driving, person walking, etc).

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.

Tropico series has it as well, complete with political leanings, food & entertainment preferences, and a tolerance level for el dictator.

I'm surprised Tropico doesn't come up in these discussions about simulated-agent city builders more often. Maybe it didn't feel Sim City-ish enough because you have to place all the buildings yourself, or because of the comparatively low population limit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com