BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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Well duh, we all knew that, or you should have if you didn't. No way they were doing some crazy hybrid thing like Notch wants to do with Ox10c, the cost alone would be insane, and they'd be doubly insane not to charge a monthly fee for such. Not to mention there was no simulation lag when they had all that server trouble, if they had been doing any simulation server side everyone would have noticed.

 

By the way guys, if your PC can run Sim City on cheetah speed without a hiccup then we can easily run a bigger city as well! You just might, GASP have to turn down some graphics settings because that portion of the engine is poorly optimized (Tropico 4 runs like a champ on medium-high on my PC while Sim City scrapes by on medium-low).

 

It just seems they became obsessed with this whole "you have to TRAAAAAADE man." Thing, which in my experience hasn't been very interesting. I don't want to "trade" for ambulances or whatever. I want to SIMULATE my ambulances. I want to have to decide where to put the clinic, and maybe a second one, or should I just add more ambulances to the first? That's ended up being way more interesting than "trading" and just having them appear off the freeway. That stuff involves a lot less thought and interesting interaction than doing it yourself.

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I love how RPS apparently didn't bother to try and get a quote from an EA representative... they already have a story fit to print. Journalism. *sigh*

 

Sad true, but this is how it works, just playing the game and doing a little reverse engineering in your head reveals it as such. It's why you get a "copy" ambulance and other stuff to send to other cities in the region rather than actually sending "your" ambulance. It's all just asynchronous stuff that "interacts" via the highway and etc.

 

Besides, there's a good chance the EA representative would have: A. regardless of having any idea how it actually works denied it all B. gone "no comment" or not commented because they don't have a position for this yet

 

Not a real profit foreseeable from doing that, and besides, since there's severely good evidence this is how it does work EA can do it's own promoting and response. P.S. I can barely imagine how much friggen crashing there would have been if there had been ANY simulation server side. Depending on what was done you'd either see your game freeze every once in a while to just crashing every two minutes.

 

P.P.S. they should probably modify their A* pathfinding stuff. A* is the standard pathfinding equation for most games, and just finds the shortest route navigable route between any two points extremely efficiently. But for traffic what they should be doing is taking traffic into account a bit, obviously a car with a huge backup in front of it will choose to go down a nearly as direct but open route in the real world. In Sim City this doesn't happen so far as I can see.

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Besides, there's a good chance the EA representative would have: A. regardless of having any idea how it actually works denied it all B. gone "no comment" or not commented because they don't have a position for this yet.

 

That's a really bad excuse for not picking up the phone!

 

I guess the difference with internet news is that they don't need the whole story before it goes to print: They can just quickly publish an update once somebody else finds out how EA responds.

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Did anyone happen to get a screenshot of SimCity's ridiculous 91 metascore on launch day? I could reeeally use that screenshot for an article I'm working on.

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For whatever reason, I just don't think Maxis is as beholden to replicating reality as completely as possible as you do. I think Maxis chose some design goals first and foremost, and did their best to be true to those; and I find those design goals interesting enough that I find the resulting game interesting and compelling, at least in theory--there are still some complaints I have even within that context. But look at something like "Civilization." Actual civilization still exists now in reality, and in the game Civilization you can reach the year 2013, and yet that series rarely takes hits for not modeling civilization as accurately as might be theoretically possible. Ultimately, Civilization uses the passage of history as its starting point, but is largely accountable to a particular game design ethic more than anything else; I feel SimCity is the same way. Some entries in the SimCity series have different goals in that respect; this one has one, SimCity 4 has another.

The issue is not at all about the accuracy of the simulation, it's about what is included in the simulation, however accurate it happens to be. I'm not annoyed that Maxis chose to simulate things with X degree of fidelity - what I am annoyed is that they chose to simulate Y things with X degree of fidelity, where "Y" is "a possibility space that rules out progressively designed cities." Civilization is abstract but it allows you to achieve different sorts of victories - scientific, diplomatic, or militaristic. If Civilization billed itself as Civilization but you couldn't beat the game peacefully, I'm sure people would shit all over it for wrongly implying that progress is only possible through beating the shit out of other cultures. That's not true, and in fact it's a dangerous and regressive idea, but luckily Civilization's systems don't suggest this and never have. Civilization's systems suggest that many things can lead to triumph, including uniting everyone in cooperation or discovering more about the world. War is of course an option, but it's not the only option, and to make it work you have to kill lots of people. All I can ask of Civilization is that it allows civilizations that thrive in real life to thrive in the game, and it does no more and no less.

I ask the same of Sim City. City designs that thrive in real life ought to be possible in the simulation, or, if they are ruled out, the simulation needs to be honest about why they are ruled out. Sim City needs to bill itself as "Fuck, We're Not Smart Enough to Make Anything but 1950's Suburbs Work in Our Simulation: The Game" instead of "The City Simulator" because right now Sim City is saying that the right (and in fact the only) way to make a city is to design a car company's wet dream. Just like if Civilization only let you win through warfare, it should call itself something like "Warcraft" or "Command and Conquer."

My basic point is that games that purport to represent reality, no matter how much they abstract reality, have a duty to model that reality in a way that doesn't suggest anything pernicious. If they want to suggest something pernicious, that needs to be part of their explicit message, something they convince you of on its merits, not something dictated by fiat in that the simulation pretends that if you disagree, you are not just wrong, you are believing something impossible. Sim City suggests something quite pernicious - it suggests that cities need to be build around cars (and that cities can't have taxes above X% without riots and so on). These things are pernicious because I would say that they are patently untrue (counterexamples exist as we speak!) and because belief in their truth leads people to vote against funding for public transit and so on, depriving cities like Seattle of mass transit that they could really use. And Sim City suggests these things by fiat. If you try to build a walkable city it just doesn't fucking work, and the reason it doesn't work is that the game thinks that car cities are the only cities. If that were its explicit message, then fine, it's just a dumb game, but it's not explicit about it. Nothing that I can see about how the game bills itself suggests that anyone would ever think it's only about building car cities until they pick it up and try to do otherwise.

So, if Sim City is really in the position you say it is, namely, as picking "Sim Suburb" as the starting point, it needs to be honest about it. Don't sell Sim City: sell Sim Suburb, or Sim Car City, or Sim City: Most American Cities version, or something. Don't just pretend like cities have to be the way they are in the game, which is the message that a title like "Sim City" sends.

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I'm just having hell of a time reading issues with this game. Some highlights (I think the first one is already mentioned in this thread):

 


 


 


 

 

Maxis strung together very broken low-level behaviours and hoped that somehow it will produce a high-level simulation of a real city. They probably realized that it didn't/couldn't work, so they introduced even more broken bumps and tweaks to make the city function barely. Of course now the numbers don't make sense and players are taking notice.

 

I think they should've gone for simple statistical+area of effect models like the previous SimCity games instead of an agent based one. It would've been more accurate simulation (at larger scale) and more satisfying too, when you see your actions produce more measurable outcome.

Or do it right - I've been playing Tropico series lately and it seems like they do everything SimCity set out to do but better (the population is a lot smaller but still).

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(Incidentally, all of this stuff also invalidates your point, Chris, about how they went in a bold new direction and had to cut certain features out to make their agent simulation work, and then later they can add this special stuff back in. At this point it looks like they're doing a worse job simulating individual sims that Sim City 4 did - at least in that game people had houses they lived in an jobs they commuted to in a sensible manner, rather in this nightmarish collectivist bizzaro-world Maxis has created with this game.)

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(Incidentally, all of this stuff also invalidates your point, Chris, about how they went in a bold new direction and had to cut certain features out to make their agent simulation work, and then later they can add this special stuff back in. At this point it looks like they're doing a worse job simulating individual sims that Sim City 4 did - at least in that game people had houses they lived in an jobs they commuted to in a sensible manner, rather in this nightmarish collectivist bizzaro-world Maxis has created with this game.)

Well, no it doesn't. I've out of my way to say that that's a completely valid line of criticism as far as I'm concerned.

For example:

"If it fails in its accountability to its own goals, I think that's a more interesting line of criticism than it failing to be accountable to the real-world models you would have liked the designers to chase but which they didn't."

I know I've said things to that effect more than once.

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I'm still more excited by a simulation built up from simple low level behavior than the statistical approach of the former games.  I really just felt like I was playing Excel after awhile.  

 

I have reproduced some of those videos linked above.  The interesting thing is that the behavior seems to result from the fact that an agent does all its calculations when it is created.  So you have a ton of cars heading down a crowded street because when those cars left work, that street was NOT crowded.  Same for fire engines and fires -- all the fire engines choose the same fire when they leave.  But any fire engines that leave after a fire engine is arrives at a fire choose another.
 
So they could either update agent pathfinding on a quicker intervals, or have agents call 'dibs' on fires/homes/etc.
 
On the lack of permanent homes and jobs: a 'day' in simcity is more like a year in a real life city.  Sims graduate school in a handful of days.  Whole new districts are built in an afternoon.  Real cities don't change like these ones so I think it's reasonable they have to change jobs and homes so often. Though it would be nice to have some kind of default weighting so people prefer their old house I suppose, given a lack of other changes.

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Well, no it doesn't. I've out of my way to say that that's a completely valid line of criticism as far as I'm concerned.

For example:

"If it fails in its accountability to its own goals, I think that's a more interesting line of criticism than it failing to be accountable to the real-world models you would have liked the designers to chase but which they didn't."

I know I've said things to that effect more than once.

No, I mean, the fact that it fails in its own goals is a valid line of criticism, like you've pointed out, but moreover it invalidates the point that focusing on these goals excuses it for having failed to model the stuff I'm saying it ought to model, because focusing on these goals hasn't bought it whatever simplicity and ease of simulation you've argued is necessary if they're going to pull off something like modeling each individual sim or whatever.

Basically the idea is that if the excuse for having car cities rather than all sorts of cities is that it's a necessary simplification to get the simulation to work right, the fact that the simulation doesn't at all work right is a sign that no amount of simplification will make it work, and thus there isn't an excuse for cutting stuff from the possibility space for the sake of workability.

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Isn't the whole point of agent-based simulation that it's more visible, comprehensible, and intuitive to the player than statistics-based simulation? It blows my mind just a little that these were the compromises that seemed appropriate to Maxis to preserve the essence of the simulation, wherein several of the major systems don't even really interact, not that I could really suggest any alternative beyond scaling back to a largely symbolic use of agents.

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This blog post addresses some of the issues we've been discussing (or more accurately some of the issues Chris and I have been discussing via massive missives while everyone else writes normal-sized posts about normal Sim City things) and I think it's interesting for that reason. His focus is on movies simplifying history, rather than games simplifying reality, but the gist of it is that he's fine with movies simplifying history in the sense that they can still be "recognizable, but not complete. Their over simplification doesn't make them untrue," because they "should be judged and defended on their merit: as a first look, a glimpse, a reminder" rather than as an actual representation of actual things that actually happen.

This is how I think Sim City ought to be judged and why I think it's bad for it to leave options off the table. I don't want a 1:1 recreation of actual cities. What I want is a simplification of cities, a first look, a glimpse, a reminder of what actual cities are, but one that I can play with, poke, prod. When I change something in my Sim City, it doesn't have to react with 100% veracity, because who could ever make a game like that? Even Receiver cuts corners. I just want my Sim City to provide glimpses of what would happen to an actual city, reminders of what would happen to an actual city. I want a vague facsimile, not a mirror. And if Sim City leaves options off the table, I want it to justify leaving those options off the table, and if it leaves options off the table that suggest that the reality it is simulating is something other than the reality I believe exists, I'm doubly in need of a justification. Sim City absent the justification seems like a movie that falsifies history not by fudging the details or simplifying things but by actively saying that things were as they were not, and to the extent that this fudging of history has deleterious results (like, for instance, making people think that cities must be designed around cars), I have an issue with that.

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Yeah, that's a good blog post. It meshes with a lot of feelings I have about historical movies as a professional historian. "Authenticity" is the word I always use, a collection of moments that "seem right" when they transpire. More than anything, I think it's about not having to see the seams where they could stitch things together and the gaps where they couldn't. Wolf Hall is a good example: not to tip my hand for when the pre-discussion thread is posted, but I enjoyed my inability to see where reality ended and fiction began. That's the role of most facsimiles, right? Blurring the line between the two in a way that appeals to the audience's instincts.

 

So watching a YouTube video of some random Joe's city, I'm immediately struck by all the incongruities. A mature city in the game behaves in few of the half-understood ways we think cities do, but that's not to say our expectations are violated in aspects that are enlightening, like sometimes (but sadly very seldom) happens in historical movies. It just seems to be a broken city inhabited by not-people. So yeah, it doesn't really adhere to anyone's intuition of a city, real or imagined, save maybe for a radical Communist's dying fever-dream of a capitalist society in transition. And that's really disappointing to me.

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Isn't the whole point of agent-based simulation that it's more visible, comprehensible, and intuitive to the player than statistics-based simulation? It blows my mind just a little that these were the compromises that seemed appropriate to Maxis to preserve the essence of the simulation, wherein several of the major systems don't even really interact, not that I could really suggest any alternative beyond scaling back to a largely symbolic use of agents.

 

Nah, the hallmark of an low level simulation is in surprising and complex results, not necessarily comprehensible.  From the PC Gamer review:

 

Sims are really good at communicating what they’re unhappy about, so much that it can be annoying, but they’re terrible at communicating why they’re unhappy about it. They constantly contradict each other: one house is concerned about crime, while its neighbor compliments the neighborhood’s great police coverage. One house says shopping is great, the other can’t seem to find the stores. Which are across the street. What the hell.

 

The problem seems to be with what I began this review praising. SimCity isn’t run by spreadsheets, it’s a simulation of hundreds of thousands of dynamic parts, and I think it’s unable to tell me the real reason Sims are unhappy because it doesn’t know. If a Sim has money, it will try to find shopping. If it can’t find shopping, it will complain. It won’t tell me if it sat in a traffic jam all day, or if there are plenty of shops but no medium-wealth Sims to run them, or if it happened to go toward a shop that went under renovation and ceased to be a shop for a short period.

 

To diagnose problems, I have to ignore the implications of complaints. “Where’s the shopping in this town?” suggests I should zone more commercial, but that’s not always the case, and my investigation must begin with the roads, the shops themselves, and the people living near them.

 

This also means the problems can be more interesting... if they can get it all to work.  

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How much of previous Sim City games have you guys played?  I don't think the 'seems' are hidden any better in Sim City 4.  Perhaps Sim City 4 modded out like crazy, but certainly not vanilla.

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No, I mean, the fact that it fails in its own goals is a valid line of criticism, like you've pointed out, but moreover it invalidates the point that focusing on these goals excuses it for having failed to model the stuff I'm saying it ought to model, because focusing on these goals hasn't bought it whatever simplicity and ease of simulation you've argued is necessary if they're going to pull off something like modeling each individual sim or whatever.

Basically the idea is that if the excuse for having car cities rather than all sorts of cities is that it's a necessary simplification to get the simulation to work right, the fact that the simulation doesn't at all work right is a sign that no amount of simplification will make it work, and thus there isn't an excuse for cutting stuff from the possibility space for the sake of workability.

That isn't my point at all. My point is that nothing needs to be "excused" in the first place. The game can succeed or fail, but it has no inherent responsibility to do any particular thing.

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Well, I just sat down to play SimCity for the first time since the tutorial and it swallowed four hours of my time.

 

So, I'm pretty pleased!!!!

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The way traffic works in this game almost feels like a bug they've not fixed yet due to the server capacity stuff. It's hard to believe they've created this sophisticated piece of software without even a rudimentary graph traversal algorithm, which would do wonders for traffic without affecting game performance at all. Now that servergate is winding down, hopefully we'll start to see patches fixing the most glaring problems. I'm interested to see how this version of SimCity will evolve, now that's it all server all the time. Will we see MMO-like frequent updates and changes, or will they stick to the Sims-like smaller expansion packs that adds pets and vacations?

 

Anyway, if you're playing this game, you sure could do worse than claiming a plot in the Thumb region on North America East 4. It seems like you have to need to have joined that server at least once to be eligible for invitations. Friend me or Gwardinen, and we'll hook you up!

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Ah, I see someone already posted links to the things going on regarding people testing the simulation within the game and how it isn't at all complex and is quite 'stupid.' I mean stupid as in simplistic.

 

I dunno... I'm not appreciating the lies coming from not just EA, but Maxis about how the cloud servers are handling the load of the game.

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So is all this proven to be lies? It's a shame that these guys can't just be more transparent about what they want to achieve, when they are caught out it just gives credence to any negative connotations people sprout about them. 

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RPS has a thing with some examples and videos. The SimCity Blog entry today was super-weirdly talking about streetcars without mentioning general traffic. I hope Glassbox is built in such a way that cars can have pathing behaviour that's different form that of sparks and poop.

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T

This is how I think Sim City ought to be judged and why I think it's bad for it to leave options off the table. I don't want a 1:1 recreation of actual cities. What I want is a simplification of cities, a first look, a glimpse, a reminder of what actual cities are, but one that I can play with, poke, prod. When I change something in my Sim City, it doesn't have to react with 100% veracity, because who could ever make a game like that? Even Receiver cuts corners. I just want my Sim City to provide glimpses of what would happen to an actual city, reminders of what would happen to an actual city. I want a vague facsimile, not a mirror. And if Sim City leaves options off the table, I want it to justify leaving those options off the table, and if it leaves options off the table that suggest that the reality it is simulating is something other than the reality I believe exists, I'm doubly in need of a justification. Sim City absent the justification seems like a movie that falsifies history not by fudging the details or simplifying things but by actively saying that things were as they were not, and to the extent that this fudging of history has deleterious results (like, for instance, making people think that cities must be designed around cars), I have an issue with that.

I've been interested in the conversation between you and Chris. Ultimately, I think your problem only arises if you accept SimCity is attempting to be an accurate model of a city. If it's just using the idea of city building to explore game concepts, then I don't have a problem. You mentioned above that you would not like a game ostensibly about farming if the only kind of farm available is a plantation. One of my favourite boardgames is Puerto Rico, where you building and run a plantation. That game totally fails to explore any of moral or political issues that went alongside plantations (eg. slavery, colonialism, institutionalized racism, etc.). But I don't really care, because Puerto Rico doesn't set out to represent the real world. 

 

So then the question is really whether SimCity is setting out to accurately model the world, or whether it is merely a game with a real-world, city-building theme. Some of the marketing did suggest that you could accurately model a city. The game itself, though, never even begins to pretend that it is a "true" simulation of cities. Marketing aside, there is nothing about the game that purports to model the real world, and so I approach it much as I do Puerto Rico: a fun basket of game mechanics with an engaging theme. Just as I don't expect to learn anything about slavery from Puerto Rico, I don't expect to learn anything about history or city planning from SimCity.

 

So take issue with the marketing if you want. I don't think the game itself pretends to be modelling a real city any more than SimAnt pretended to model a real anthill. Since I don't think it's a true simulation, I don't really care that they left some real-world mechanics out. 

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So hey, nobody mentioned that this game has really good music. Was watching some gameplay videos and it's much preferable to the SC4 music IMO, which is kind of important considering how much time you spend with it playing in the background (unless you're one of those guys who turns it off). I see it was done by the Fringe soundtrack composer, which is probably one of my favourite TV soundtracks. Good to know. :tup:
 

Of course I'm not buying it and exposing my ears to its audible delights until the connectivity, city size, and maybe even simulation logic flaws are sorted out. I'm really not liking the sound of all these issues with sims going to home, work, shopping, etc and it seems to be causing a lot of far-reaching gameplay problems that go beyond it simply looking a bit silly (based on those EA threads posted earlier). Looks like some serious steps back from SC4 have been made in some respects.

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