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Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

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Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#41

Post by ktrgardiner »

wlesieutre wrote: post #18
justjimmy wrote: post #11

Sim City should be a recommended game for those taking Geography, especially in HS. When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters, as they happened, which was already too late. Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Al…

Just so you're aware about the new SimCity, it requires a constant internet connection to play, and there's no way to save/load previous versions of a city. You can't mess around and experiment without doing irreversible damage, which was a big part of the fun.

If I recall correctly, this is only the case for the beta version of the game so that people can become familiar with the gameplay but won't be the case for the retail version.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#42

Post by morsch »

undergroundhero wrote: post #37
wlesieutre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you're aware about the new SimCity, it requires a constant internet connection to play, and there's no way to save/load previous versions of a city. You can't mess around and experiment without doing irreversible damage, which was a big part of the fun.

I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power than I had for SC4), are they going to put up 50W of processing power while I'm playing?

I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way, using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.

I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's everything else that I'm hearing that scares me.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#43

Post by specto »

ktrgardiner wrote: post #41
wlesieutre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you're aware about the new SimCity, it requires a constant internet connection to play, and there's no way to save/load previous versions of a city. You can't mess around and experiment without doing irreversible damage, which was a big part of the fun.

If I recall correctly, this is only the case for the beta version of the game so that people can become familiar with the gameplay but won't be the case for the retail version.

It is the case for the retail version as well, always on connection is EA's mantra.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#44

Post by tobylane »

wlesieutre wrote: post #18
justjimmy wrote: post #11

Sim City should be a recommended game for those taking Geography, especially in HS. When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters, as they happened, which was already too late. Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Al…

Just so you're aware about the new SimCity, it requires a constant internet connection to play, and there's no way to save/load previous versions of a city. You can't mess around and experiment without doing irreversible damage, which was a big part of the fun.

Ah EA, creating a 'market' of open source clones, like CorsixTH and surely one of Sim City. This time we're being pushed to the clone before the original is dead.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#45

Post by nekojima »

justjimmy wrote: post #11

Sim City should be a recommended game for those taking Geography, especially in HS. When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters, as they happened, which was already too late. Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Al…

A better (and perhaps cheaper) solution would be to use either Cities in Motion which has a good transportation model, or Cities XL (I'd suggest the 2011 version for price and performance over 2012) which has a good balanced play as the cities grow in size. These seem from initial new SC exposure, to be better models for teaching and from a learning perspective. As well the saved games feature (hardly a feature, more a necessity for most of us) is far more valuable for teaching lessons, which the new SC lacks.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#46

Post by mcphilip »

In the original Sim City my brothers and I eventually figured out the solution to ALL traffic problems was to simply never build roads and only use rail lines. Apparently sims were much happier waiting for hours or even days for a train to finally pass their out of the way residential area.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#47

Post by undergroundhero »

morsch wrote: post #42
undergroundhero wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power than I had for SC4), are they going to put…

I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.

It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.

That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#48

Post by a_p »

potatolicious wrote: post #39
a_p wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sim City 4 is single threaded and only uses one core, which is why it is so slow on new hardware. The other major drawback to Sim City 4 is that there is a bug which prevents rich ($$$) Sims from working in the High Tech industry. The only way to fix this is to use a 3rd party mod.

There are many problems with SC4. The most egregious one (for me anyways, someone who likes to build insanely dense cities) is that pathfinding "bug". The short version is, your sims must find a reasonable commute from home to work, otherwise your economy stagnants and unemployment runs rampant. SC4's pathfinding heuristic disallows a sim from going backwards to go forwards. This creates many transportation deadzones…

Ugh. It's been a while since I played, so I had forgotten about this.

It's not as bad as you described it. It's even worse.

The hack the creators of SC4 used to get around the problem of traveling the same path twice in one trip is responsible for a large waste of CPU cycles. Essentially, the hack allows the Sim to "forget" how he got to a certain location and start a new trip to the final destination. The downside is that this is that all of the information from the previous leg of the trip is lost, and the algorithm must run again. There isn't a 1:1 ratio between the amount of citizens and CPU cycles wasted, because as your city grows the path each citizen must take becomes more complex and consumes more cycles.

You can read more about it here, at a third party fan site. [1]

[1] http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=fcff28ec82...

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#49

Post by ktrgardiner »

specto wrote: post #43
ktrgardiner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, this is only the case for the beta version of the game so that people can become familiar with the gameplay but won't be the case for the retail version.

It is the case for the retail version as well, always on connection is EA's mantra.

I was referring more toward not being able to save/load but as I read this awhile ago, the case may have changed.

Re: Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

#50

Post by mauriciob »

ktrgardiner wrote: post #49
specto wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the case for the retail version as well, always on connection is EA's mantra.

I was referring more toward not being able to save/load but as I read this awhile ago, the case may have changed.

I don't think that's an option when you have neighboring cities that are played by other people.

I believe your city will impact theirs and vice-versa.

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