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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

#81

Post by michaelt »

monkeypizza wrote: post #77

I love simcity, but recently played it and noticed it is really paternalistic. The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without government planting efforts. Farm…

When a game plays itself too well without user input, some people feel that takes away the fun [1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbLOFGSEDo

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

#82

Post by petepete »

Yhippa wrote: post #4

FTA: "...including the fact that once I'd built East Didsbury, the strip of shops in Northenden stopped making as much money as they once were, and some were even beginning to close down as my time ran out. Walk along Northenden high street, and you'll know that feeling." This is interesting. Urban planners out there, do these types of simulations occur before an area is zoned?

I'm not sure urban planning has the same impact in 'old' towns; Northenden has been around for a thousand years and other than being engulfed by Wythenshaw hasn't really undergone dramatic redevelopment.

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

#83

Post by rowanseymour »

monkeypizza wrote: post #77

I love simcity, but recently played it and noticed it is really paternalistic. The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without government planting efforts. Farm…

Isn't SimCity as fun as it is because the player has godlike power over everything?

I can't imagine SimCity: Libertarian Edition being as much fun if you just sit back and watch entrepreneurial sims do everything themselves, followed by sim corporations taking over your sim world.

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

#84

Post by webjunkie »

potatolicious wrote: post #23
webjunkie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What video card are you using? Mine was apparently too old, so I'm looking for a new one.

Two GTX570's in SLI - I'm surprised all the newfangled overlays and postprocessed effects ran so well, though the real surprise is that the CPU-side simulation didn't eat my computer for lunch. SimCity 4 for mid-sized cities and above still kills a i7.

Two GTX570? And you are surprised that it works well? :D

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

#85

Post by webjunkie »

monkeypizza wrote: post #77

I love simcity, but recently played it and noticed it is really paternalistic. The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without government planting efforts. Farm…

You don't control a whole country, you have on city (or now "region"). Any it's made so that Sims only move to your city if you provide everything. They wouldn't move to a new city where there is nothing, no schools, no fire department. I think that's close to the real world. If there is a new town or new part of a town to be build, no one would move there unless some people in charge decide to provide basic services.

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

#86

Post by gnoupi »

undergroundhero wrote: post #47
morsch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The game can actually go on for a few minutes when you lose connection. So I don't think there is much of the simulation happening server-side.

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

#87

Post by Alphasite_ »

gnoupi wrote: post #86
undergroundhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The game can actually go on for a few minutes when you lose connection. So I don't think there is much of the simulation happening server-side.

Yep, one of the developers mentioned that everything is verified server side, but the temporary offline mode indicates that its not that important.

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

#88

Post by Alphasite_ »

elktea wrote: post #62
chrismealy wrote: post #13

Unless you can build cycle tracks there's no point.

You can't. It's a super car-centric game. You can't even build pedestrian-only streets or lanes. Light rail is married to roads. There's no way to set bus routes, buses will visit every single stop in town. Oh and subways don't exist either. Hopefully there's a 'rush hour' style expansion that lets us simulate cities other than Los Angeles.

There is a pedestrian only road, but at the moment its tied to the university as a plopable. But a developer mentioned that he would have a look at it.

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

#89

Post by guelo »

monkeypizza wrote: post #77

I love simcity, but recently played it and noticed it is really paternalistic. The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without government planting efforts. Farm…

WTF. Libertarianism is like some grumpy religion, people are always trying to bring it up even when it doesn't fit.

And it's so wrong about how the real world works. If a community doesn't have a school the first thing that normally happens is they form a government and elect a school board to figure how to build and fund it. Same with a fire department, even with volunteers there are a lot of expenses that need to be paid by the town. Even the sports team is normally brought to a town via the work of politicians.

What these government-haters don't understand is that government IS the community. It's how a community comes together to get things done.

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

#90

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jstanley wrote: post #2

He should have built the town in mirror image so as to account for driving on the right. It may be that the interaction of various turns across the road have an impact.

That was my first thought too. It surely would make a difference as in one case a busy road moving to another via a left turn can simply filter in and in the other it has to wait for the opposite flow of traffic to clear.

Is there a widely available traffic profiling tool like Sim City without the extraneous "fun" parts?? I assume there's some sort of gui based analysis prog that city planners use?

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