Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem

gamasutra.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 115 posts

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

#91

Post by bdunbar »

webjunkie wrote: post #85
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…

"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."

Eh. The real world has a lot of examples of people doing exactly that.

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

#92

Post by bdunbar »

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…

Simcity Libertarian edition - I'd love that.

No, really, I would.

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

#93

Post by bdunbar »

guelo wrote: post #89
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 b…

"What these government-haters"

Hi. libertarian here. I don't hate government. Government is probably a necessary evil.

I hate obnoxious, inefficient, bug-ridden, corrupt, expensive, government. I hate government that says one thing to get elected and then promptly does another. I hate government that ostensibly is an extension of the will of the people and then acts against their expressed wishes.

But I'm not grumpy about it.

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

#94

Post by guelo »

bdunbar wrote: post #93
guelo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

"What these government-haters" Hi. libertarian here. I don't hate government. Government is probably a necessary evil. I hate obnoxious, inefficient, bug-ridden, corrupt, expensive, government. I hate government that says one thing to get elected and then promptly does another. I hate government that ostensibly is an extension of the will of the people and then acts against their expressed wishes. But I'm not grumpy…

Everybody wants well-run government, that's not libertarianism. Libertarians want less government, not better government.

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

#95

Post by kalleboo »

wybo wrote: post #80
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…

True to some extent. Though in many countries the government has to give planning/zoning permission at least. And notice how in all versions of Sim City most buildings do appear and 'grow' by themselves. So it is not as bad as you make it sound. Also in many European countries at least, schools and other educational institutions are commissioned and payed for by the government. The same for fire-departments. Sports-s…

I don't know about later versions, but SimCity 2000 did have riots.

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

#96

Post by winthrowe »

batiudrami wrote: post #65
mratzloff wrote: post #64

It seems to me that they blundered when it comes to marketing. If they had just called it SimCity Online and promoted it as an MMO, no one would get upset about the persistent connection requirement and no save/load functionality.

That may do more damage than good. [Franchise] Online titles tend to be met with suspicion and disinterest from gamers who traditionally enjoyed the franchise.

It's already SimCity Online in everything but name, and many gamers who traditionally enjoyed the franchise are exceedingly sceptical about the changes. Might as well call a spade a spade.

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

#98

Post by bdunbar »

guelo wrote: post #94
bdunbar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What these government-haters" Hi. libertarian here. I don't hate government. Government is probably a necessary evil. I hate obnoxious, inefficient, bug-ridden, corrupt, expensive, government. I hate government that says one thing to get elected and then promptly does another. I hate government that ostensibly is an extension of the will of the people and then acts against their expressed wishes. But I'm not grumpy…

Everybody wants well-run government, that's not libertarianism. Libertarians want less government, not better government.

I may have skipped over some steps in my thinking.

But yes, a small government with few to little power is what we need.

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

#99

Post by lttlrck »

mcphilip wrote: post #46

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.

The Victorians figured that out when there were just horses...

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

#100

Post by ersii »

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'm just curious, why are you using Watt as a unit here? Is that like, half the TDP of your CPU or something?
Post reply on HN