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The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

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Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#41

Post by creshal »

intull wrote: post #33
creshal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ac…

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 it…

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.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#42

Post by Kiro »

joshfinnie wrote: post #2

Cities: Skyline is a great game. It really fills in the gaps that I had from Sim City 5, but it's iterative; it's definitely "picking up the pieces"... I am hoping that with some future updates this game gets to the point that it replaces the Sim City franchise completely for me, but it's off to a great start.

> but it's iterative; it's definitely "picking up the pieces"

Do you mind elaborating?

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#43

Post by lucaspiller »

zrail wrote: post #16

This looks awesome! Does anyone know if it plays acceptably on a new Macbook Pro 13"? The spec sheets for the game say it doesn't support Intel integrated graphics, but maybe that means it just can't run full resolution?

I've got an Air with Intel HD 5000 and it runs ok. The framerate is a bit low, but for a simulation it's fine.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#44

Post by jdmichal »

intull wrote: post #33
creshal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ac…

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 it…

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.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#46

Post by ijk »

dagw wrote: post #22
talmand wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually sounds quite realistic to me. Part of traffic management is dealing with, and trying to predict, stupidity.

In real life you tend to have the exact opposite problem. People changing lanes the second the lane they are in starts slowing down without any forward planning about where they might have to go next.

I expect that the naive traffic sim implementation is to simulate everyone following their GPS perfectly. Real humans seem to have a bit more randomness and a mix of different driving patterns.

I wonder how regular GPS use has changed real-world traffic patterns?

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#47

Post by johnward »

mbel wrote: post #24
gautamnarula wrote: post #23

Skylines looks promising, but I'm still reserving judgement. It's a shame that EA completely botched the new Sim City. I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.

There is a steam version that at least for me works flawlessly.

Even the steam version required hacks for me on Windows 7 and still crashes. Skylines is good enough to replace SC4 for me though.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#49

Post by fuck_google »

gautamnarula wrote: post #23

Skylines looks promising, but I'm still reserving judgement. It's a shame that EA completely botched the new Sim City. I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.

It's a good thing that EA botched the new Sim City as it gave small game developers an opportunity to make their mark.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#50

Post by rxt »

icehawk219 wrote: post #5

Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend. But it's not without faults. For me one of the telling things will be how they handle a very similar problem that EA had with the latest Sim City. Traffic. Once your city becomes a certain size the game goes from City Builder to Traffic Management Simulator. Which itself wouldn't be a problem if…

Traffic is on their radar, at least. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?844893-PS...
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