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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

#161

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

robwilliams wrote: post #156
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

assume I have a "good" mod, lots of people download it, which as far as I understand is a "subscription" in steam workshop terms, somebody breaks into my account and uploads a malicious update, now everybody will download the malicious update instead: unless there was a way to tie a code audit to a specific module that you download it seems like this would still be risky

That's a risk you take running any program that isn't sandboxed. I don't see how mods through Steam are any different. Until any popular mod is found to be malicious I don't think it's worth getting paranoid about.

mods that cannot initiate network connections or the local filesystem are not that much of a concern, but running an arbitrary C# program as your local user to me is a significantly different use-case, I think the steam workshop should integrate a checksum approval process where a user can decide for each individual update if they want to install or not.

I personally have bought skylines and find it great, but I am really wary about downloading mods for it as things stand now unfortunately.

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

#162

Post by nitinag »

Opensource OpenTTD [1] (based on Transportation Tycoon Deluxe) is still around and in active development it seems. It was a great Simcity replacement in the past for me. Obviously graphics are dated, but gameplay was great.

[1] https://www.openttd.org/

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

#163

Post by Havoc »

zo1 wrote: post #113
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…

I think you guys make it sound a whole lot more glamorous than it really is. I played those city-building games back then (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus). And do note, I absolutely loved them. Caesar 3 basically had delivery "serfs" that would move stuff from one place to another. Each building had it's own unit to get supplies (materials to do it's thing), and it would simply retrieve it from the relevant store, so…

> (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus)

wow - didn't even realize there was one after Pharaoh. Might check that out...

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

#164

Post by scubadude »

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…

One of the developer's previous games was Cities in Motion, which was all about transport, so I guess a transport focus is to be expected in Skylines. It has sure made me think what a headache it must be to design roads in the real world!

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

#165

Post by UberMouse »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #128
mikeash wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like that is pretty common in suburban Northern Virginia (for example). There are lots of busy roads with two lanes in each direction which expand to three, four, five, or even six lanes at intersections with dedicated turn lanes. I think the only reason that "proposed hack" screenshot looks so weird is because the distance between intersections is much, much shorter than it would be in real life, relative to t…

It sounds like the game is inaccurate in how it models traffic, because in real life people do move out to make use of empty inner lanes (outer lanes? I can never remember). NB: I've not played the game so I'm not 100% on what the traffic problem is, exactly.

The problem stems from the car AI being crazy aggressive in it's lane switching. They will switch to the lane for their exit the instant they can, even if they still have to travel around the entire city to get to it. Leading to middle lanes not getting as much use (At least without careful planning to ensure there is something they can exit the road from the middle lanes with) and potentially large backups of a single line of cars waiting to turn right (Even when the lane right next to it is also a right turn lane). They also cannot merge properly so I end up placing exits on both side of my highways (For both incoming and outgoing traffic) with one side coming up and over the road to join into the other sides exit to limit congestion.

Not that any of these things are completely unrealistic but it is occasionally annoying when your traffic is backed up solely because they're ignoring the adjacent lane.

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

#167

Post by gr8b8m8-88 »

ffn wrote: post #117
toxican wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…

This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or…

The racism / gentrification thing might actually be extremely interesting for its effect on land-value. Like, each sim-citizen would be assigned arbitrary a race; to not conflict with real world race, we can call it race alpha, beta, eta, and omega. On a regional (or global) level, each race would have an affinity value for the other races that is periodically calculated based upon the aggregate contribution to city land value from that race...

For example,

Affinity-omega-to-beta = affinity-beta-to-omega * k1 + (landvalue-total - landvalue-beta) * k2

and,

landvalue(tile) = super.landvalue(tile) + sum-over(all-tiles, (another-tile) -> affinity(race-living-at(another-tile) ) * distance-between(tile, another-tile) )

Or, in colloquial terms, I like you if you like me or if you bring up the land value of my house. And the land value of my house is equal to however they used to calculate land value, and how much I like the race of my neighbors.

It would be amazing (and probably instructive) to see how much gentrification, segregation, and whatnot evolves out of this. Would we see all the races converge to harmony as race becomes a non-factor in calculating land value (because the affinities converge to 1 number)? Or will we see cycles of alpha race at times increasing land value, and at times decreasing it? Or will we see high rates of crime due to increasing population in sectors of eta race? Or will we see long-term oppression where omega race always increases land-value and beta race always decreases land value?

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

#168

Post by bobbles »

interpol_p wrote: post #32

I'm probably in the minority here, but for me the biggest appeal of the SimCity series was the aesthetic and music. The music in particular. I absolutely love what I have seen of Skylines so far, but it seems to be missing the SimCity charm — that urban soundtrack, the way the buildings light up at night, the unique architecture and art style. I'm hoping mods will fill in all these areas.

The sound design in skylines is somehow 'jarring' but i really cant define exactly what causes it

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

#169

Post by methodover »

danudey wrote: post #160
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…

The problem with Simcity is that 'traffic' would basically take absolutely any turn that would get them to where they wanted to go. This meant that if you had a gridded layout of large, wide avenues, four-lane primary streets, and two-lane side streets, your traffic will gladly back up for miles outside of town because everyone entering your city is trying to take a two-lane side street to get to their destination, e…

This behavior applied to train stations too: When a train entered the station in SimCity 2013, it would randomly decide to either continue forward or go backwards (it was strange to look at it -- it would "skip" the tracks and face itself in the opposite direction).

So even if you had a single long train track with no intersections, but multiple train stations, some train stations would receive more traffic than others.

It was incredibly dumb.

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