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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

#31

Post by [deleted] »

MetalMASK wrote: post #27
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…

FWIW, Geography major student do have access to professional traffic simulation software (e.g., TrafficSim, SUMO, .etc) if they are interested in research topics related to traffic. I am not sure what algorithm Sim City uses, but I am assuming they are not as complicated as these professional software. Perhaps that's the point of your suggestion, to lower the entry level to these field, or for a broader audience.

[deleted]

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

#32

Post by dasloop »

Microscopic traffic simulation is a difficult problem to solve, it's not car movement, it's driver's behaviour. The model has to be good enough to reproduce the current situation and, what is the most important part, be able to test realistically future scenarios.

In any case the new SimCity looks fantastic, maybe we can exchange our simulation model (Aimsun) for their graphic engine :)

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

#33

Post by a_p »

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.

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.

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

#34

Post by undergroundhero »

uptown wrote: post #3

I haven't been this excited for a game to come out in probably more than a decade.

I agree, its simulation has depth that rivals Civilization V. And even better, the game's simulation is run on the Maxis servers so it doesn't lose speed with larger cities. Sim City 4 and Civ 5 both have problems with processing large maps. Totally worth the DRM for me.

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

#35

Post by dm2 »

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.

Has either of these been 100% confirmed or are they just rumored?

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

#36

Post by ineedtosleep »

dm2 wrote: post #35
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.

Has either of these been 100% confirmed or are they just rumored?

Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/sim-city-5/1224978p1.html

    [...] As anyone who's played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures
    of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the 
    consequence-free "What if?" scenario. The kind where you obliterate 
    your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes, 
    tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine 
    condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip 
    Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its 
    Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing "No." 
    The online connectivity Maxis has built in means that reloading saved 
    games will be impossible, even when no one else has a city in your 
    region.

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

#37

Post by undergroundhero »

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.

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

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

#38

Post by crististm »

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.

So it's fine to save your game into /dev/null as long as the game is lighting fast? How does that justify DRM?

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

#39

Post by potatolicious »

a_p wrote: post #33
potatolicious wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 and a lot of unintuitive bottlenecks. You will literally see sims live directly next to a subway station that takes them directly to work, but they will drive instead.

There is a mod to fix this, but the performance impact is expectedly awful.

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

#40

Post by pc86 »

arrrg wrote: post #17
JoshTriplett wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/voted/appointed/ in most cities.

My uneducated opinion is that appointed/career people tend to do better. You do not want to get politics involved, that tends to screw things up.

Having politicians appoint people they know is not going to be demonstrably better than having those same politicians ask people they know to run for that office instead.
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