I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due to limitations in the transport simulation.
The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful.
However, at each junction, the trip randomly selection one of the routes.
So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea where they should get off (this branch leads to industry, for example), and some trips just keep going round and round until they reach their max travel distance and fail.
You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would go into this, and never emerge.
In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.
Same for SimCity 2013, except the flaws extended to every agent. I've always thought that's why they limited the city size so heavily. Such a shame, because there was so much promise there.
Power, water, etc. randomly chose a direction at a junction, so even basic grid would make it impossible to power a building on the other side of the city, even if the power demand was there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvq6zAMJfOU.
Traffic and pedestrians were attracted to available houses/work, but randomly every day, rather than having a defined home/work location. I built a pedestrian heavy city and would watch crowds of pedestrians head for the nearest available house on a street, before the whole street filled, and they turned around for the next nearest. Same for work, shopping, despite there being plenty available.
SC 2013 was such a let down after so much hype, for so many reasons. As a lifelong Sim-anything fan it was crushing.
Cities Skylines seems like the successor to SimCity, but even that has some deep-rooted flaws in traffic management and agent flow. Some mods exist to help coax it a bit, but it's still just a broken approach at scale.
Traffic and routing is hard, I get that, but there has to be a better way. Building a city around the routing flaws is not that much fun.
Cities Skylines can provide among the best city sim experiences to be had if you're willing to invest a day (or two) modding it to within inches of its life.
The CitiesSkylines subreddit has a list that contains (IMO) a good number of useful and essential mods.
Word of warning: if you're one of those people that likes to install a lot of mods keeping everything up to date and non-conflicting can be an pain the rear. There is, of course, a mod to keep track of which mods are out of date or could cause issues, but that's really a band-aid on top of a larger problem. The game is old enough now that many popular mod authors have long been abandoned their projects or otherwise moved on so you end up with things like "MyPopular Mod" and "MyPopular Mod UPTODATE" or "MyPopular Mod FORKED" or "Use this instead of MyPopular Mod".
If I take a few weeks / months between plays this usually ends up with me having to take 30 minutes to an hour to get the mods up to date and tested. Not a huge amount of time, but when your gaming time is limited it's something to take into account.
They still add updates to the game once or twice a year, so you usually want some of the new features. That can also lead to the issue of when you finally do decide to update 3 years later or whatever, now it's a 4 hour ordeal to fix instead of 30 minutes. There's no really perfect solution, but it's worth it if you love city builders.
Can it ? In my experience, once Steam is aware that there is an update, you cannot even start the game before updating, even in offline mode... but that was some years ago, maybe this behaviour has changed ?
Yes, that is an annoyance. I think that Steam should put more pressure on developers to make old versions of their games available. I am glad that the software support is there (even if the UI is buried; it was originally intended to support beta–testing programs, complete with passwords to unlock the beta releases), and that developers sometimes use it, but I wish it was a formal requirement for publishing on Steam.
He also has some fun youtube series' where he builds up a region by following a "story" he makes up (or sometimes uses viewer polls). So rather than building a super optimized city, it gets a very natural layout as he pretends to play out rivalries between developers, mayoral or policy changes, etc.
Also I seem to remember something silly involving a nuclear meltdown if you don’t have enough educated workers or if they are stuck in traffic long enough (related to the aforementioned random house issue). I wonder if there has been any fan mods to fix the issues since then. I seem to recall they eventually added an offline mode. The always online requirement was a bit excessive and plagued with issues on launch.
Are you arguing that a game in 1993 is flawed because it failed to accurately simulate a city populated with 100k+ people and associated cars and infrastructure?
I think if you assumed such a thing in the first place your premise and assumptions were massively flawed.
You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can invade? Or the fact that you can magically position fire "trucks" where you want instantly?
The flaw isn't that it is not realistic enough, but that it goes too much against an average human's preconception of how a basic traffic system should work.
It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect a 1993 game to not choose a random route at a junction; it should use a basic pathfinding algorithm (which were well-known, even in 1993) to choose the closest one.
Of course it is limited by performance but optimization is hardly a good counter-point to intuition in this kind of game.
What if the flawed routing simply exaggerates flaws with the way we think it should be designed?
The number one bottleneck in real traffic is intersections. Some people think optimal city design should mix zoning types at a finer level.
To your point though, we can't really demonstrate what's better when the agents are acting stupidly. I'd like to be able to learn what would work in the real world too.
Yeah, also it is not clear to me why is that so bad, so what that you have a circle line, wouldn't only a microscopic fraction of paths get stuck on it after a large number of crossroad steps ?
This game was meant to run on a 25mhz 386 and 4mb of RAM. Complex pathfinding and over-complicated sub-simulations would have drastically limited how large of a city you could build before your system just stopped working.
> You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can invade?
So, all bets are off when a fantastical element is introduced? We should no longer expect any internal consistency, and the work is entirely above critique?
Why didn't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw the walking trees, so I know that anything is possible.
The answer is because we expect internal consistency. Ok, so there's a superhero in this game system. Doesn't change the fact that it's supposed to simulate traffic, and that this is one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon. Oh, it doesn't actually simulate traffic? Yes, this is a problem: it's a traffic simulation with superheros.
> that this is one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon.
No it isn't. Traffic played basically zero part in the game and certainly didn't influence "success" or "failure." Traffic was 99% for visual effect. When I played Sim City 2000 I never put any work into optimizing for traffic and my cities were effectively "perfect" in terms of crime, life expectancy, citizen happiness etc.
Interesting. This is similar to a common optimization in the genre of city builders with walkers, like Caesar or Pharaoh. In these games, buildings like a market or a temple spawn walkers, which walk on roads and distribute services and goods to tents and houses they walk past.
An important optimization in these games is to avoid crossroads and junctions, because walkers tend to randomly choose a direction at junctions. This would make it a coin flip which of the two roads would get food or religious services, possibly causing all kinds of chaos. One of the best layouts as far as I recall was just a big block with a circular road going around it, because this forced the walkers to walk past all buildings in the block reliably.
Saw this. Really looking forward to checking it out for the very topics being discussed here. I love looking at how different teams implement these details. Is it just faked enough to be visually pleasing or do they really have each visual actor in the world doing the real work. :D Used to love playing with these details in the old version of Pharoah and Caesar.
Skylines (which I liked) still has weird simulation errors. Like how many ships arrive at ports, which is an ever-changing amount and has no or little relation to the real transport demand. And the amount of trains using a train line depends on the number of stations, meaning outgoing train lines always need to be connected to a single one to not overflow.
How single agents path is also weird, like how much they walk. I think I remember that homes were also not persistent?
When separating city blocks completely fires would not get extinguished. Either the fire station assigned is random, or only a few actually can send cars out. Which breaks down in a city not fully connected by streets.
Haven't played for a few years now (last run was with the industries dlc), but also haven't read about patches adressing such issues.
I ultimately gave up on skylines because I kind of broke my city and it got really tiresome to try and repair or start over. Tried a few mods to greater or lesser success but they just revealed other flaws. For example, whichever mod allowed for more realistic population densities; you'd have 700 families in a residential building or w/e, but no clue where they work, and likewise in the reverse. I somehow can't click on an office tower and see what the geographic distribution of occupants is, only those that are currently commuting. I'd also get strange issues like some of my subway lines inexplicably being totally vacant no matter what I did. It's also an incredibly inefficient game to run.
Most of the agents in a building are not actually doing anything most of the time; the game has a strict limit of 16,383 moving and 32,767 parked vehicles. These numbers were chosen so that the minimum spec computer at time of the initial release would get 60fps. Mods can increase this somewhat, which is usually safe because our computers have gotten faster.
The built–in tools are also somewhat hit and miss, and that is partly driven by what information the game holds on to and what it throws away for increased efficiency. Agents know their destination and chosen route, but they don’t remember where they are coming from. Thus, when you click on a building to show the associated traffic routes it can only show routes with that building as a destination.
The exception is service buildings like fire or police; each one supplies a fixed number of vehicles, and in theory the tool could show what all of those vehicles are doing. It still just shows the routes that end at the building though, so you end up seeing just those service vehicles that are going home and people who are going to work at the service building. In principle, mods can fix some of these oversights. I use one that shows what each service vehicle is doing, for example. Another mod that I really like allows you to select a stop on a mass–transit vehicle route (a bus stop or a metro station or a ferry station or whatever) and see where everyone who is currently waiting at that stop is going. Very useful.
That said, I think Cities: Skylines is the best SimCity we’ve ever had. It is everything that SimCity 2013 should have been. I recommend it to everyone, but especially people who ever enjoyed a game of SimCity, or has enjoyed any city builder of any stripe, or who think that games are only for children.
The realistic density mod is one of the most game changing and I wouldn’t recommend it until you’re very familiar with the game and how it works/models.
Most of the population just is not simulated, I think. So the game can't show you that information.
I had a similar reaction, after a city of mine completely broke because of simulation errors I gave up on it for a while. Then revisited a bit later to write an article about all the dlcs. It felt a lot more stable then, but that might be because I did not test the edge cases again.
I tried playing it again recently with mods and kept on running into issues where there would be long traffic jams on a single lane of a multi lane road. Basically it seemed like everyone had an affinity to make the same left turn at a this one particular intersection.
In a real city people would just drive around that madness and make a left turn at the next block.
Biffa has videos on “lane control” which are things you can do with mods to help reduce the single lane issues. It can be worked around but it’s not entirely realistic (there are mods that to try).
Cities: Skylines is great, but I do feel it leans a bit too strongly on the agent simulation. So much that a lot of the game is about traffic planning. You are almost required to mod the game (with TMPE) to make the most optimal traffic network, which involves manually planning each major intersection, micromanaging road lanes and configuring timed traffic lights. I've had a lot of fun with it, but I wish I could let the computer handle all the road planning details and I could get on with designing the city, but past a certain size, I feel it forces me to start doing road planning more than city planning. Almost wish there was a "Traffic Manager AI" mod to do all that for me.
Alternatively, you could use it to build dioramas. With enough mods it is one of the best tools for building digital city dioramas and best of all, the simulation still mostly works, so you get to watch people live in the city.
Overall definitely a fun game, lets you build much more natural-looking cities than Sim City, with the only downside being that the road network has a greater impact on the simulation and requires more micromanaging than I would like.
Traffic planning is the single most important aspect of planning real cities too. If everyone would just pick a spot and stay there, cities would be a lot more pleasant.
Can you explain this a little bit more? Are you saying that the game actually simulates each vehicle trip individually, and then decides on a random path at every intersection?
Mmm. The simulation engine as part of simulation any given zone, produces "trips" (I don't know how many or how often) from each zone, and figures out where those trips end up - successfully reached a useful destination, went too far and gave up, etc.
In SC2K the graphics do not depict individual cars or people, and I have no idea if in later games there is a correlation between individual cars and people and "trips" (or if trips are still used as mechanism in later versions - although from what people are writing, it seems they are).
RollerCoaster Tycoon does the same, guests wander aimlessly around park and interact with whatever they come across while considering their needs.
The Sims displays the other end of this spectrum, where agents path deliberately (while still considering their needs), and the difference in simulation scale is immense.
Simple fact is, pathfinding is a performance bottleneck that hasn't been solved yet. We are still using algorithms from the 1960s, and no hardware acceleration exists.
SimCity has always been more of a spreadsheet with houses on top.
But that still doesn't change the fact that path finding must necessarily occupy a larger and larger fraction of the cpu time as the player builds a larger and larger city. Each path becomes longer, there are more paths to plan, etc. In order to maintain an acceptable frame rate in a large city on the minimum spec computer at the time of release, Cities: Skylines has a fixed limit of 16k moving vehicles. This caps the time spent path finding as well as maximum frame time because once the vehicle limit is hit, agents start teleporting rather than being forced to traverse the map.
I'm picturing an alternate history where in addition to dedicated graphics cards, we also start building dedicated common algorithm cards - NVidia and AMD duking it out over whose hardware-accelerated sorting implementation performs best, Phoronix benchmarking how each companies' Linux drivers handle A* etc :)
Exactly. The only time you should be calculating paths is after the player places new roads. Repeatedly calculating paths on a fixed graph is a huge waste of time!
It’s even easier than that since each agent only needs to plans a path once, when they start their trip. After that they are simply following a cached path, removing road segments from it as they go. Most games will simply not recalculate those paths when you change the network, because it causes a lag spike every time the player makes a change, and because most routes wouldn’t end up changing. Better to just have cars ignore roads that didn’t exist when they departed, and have them vanish if they need to take a road that has since been deleted.
My graph is changing a lot, my whole environment from walls to objects is destructable and contains complex logic like access controlled doors.
Maybe your game doesn't change much. Lack of good pathfinding is what's constricting that the most. If good pathfinding existed, games in general could become more dynamic.
At least in the original simcity, as a path was made it was pushed to a stack. If the route didn't reach a destination, the stack was popped and intersections tried again. At least that's what I get from these https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr... Was this changed in 2k?
The original SimCity has (IIRC) checks to see if services were available and ways to estimate traffic load, later ones tried to simulate actual trips.
So it went from “can this house reach a job” to “simulate this house driving to work” - the difference comes from a high density doing one check to doing multiple.
I do not know if in the later versions, there is a correlation between visually depicted cars/people and trips (or if trips are used at all, although from what people are writing here, it seems they are).
This doesn't seem related to the flaw that was described at all - it seems like it applies equally to both road and rail. So while Sim City is very US-centric ("zoning" felt like just a gaming construct to me and I was very surprised it existed in real life) it sounds like they just flubbed the pathfinding a bit.
That's probably right but, at least where I grew up, it's not something you'd know about unless you are building your own house. And it's a bit more flexible than "this bit here is residential, and this separate bit here is commercial" - these things can be mixed.
But in the game you’re playing a city planner (well, a very idealized, pluripotent, undemocratic version of one), so surely it should feature concepts fundamentally relevant to a city planner’s job, even if those concepts are not necessarily familiar to a layperson! Games are typically meant to educate too, after all.
That said, yes, the lack of mixed zoning is one of the more unrealistic parts of city builder games, and one of the most often requested features in the Cities: Skylines community. However, it should be noted that separation of functions is a notion very fundamental to the modernist (1930s–) school of urban planning, and this originated from the entirely reasonable desire to genuinely improve the human condition in cities by separating residential areas from a polluting industry.
Because single-use zoning, together with the ideal of a single-family house for everyone and the use of personal automobiles for transport, turned out to be unsustainable in more ways than one, and because polluting industry is now relegated to a Someone Else’s Problem, mixed use has become (or is becoming) fashionable again, with current ideals and best practices in planning clearly diverging from those of the modernist era.
Another unrealistic idea is, of course, that of a city designed from the ground up, which, although there are indeed real-world examples of fully planned cities, they are very rare. Many players do prefer to start with a tabula rasa in these types of games, and it’s of course much less work for the developers to create maps devoid of existing human population. I, for one, would love to see more maps where the starting point is an existing town, or a group of disjoint villages scattered on the map!
Nb. the notion of planning as a profession emerged in the West mostly during the 19th century, before which cities had, for the most part, grown more or less organically. The need for central planning was in many cases precipitated by fires which could easily destroy neighborhoods or entire towns. Building fire-resistant cities in the era of predominantly wooden buildings necessitated measures such as firewalls between adjacent buildings, streets wider than the alleys of old, and separating neighborhoods with wide, tree-lined esplanades or boulevards. Conveniently, the destruction left by fires also provided the opportunity to realize these measures when rebuilding.
That's totally true that you're playing a City Planner so you might end up exposed to concepts usually only a City Planner really cares about. However my impression (and I might be wrong!) was that Americans were more aware of these things than those of us in UK. Like I literally thought that the light/medium/heavy residential, commercial and industrial "zones" were just a thing Will Wright came up with to make SimCity work (though I know in reality it's more complex than painting a little square block blue, green or yellow)
I read the rest of your comment and nodded along approvingly, but I don't have anything else to add other than that I also liked fiddling with existing towns and cities in these games. In SC2k I really loved the scenarios, free-form citybuilding is definitely good but to have a specific constraint and a goal was a really fun challenge.
Your average American is likely to only be familiar with zoning as a thing that exists. You can travel about and notice that some areas have homes, some areas have businesses, and that's about it.
Those who live in rural areas will be a little bit more familiar- it is not impossible to buy some farm land while working with the local municipality governments to re-zone from agrigultural use to residential use, so that you can build a home there.
The notion that commercial can be split into "light" or "heavy" or that industrial can be split from commercial at all probably isn't something the average person has much awareness of, even intuitively.
I'm not sure if Americans in general are more aware of zoning and planning [speaking as a non-American], but maybe an intuitive conception of a city as a set of functionally separated areas is more prevalent there, because many/most of their cities are shaped by modernist ideals to a much greater degree than many European cities (to an extent that there are essentially _no services_ in many suburbs besides a primary school and a gas station, and city centers, on the other hand, are largely devoted to office buildings).
A friend of mine is making a new city-builder called Metropolis 1998 [1]. If you're into SimCity 2000 specifics, you might also enjoy his dev updates where he posts about his pixel graphics engine, custom pathfinding for agents/cars, etc.
SimCity 2000 was the first simulation game I've ever played. I had a neighbor friend who had a copy and I watched him play a couple times before I was hooked.
SimCity 2000 also misleads people about the safety of atomic energy due to the way power plants work:
- Destruction of the nuclear power plant spreads radiation tiles that persist for 10+ thousand in-game-years.
- All power plants are automatically destroyed at the end of their design life, so if you forget to manually replace your nuclear power plant every 50 years you get radiation.
- All power plants will catch on fire and eventually be destroyed when overloaded, and there is no option to choose load-shedding / brownouts, so if you overbuild you get radiation.
- The "Nuclear-Free Zone" is the only in-game ordinance that costs no money, earns no money, and basically only exists to make a statement.
> In other words: SimCity deliberately misleads players about parking because if they showed parking in its true dimensions, it might make dysfunctional land use patterns look (and act) dysfunctional.
> And we can't have that.
That seems like a fairly bad faith reading of the interview comments. In SC2K you only have so many pixels per building. Even the newer sim cities are not proportional, it's not like looking at a satellite map.
Simcity (originally) was based on problematic books like Urban Dynamics (https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/4/1/22352583/simcity-hid...), which has heavily influenced every other city builder ever since. I don't think things like the lack of parking are an accident. I wouldn't be surprised if real harm caused by social policy/planning could be traced to some degree to Simcity.
Everytime parking (or how cities transit should be) is mentioned, the US is (rightfully) shown as a bad example, and usually compared with Europe.
So I feel like I could give an example about other parts of the world, just for perspective. In summary -- man, I wish my city is half this good so I can actually park in peace.
I live in China, a relatively large size city (pop around 8M to 10M, not too special within China) and we have what I would say "good" public transit system (hundreds of bus lines, 8 metro lines and increasing), not to mention millions of people just commute in e-bikes.
But the thing is, people still need to drive from time to time. (So traffic is as bad). How do we solve the parking issue without building enough parking places? Well, we kinda of don't. For most of public places, you just park everywhere that you can squeeze in. On Roads, on sidewalks, you name it. You better be instantly good at parallel parking and reversing, otherwise you won't survive.
Residential locations are much better nowadays since most new communities now build with parking in mind, but public locations are still a nightmare (an exception is large malls, which usually have underground parking). Everytime I want to go somewhere the first thing I need to do is to plan how to park once I were there. It's awful.
Anyway, my point isn't that "the US is fine as soon as other places are worse", just that "it's complicated" I guess. I lived in the US for years including some large cities. While I really wish there is better public transit (especially when I were traveling), at least parking is bearable thanks to enforced parking lot requirement.
> Everytime I want to go somewhere the first thing I need to do is to plan how to park once I were there. It's awful.
I’d say it’s a fair requirement: if you want to carry a big machine around, you are responsible for leaving it somewhere adequate.
Enforced parking lot requirement is just obliging other people to reserve mostly unproductive land in their properties, and that has very negative effects, such as creating big distances between destinations and, as a consequence, making public transportation less efficient and walking more difficult. It usually (always?) makes cities worse.
The point is that there should be less parking, not more, and there should never be subsidized parking. You do not deserve to store your giant metal box on public property for free, and I want to be able to patronize businesses that aren't surrounded by parking lots and forced to raise prices to cover the cost of building/renting parking.
I did a bit of work on re-implementing SC2K years ago (it was going to be called "21st Century Micropolis") that never got much further than creating asset rippers, a city viewer, and researching into how the simulation works. Nothing playable.
I did discover a semi-easter egg in the newspaper. One paper has an opinions section, and there are two possible lines that have fixed names (both are in the list of tax complaints):
-fred Haslam: "I just *[0x7f] to say, property taxes are primitive, repressive and regressive. only barbaric societies continues to tax the rich."
-pat Mullanney: "you bet I mind! I feel like the *mo's got a gun to my side, robbing me of MY *[0xb9]."
Fred Haslam was a programmer on SC2K, and was also credited for being one of the newspaper writers. I'm not sure who Pat Mullanney is.
> The newspaper specification is considered a work in progress as it can parse all of the text, but very little around how stories are composed has been determined.
This is the part I was most interested in seeing how it worked, unfortunately not developed much yet.
In the video you posted, the host talks about Magnasanti a project to create the perfect city (in the eyes of the game). There is no crime, abandoned buildings, or traffic. A population of 6 million with no hospitals, and no public funding except mass transit and police. Ultimately we can see that the game does not reward citizen happiness, but industry.
The "black box" nature of the simulation within SimCity is fascinating, thank you for the rabbit hole.
I absolutely am not looking to start an argument here, but do you have maybe a link to a discussion or exposition on why CS is an SC? Genuinely curious about the reason for that statement. I have a reasonable understanding of the differences, but for the context of your statement, what qualifies the statement?
Played 2000 for perhaps thousands of hours for years. Didn't get 3000. Got 4, played for a hundred hours, and decided that it wasn't as much fun. It felt too complicated compared to 2000, and the traffic simulation never liked the way I built cities (everybody would always use the busiest streets, ignoring the completely empty streets running parallel to it).
Personally turn off the stupid twitter clone and radio stations. The fake commercials and radio DJs and stuff are ok once, but you’ll hear each of those clips far, far too often. Just play your favorite music in the background.
But I agree that SimCity had a unique character that Cities: Skylines doesn’t try to replicate. Instead of trying to clone SimCity they went their own direction, which is on the whole a good thing.
I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due to limitations in the transport simulation.
The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful.
However, at each junction, the trip randomly selection one of the routes.
So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea where they should get off (this branch leads to industry, for example), and some trips just keep going round and round until they reach their max travel distance and fail.
You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would go into this, and never emerge.
In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.