I’m eagerly awaiting for rail

Every city builder ignores something that most American planning ignores: mixed-use districts.

The neighborhood bar. The grocery shop down by the corner. The bakery in a remodeled house. The multi-story apartment block with a couple restaurants on the ground floor. The plumbing business in an old warehouse completely surrounded by houses. The 150-year-old pastry shop that's been in its current location for fifty years and seen the neighborhood change around it. The run-down building whose owner has been letting it rot for four years and turns out to own about fifty properties in similar condition throughout the city. All of this is stuff I see around me in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans. I see it even more so if I go down to the French Quarter, which is still shaped like an old European city with cars awkwardly driving through it. Half the buildings down there have people living in apartments atop ground-floor shops, with hidden courtyards instead of houses awkwardly dropped into the middle of vast road-facing yards. The cook at one of the Quarter cafes I'm a regular at lives in a place right across the street, above a magic shop and an art gallery and a bar. Things are dense and intertwingled and weird and exciting.

None of that. Just, here's the residential zone, here's the commercial zone, here's the industrial zone. It was fine as an abstraction when Will Wright was trying to make something that'd work on a C64 but it all feels so absurd when I look at the actual world now that computers are powerful enough to run Sim City in a Mac emulator running in your browser with only a couple percent of your CPU time.

The archetypical city builder has "people live in the suburbs and drive into the city to work and shop" baked so, so deep into its core.

(Apparently Cities Skylines 2 actually implements this now that I go searching? Huh. City builder's really not a genre I play much and the continued persistence of this abstraction is one of the reasons I bounce off of it, it's impossible to make a place I feel like I'd want to live as a non-driver.)

FWIW the subreddit for this game has posts of dogs humping. Development appears to be dead, unfortunately.

Dead/dying project unfortunately. I wish I had extra money lying around. I’d love to see what something like this could turn out to be if only the person working on it had the funding.

This is DEAD. The dev also had a bad track record on Patreon

I used to contribute to the authors Patreon, and used to contribute PRs. But I stopped a while back as the author has abandoned the project. The last commit in git was five years ago. (Look at the subreddit if you don't think this has been abandoned)

> Hundreds of thousands of cars physically move along roads and have to break, accelerate and change lanes in traffic to safely get to their destination. Future work: Other modes of transport (pedestrians, light & heavy rail, airports, etc.). Multi-modal pathfinding (combining walking, public transport, taxis and driving to reach destinations).

So this is a US simulator.

Same guy behind jazz.tools

https://aeplay.org/

Does it simulate the darker side of city life, corruption, crime, etc.

I don't understand the modern fad of choosing a noun+"bound" for naming games. Whenever a game has a name like this it really puts me off, because it just screams "I don't care enough about my game to choose a unique name for it". And in many cases, it doesn't even make sense. "Arrowbound"? What's that even supposed to mean?

  $ ldd ./citybound-v0.1.2-685-g8a11e4d 
      linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007f6f3c2d2000)
      libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found
      libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
      libdl.so.2 => /usr/lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f6f3c299000)
      librt.so.1 => /usr/lib/librt.so.1 (0x00007f6f3c294000)
      libpthread.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f6f3c28f000)
      libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f6f3c260000)
      libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f6f3aa16000)
      /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f6f3c2d4000)
      libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f6f3a928000)

The workaround is copying the right lib{ssl,crypto}.so to lib{ssl,crypto}.so.1.0.0, but I do not have the time right now.

Looks good enough on the video.

I followed this project from when it was announced but it was unfortunately abandoned a few years ago. It's probably not worth wasting any time on now.

Very cool project from the early rust game-dev era, I used to follow it while it was in development. Seems to have been dead for 5 years now, tho.

needs a "(2020)" in the title. this is not an active project.

Trying to simulate every microscopic detail doesn't necessarily translate to a fun game (or even a realistic simulation). After working with Will on SimCity and The Sims, I've written about what he calls "the simulator effect" aka apophenia (delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations), and what I call "Reverse Over-Engineering":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590

DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course

Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...

>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.

RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE

5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0

>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.

>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698922

DonHopkins on June 16, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machin...

Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims. Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations.

All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things.

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqzVSvqXJYg

SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect":

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem). Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination! They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY

    From: "Gavin Clayton" <gavinc@eidosnet.co.uk>
    Newsgroups: alt.family-names.sims,alt.games.the-sims
    Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 2:59 PM
    Subject: No other game has done this...

    > Hi... no need to reply to this cos it's just a whimsical thought :-)
    > 
    > When I first got the game I tried to make my own family, trying to get 
    > their personalities accurate too. When making myself, my dad and my 
    > sister, I attributed points to all the personality categories, and I 
    > found I had points left over. But when I made my mum I ran out of 
    > available points and was wishing for more -- I wanted to give her more 
    > points than are available. It made me realise for the first time in 
    > years how much I love my mum :-)
    > 
    > Now what other game has ever done *that*? :-)
    > 
    > Gavin Clayton

Lots more interesting stuff about the design of SimCity in the HN discussion of Chaim Gingold's book "Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine"), and the book itself of course:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698442

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547482/building-simcity/

This project has been dead for 5 years sadly.

I was excited for awhile about this project, but sadly it is not maintained. For scratching the same itch (for me it's traffic mainly that is somehow interesting) you might want to look at https://github.com/Uriopass/Egregoria or for the tighter focus on traffic, https://github.com/a-b-street/abstreet .

A satirical take on "western city builders" is a game called Car Park Capital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFJEbv4qqo8

I find most US urban/suburban planning to be dystopian in nature. It is like the movie Cars: it is a fantasy world without people where essentially none of the infrastructure is changed because everything was already built for the car.