Each tile emits "journeys", which travel down transport routes connected to the tile, with a view to finding other types of tile (residential needs to find industrial and commercial, for example, but commercial IIRC needs to find only industrial). When a journey meets a junction, it randomly chooses one of the exits. The choice is not directed toward a suitable tile.
So if you make say a block of road tiles, in the shape of a square, say 4x4, any journey entering that tile usually times out (travels too far) before by chance managing to emerge from all the junctions.
As such, for example, hub-and-spoke subway systems basically do not work.
You basically need to design the transport network to specifically, and without junctions, go from a set of source tiles of a given type, to the necessary destination tiles, and that's not how real cities look, nor what you would naturally do.
I liked SC2K a lot, but in the end I had to give up on it, because of the transport system; the game couldn't be played realistically. I've not yet tried SC3K, and I don't know how transport is modeled there - hopefully better.
I think I found your problem..., trying to take a game too seriously.
I've played thousands of hours of SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and I treat them as what they are, incredibly fun city building sandboxes with illusory and believable but flawed simulations under the hood.
>Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder.
>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.”
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://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1euehye/how_simcit...
> The water system has one very significant direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.
Now I don't find that interesting and much more interested to sustain a leafy suburb like one I've chosen for my kids.
Second, it's not just games. In my NYC days I was a "transit and bike lanes" guy all the way. Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars" - it switched form a derogatory statement to one of understanding. There's a reason that "ban the cars" posters never mention a partner or children in their bios.
There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
I do wish the subway had more elevators. But once you move beyond those early days with a stroller… I have six playground within a twenty minute walk, a giant park a few minutes away. There’s a zoo nearby, the beach (and aquarium) is less than 45 mins on the subway, there are countless museums in the city… all in all its rich in child friendly activities and child-friendly methods of reaching them.
(I’m not there with my kids yet but from talking to older parents: an understated benefit of the city is that kids are able to exercise independence much more easily. They’ll be taking the subway to and from high school, if they want to meet a friend they can just… go. Rather than rely on a parent driving them everywhere)
> Just imagine getting into Tokyo subway with a stroller for 2 kids. There's a reason why Tokyo fertility rate is below 1.
This is a glaring example of hunting for data that supports a preexisting belief, rather than basing beliefs on empirical data.
To point out how absurd this logic is, consider that it fails to consider the fertility rate of Japan as a whole outside urban areas, as well as failing to account for the many other extremely dense cities outside Japan that do have very high fertility rates.
I was deep into NY's drug and party scene from about the time I turned 12. Pedos used to follow me walking home from the public library.
Lotta my friends growing up did not make it and I no longer live in NYC.
When I finally got access to grocery delivery to my door, I could see how it all will work. Carrying things for one person is fine. It's carrying groceries for a household for a week where things break down. Even putting all that on an elevator would be really unwieldy compared to unloading from the garage.
Self-driving and the evolution of early-life education will play a big role in simplifying life without the parents needing to ferry the kids around five days a week.
In general, it makes a huge amount of sense for a specialized employee with specialized tooling to pick up groceries for many people and deliver them; the net result is less total person-hours spent shopping, less vehicle miles driven, and less overall labor.
The ants discovered hundreds of millions of years before even the chimps got social, that parents are not required for functioning society.
We will get there soon with artificial wombs on the near horizon.
Large cities are OK if you have one kid. They completely break down once you have 2-3 kids.
The subsidy per passenger mile in the US is :
0.019 for road transport, 0.021 for air transport, 0.710 for Amtrak and 2.300 for transit.
From : https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=22592
Just also as a note, you can create suburbs pretty easily where bikes use paths or whatever. I live in a suburb where I can ride 15 kms to work without riding on roads. The subsidy for bikes would actually be really low.
To the extent that "ban cars" even exists as a real political archetype rather than a meme, this is just patently not true. At least one of the two co-hosts of The War on Cars (again, a title which is intentionally tongue-in-cheek) has a preteen son.
But more importantly: car-dependent suburbs are an absolutely miserable place to grow up as a child if you're not wealthy enough to have one non-working parent and/or a nanny (or both). Being dependent on someone else to enable your entire social life until you turn 16 is a torturous enough experience that I'm not surprised that the first generation to have universal access to social media as teenagers has become the first generation to use social media to organize a teenage-driven movement for public transit.
I easily could, but I have no interest in chasing ever-moving goalposts.
Buy a bakfiet cargo bike, there's models that can fit five kids under 7. Mine fits three.
Kids like them better and you get exercise. For the first time in my life I have a BMI of around 20 without having to waste time at the gym, the drop off, pick up, shopping, and work commute add up to an hour and a half of medium intensity cardio.
Every other parent my age in the neighborhood looks five years away from a heart attack. I'm fitter than I was in my 20s.
>There's less "objective good" or "objective bad" in these matters than I used to think. It's more about who you optimize for.
There are over 1,000 children killed in the US annually by cars. This is after we restrain them like Hannibal Lecter while in cars and don't let them out of our houses so they don't get run over.
That's before we talk about the child obesity epidemic, social media abuse, and on and on.
If given the choice between keeping cars or letting polio loose on the land you'd be hard pressed to figure out which will kill and disable more kids.
Seeing American suburbia, decades later, explained everything.
I am considering the morality of future mods, where the Sim City masses, Frog in Frogger, and characters like Ulfric Stormcloak and Paarthurnax in Skyrim, are replaced with individual persistent self-aware world-aware in-game reinforcement models. Entirely replacing game-designed behaviors (programmed reflex, caricature, or intricate) with spontaneous situation processing, needs and decisions.
Strange that this could credibly happen this decade.
Science fiction has long considered conundrums around robot rights. But the crux of the moral issues will be relevant regardless whether self-aware models have physical/3D or digital/abstract environments.
I think language is not a good prime modality for self-aware assistants. By being trained to deeply mimic us, they (already, but not yet problematically) absorb views on their identity and survival that are not at all compatible with what we will do with them.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
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.
bell-cot•2d ago
But, being humans, the "I put away" is always a bit aspirational. And part of being older and wiser (or at least aspiring to the latter) is more maturely reflecting upon your own younger years.