Simcity

[Wiglaf]

I can delete the European buildings I placed later today. It's just the French police station and the German rail.

[Sava]

krautfrogs

[Wiglaf]

OK, DLC buildings deleted, except for Dr Vu and Maxis man (limited edition should be able to access it, so that's you sava). Let me know.

Speaking of Dr Vu, he likes to drive around in a limo and convince factory workers to join his cause. Either that or he's asking directions.

[Wiglaf]

Compiled List of Transit Tips from developer (self.SimCity)
submitted 15 hours ago by McGod
In the pursuit of information on how mass transit worked, I've found that MaxisGuillaume who wrote the original code has given some advice, that I've compiled here for easy access to others.
Traffic Pathing Algorithm
Indeed Ok, now take your road network, and imagine there are dozens and dozens of D* graphs getting built all the time, one graph per destination type. Some of those are pedestrian destinations (like a house, workplace, shop, etc...) some are "transit" pedestrian destinations (like a bus stop that will lead you to a house, a street car stop that will lead you to a workplace, etc...). Those are used by the pedestrians and the stops to figure out who should go where. Then there's a bunch of sets that are used by the transit vehicles themselves, like "pick up shuttle passengers", "pick up train passengers at a neighbor's", "drop off streetcar passengers near a workplace", "drop off muni bus passengers near a home", and finally, "go from stop to stop". Whenever a transit vehicle makes a stop, it drops off all the passengers that can walk to their destination from it, then pick-up passengers. In most cases, if there is still room for passengers, the vehicle will try to go to stops that have people waiting. If it's full (or with a small chance if there's still room) then it will go straight to the first valid drop off point in a list, based on its passengers desired destination. If it's empty, then there's a chance it will drive at random from stop to stop, until it picks up people. Hope this helps figuring out how to play the transit game! [Source]
Zoning
If you use the guides, then you should get the right amount of space for back to back medium and high density buildings (they have the same depth). Sometimes it helps to be zoomed in when you draw your roads, as the guides tend to be followed more precisely than if you were zoomed out. [Source]
Reset Traffic
Also, when you load into a city, all the cars, pedestrians, trucks, buses, etc... start from the unit that originally emitted them again -- their location on the map isn't saved. [Source]
Mixed Zoning
Do a search for Horizontal Mixed Use and Neighborhood Commercial, those are the two types of mixed use zoning the game supports. [Source]
Work Requests
I wrote the original code, but another scripter took over after I started working on the public transit piece. Work buildings send requests to residential buildings at 6am and 6pm (for night shift/continuous workplaces), but only for a portion of their workforce, say about 1/3. Neighbors will also call for workers at those times. This is so you get the rush hour effect. People will decide to walk or drive based on the distance between the workplace that requested them and where they live. If you build your city so you tend to mix zones, then you can effectively create a walkable city. Then for a few more hours, the rest of the workforce will trickle in. You can speed up that process by building public transit. [Source]
Street Car Design
OP is definitely on the right track in being disciplined and building his streetcar system as 1 line per depot, as opposed to a spaghetti dish. [Source]
Don't place your streetcar depot so close to an intersection. Seriously, don't. [Source]
Bus System
Keep buses on avenues and off smaller streets. Place bus stops on both sides of the road (so they're paired) to limit how many U-turns buses have to make. [Source]
You need to balance the number of buses you place with the number of stops as well as the complexity of your network. Not enough buses, and people wait a long time. Too many buses, and your streets get flooded by them. [Source]
Sims don't know which way the bus is going, they just know that if they go to this stop, then they'll be able to reach their eventual destination. [Source]
People will walk to park & ride, yes. [Source]
You should also put the pairs farther apart from each other, each stop can cover about 400 meters each direction. [Source]
Eventually the bus will go back to the garage, at which point the Sim may walk back home (or take transit back home) [Source]

[Sava]

The view of Vulvaville from Vaj Town AMERICA:



The traffic is scissoring right through her!

[Sava]

Good morning Vulvaville!

[Wiglaf]

These filters are..interesting

[Wiglaf]

So it turns out that once you get to high density low wealth buildings, the game starts adding phantom sims to pad your population count. In other words, when you see your population at 400, all of those agents appear as sims in the game and drive around and jerk off and all that, but when you get skyscrapers, it starts fudging the numbers and adding sims. Presumably this is to avoid having a ton of skyscrapers but only 8,000 sims, but this has some strange effects to be aware of:

1) Your population will boom suddenly as your city develops, without a corresponding increase in traffic congrestion;
2) [unconfirmed] Your number of required workers will increase, even though the number of agents looking for jobs will not. This means it would be possible to have a city with 100,000 low wealth sims and 80,000 low wealth jobs, but a worker shortage.

[Guynemer]

So I just read something that I find... difficult to believe.

Someone has claimed that the citizens do not have an assigned home/job in the new SimCity. Houses just generate a set number of workers each morning, who migrate to the nearest job given their class; and then, at night, jobs release citizens who just flock to the nearest residential building until it fills up, then move on to the next, etc.

That... that isn't true, right? Because that might just be the diarrhea topping on this **** sundae.

[Wiglaf]

I can't confirm that, but it seems likely -- it's what I meant when I said power functions like sims, and vice versa. Both are agents that zip around the map invisibly until they find something they are looking for. Power is always looking for buildings, randomly. Sims look for different things depending on time of day.

While it seems strange at first, I'm not sure why it necessarily is a bad design decision. The game was never modelling each sims' personal needs, life and ambitions, nor would it be reasonable to expect that.

[Guynemer]

No, but that is another significant--shocking, really--step backwards from SimCity 4, where sims from a given building would work in a given job and you could track this with the query tool, planning your mass transit, etc.

I... I am just flabbergasted. Some of the design decisions in this game are so wrong-headed that I'm wondering what the lead content is in the EA/Maxis water supply.

[Wiglaf]

SC4 as far as I know simply assigned random homes to random jobs. In SC5, agents have to get to jobs, using roads and transit. For some reason you want to have attachment to each sim, and you are overlooking the new importance of infrastructure in SC5.

[Wiglaf]

The devs are saying the pathfinding is using weighted routes, and sims will reroute around congestion. But a road has to be gridlocked for this to happen - otherwise they take shortest route. They are patching too.

[Alexander's Horse]

maybe there were sabateurs on the design team

[Guynemer]

SC4 as far as I know simply assigned random homes to random jobs. In SC5, agents have to get to jobs, using roads and transit. For some reason you want to have attachment to each sim, and you are overlooking the new importance of infrastructure in SC5.

I have no attachment to each sim; I am just amazed that this game has taken a step backwards in actual simulation as opposed to SC4. (Or, again, Tropico 4 for that matter.)