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Mameluke
Aug 2, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

Singing Sunflower posted:

Ah yes, how dare they fund the continued support of their games by releasing paid content on the side? Good and honest thing to do would be to leave their games to rot.

I think more C:S players than not would prefer this game no longer be supported so that the mods don't break every time devs arbitrarily decide to add more minigames

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Kyte
Nov 19, 2013

Never quacked for this

Mameluke posted:

I think more C:S players than not would prefer this game no longer be supported so that the mods don't break every time devs arbitrarily decide to add more minigames
I really doubt most users would be happy with no bugfixes, new functionality or new stuff in general.

Popete
Oct 6, 2009

This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs

Grimey Drawer
I just want a big expansion pack that really expands on the simulation. These small "industry", "college", "parks" DLC are ok I guess but they just feel tacked on and like they aren't really changing the game itself, I've only bought Mass Transit cause it was the only one that seemed to be expanding the underlying sim. Also $10 for a snow map where the weather never changes? That's pretty lame.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord

Popete posted:

I just want a big expansion pack that really expands on the simulation. These small "industry", "college", "parks" DLC are ok I guess but they just feel tacked on and like they aren't really changing the game itself, I've only bought Mass Transit cause it was the only one that seemed to be expanding the underlying sim. Also $10 for a snow map where the weather never changes? That's pretty lame.

I feel like this will be as deep as depth goes until C:S2, should that ever happen. None of the DLCs have really built up that sim later underneath.

Bold Robot
Jan 6, 2009

Be brave.



I just want to be able to make a big, realistic city without using a ton of mods and hand-placing everything. If this means cutting back on the simulation aspects (say, not having it be agent-based) for performance reasons, I'm 100% cool with that. The game systems in C:S are not interesting and I ignore them as much as possible anyway. I just want poo poo that looks cool.

um excuse me
Jan 1, 2016

by Fluffdaddy
I want them to re do industries. The current attempt feels half assed.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I feel like they could do so much more if they cut down the numbers of agents for a lot of things.

Industries could be really good if they just used fewer trucks and needed more heavy haulage and dedicated pipe and conveyor work. Build actual railyards through industrial complexes and internal road layouts that don't get used all the time but just need to be there to complete the look and for the components to work.

Similarly you could probably glom together pedestrians into like, blobs of 3-5 and make a much bigger focus on pedestrian accessibility and mass transport usage.

The game can mechanically simulate a lot of stuff it's just you need to mod the poo poo out of it to actually access it and the numbers aren't tuned well so the game loves spamming just piles of cars and trucks.



OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:08 on May 14, 2019

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

um excuse me posted:

I want them to re do industries. The current attempt feels half assed.

I feel very much the same, but for every DLC and the base game.

hailthefish
Oct 24, 2010

OwlFancier posted:

I feel like they could do so much more if they cut down the numbers of agents for a lot of things.

Industries could be really good if they just used fewer trucks and needed more heavy haulage and dedicated pipe and conveyor work. Build actual railyards through industrial complexes and internal road layouts that don't get used all the time but just need to be there to complete the look and for the components to work.

Similarly you could probably glom together pedestrians into like, blobs of 3-5 and make a much bigger focus on pedestrian accessibility and mass transport usage.

The game can mechanically simulate a lot of stuff it's just you need to mod the poo poo out of it to actually access it and the numbers aren't tuned well so the game loves spamming just piles of cars and trucks.



Yeah, exactly. There's too many agents being wasted on poo poo that doesn't need to be agents, and on top of that the agents don't really seem to actually matter that much for the most part. Maybe by condensing down the agents and eliminating the unneceessary ones, the remaining agent simulation might provide more mechanical impact and gameplay value.

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

hailthefish posted:

Yeah, exactly. There's too many agents being wasted on poo poo that doesn't need to be agents

Besides seaguls what else is?

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Simcity had CPU cycled dedicated moving poop agents down sewer pipes and electricity agents down lines. Skylines doesn't agent-base anything too stupid, it just generations way too many on the screen at once.

A problem with skylines and other real-time agent based games like Soviet Republic is that they are trying to strike an impossible balance between the city functioning in real time, with roughly real-time walking and driving speeds, but not actually playing in real time or with real-scale geography. If you had the scales and speeds and time accurate you'd need a real life day to simulate a game day, but if everything else was sped up so days could tick by in seconds, traffic and people would be a blur.

So we get this weird abstracted time scale and slightly sped up movement speeds. But, if people spent a realistic proportion of their time actually working or sleeping there would still not be "enough" traffic and activity even with these compressed scales. Also, players want to build big mega highways and complex metro systems which really shouldn't exist in a city of a hundred thousand people. So, to compensate for these various scale issues they just jack the traffic up. People spend 90 seconds commuting to work but then only stay there for about as long. This ensures a constant buzz of activity, a constant flow of pretty moving objects to watch flow through your networks.

But of course this means the streets are always full of cars, your factories are always a tangle of trucks, and the sidewalks always filled with throngs of people. And all these agents need to be simulated. There's no correct solution, it really comes down to a matter of taste. The current trend in games of this sort is full 1:1 simulation with few things abstracted. If that truck gets stuck in traffic its delivery is actually delayed, that fire truck doesn't put out the fire, that coal miner doesn't get to work. On the other hand you have older school games like Simcity 4 that heavily abstracted things, it was as if the game was running in full accelerated real time and those blurs are boiled away into their statistical averages then applied to your roads and highways statistical capacities.

For a game like Soviet republic where you're never getting more than 10,000 people and there's a huge focus on transport-tycoon style railroad signal puzzles true agent based simulation makes sense. For a city builder though I think a more abstracted model makes much more sense. Toss a layer of agents over top that follow the abstracted statistical routes and data, but save your processing for more interesting things. Does it really matter if a busy intersection is jammed up now and again if you watch long enough by individually simulated cars turning left, or a traffic overlay shows you that the left turn capacity at that intersection is slightly over its optimal limits? Does it matter that the reason a good intersection design works in a certain situation because there's a traffic simulation actually using it, or if statistical models based on simulations that show how an intersection like that handles different types of traffic is simply telling you the stats? For some people, a huge joy in skylines is the former examples, for me I can take or leave it.

There's also the problem of bad AI that actually give worse results. An abstracted statistical simulation can take real-world data that actually uses motorist behavior to form its statistics, while a AI simplistic enough to be simulated on such a huge scale can't figure out when or how to change lanes. The correctly simulated intersection could tell you it allows 5,000 cars per hour but the tested agent-based intersection only allows 3,000 because of quirks in the driver AI. For me, stuff like this generally makes fully agent based simulations not worth it. The entire game is forced to center around them and I think there's more interesting things than traffic.

Mameluke
Aug 2, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

Kyte posted:

I really doubt most users would be happy with no bugfixes, new functionality or new stuff in general.

All of this is what mods are for. Hide It! came out after the last xpac, or ronyx69's railway replacer mod. If CO wants to, say, fix the way closely-clumped roads jank eachother up, or provide their own fix to the AI not using multiple lanes, that would be welcome. Breaking all the current mods to introduce another vestigial organ of the "game" is not.

John_A_Tallon
Nov 22, 2000

Oh my! Check out that mitre!

Mameluke posted:

[Real improvements] would be welcome. Breaking all the current mods to introduce another vestigial organ of the "game" is not.

That's the real issue, mods being rendered incompatible is an inconvenience for players.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

turn off the TV posted:

Besides seaguls what else is?

Pedestrians could definitely be abstracted into groups and place more focus on mass transit to reduce the numbers of individual cars.

Industry traffic has very low capacity/generates way more trucks than it needs to, and has no way to just, like, integrate rail/heavy transport directly into the output, so you even need trucks just to get things from a factory to the rail yard next door.

I live near a steelworks, it has its own giant rail yard that handles most of its cargo and also, once upon a time, a large amount of its labour force.

I like agent based stuff but the game uses a very similar number of agents to simulate a person, a bus, a train, and a cargo ship, all with wildly different capacities. If it focused more on higher capacity things and abstracted some of the smaller stuff a bit that would probably improve the simulation as well as putting more emphasis on stuff the player is involved in like heavy transport links.

Hell TBH you could probably completely abstract out the pedestrian level, and just visualize busy routes as being populated with people but not actually simulate them as agents, as neat as it sometimes looks to see trainloads of people all pop out of a station.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:56 on May 14, 2019

um excuse me
Jan 1, 2016

by Fluffdaddy
You bring up another thing, infrastructure that takes up huge amounts of space don't exist. Shipping yards, rail yards, parking, large manufacturing plants, etc. Other than traffic production, industries are unrealistically efficient.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

Yeah definitely, I'd love to plop together an industrial complex and run all the routes through it. And as I wrote earlier that internal connectivity would be ripe for statistical simulation. And an agent based system would be very justified if it meant you actually had to build proper rail yards and poo poo on a more OTTD level to specifically park and load/unload large vehicles.

Everything works by booping. The truck boops the building, the train boops the cargo terminal. There's no holding capacity, no load/unload time, none of that stuff you could actually make interesting with agents and the existing network tools.

You could have yards that load faster or slower depending on what equipment they have, or how many workers they have, needing different amounts of warehousing dependent on how much stuff they get delivered at once, or how good their networks are to get the goods to the production floor/how many production floors they have.

Essentially you could make this a really cool industry designer using the existing tools while also feeding into the "build a cool looking thing" element.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:05 on May 14, 2019

ToastyPotato
Jun 23, 2005

CONVICTED OF DISPLAYING HIS PEANUTS IN PUBLIC

Baronjutter posted:

Simcity had CPU cycled dedicated moving poop agents down sewer pipes and electricity agents down lines. Skylines doesn't agent-base anything too stupid, it just generations way too many on the screen at once.

A problem with skylines and other real-time agent based games like Soviet Republic is that they are trying to strike an impossible balance between the city functioning in real time, with roughly real-time walking and driving speeds, but not actually playing in real time or with real-scale geography. If you had the scales and speeds and time accurate you'd need a real life day to simulate a game day, but if everything else was sped up so days could tick by in seconds, traffic and people would be a blur.

So we get this weird abstracted time scale and slightly sped up movement speeds. But, if people spent a realistic proportion of their time actually working or sleeping there would still not be "enough" traffic and activity even with these compressed scales. Also, players want to build big mega highways and complex metro systems which really shouldn't exist in a city of a hundred thousand people. So, to compensate for these various scale issues they just jack the traffic up. People spend 90 seconds commuting to work but then only stay there for about as long. This ensures a constant buzz of activity, a constant flow of pretty moving objects to watch flow through your networks.

But of course this means the streets are always full of cars, your factories are always a tangle of trucks, and the sidewalks always filled with throngs of people. And all these agents need to be simulated. There's no correct solution, it really comes down to a matter of taste. The current trend in games of this sort is full 1:1 simulation with few things abstracted. If that truck gets stuck in traffic its delivery is actually delayed, that fire truck doesn't put out the fire, that coal miner doesn't get to work. On the other hand you have older school games like Simcity 4 that heavily abstracted things, it was as if the game was running in full accelerated real time and those blurs are boiled away into their statistical averages then applied to your roads and highways statistical capacities.

For a game like Soviet republic where you're never getting more than 10,000 people and there's a huge focus on transport-tycoon style railroad signal puzzles true agent based simulation makes sense. For a city builder though I think a more abstracted model makes much more sense. Toss a layer of agents over top that follow the abstracted statistical routes and data, but save your processing for more interesting things. Does it really matter if a busy intersection is jammed up now and again if you watch long enough by individually simulated cars turning left, or a traffic overlay shows you that the left turn capacity at that intersection is slightly over its optimal limits? Does it matter that the reason a good intersection design works in a certain situation because there's a traffic simulation actually using it, or if statistical models based on simulations that show how an intersection like that handles different types of traffic is simply telling you the stats? For some people, a huge joy in skylines is the former examples, for me I can take or leave it.

There's also the problem of bad AI that actually give worse results. An abstracted statistical simulation can take real-world data that actually uses motorist behavior to form its statistics, while a AI simplistic enough to be simulated on such a huge scale can't figure out when or how to change lanes. The correctly simulated intersection could tell you it allows 5,000 cars per hour but the tested agent-based intersection only allows 3,000 because of quirks in the driver AI. For me, stuff like this generally makes fully agent based simulations not worth it. The entire game is forced to center around them and I think there's more interesting things than traffic.

drat this pretty much sums up exactly how I feel. I wonder if, like you mentioned, a compromise where the sim is actually abstracted, but there is a visible agent layer for traffic visuals could work. So like, rather than this insane idea that you can click on every person or car and follow them home and to work or school and see their name, etc, the agents that you see would merely be representative of the most common routes according to the abstracted stat data. They wouldn't really be AIs trying to path their way around the city, and they wouldn't be traceable to specific buildings. Basically they would be little things that go from point A to B before disappearing at their destination, their routes are based on the data from the simulation, as opposed to path finding AI. Traffic agents would be completely divorced from the occupancy of work places or schools. For emergency vehicles, similarly, it would mostly be a visual thing I suppose. Them getting snarled in traffic would be a visual representation of your traffic, and less a literal representation. That is, just because the agent is stuck in traffic, doesn't mean they get there too late, necessarily. The sim will have decided whether or not your coverage is enough. Maybe one visual conceit for that could be that even if you have highish traffic, they will give way to emergency vehicles in some cases, but not others, depending on various factors regarding the sim data, as opposed to the current system where the AI doesn't know how to do stuff so things get stuck when maybe they shouldn't. Stuff like commute times would be reflected in the happiness ratings of workers or students, rather than having agents stuck in traffic for "reasons" causing issues with buildings being occupied. High traffic would lower happiness, and make it harder to fill slots in general, as perhaps there might be some threshold for commute times that could be applied (with variance of course) to different types of citizens where if the routes between point A and B are too slow, they just won't "go".

Kyte
Nov 19, 2013

Never quacked for this
I'm fairly sure there are more people are interested in following an individual sim than in building the ideal factory logistics. Even SimCity 4 added U-Drive It with Rush Hour. People like interacting with the city as more than a statistical model. Just like they like interacting with individual guests in Roller Coaster Tycoon/Planet Coaster, or individual patients in Theme Hospital, etc. It's why The Sims overtook every single other simulation game in existence.

The door was opened with SC4, and CSL paved the entrance. Removing individual simulation will never be seen as anything less than a regression.

Kyte fucked around with this message at 21:00 on May 14, 2019

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

Maybe you could still fake it for when people select a person to see where they are going. Just give that one a real destination.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Was U Drive It anything more than just the ability to get a street-level view of your city though? Never played SC4.

Those other games make it work by operating on a totally different scale. Additionally, examining individual people in those games is a critical gameplay element. Not only are individuals in Skylines totally faceless, interchangeable agents but following them doesn't really provide all that much information. And the really (not-so-)critical info gets shunted over to Tweeter anyway.

I'd be genuinely interested to know how many players actually care about being able to follow individual pedestrians. Cars might be a slightly different story since the game is so traffic focused, but peds?

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 21:31 on May 14, 2019

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Poil posted:

Maybe you could still fake it for when people select a person to see where they are going. Just give that one a real destination.

Yeah, you could easily have some named and tracked character sims that helped represent huge swaths of people. You could follow them on their daily routes and patterns, which wouldn't effect the actual game but would be generated based on their abstracted life and be a good indication on how the city is working.

You'll never get a game that pleases everyone. I personally don't really care about individual folks. It's fun following people and seeing them use all your transit to get from A to B, but I don't care about the character/person I just get a kick out of confirmation that my system is being used. I'm just as happy seeing a simcity 4 style route overlay showing me where and why they go where they do.

This person works at Industrial Thingamajigs and they drive to work every day and I can see an overlay of their route, I can see their preference for driving this route is only 58% meaning if I was able to make other methods a little more attractive they'd consider a mode shift. I click on another button and it shows me all their non-work related routes, a spider web of their shopping, leisure, and social travel. They are able to do most of their shopping on foot in their neighbouhood but they make a social trip to a suburb on the other side of town a lot and there's just nothing I can do about that but it's minor so who cares.

I can then take this information, improve some bike lanes, rejigger some roads so that her drive requires a bit more of a detour by car but by bike she can bypass it all. Her preference for driving the route falls down a bit and cycling increases a lot and now I can see she rides her bike to work.

Maybe I can even click on her or one of her routes and hit "view" and the game then plops her out of her home and lets me follow a simulated version of that typical trip. Hell, maybe during that viewing I can watch her make some Roller Coaster Tycoon style thoughts like "I don't feel safe riding my bike through this intersection" or "I love the trees and little shops on this block" or "Fast traffic on this street makes it unpleasant to walk" and so on. And it's all useful information. I go and check out the intersection she complained about and I see that due to the heavy car traffic and long lights it's very unattractive to cyclists, so I click it and go into the intersection customize and install some dutch style cyclist protections, which lower the car flow rate but make it much more attractive to cyclists. I check out the street she complained about and lower speed limits and reduce the lanes from 6 to 5 and add some space for street trees to buffer the sidewalk. I also look at the street she liked so much and take note that is has nice wide sidewalks with trees, limited car access, and is lined by fine-grained retail. I can see how the game is cool enough to simulate and track the sort of things that make an area pleasant and attractive and gave me the zoning tools to shape the area as such.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

Baronjutter posted:

Maybe I can even click on her or one of her routes and hit "view" and the game then plops her out of her home and lets me follow a simulated version of that typical trip. Hell, maybe during that viewing I can watch her make some Roller Coaster Tycoon style thoughts like "I don't feel safe riding my bike through this intersection" or "I love the trees and little shops on this block" or "Fast traffic on this street makes it unpleasant to walk" and so on. And it's all useful information. I go and check out the intersection she complained about and I see that due to the heavy car traffic and long lights it's very unattractive to cyclists, so I click it and go into the intersection customize and install some dutch style cyclist protections, which lower the car flow rate but make it much more attractive to cyclists. I check out the street she complained about and lower speed limits and reduce the lanes from 6 to 5 and add some space for street trees to buffer the sidewalk. I also look at the street she liked so much and take note that is has nice wide sidewalks with trees, limited car access, and is lined by fine-grained retail. I can see how the game is cool enough to simulate and track the sort of things that make an area pleasant and attractive and gave me the zoning tools to shape the area as such.

:five:

I know I said scale is what makes this kind of stuff work better in other games but I would still love to see this kind of thing.

Also it would be cool to see more small to mid-scale, well, not so much city builders as town builders. They put out a few back when the SimCity brand was big, I think (Societies and SimTown) and there's a few low-tech games already out there, but nothing really exists if you just want to manage a single modern town rather than expanding into an endless urban sprawl.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 14, 2019

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

I just want them to stop relying on ploppable buildings.

OwlFancier posted:

Pedestrians could definitely be abstracted into groups and place more focus on mass transit to reduce the numbers of individual cars.

Industry traffic has very low capacity/generates way more trucks than it needs to, and has no way to just, like, integrate rail/heavy transport directly into the output, so you even need trucks just to get things from a factory to the rail yard next door.

I live near a steelworks, it has its own giant rail yard that handles most of its cargo and also, once upon a time, a large amount of its labour force.

I like agent based stuff but the game uses a very similar number of agents to simulate a person, a bus, a train, and a cargo ship, all with wildly different capacities. If it focused more on higher capacity things and abstracted some of the smaller stuff a bit that would probably improve the simulation as well as putting more emphasis on stuff the player is involved in like heavy transport links.

Hell TBH you could probably completely abstract out the pedestrian level, and just visualize busy routes as being populated with people but not actually simulate them as agents, as neat as it sometimes looks to see trainloads of people all pop out of a station.

I think that you're touching on two issues here.

The performance issues that the game has comes from pathfinding, not necessarily the agents, and for whatever reason pedestrians are much cheaper to compute than cars are. In fact, I think that cars are the only kind of agent that really causes significant performance problem. There isn't a way to optimize the computation time of road traffic that's really workable because there isn't a better way to do pathfinding than what the game currently has.

AFAIK their best bet wrt performance is to do what you're suggesting and change how the game uses agents in order to streamline things like cargo.

The second issue is the way that the game stores data is a holdover from Cities in Motion. It wasn't written with the intention of working in a large scale city builder, and as a result the game can hit hard limits on the amount of objects it can store. There isn't really a way around that without doing a huge rework of the game's code, at which point you're basically making a new game.

turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 23:50 on May 14, 2019

BigBallChunkyTime
Nov 25, 2011

Kyle Schwarber: World Series hero, Beefy Lad, better than you.

Illegal Hen

Bold Robot posted:

I just want to be able to make a big, realistic city without using a ton of mods and hand-placing everything. If this means cutting back on the simulation aspects (say, not having it be agent-based) for performance reasons, I'm 100% cool with that. The game systems in C:S are not interesting and I ignore them as much as possible anyway. I just want poo poo that looks cool.

I see all these big, beautiful cities people create on here and other places with insanely low populations for the building sizes and land area. It takes a lot of the fun out of it for me that the game will pretty much be unplayable whenever I get around 100k.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

turn off the TV posted:

The performance issues that the game has comes from pathfinding, not necessarily the agents, and for whatever reason pedestrians are much cheaper to compute than cars are. In fact, I think that cars are the only kind of agent that really causes significant performance problem. There isn't a way to optimize the computation time of road traffic that's really workable because there isn't a better way to do pathfinding than what the game currently has.

This seems really weird given that pedestrians use the same grid as roads do..?

turn off the TV
Aug 4, 2010

moderately annoying

OwlFancier posted:

This seems really weird given that pedestrians use the same grid as roads do..?

I think that it's a result of pedestrians just walking from point a to b without really caring about anything besides stoplights. If they simulated crowds with the same level of detail as they do traffic I'm sure pedestrians would have a bigger impact.

pointlessone
Aug 6, 2001

The Triad Frog is pleased with this custom title purchase.
I think the best thing that could be done for the agent issue would be heavy culling with the abstraction others have suggested. Treat everything within camera range as agents while zoomed at a certain range, cull off everything else. I don't need to know what donut truck 75683 is pathing it's way around 15 squares away off camera, but the game keeping track of 45 units of industry items from [location]. Cull individuals unless they're in sight, generate randomly on render.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

turn off the TV posted:

I think that it's a result of pedestrians just walking from point a to b without really caring about anything besides stoplights. If they simulated crowds with the same level of detail as they do traffic I'm sure pedestrians would have a bigger impact.

I guess so, just seems really strange that the game can handle massive pedestrian density easier than it can car queuing.

Suspect Bucket
Jan 15, 2012

SHRIMPDOR WAS A MAN
I mean, HE WAS A SHRIMP MAN
er, maybe also A DRAGON
or possibly
A MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL TEAM
BUT HE WAS STILL
SHRIMPDOR
I spent a relaxing evening making tiny Jamaica Queens. So far I have a tiny Jamaica Station, and part of Little Rochdale.

Except mine is on a coast, so it's also going to be tiny Freeport and Jones Beach.

Kyte
Nov 19, 2013

Never quacked for this

OwlFancier posted:

I guess so, just seems really strange that the game can handle massive pedestrian density easier than it can car queuing.

It's likely that a big reason is that roads have lanes, which means a single road segment is actually multiple pathfinding segments. There's also the much more complex intersection behavior, pedestrian crossings, lane switching, etc. And since it has to do math for every node (even straight nodes, because lane switching), it gets exponential.

Gonna quote some guys in the Real Time mod github which were in turn quoting some guys in the TMPE mod github:

quote:

Case in point, in a recent pull request review on the TMPE mod, this cropped up:

Assuming every source lane has 2 target lanes on average: n * 2 extra computations needed (max. 262144 * 2 = 524288) which gives us a total maximum of 2*n*n + n*2 = 137,439,477,760 required calculations.

That's the outcome of an increase from 1 to 2. Simple change, big ramifications.

(This also illustrates why CO has refused to integrate TMPE-like behavior to the base game, btw)

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




pointlessone posted:

Treat everything within camera range as agents while zoomed at a certain range, cull off everything else. I don't need to know what donut truck 75683 is pathing it's way around 15 squares away off camera, but the game keeping track of 45 units of industry items from [location].

That's not viable - agents aren't just a graphics thing, they're how the simulation works and calculates. With the exception of a few garnishes like seagulls you can't just cull and add detail as the player zooms around.

Kyte
Nov 19, 2013

Never quacked for this
I think what they're suggesting is that it all follows statistical models and only spawn agents that follow those models for stuff that's in view.
A more advanced version of what SimCity 4 did for its cars, I think.

Personally I'd rather have a limited size city than lose agents, I like seeing peeps running around and micromanage their pathfinding with stuff like TMPE and high-detail road construction. I'd actually prefer if they had more detail to their simulation, like an integrated Real Time mod (and select destinations based on wealth, education and distance).


On a vaguely related note, is there a way to make subways use both platforms on the terminus and have them switch tracks on an alcove past the station? It's how they do it here so yeah.

Mameluke
Aug 2, 2013

by Fluffdaddy

Kyte posted:

Personally I'd rather have a limited size city than lose agents, I like seeing peeps running around and micromanage their pathfinding with stuff like TMPE and high-detail road construction. I'd actually prefer if they had more detail to their simulation, like an integrated Real Time mod (and select destinations based on wealth, education and distance).

That's part of the challenge with this game IMO, it was one thing upon release but the devs and community have pushed it in two directions at odds with one another.

tombom
Mar 8, 2006

Mameluke posted:

That's part of the challenge with this game IMO, it was one thing upon release but the devs and community have pushed it in two directions at odds with one another.

It's weird because basically the only difficulty in the base game is traffic management (at worst money just comes in slowly, everything else is just putting more services down) and it's also the most complicated system yet they've been very reluctant to extend it or improve it, hence mods. I don't care for difficulty but personally I like more complicated traffic because it's the only way to judge if you're city is going "well" and it always gives you something to be fiddling with - focusing on the aesthetic alone is too dull for me.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:
Could you not do a Schrödinger's Agent? Before you click on a person/car, they're a graphical representation of a statistical model, when you do an agent is spawned to replace them with a specific destination in mind? The statistical model could be based on a more limited number of actual agents, which initially might be on a 1:1 basis but as your city grows the statistical model starts taking over?

Like, say you had a city with a population of 100,000. Maybe only 10,000 of them would be active agents at any one time, randomly chosen, with the remainder acting based on the aggregated data of previous agents as well as currently active agents. The larger your city is the less you need to model specific agents to get a satisfactory result, so the number of agents could be largely divorced from city pop - allowing the developer to divorce city size from computation needs to a great degree. Since agents are still used, Schrödinger's Agent should work - and it shouldn't really affect performance much since these manually activated agents would still be few in number compared to the total number of active agents.

Kyte posted:

I'd actually prefer if they had more detail to their simulation, like an integrated Real Time mod (and select destinations based on wealth, education and distance).
If you limit the number of agents active at any one time, it seems like you should be able to add more detail to the simulation of the ones that are active? And the statistical simulation I suggested above would act as input to these agents too, so congested roads would be deselected by agents in favor of roads with less traffic.

Bold Robot
Jan 6, 2009

Be brave.



A Buttery Pastry posted:

Could you not do a Schrödinger's Agent? Before you click on a person/car, they're a graphical representation of a statistical model, when you do an agent is spawned to replace them with a specific destination in mind? The statistical model could be based on a more limited number of actual agents, which initially might be on a 1:1 basis but as your city grows the statistical model starts taking over?

Like, say you had a city with a population of 100,000. Maybe only 10,000 of them would be active agents at any one time, randomly chosen, with the remainder acting based on the aggregated data of previous agents as well as currently active agents. The larger your city is the less you need to model specific agents to get a satisfactory result, so the number of agents could be largely divorced from city pop - allowing the developer to divorce city size from computation needs to a great degree. Since agents are still used, Schrödinger's Agent should work - and it shouldn't really affect performance much since these manually activated agents would still be few in number compared to the total number of active agents.

I would be super down for something like this. It's cool to be able to zoom in on an agent but it doesn't seem crazy for the sim to fudge it a little. No idea if it would actually work in practice though.

hailthefish
Oct 24, 2010

Yeah, an approach like that would be the one that appeals the most to me and the things I enjoy about C:S but I don't have any better idea than anyone else how feasible it is.

dogstile
May 1, 2012

fucking clocks
how do they work?

John Murdoch posted:

Was U Drive It anything more than just the ability to get a street-level view of your city though? Never played SC4.

Those other games make it work by operating on a totally different scale. Additionally, examining individual people in those games is a critical gameplay element. Not only are individuals in Skylines totally faceless, interchangeable agents but following them doesn't really provide all that much information. And the really (not-so-)critical info gets shunted over to Tweeter anyway.

I'd be genuinely interested to know how many players actually care about being able to follow individual pedestrians. Cars might be a slightly different story since the game is so traffic focused, but peds?

I played a ton of simcity and the U-Drive stuff had some side missions that you would need to drive around your town to complete, with additional penalties for breaking stuff and monetary rewards for doing it properly. Wasn't a particularly balanced thing but it was really, really cool at the time (at least to young me!).

It also had people you could place down in certain areas and it'd tell you about their life, which I thought was cool. Individual agent you'd track was down to five, but I cared about them.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Kyte posted:

I think what they're suggesting is that it all follows statistical models and only spawn agents that follow those models for stuff that's in view.
A more advanced version of what SimCity 4 did for its cars, I think.


You really wouldn't want that, agent simulation is much better than statistical simulation for this kind of game. It'd be a huge leap backwards in terms of modelling quality.

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Kyte
Nov 19, 2013

Never quacked for this
Free update details:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/cities-skylines-campus-dev-diary-6-free-update.1178499/

Salient points:
  • Baked-in vehicle customization for bus lines.
  • Industry policy that shifts them to mechanized production, makes them use educated workers instead.
  • Library building, gives entertainment and a very small chance of leveling up a sim's education.
  • Education levels now properly follow the education track, e.g. an adult can't go from uneducated to educated by going to uni, if they miss the boat that's it. This has two consequences:
    • There's no more discrepancy between number of graduates and expected number of educated citizens.
    • By preventing cims from leveling their education later on, the education spread should be more even, making it easier to keep uneducated adults for zoned industry, for example.
  • New option to prevent fires from spreading, including tree fires (no forest fires).

as an aside, were you able to have multi-building complexes that only needed one main building for city services? because that could have modding potential, depending on how exactly it's implemented.

e: oh, so they did answer how'd Match Day (real football) stadiums interact with Campus stadiums.

quote:

The Match Day arenas can be placed inside University zones, but you can't customize them the way University arenas work. They're still considered city-wide buildings. They expect modders will make variants that work with the new University features.

quote:

Campus arenas can be placed anywhere and they'll work like a Match Day stadium outside of Campus zones.

Kyte fucked around with this message at 17:46 on May 17, 2019

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