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.)
this was basically a cheat code in the original cities skylines. if you zoned 4x1 alternating residential/commercial/office, you can pack in way more residents, they were happier, and there was less traffic.
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.
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)
That's one of the reasons I really dislike year-less blog posts. The most recent blog entry just reads "(Mar 28)". The first assumption would be the current year.
> 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).
I hated all the heavy traffic in SimCity, so I created the Church of PacMania, which worships PacBot: a gargantuan yellow road following car devouring PacMan.
The Church of PacMania generates a mobile traffic-seeking PacBot agent, plus a whole lot of traffic, the point of which is to attract the PacBot to the church, to sacrificially feed its followers to god, in contrast to the Catholic tradition of worshipers devouring the flesh and blood their god.
Kind of like an automotive version of PKD's "Rautavaara’s Case":
DonHopkins on April 12, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or...
In Micropolis, the open source version of SimCity, I scripted a "PacBot" agent in Python: a giant PacMan who follows the roads around, looking for traffic to eat, always turning in the direction of the most traffic.
The PacBot only has a limited local view down the roads a few cells, and can't see around corners.
Even though they're extremely simple and stupid and short-sighted, they still have interesting emergent behavior when multiple PacBots are competing for the same traffic, like how PacBot will give up and turn around when its competitors eat the cars it was wok-a-wok-a-ing towards.
There is a good example of lots of competing PacBots around 0:55:
>Now you have some good, uuh, there's some traffic here. There's this thing called a PacBot. It's this PacMan that follows the road around looking for traffic. And then he eats it. So that's good for your city. And you can have a lot of different PacMans on the thing, and you know, just editing the road gives the PacMan somewhere to go. So their score is how many cars they've eaten. So it's an "agent", and it woks all around, and he follows roads. And you can put a lot of them on the map to keep the traffic low.
MicropolisRobot.scanRoads looks down the road in a given direction for a given distance, and counts the number of cars (in the traffic density layer), attenuated by distance (further away cars don't count as much).
As it turns out, the PacBot is actually the God of the Church of PacMania (each Polytheistic PacMania Church spawns up to four PacBot God Agents, if it's connected to a road), and the church zone itself generates a LOT of traffic, in the hopes of attracting the PacBots. The emergent behavior is that followers of the Church of PacMania happily drive back and forth between church, home, work, and shopping, again an...
It mostly illustrates the trap that captures many new game developers. The existing game engines are too difficult so I will make new one, and then somehow they spend all the time working on technical side while the actual gameplay never realises.
In this specific case I think the main goal was to show how Rust is superior tool for gamedev :D
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?
if you are trying to bend a different lib version then use a soft-link, so that you are not left wondering in the future which version of the library that actually is
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.
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":
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.
>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.
>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
>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 suppo...
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 .
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.
28 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] threadThe 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.)
So this is a US simulator.
The Church of PacMania generates a mobile traffic-seeking PacBot agent, plus a whole lot of traffic, the point of which is to attract the PacBot to the church, to sacrificially feed its followers to god, in contrast to the Catholic tradition of worshipers devouring the flesh and blood their god.
Kind of like an automotive version of PKD's "Rautavaara’s Case":
https://philipdick.com/mirror/websites/pkdweb/short_stories/...
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:
https://youtu.be/8snnqQSI0GE?t=56
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849908
DonHopkins on April 12, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or...
In Micropolis, the open source version of SimCity, I scripted a "PacBot" agent in Python: a giant PacMan who follows the roads around, looking for traffic to eat, always turning in the direction of the most traffic.
The PacBot only has a limited local view down the roads a few cells, and can't see around corners.
Even though they're extremely simple and stupid and short-sighted, they still have interesting emergent behavior when multiple PacBots are competing for the same traffic, like how PacBot will give up and turn around when its competitors eat the cars it was wok-a-wok-a-ing towards.
There is a good example of lots of competing PacBots around 0:55:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
>Now you have some good, uuh, there's some traffic here. There's this thing called a PacBot. It's this PacMan that follows the road around looking for traffic. And then he eats it. So that's good for your city. And you can have a lot of different PacMans on the thing, and you know, just editing the road gives the PacMan somewhere to go. So their score is how many cars they've eaten. So it's an "agent", and it woks all around, and he follows roads. And you can put a lot of them on the map to keep the traffic low.
MicropolisRobot.scanRoads looks down the road in a given direction for a given distance, and counts the number of cars (in the traffic density layer), attenuated by distance (further away cars don't count as much).
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...
Then the PacBot simulator calls scanRoads in all possible different directions to get a score, and moves in the direction of the best score.
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...
As it turns out, the PacBot is actually the God of the Church of PacMania (each Polytheistic PacMania Church spawns up to four PacBot God Agents, if it's connected to a road), and the church zone itself generates a LOT of traffic, in the hopes of attracting the PacBots. The emergent behavior is that followers of the Church of PacMania happily drive back and forth between church, home, work, and shopping, again an...
https://aeplay.org/
Well it has heavy traffic.
Looks good enough on the video.
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 suppo...
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.