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SimCity update to fix pathing issues
by Steve Watts, Mar 15, 2013 8:00am PDTSimCity has been the subject of plenty of criticism and scrutiny since its launch, due mostly to the little problem that many players couldn't access the game. As the servers start to catch up to player load, or vice-versa, Maxis is turning its attention towards what to patch next.
The bulk of the studio's focus is on alleviating pathing issues among the Sims and their vehicles, according to a blog post from lead designer Stone Librande. Maxis is currently tuning the values to make traffic flow easier, with a new weighted system that will reroute cars to alternate paths as roads hit fuller capacity. Emergency vehicles will also be smarter, moving into empty lanes to get around traffic jams.
Librande also mentioned that the game will be re-enabling some non-essential features that were turned off during launch week. Those include Regional Achievements on select servers, and Leaderboards on the test server. "We need your help testing the Leaderboards so I encourage you to go to the Test server so that we can expedite the timeframe in which this feature is brought back to the rest of our servers," he said.
Clearly missing was mention of an offline mode, which has been a major point of player feedback. Librande assured players that the studio is listening to all feedback, but didn't address that piece specifically. "We'll continue to provide you with updates on the game as we make these changes," he said. "We appreciate all of the feedback that you've been giving us and I want to assure you that we're listening. It's fascinating for us to see all of the different ways that players are testing our systems and we're excited about making SimCity better with your help."
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SimCity is starting to show signs of recovery, and Maxis has outlined its current moves to turn on non-essential features and plans for an upcoming patch.
SimCity is starting to show signs of recovery, and Maxis has outlined its current moves to turn on non-essential features and plans for an upcoming patch. : Shacknews
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SimCity has been decribed repeatedly in the promotional information as a simulation that has grown to track the activities (as well as cause and effect) of every single Sim "agent" in the environment. I clearly heard about how you could track an individual agent throughout its lifecycle, seeing where goes, what it does, what impacts the environment has on its behavior and vice versa. In theory, it sounds amazing. It also sounds like a simulation who's processing demands could rise expoentially with increasing agent populations.
Which is why we have learned all that was bullshit marketing speak.
The fact is, without some agressive, high level algorithms managing large collections of agents with good heuristics and logic, it requires a massive amount of computational power to track individual pathfinding for hundreds of thousands of individual simulation agents. It doesn't suprise me that a company who's main focus is profitable entertainment is not doing serious legwork on the efficency of the simulation. Why actually deal with the headaches of individual pathfinding, when you can simply provide some basic swarm, shortest-point pathfinding to all the agents to provide the illusion of full simulation when people are paying for an entertainment product. The only people who are going to truly care that the real simulation isn't there is those who have already dropped many hours into the game, and by then, you've already made a profit on them. From a business standpoint, all you need to do is ensure the illusion is strong enough to generate enough entertainment so they might come back to the well again for DLC offerings.
Of course, when it comes to profitability, it also helps if you don't completely screw up your product launch by dropping the ball on a controversal design decision, but that's an entirely different argument.
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