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Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Are you arguing that a game in 1993 is flawed because it failed to accurately simulate a city populated with 100k+ people and associated cars and infrastructure?

I think if you assumed such a thing in the first place your premise and assumptions were massively flawed.

You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can invade? Or the fact that you can magically position fire "trucks" where you want instantly?

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The flaw isn't that it is not realistic enough, but that it goes too much against an average human's preconception of how a basic traffic system should work.

It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect a 1993 game to not choose a random route at a junction; it should use a basic pathfinding algorithm (which were well-known, even in 1993) to choose the closest one.

Of course it is limited by performance but optimization is hardly a good counter-point to intuition in this kind of game.

What if the flawed routing simply exaggerates flaws with the way we think it should be designed?

The number one bottleneck in real traffic is intersections. Some people think optimal city design should mix zoning types at a finer level.

To your point though, we can't really demonstrate what's better when the agents are acting stupidly. I'd like to be able to learn what would work in the real world too.

Yeah, also it is not clear to me why is that so bad, so what that you have a circle line, wouldn't only a microscopic fraction of paths get stuck on it after a large number of crossroad steps ?

This game was meant to run on a 25mhz 386 and 4mb of RAM. Complex pathfinding and over-complicated sub-simulations would have drastically limited how large of a city you could build before your system just stopped working.

> You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can invade?

So, all bets are off when a fantastical element is introduced? We should no longer expect any internal consistency, and the work is entirely above critique?

Why didn't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw the walking trees, so I know that anything is possible.

The answer is because we expect internal consistency. Ok, so there's a superhero in this game system. Doesn't change the fact that it's supposed to simulate traffic, and that this is one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon. Oh, it doesn't actually simulate traffic? Yes, this is a problem: it's a traffic simulation with superheros.

Why didn't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw the walking trees, so I know that anything is possible.

That’s it, no more internet for me today. And I haven’t even had lunch!

> that this is one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon.

No it isn't. Traffic played basically zero part in the game and certainly didn't influence "success" or "failure." Traffic was 99% for visual effect. When I played Sim City 2000 I never put any work into optimizing for traffic and my cities were effectively "perfect" in terms of crime, life expectancy, citizen happiness etc.

I’m with you. I stopped participating in online discussions because of this very issue.

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