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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.

Note also that Sim City, at least, ignores the reality that American cities are mostly vast swathes of parking with a building sprinkled here and there in the parking-scape.

https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

I dunno, a vast sea of parking spaces with the occasional building sums up suburbia for me.

But ok, it's not called "SimSubUrbia"...

But it has the suburban cars and suburban zoning, without the parking lots or even a full simulation of the generated traffic (because that would render it nearly unplayable). It sells new generations of potential urbanists on the idea that a car centric city can work as anything other than a failing pothole filled parking wasteland.

> The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

-- James C. Scott ~~in his review of simcity~~ Seeing Like a State

You could play Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, which has no zones at all. And apparently you start with apartment blocks, not single–family housing. And if you want sidewalks, you have to place them. All of them, individually. I haven’t played it (or CS2) yet, but I’ve been considering it.

Workers and Resources is fantastic!

You even have to lay sewer lines with an appropriate gradient and/or place lift stations to get it to the treatment plant.

Also: it has one of the best soundtracks ... of anything anywhere of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZROr6D2Sb8&list=PLdAfbEvw-2...

Treatment plant is optional.

Japan’s fairly simple urban zoning scheme seems to work quite well. There’s essentially a sliding scale from light residential to heavy industrial, but “lighter” uses are always allowed in “heavier” zones.

> but “lighter” uses are always allowed in “heavier” zones.

As far as I know, this is true of the American zoning system, as well.

One of the major differences with the American system is that the Japanese government only has twelve types of zones that local governments are allowed to use. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...

American zoning codes get really complicated really fast, particularly around what businesses are considered low-nuisance in what neighborhood. Especially the moment people start getting worried about parking. Particularly home businesses, like daycare, hair salons, even the humble lemonade stand can all be zoned down to a single hair.

In the US you can usually build "lighter" within a category, up to a point, but not across categories (e.g. you could build a single family home in a high density residential zone, but not in a commercial zone).

I'm not sure how that compares to Japan's system, but from GP's comment it sounds like you can cross categories there.

It depends on your local law. Where I live, we have mixed use, office residential, general office and warehousing. All broadly allow home building of various types. Going the other way, the rules are quite detailed as to what sort of commercial operations you could start from a residential property in those zones, subject to superseding HoA restrictions.

Japan’s system is more about what would disrupt QoL around it. If you want to open a small bakery in the middle of a residential neighborhood you can do so. Not really economically viable, but some people run these things out of just the front room of their house.

Why wouldn't it be economically viable ? It's been done like this for centuries in France.

Most people buy around the stations. It’s not theoretically impossible, I just don’t get the idea that these places are exceptionally profitable.

It’s not. US zoning often strictly regulates usage.

This is almost never true in practice in the US.

Cities Skylines 2 only implements mixed-use as building variants within traditional zoning, not the organic neighborhood evolution you're describing where buildings naturally adapt between residential/commercial uses over time.

Cities skylines 2 implementation is still pretty lackluster in related aspects.

Lots of buildings have forced carparks.

People are content to walk absurd distances.

I almost preordered when I saw mixed use zoning.

Forced car parks for buildings is at least accurate for a North American context.

mediaeval city builders (e.g. "kingdoms and castles") typically don't have zoning at all, though arguably they are more like "small town builders" in that you place individual buildings rather than areas.

They're also very abstract really - a cottage provides a game-balance worth of people.

> 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).

So this is a US simulator.

It would be a US simulator if it also required at least two parking spaces for each of the hundreds of thousands of cars.

If your only mode of transport is cars you can hardly call what you're building a "city".

Because cars?

Because only cars, and treating everything else as an afterthought.

Those videos show suburbia with huge roads - that does not sound like 'City'.

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":

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 and again, in the hopes of sacrificing themselves to their God, PacBot. And the PacBot Gods hang out around the Church of PacMania, eating their followers, and raising their scores -- everybody's happy!

class MicropolisZone: def generateRobots(self):

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...

class MicropolisZone_ChurchOfPacMania(MicropolisZone):

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...

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 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.

FWIW the subreddit for this game has posts of dogs humping. Development appears to be dead, unfortunately.

That's a very fine level of simulation.

Yup, abandoned 5 years ago judging by the Github page.

https://github.com/citybound/citybound/forks is always something I go poking around in when the original developer moved on. Sometimes one can find bugfixes, other times someone that has picked up the mantle quietly

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.

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.

  $ ldd ./citybound-v0.1.2-685-g8a11e4d 
      linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007f6f3c2d2000)
      libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found
      libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
      libdl.so.2 => /usr/lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f6f3c299000)
      librt.so.1 => /usr/lib/librt.so.1 (0x00007f6f3c294000)
      libpthread.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f6f3c28f000)
      libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f6f3c260000)
      libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f6f3aa16000)
      /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f6f3c2d4000)
      libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f6f3a928000)

Looks good enough on the video.

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

Yes, of course.

This is DEAD. The dev also had a bad track record on Patreon

This project has been dead for 5 years sadly.

Very cool project from the early rust game-dev era, I used to follow it while it was in development. Seems to have been dead for 5 years now, tho.

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?

Not a fan of earthbound, ey?

Same guy behind jazz.tools

https://aeplay.org/

needs a "(2020)" in the title. this is not an active project.

I think even (2019)? According to the youtube videos

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31794872

Does it simulate the darker side of city life, corruption, crime, etc.

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

> etc.

Well it has heavy traffic.

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":

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 support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698922

DonHopkins on June 16, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machin...

Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims. Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations.

All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things.

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqzVSvqXJYg

SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect":

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the 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.

The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem). Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination! They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY

    From: "Gavin Clayton" <gavinc@eidosnet.co.uk>
    Newsgroups: alt.family-names.sims,alt.games.the-sims
    Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 2:59 PM
    Subject: No other game has done this...

    > Hi... no need to reply to this cos it's just a whimsical thought :-)
    > 
    > When I first got the game I tried to make my own family, trying to get 
    > their personalities accurate too. When making myself, my dad and my 
    > sister, I attributed points to all the personality categories, and I 
    > found I had points left over. But when I made my mum I ran out of 
    > available points and was wishing for more -- I wanted to give her more 
    > points than are available. It made me realise for the first time in 
    > years how much I love my mum :-)
    > 
    > Now what other game has ever done *that*? :-)
    > 
    > Gavin Clayton

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698442

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547482/building-simcity/

I’m eagerly awaiting for rail