- 21 hours
I’ve thought that after releasing my current game, I could play around with large scale real time population simulation.
An interesting fact I learned is that there does not seem to be a significant performance bottleneck. Nagel published a paper in 1995 with an algorithm that could simulate the entire LA metro traffic on 1990s hardware. Actual real time large scale simulation was shown in the early 2000s etc.
AVX and hybrid GPU/CPU ECS can handle millions of “things”. Factorio handles millions of belt objects and traffic is actually simpler because it can use cellular automata. Also peak traffic in a 4M city is only something like 150k-500k cars. HPA and caching could handle pathfinding at that scale.
Other parts of agent based simulation happen so rarely that they also should not take too much performance. Many things have to be updated at a minute scale, so may as well be millions of years for a CPU.
The translation in the post does not really make sense. At that point it’s not agents anymore. Agents act based on their own ruleset, it’s what makes them agents. But absolutely many things can be simulated at macro level that directly impact the agents behavior, because they simply change the simulation parameters.
The issue is mostly that realism is not always fun. If something realistic happens that the player does not understand it sucks. This is the core tension in these games I feel.
Agents will give probably the most realistic outcome, but not sure they make for the most fun one.
- otacon239@lemmy.worldEnglish18 hours
I’ve always wished for a macro to micro transition in a city builder. You could have the macro city builder for your general city management, but have micro areas that you get to influence more directly.
(I don’t know how this would work technically) Imagine being able to create the city at large, but when you want to create a downtown or a park, it lets you place individual objects and decorate directly. It would generate these initially just based on the lot and then you could go down to the micro level and make adjustments and move things around to make it yours. Sort of like how NMS will generate the whole planet, but then as you mine and chop trees, those changes persist into your next session.
- 18 hours
I think it’s necessary when making really large scale games to do this. If you want to build a city the scale of Paris you’re not going to place every road individually. There could be a sort of district tool, where you just designate the area and it can place roads etc. by itself. Or you toggle it off and do it by hand.
- fibojoly@sh.itjust.worksEnglish19 hours
Reading this article made me realise that none of the people in my hometown played games like these. Ever. Or at least, not enough of them, because for the last thirty years, the city has been all about the income and the building, and the infrastructure can go suck some hairy balls…