Hence, it's understandable that as city-building simulation games seek to become more and more realistic, the challenges that developers face will rise accordingly.įirst let's talk about the citizens, how do they work and what impact are they going to have on the traffic network. There are efforts to employ artificial intelligence to handle the complexities of real-world traffic management, but it is far from a solved problem at this time. These systems have to manage signalling, traffic flow and congestion, tracking and responding to accidents and other incidents on the road such as spillages, damage to the road or faults emerging in signalling systems and CCTV cameras that used to provide oversight.
Traffic management systems in the real world are highly complex and incredibly expensive to research and develop. Now before we get into the intricacies of this problem and how it is tackled in Cities: Skylines, it's important to acknowledge that this isn't just an issue that plagues video games, but the real world too. That said, it still suffers from traffic congestion issues. And as we'll see in a moment, it not only tracks the passage of every vehicle through your city's road system, but your citizens will go about their daily business as one would expect. However, Cities: Skylines when released satisfied many of the features that players sought from its competitor. While SimCity sought to address this through numerous patches, it never really coalesced at a solution that players were happy with. While this is undesirable it seems slightly innocuous, until you realise how big an impact this had on the already troubled traffic systems as well as the actual behaviour and economy of the cities themselves. Instead, they simply go to the nearest vacant property. Sims would leave the house in the morning, find the nearest job available in the city and then after the working day, they didn't necessarily go back to the house they left that morning. While it was anticipated that the sims would live their pre-determined lives - working jobs and living happily in their homes - in reality, they lacked any individuality. Secondly, the citizens in SimCity did not behave as expected. Meanwhile, should the play attempt to rework junctions to enable better traffic flow or add public transportation this often proved to be more a hindrance than a help. Traffic would often bottleneck, creating massive jams that seemingly never resolved themselves. Sim City had issues with pathfinding and citizen behaviour.įirst, the traffic simulation in SimCity was highly problematic. And while the issues raised were numerous, there are two critical points we are exploring in this piece. The game came under intense criticism at release with players posting screenshots and videos of cities not behaving as expected. However, 2013 saw a gap emerge in the market courtesy of the latest entry in the beloved SimCity franchise from Electronic Arts.
#MOVE IT CITIES SKYLINES FULL#
Colossal Order, having achieved success with the Cities in Motion series had sought to expand into a full city building title, a sentiment that at that time Paradox Interactive did not share. This includes establishing city zoning, utilities such as water and electricity, establishing zones for residential, commercial and industrial growth, public services such as schools, fire services and law enforcement, all the taxation that is required to pay for it all and - critically for this episode - road placement and establishing transportation services within the region.
#MOVE IT CITIES SKYLINES SIMULATOR#
Released in 2015 and published by Paradox Interactive, Cities: Skylines is an open-ended city-building simulator where players are responsible for many aspects of modern urban planning. In this article, we'll take a look at the traffic and navigation systems that run in every city, how citizens go about their day-to-day routine and how developers Colossal Order sought to address the traffic jams that can easily emerge. Let's take a look at a fantastic example of this found in the popular city-building simulator Cities: Skylines. An AI tool or system can be running in plain sight, providing a critical element of the game that players are largely unaware of until it starts to go wrong.
Quite often artificial intelligence is in control of so many elements of our favourite video games, but we seldom take notice and take it for granted. You can support this work by visiting my Patreon page. 'AI and Games' is a crowdfunded YouTube series that explores research and applications of artificial intelligence in video games.