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Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned From "The Sims"
There's a great article by JC Herz about The Sims and its implications for information architecture versus urban planning. Cool article - I've certainly planned a lot of The Sims, and can testify to its addictiveness. The whole aspect of involving the community with "skinning" and object creation - in an environment *designed* to accept it has made the difference, IMHO, for the game.
If the /. title here is true, then what I learned from the Sims is awfully depressing: Life is intensely interesting for about 3 days, and then you never want to see it again.
I have to agree with you. It was addictive, but there were parts of it that drove me so nuts, it killed the addiction:
... NO TIME. I don't understand how people got anything done in this game. You barely get out the door in time for work (since it takes you an hour to get up and shower, never mind trying to eat). You get home, and you've got to focus on whatever you need to do to make your sims happy (read, watch TV). You barely have time to make dinner and clean it, never mind tring to make peopl e happy. Then they get so tired they can't even walk to their beds. All so they can get up right away the next AM and do it all again!
... couldn't stop for a second! Had to be at your quickest reflexes 24/7!
:).
1. It takes over half an hour to get out of bed. Come on, people, move.
2. If one sim cuts the other sim off, he sits there like an idiot for, again, half an hour.
3. You had
4. No weekends. Weekends might have helped solve #3.
5. Suspension of disbelief thrown out the window. Come on. Why do my neighbors just drop by for a visit while I'm in my pajamas?
6. No time! (did I mention this already?) How am I supposed to let my sims socialize when I can barely keep them fed and well-slept? I mean, I can barely make them happy, how am I supposed to supplement this with visiting?
Basically, the sims as an exercise in stress management -- my own stress! Never having enough time, constantly rushing until it's time to sleep. As they sleep, you catch your breath, focus, and get right back into it. It felt more like an action game than a sim game
Geez I can feel my heart tensing up as I write this
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
A little offtopic but I really mean this, so think before you moderate me down ...
When SimCity was popular I played it a lot. My strategy was to build the railroad in an early stage, even when I had no money. This prevented me from having to demolish houses at a later stage when the city traffic became to heavy. It meant an expencive start up, but payed off in the long run.
I work as a Software Architect in a Danish IT company. We have tried all of the known development methods: Waterfall, prototyping etc. They all failed and ended as a kind of iterative feature driven development case. We came up with the idea of implementing SimCity in our development: Make a base line platform, that all developers can build on.
The Sys. Arch. is respontible for all the OO planning.
The Senior Developer is responsible for creating/coding the platform, which will consist of fractures of the 1st, nth and last tier in order to "make the railroad work". This e.g. is a control class (1st tier), a logic class (2nd tier) and a database connection class (last tier). This MUST be functional code. Look at this as a horisontal platform.
Now its up to the developers. They can work vertically on each their part/module/object just by looking at the existing code and adding controls to is.
It worx! It pays off, since the developers can code more effectively and independantly - with fewer errors. Somebody calls it vertical iterative prototyping, but "The SimCity Model" is a more attractive name =)
Eih bennek, eih blavek
In socialism, individuals can own property, but the government plays a role in providing services that benefit the society as a whole. Welfare, government insure medicine (like in Canada), and a defensive ary are all socialist policies. The U.S. has socialist policies, Canada has them, and Europe has them. This is because it's been shown that a pure Capitalist system does not benefit the most as well (a few individuals benefit greatly, and large numbers of people suffer from unexpected things like loss of health or economic downturn, and this in turn increases the crime and violence rate).
-no broken link
As I'm sure many of you did, when I first started playing The Sims, I tried to model a character after myself. Unfortunately, in the Sims' world, living on junk food and spending all day on the computer doesn't work out very well. (Or maybe it isn't working out well in the real world either, and I just haven't realized it yet.)
I only have one complaint about the game, and that is when a Sim is "cut off" by another Sim when trying to reach a destination in the household, he tends to stand around for a half-hour of SimTime, just fuming. That frustrates me to no end. The only thing that's worse is when they pass out cold, three feet from their nice comfy bed.
Myself, I stopped playing a couple months ago, and am going to try to stay away until this summer at least. That game is dangerously addictive! Once I start playing it tends to crowd out most other aspects of life.
One last SimNote -- I recently learned that "ChiaBot" from the last season of Comedy Central's BattleBots was built by Will Wright's teenage daughter. I wonder if she reads /..
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I like to watch.
I bought an extra box of Kleenex for nothing!
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I like to watch.
Today was a horrible day. When I tried to watch TV, Fred cut me off and got to the remote first. That makes me so mad! Never want to talk to him again. But somehow, I know I will. The Mystic Force causes me to.
Yeah Diary. I must reveal this little secret. I believe in the Mystic Force. I know all of my roommates will laugh at me. There is no Force. We are all just C++ objects. But then I put on my stupid acts and ask them to explain. None of them can. Fred laughs his silly laugh and Trevor just throws a fit. Then I ask them how they can explain where we get the TV, where we get money, how the extension room to out house gets built. And Trevor gets into a bigger fit. LOL!
These men. All they can think about all day is how to get me into bed. I think the Mystic Force has something to do with it. But you know something? Just because I believe in it, doesn't mean that I don't have standards. Fred? Trevor? Ewwww. What is the Force thinking about, and how did I end up with these losers? I'd rather self->die().
However, C++ is de-facto standard for any commercial game development, as of today. So, it's not the question of language you choose, but rather how you implement the features you need in the given language (i.e. in C++).
As for multiple dispatch... Forced to write in C++, I would implement it using Factory class, returning the correct Functor-object depending on types of classes involved (the simplest case of Functor-object is just a function pointer). This way you can get and call the proper function for any combination of interacting classes.
It may look that way to you (and I'll point out that many people who don't live here have a very inaccurate picture of what LA is actually like) but it's not true. The LA metropolitan area was actually planned in much greater detail than most cities. Starting in the 1920's, well before the really explosive growth in the area, the regional planners were designing what the city was supposed to be like. The designed the city as a central downtown hub connected by a series of major traffic corridors to outlying bedroom communities. As traffic engineering advanced they incorporated new ideas, chiefly freeways, into their design, and the majority of the LA freeway system was actually planned in the 1930's and 1940's.
And ultimately, that's the problem. LA was planned, but it was planned before people had a clear idea of the consequences of their design or how large the city would eventually get. The design of a vital central core and surrounding bedroom communities has been followed fairly well, and is actually the cause of a lot of the problems. In particular, it means that everyone depends on cars for transportation (because the city was designed with them in mind) so poor people without cars are in trouble. It also means that a lot of the region's traffic comes crunching into the central city every rush hour, creating a traffic nightmare. So LA's problems are a result of bad planning, not of no planning.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Ughh... I can't imagine using C++ to model the class structure in a game like the SIM's. The static class system combined with the difficulty of single-dispatch methods would make any reasonable simulation a pain in the ass to develop.
That doesn't mean one couldn't write a decent dynamic class system on top of C++, but only that C++ by itself doesn't have any of the things that would go into a decent dynamic class system.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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I would have to think that The Sims is the strongest argument ever for using an object-oriented language to create a very specific result.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The solution would be to fill in gaps with AI-driven people. However, if most or all of the people are AI-driven, you start to lose the point of player-populated cities. Even worse, what happens to the player-driven people in a city "owned" by someone who quits? What happens if a grief player becomes mayor? (Let's run the city into debt and trigger all the natural disasters.) I do have a few ideas on how to pull it off:
Replication -- the population filling a given SimCity is "cloned" from the SimsOnline population; a given house built on an area that's zoned residential might resemble the house of a SimsOnline house, but bulldozing it won't destroy the SimsOnline version.
SimsOnline self-rule -- let SimsOnline manage itself on its own with some SimCity-like issues being controlled by some sort of democratic glob of the SimsOnline players in that community. For example, if they need a local police station, it would be the responsibility of the city council (composed of multiple players) to do something about it.
Of course, I still think there's a certain amount of inanity in going so far to simulate real life. I never saw the point in Ultima Online (where a character had to actually spend a lot of time "working" to make money) and that, at least, had the excuse that it was a fantasy world.
If there were such a project that could harness the processing power of all the players of The Sims could we fashion bigger and better cities for Sim City 4000?
I wonder if SimCity4000 wont be a game where you build Cities where SimsOnline Players build thier houses... that would be tremendous. When you lay down a track of Residential - people actually chose the space for their Sims Players. Industrial & Commercial space would be to house the 'retail' aspect they describe in the article. Your infrastructure (roads/hospitals/wonders/parks) would serve to make The Sims lives more convenient or 'happy'; making your city more attractive to new players... Imagine the Fun you could have by starting a UFO Invasion or Starting A Fire! Run Sim People RUN!!
1. Workplaces have no toilets. If you don't go before you leave the house in the morning you'll just have to wet your pants!
2. If a car pulls up outside a house where you are sitting with your friends, you may encounter a strange twist in the fabric of space-time, where every action will take twice as long to perform as when the road outside is clear.
3. Drinking coffee can sometimes be so much fun that it causes the consumer to whoop loudly, even when standing totally alone in a kitchen filled with buzzing flies.
4. Many burglars are equipped with special tardis-bags which, despite being the size of a small purse, are easily able to accommodate a fridge-freezer or oven. The bag can then be easily slung over the shoulder as the burglar sprints away!
5. Some of the best weddings are impromptu ceremonies in toilets. It's true I tell you!
Just a thought.
It strikes me as odd that a game like SimCity was such a huge success in among american computer enthusiasts.
Think about it, the basic of the game clearly implements the basic framework of a socialist state in which the player represents the central planning authority of a virtual state. You're main task is to eliminate the effects of random events such as monster attacks (Godzilla), earthquakes, chaotic traffic and urban development to maximize the efficiency of your carefully established development plans.
This is definitively not how western cities have been evolving in the last century. Sure, there is some larval attempt at central planning (witness for example Paris/France and Mitterands "Great Works: the Defense district, the Louvre etc. -- but then again most americans would consider France a socialist state), but most would agree that a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.
Games such as Quake 3 have been under heavy attack by conservatives as direct causes for violent youths, but I have yet to see a rant about the "five-year-plan" mindset SimCity and it's clones or similar works (Populous, Theme Park et al.) instill onto the gamer.
Face it, the concepts of central planning, authority and legal power is very analogous to the basic premises of engineering and software architecture. Every professional in these fileds (myself included) needs to have some sensibility for these propositions in order to manage his projects efficiently...
In short:
There is a repressed communist in every one of us!
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
I call it Simsim.