![]() ![]() Here's a video I stumbled on comparing the vanilla traffic AI with the TMPE AI across various different types of intersections: It's not a problem with the agent system it's a problem with poor AI programming. But Skylines has several different street types built in, and the game itself uses a more flexible layout engine that doesn't penalize you for doing curves and diagonals.Īlso, the traffic AI is just poorly coded, and there are mods to replace it with better, such as Traffic Manager: President Edition. The SimCity games never really cared much for letting you build different types of streets (SC4 came close, but not to the extent of Skylines), and the game itself made you place everything on a grid where every tile matters, diagonals are a waste of space, and curves are close to impossible. If you set up a proper street hierarchy with arterials, collectors, and local streets, you'll have much better traffic flow, just like in real life. There's a reason why real downtown areas are horribly congested. I think that has more to do with the fact that the game is developed by a European studio (Finnish, IIRC), and in Europe even smaller cities have decent mass transit systems, so it makes perfect sense to them that you should put mass transit in a city of 50K.Įdit to add: Doing a SimCity-style fixed grid layout with two-lane roads is a disaster in Skylines because it's a disaster in real life. ĭo you have any memories of playing SimEarth? We’d love to hear them in the comments!ĭiscover more retro games at Power UP this Easter.> for example, who does a city of 50K need a mass transit system? You can listen to an interview between the Museum and Lovelock here. The Science Museum’s Collecting Board deemed it a worthy addition as it complemented the museum’s existing Lovelock archive. It seems fitting that the Science Museum acquired a computer game inspired by Lovelock, who as a child had himself been inspired by his visits here. They added it was ‘very good … excellent graphics’ if a ‘little complex’, reflecting that ‘the average 12-year-old would probably have no problems’. It came with a delightful note from 1993 indicating it was free of viruses. The copy we found in our stores is the first EU release of the game, published by Ocean in 1990, for the IBM/Tandy PC platform. Some climate scientists have even attributed their careers to playing the game when they were younger. Perhaps unusually for a commercial computer game, the SimEarth manual contains an entire introduction to Earth science! It also contains a section on Gaia authored by Lovelock. One of the scenarios that can be played in the game is Lovelock’s own ‘Daisyworld’ computer simulation, a world in which the only lifeforms are daisies. In fact, Lovelock contributed to the game’s design. The theory asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. The game’s subtitle ‘The Living Planet’ nods to the key scientific inspiration behind SimEarth: James Lovelock and his Gaia Hypothesis. In SimEarth its players were invited to take control of a planetary ecosystem, tinkering with environmental factors such as atmosphere, temperature, and landmass, to see how their decisions influenced the evolution of living organisms. Wright pioneered this genre of what he called ‘system simulation’ games. SimEarth was the second in Will Wright and Maxis’ extremely successful ‘sim’ series of games (including The Sims), following the release of SimCity in 1989. It had first come to the Museum sometime in the early 1990s, shortly after its initial release. One such thing was a copy of the cult computer game SimEarth, which had been languishing in a box of miscellaneous objects in the archives. Part of the fun of working with the Science Museum Group’s collections is the rediscovery of things that have been long forgotten. Assistant Curator Rupert Cole takes the controls and explores the comprehensive world of SimEarth. ![]()
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