There has been much debate over timetables, traffic animations, time compression and so on. Rightly so because as we have seen here, and Sim City players have also found, there are significant problems moving from an abstraction based simulation model to a game based on individual agents going about their business. Some argue that the inherent contradictions involved with time compression make the whole idea a bust by definition. Personally I believe it is a natural progression in game design taking advantage of current available CPU and RAM resources to create a much more immersive game world, or try to. Examples of games that have successfully implemented the idea are X3 where you have a few hundred NPC space ships and space stations going about their business round the clock, and Skyrim where you have a few hundred NPCs doing this and that all the time, all to great effect immersion-wise. The difference is neither of these games have game clocks that actually interfere with anything in a meaningful way and there are not 50,000+ such agents to contend with.
I think that in order to make progress in getting this model to work properly players need access to some tools that help them understand what the hell is actually going on in their city so that they can make decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork and determine if those decisions worked out or not, and if not whether because they made a wrong call, or because there is an inherent problem with the game itself that needs addressing.
This is a list of tools in no particular order that I think would immeasurably improve player's understanding of what is going on:
1. Destination vector overlay: If you have a stop with 150 angry Cims waiting, you need to know where they came from and where they are going to figure out what to do. You can look at each CiMs panel and it will tell you where they work, where they live, where they have just come from and where they are going to. Problem is you cannot correlate this data in a meaningful way (short of building your own spreadsheets, manually recording data and printing off maps etc). What is needed is a vector diagram centered on a selected stop or vehicle that shown these four pieces of information in summary at a glance.
2. Line demand/capacity monitor: At the moment figuring out how many vehicles you need to run on a line to meet demand is pure guesswork - make a change to the timetable and see what happens. That doesn't work when you have 30, 40, 50 lines to consider in a dynamic city. You need a widget that tells you the demand through each stop on a line and the theoretical maximum capacity under current timetable and vehicle pool available.
3. Point-to-point journey analyser: Select two buildings or stops and a proposed departure time and see an annotated graphic showing the route between them and including arrival and departure time at each interchange and arrival time at destination according to current timetables. This can be used to tune up timetables for connections and identify areas where journey times need to be improved with new infrastructure/lines (especially in conjunction with the destination vector overlay) to stimulate economy and satisfy CiMs.
4. Standard timetable templates: Once you get to 30, 40 lines the current timetable allocation system becomes increasingly cumbersome to manage, discouraging the player from altering them which is bad from a game play point of view. You can't remember which line has which timetable you want to use as a basis to copy from and it gets very messy, annoying and time consuming. Allowing the player to create standard timetables and allocate these to lines would help - if you change a standard template then all lines allocated that template would be automatically updated and you can change a specific line from one template to another. Of course if you edit a specific line's timetable it should cease to be controlled by any standard template. The question of whether attempting to coordinate timetables at interchanges is realistically workable under in the current game model is moot, IMO, but with the point-to-point journey analyser available this might become clearer, or what needs to be done to the game model to make it workable clearer.
I think these tools would not only add depth to the game, but also help separate player misunderstanding/error/play time limitations from actual deficiencies in the underlying game model so that we can more accurately focus on the big challenges around time/distance compression, vehicle speeds, traffic behaviour and CiM behaviour.
I think that in order to make progress in getting this model to work properly players need access to some tools that help them understand what the hell is actually going on in their city so that they can make decisions based on evidence rather than guesswork and determine if those decisions worked out or not, and if not whether because they made a wrong call, or because there is an inherent problem with the game itself that needs addressing.
This is a list of tools in no particular order that I think would immeasurably improve player's understanding of what is going on:
1. Destination vector overlay: If you have a stop with 150 angry Cims waiting, you need to know where they came from and where they are going to figure out what to do. You can look at each CiMs panel and it will tell you where they work, where they live, where they have just come from and where they are going to. Problem is you cannot correlate this data in a meaningful way (short of building your own spreadsheets, manually recording data and printing off maps etc). What is needed is a vector diagram centered on a selected stop or vehicle that shown these four pieces of information in summary at a glance.
2. Line demand/capacity monitor: At the moment figuring out how many vehicles you need to run on a line to meet demand is pure guesswork - make a change to the timetable and see what happens. That doesn't work when you have 30, 40, 50 lines to consider in a dynamic city. You need a widget that tells you the demand through each stop on a line and the theoretical maximum capacity under current timetable and vehicle pool available.
3. Point-to-point journey analyser: Select two buildings or stops and a proposed departure time and see an annotated graphic showing the route between them and including arrival and departure time at each interchange and arrival time at destination according to current timetables. This can be used to tune up timetables for connections and identify areas where journey times need to be improved with new infrastructure/lines (especially in conjunction with the destination vector overlay) to stimulate economy and satisfy CiMs.
4. Standard timetable templates: Once you get to 30, 40 lines the current timetable allocation system becomes increasingly cumbersome to manage, discouraging the player from altering them which is bad from a game play point of view. You can't remember which line has which timetable you want to use as a basis to copy from and it gets very messy, annoying and time consuming. Allowing the player to create standard timetables and allocate these to lines would help - if you change a standard template then all lines allocated that template would be automatically updated and you can change a specific line from one template to another. Of course if you edit a specific line's timetable it should cease to be controlled by any standard template. The question of whether attempting to coordinate timetables at interchanges is realistically workable under in the current game model is moot, IMO, but with the point-to-point journey analyser available this might become clearer, or what needs to be done to the game model to make it workable clearer.
I think these tools would not only add depth to the game, but also help separate player misunderstanding/error/play time limitations from actual deficiencies in the underlying game model so that we can more accurately focus on the big challenges around time/distance compression, vehicle speeds, traffic behaviour and CiM behaviour.
