‘SimCity’ Patch To Improve Sim AI, Reduce Traffic Jams

To put it lightly, the launch of SimCity from developer Maxis hasn’t gone particularly well; server issues caused some to not be able to play the game at all, and others had their progress — in some cases, a day’s worth — completely wiped out.

Most of the issues with SimCity are on the server end, but users have been noticing a few quirks with the game itself. For example, some of SimCity‘s inhabitants, called Sims, may leave their home to go to work and return to a different home with an entirely different family.

Another quirk involves traffic. As Eurogamer points out in their report, the vehicles in the game are programmed to take the shortest route possible to their destination. The problem is, the AI doesn’t account for traffic — and so it’s fairly common to see large traffic jams, and the problem only gets worse the bigger your city becomes.

The problems don’t stop there; there are even issues with firetrucks. If multiple buildings are on fire, for example, all of the city’s firetrucks may deploy to a single fire rather than spreading out. Obviously, that can lead to problems.

Maxis is of course aware of these problems and is actively working to address them and any other glitches that may pop up along the way. In a blog post, lead designer Stone Librande outlined the problems and how the studio plans on addressing them.

No specific date was given for a fix, but Maxis promises to have it out “soon.”

Below you can find a couple of snippets from the post. If you’d rather read the whole thing, you can head over to this link.

“We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.

“We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values to make the traffic flow more realistically.”

Glitches and server issues aside, have you been enjoying your time with SimCity?