SimCity: Inside the GlassBox engine
Tyler Wilde at 01:35am March 8 2012
At EA’s Game Changers event yesterday, Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw
confirmed that SimCity is back, and showed off a very pretty, but very gameplay-less, trailer. Today at GDC, however, Maxis went into detail when it unveiled the game’s engine, GlassBox, which I also got a look at during a recent visit to the studio. Wow. Spore was certainly ambitious, and The Sims has reached incredible commercial success, but GlassBox may turn out to be Maxis’ most impressive achievement yet.
The previous SimCity games rely on relatively high-level statistics to tell us what’s going on–the pollution number goes up, so the happiness number goes down. GlassBox does the opposite. It simulates the little things–thousands of individual Sims–and lets the city mechanics emerge naturally. You won’t have to look at a spreadsheet or graph to identify a crisis, because you can watch it all happen in real-time. Pollution will taint the soil and thicken the atmosphere with smog, Sims will get sick and fill the hospitals, businesses will lose employees, and everyone will be really ticked off about the whole thing.
Fire stations no longer provide statistical coverage–a fire truck must drive from the station to the scene of a fire, and the longer it takes, the longer the building burns. Every car and every pedestrian (which are referred to as “agents”) is someone going somewhere to do something, and every traffic jam is the natural result of the patterns they create as they navigate your roads.
Creative Director Ocean Quigley demonstrated how agents operate by artificially populating a closed loop of road with vehicles and pedestrians.
“We’ve created all these people in here, and there’s no jobs for them, no houses for them, and no place to shop. They’re basically all miserable and would love to get out of here as fast as possible,” said Quigley, as hundreds of his sadsack residents drove and trudged in an endless circle.
“So let’s connect their little maze to the outside world, and these people are going to abandon the city as fast as they can. So, all the little agents, they have an agenda, a mood, something they want to do. They hate it here, they want to get out, and so that’s what they’re doing.”
Now consider that Maxis is striving to simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time, and that resources such as power, water, coal, and oil are also treated as individual units, as well as every house, business, and factory, and you can start to get an idea of the incredible number of emergent possibilities GlassBox introduces.
Read more here.