don@brillig.umd.edu (Don Hopkins) (12/26/89)
I just got a chance to play SimCity! It's like a drawing program that lets you build cities, by zoning districts, putting down power plants and football stadiums, wiring up the power grid, laying down roads and railroads. The simulation is actually running *while* you're constructing it! It acts like cellular automita with very high level rules -- it keeps track of each cell's population, land value, pollution, and many other factors, and the rules that govern how the zones develop are based on the state of neighboring zones, and other global factors (tax rate, etc). Districts that you've zoned don't come online and start developing until they're hooked into the power grid, by being connected through power line cells or adjacent buildings. Buildings seem to "feed" off of people brought in by roads and railroads. Residential zones in busy districts grow into high-rise apartment buildings. Traffic patterns develop on the roads, and you can see little cars zooming around based on the population of the area, and the flow of the roads! Once you build an airport, a helicoptor flies around the city and reports on heavy traffic, encouraging you to redesign the roads in that area! You may wonder what traffic copters have to do with cellular automita. You just have to play it yourself to understand. SimCity is absolutely the most amazing game I've seen on the Macintosh to date! (It's available on other computers like the Amiga, as well.) The graphics and animation are beautiful. I'll leave it at that -- mere text cannot do it justice. -Don