In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them – so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots – but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.
I think I would love a game where you start with a car-centric city or region and then can either try to build it up continuing with the status quo or try to convert it to something that doesn’t depend so much on cars.
The only game I know where you have to consider parking is “Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic”. I haven’t provided any private cars to the people from my Republic yet. But from what I have seen, you need to provide parking lots close to their home and their destinations.
Do you know if it stimulates individual cars filling up the lots or is it just a “is there parking available?” check that doesn’t go deeper to see if it’s enough parking?
Sounds like an interesting game even if it’s not to the level I’d like to see (which I’m not even sure is feasible for a real time game).
Edit: lol “stimulates”, gotta get the cars all hot and bothered before they can park! I’m leaving it, but I do see it now.
SimCity 2000 had scenarios of pre existing cities with specific goals, and though it did not have as many or as elaborate mass transit systems as later city builders, I think a few of them required you to both grow and reduce traffic, basically requiring you to build a working mass transit system.
I meant with accurate car storage. Being able to reclaim that space for other uses would be pretty satisfying. It would need to simulate at the individual level, so I’m not sure how technically feasible it would be (I think cities skylines does this to a degree, but I don’t know if they simulate the full population or just a portion of it).
It should also include accidents, including “truck tried to drive under bridge it didn’t fit under” and “incompetent boat operator takes out bridge” style ones.
It would be neat if the simulation was good enough to be able to see realistic effects of various policies and changes. Something that could capture unintended consequences without the high level pattern bring coded into the simulation directly. Like how high speed roundabouts are death traps, base that on when conflicts would become visible and the reaction time available to avoid an accident rather than just “high speed roundabout = x accidents per y time”.
It would be an engineering tool as much as a game at the accuracy level I’d like to see, but I’d have a blast playing around with something like that.
