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Cities: Skylines II Feature Highlight #2: Traffic AI - Paradox Interactive
(www.paradoxinteractive.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Remember the time when every server space suddenly got called 'cloud'? Or when every device needed to be '3D'? Or every household item got Bluetooth to make it a 'smart' item? Or you needed the word 'crypto' included your software products? Or when all the products had a lower case 'i' in front to make them look advanced?
In a few months we'll look back at the time a the time, when everyone suddenly called their algorithms an 'AI'. Paradox could just call it Smart iTraffic 3D to hit more buttons.
Judging from the 1st game, it's probably mods and player ingenuity to solve the issues with the traffic. Which his honestly a part of the experience of playing Cities Skylines. Getting around all the problems with your own solutions. Sometimes I completely (had to) redesigned parts of the city to solve one junction.
Afaik when it comes to games the way npcs think has always been called AI, so wouldn't really say its something new or making it seem smarter in this context.
I get that it's not ideal. My issue is just that a big part of Cities Skylines is to solve the traffic. Try to keep it flowing with a more and more complex city around it, changing main routes, changing infrastructure options. You cannot just make it Smart iTraffic 3D without removing the major challenge from the game. Fixing some bugs and not having traffic that dumb like in the 1st game would be appreciated though.
The term 'AI' just gets used way too loosely, only getting worse in the recent months. 'Traffic' and 'AI' in Cities Skylines just doesn't fit together well.
AFAIK the way it worked in the first game, the pathfinding was a simple A* algorithm that used only the length & speed limit of each link in the network to determine the shortest path. The way this video makes it sound, travel time will be the most significant factor, which means traffic will make a difference in the pathfinding. Then they're also introducing factors related to the individual cim's need for parking, comfort, and risk-taking. It should be a lot more realistic and just as challenging, without the ridiculous situations where traffic would come to a complete standstill because everyone is taking the same route even though there are hundreds of alternative side streets to take.
As someone who's done some advanced coursework in traffic engineering, I'm pumped.
Exactly! It should allow for even more control when designing your road network, without the random things you cannot do anything about.
I’m stoked too! Big improvement from the first game
This has always been called AI, and it's a correct use of the term.
What are you on about? This sorta thing has been called AI in games forever. This has nothing to do with the Gen AI fad that’s going on.
They called it AI in the first game too. It's been called AI in games for decades.
Example: https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/448825-cities-skylines-traffic-ai-better
AI has been game dev jargon for decades. Gamers are unlikely to confuse it with having any relation to machine learning models.
This type of AI has nothing to do with the recently more popular machine learning. Gaming has been using Artificial Intelligence as a term since forever, it is simply an algorithm that approaches realistic behavior. When you look back at games like Command and Conquer they also called the computer opponents AI
What? AI was a term regularly used in gaming context since the 90s. It's not self-learning neural network, it's just the usual, specific problem-solving algorithm in the game. It's not marketing term, which is riding on the newest popular buzzword.