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Passenger intelligence

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thestoon said:
Big cities are chaotic, and public transport systems are too. Not every journey is perfect, for various reasons. People don't know the system so they make mistakes, people who change lines to travel part of a journey with their friends, if you can think of it, there will probably be someone, somewhere who will do it. The imperfections in the AI go some way to representing this kind of chaos. We see as much about our citizens as a traffic planner would in real life, we can't do surveys to find out why people use the system the way the do, so its up to us to fill in the gaps using our own imaginations

Try it, its fun.
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Why don't you try commuting to school or work every day through a bad route making the trip take 4 times as long as it has to? The people in CiM2 do this every singe day.

"Try it, it's fun" ;)


You have a small point, but these chaotic "random" journeys make up perhaps 1-10% of the total journeys in a real city unless it's holidays/vacation so the only group the current AI fit for is tourists.
A very very big majority of all other travels are following your well planned day to day schedule to get to school/work/shopping for food that repeats day after day after day.
 
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Exactly. You don't see masses of people getting off the metro to wait in thousands for a small local bus which runs every hour and finally get angry and walk the whole trip on foot because they didn't get place in the bus, when they have empty metro trains leaving every 5 minutes and going in the same direction. It is a real game flaw and in big non-linear cities it is almost impossible to plan your transport in a way in which the citizens will not be making absurd decisions.

My tip which can make the situation a little better is to tweak the quality of service of all vehicles to 100%. This way citizens will not leave metro to take a few stops by tram just because its QoS is better.
 
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Marwin2401 said:
Dear CO,

what about the next patch? The passenger intelligence is terrible. I think the AI needs to be revised.

Best regards
Marwin2401

View attachment 103083
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I would +1 this, but...

Unfortunately CO has already determined that the current AI is optimal. This is part of a quote from CO Dev Gebbiz "...our algorithm already finds the optimal solution in terms of travel time / comfort and cost. However, it uses average times for waiting, not the actual timetable. This would make the calculation much more complex..."

We have tried showing various ways to make calculations not so complex but they seem to have made their minds up. I have tried explaining that average wait time, to me would not be an optimal way to travel. They claim that doing it based on the actual, you know schedule, would take terabytes of ram. So division by zero using average wait time, or using actual game numbers, which would you choose?
 
kensternation said:
IUnfortunately CO has already determined that the current AI is optimal. This is part of a quote from CO Dev Gebbiz "...our algorithm already finds the optimal solution in terms of travel time / comfort and cost. However, it uses average times for waiting, not the actual timetable. This would make the calculation much more complex..."
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And it does not take any additional time for changing lines into account.
If changing lines would at least "cost" only a second extra time, the simulated people wouldn't change between lines just for fun!!!
This really f**** me up!

I love this game and most of the time I am really chilled about problems.
However, the Pathfinding is crap...
Just add a penalty for changing lines, goddamn. Easy as this ;)
It may be 5 minutes of work but the game will profit endlessly from this.
 
AlexanderN said:
And it does not take any additional time for changing lines into account.
If changing lines would at least "cost" only a second extra time, the simulated people wouldn't change between lines just for fun!!!
This really f**** me up!

I love this game and most of the time I am really chilled about problems.
However, the Pathfinding is crap...
Just add a penalty for changing lines, goddamn. Easy as this ;)
It may be 5 minutes of work but the game will profit endlessly from this.
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Path-finding is one of the problems human have solved with affordable cost(I mean calculation difficulty). Some using “adjacency matrix” seems suitable for this game, they can achieve high efficiency. If you or CO are asking algorithm using “adjacency matrix” got any advantage. In short, calculate once and use it many times(on many passengers in the game).
The path-finding algorithm only needs to be run every time you change your lines to keep itself up-to-date. And it can store an old version before it complete update your network. It's an algorithm with a complexity of O(n^2) with n representing total stops you have. Even if it takes 30 seconds using one of your quad or dual cores to finish, it's probably only needed every 10 minutes or more. During the period, the old version still working(But it did not re-act to what you have changed since last update). So, completely affordable.
Also, the adjacency matrix could take quality of service, time table as well as the overcrowded into account. What is needed? Hard work! I think they spend a lot of time on DLCs, so...

It costs far more than 5 minutes to finish this. But I think they should improve AI, either in this way or some else.
BTW, the algorithm is not hard to finish, a team of undergraduate can do it.
 
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I'm not talking about a complete change to the whole AI pathfinding, CO will never do this (and I'm okay with this).
Just the slight change of taking changes between lines into account, as I described, would be sufficient for me to be reasonable happy with the pathfinding.
Most of the time the paths are okay-ish, however, this frequent unnecessary changing is really annoying.
 
kensternation said:
I have a route that has three different vehicle types running on it. During the week I have a tram running from 4:00a- 2300p; overnight I have a bus running from 00:00 to 03:00; on the weekends I have a trolley running from 4:00a-23:00p. During the week crowds of people wait for the trolley, which only runs Saturdays and Sundays. On weekends I have crowds of people waiting for the bus, which only runs a limited number of hours overnight. All three follow exactly the same route. Why would they wait for a line that is not currently running? Please don't ask why I have the setup- it is just for fun.
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the cims must be so confused. :D
 
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