SimCity Player Spends 3 years on optimal city design

The best part of the vid is from 5:35 onward, where it shows pretty decent detail of the city.<p>It's interesting to see the way "perfectionist" players approach their games. The details of the optimization are often surprising. Even the specific choice of factors to optimize for are interesting. In SimCity, one player shoots for maximum population; another might go for the quickest time to reach a particular population level; yet another might seek to maximize industrial production. I like seeing how they work within the rules to reach those different goals.

If someone had fun, how could this time be wasted?<p>It's interesting, that the kind of people, that see this as wasted time, because they think this isn't changing the world, that it isn't ethical to use your own time this way, that these people will always criticize themself and others regardless what they do, because there's always something more meaningful to do.<p>At the end these people won't change anything in the world, but just bring harm to themself and others.

I'd be interested in seeing more of the analysis that went into designing this.

I'm a little disturbed at his population distribution in the final city. Scary how his optimal city has no one over age 60.

i wonder if there's a scriptable game like simcity (maybe freeciv? i dunno) ... that could make for a good testbed for certain optimization algorithms

I do not understand why such a large piece of a person's life would be spent doing this. Even model railroads have some tangible significance -- it is possible to share them with others in such a way that the others enjoy them and you bring happiness into somebody else's life. Perhaps this is because I find value in helping others. Some may find value in simply being pre-occupied as they wait for death. To each his own. I do not understand a lot of things.<p>What I found totally amazing wasn't spending years trying to optimize solutions to random problems others have created, but how this guy made a super-awesome video explaining how he did it. Very impressive. Loved the music and the camera movements. This guy should start charging to do demo videos for software products.

As an aside, and because SimCity doesn't get mentioned much here, if you're on OS X and want to play Simcity 4, I spent a lot of time getting it to work "just so." The trick is.. Windows XP + Parallels 5 (I'm a big VMware Fusion fan but Parallels 5 boosts SC4 performance wise somehow) + software rendering (hardware rendering is a FAIL/unstable on both Parallels and VMware with SC4).. and I can run everything on high no probs on my iMac. Works a treat.

As someone who's played SimCity for many years, I'm super impressed by this. Although he didn't use cheats, SC3000 was the best cuz it had a cheat where you could place a specific building and have it be there permanently--without any worry of abandonment. SimCity 4 is much harder because there are a lot more variables to deal with, including the fact that you can run multiple cities in a region.

I wonder how many of the theories could be applied to actual urban planning.

The other day I was studying 'dashboard' systems for ERP software and the like and it occurred to me how SimCity and Civilization type UIs would fit the bill (if only they worked on reality).

impressive, fascinating, yet a tad bit disturbing... kudos none-the-less

What a waste of time! I'm a bit ashamed that we (me included) are all so impressed by this. We should be weeping for the tragic waste of human ingenuity and productivity. Three years of <i>work</i> for nothing.

I'm surprised he could find the time with all the sex he must have been having.

Fucking loving Jeezus christ. This guy could have solved wolrd hunger with his skills, instead he maxed out Simcity 3000.