Tag: simcity
Amazon built the most realistic version of SimCity we’ve ever seen
Amazon has a new AWS service, AWS SimSpace Weaver, that lets users build massive simulations that look like real-world SimCity maps. The idea of this new service is that users can take advantage of Amazon’s massive AWS resources to run simulations that scale across multiple servers without running into computing or memory limitations, which could be useful for things like modeling the foot traffic surrounding a new sports stadium.
You can see AWS SimSpace Weaver in action in this impressive video demo from uCrowds, which simulates 1 million people walking around Las Vegas. By layering in geospatial data with the hordes of simulated people, it can give you an idea of how people might move around the computerized streets of the city if…
Windows 95 Went the Extra Mile To Ensure Compatibility of SimCity, Other Games
Spolsky’s post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds: “Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.”
Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: “provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks.” Windows developers may have deserved some sit-back time, seeing the extent of the tweaks they often have to make for individual games and apps in Windows 95. Further in @Kalyoshika’s replies, you can find another example, pulled from the Compatibility Administrator in Windows’ Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). A screenshot from @code_and_beer shows how Windows NT, upon detecting files typically installed with Final Fantasy VII, will implement a fittingly titled compatibility fix: “Win95VersionLie.” Simply telling the game that it’s on Windows 95 seems to fix a major issue with its operation, along with a few other emulation and virtualization tweaks. “Mike Perry, former creative director at Sim empire Maxis (and later EA), noted later that there was, technically, a 32-bit Windows 95 version of Sim City available, as shown by the ‘Deluxe Edition’ bundle of the game,” adds Ars. “He also states that Ross worked for Microsoft after leaving Maxis, which would further explain why Microsoft was so keen to ensure people could keep building parks in the perfect grid position to improve resident happiness.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Windows 95 had special code just to fix a bug in the original SimCity
It’s easy to take backwards compatibility for granted on PC, so much so that we rarely even use the phrase “backwards compatibility”. Most old games will simply run, and for everything else there’s usually a compatibility mode built into Windows or DOSBox to get it going.
This didn’t happen by accident, as an old blog post by a former Microsoft programmer explains. When Microsoft wanted users to switch to Windows 95, for example, they went so far as to add specific code that looked for SimCity and, if it was running, changed how memory allocation worked so that the game wouldn’t crash.