micropolis

ld access to modern education. By gifting SimCity onto each OLPC laptop, EA is providing users with an entertaining way to engage with computers as well as help develop decision-making skills while honing creativity. This is the first time a major video game publisher has gifted a game to the world. Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2... >Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold. >[...] The next chapter looks closely at the code to SimCity, which is possible only because it has been open sourced. There are few instances in which a company has open sourced the code to a commercial game, which makes the story of how this happened remarkable for a number of reasons. Recounting this story not only explains the provenance of my research materials, but reveals how social forces, in this case a heterogeneous collection of agents and agendas, shape software. >[...] Surprisingly, Electronic Arts agreed to the arrangement. Their legal counsel, in consultation with Eben Moglen (Columbia Law Professor, general counsel to the FSF, and OLPC advisor), worked through the legal logistics. This effort was aided by Hopkins’s discovery and copying of the original Maxis/DUX licensing agreement, on a lark, while working on The Sims. Hopkins did the coding work of the conversion. EA executives approved of the endeavor, no doubt aided by Will Wright’s legendary persuasiveness and considerable prestige, not to mention the prestige of the OLPC project itself. [...] Demo of SimCity on OLPC XO-1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKhh10K-j0 >OLPC SimCity Demo: A demonstration of OLPC SimCity running on the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 laptop. OLPC / EA Contract: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf >This license and distribution agreement (this "Agreement") is entered into as of September 4, 2007 (the “Effective Date”) by and between ELECTRONIC ARTS INC., a Delaware corporation with its principal offices at 209 Redwood Shores Parkway, Redwood City, CA 94065-1175 (“EA”) and ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD ASSOCIATION, INC., a Delaware corporation, located at One Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA, 02142 ( “OLPC”). Free SimCity Source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis >Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright.

ing for traffic. And then he eats it. So that's good for your city. And you can have a lot of different PacMans on the thing, and you know, just editing the road gives the PacMan somewhere to go. So their score is how many cars they've eaten. So it's an "agent", and it woks all around, and he follows roads. And you can put a lot of them on the map to keep the traffic low. MicropolisRobot.scanRoads looks down the road in a given direction for a given distance, and counts the number of cars (in the traffic density layer), attenuated by distance (further away cars don't count as much). https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... Then the PacBot simulator calls scanRoads in all possible different directions to get a score, and moves in the direction of the best score. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... As it turns out, the PacBot is actually the God of the Church of PacMania (each Polytheistic PacMania Church spawns up to four PacBot God Agents, if it's connected to a road), and the church zone itself generates a LOT of traffic, in the hopes of attracting the PacBots. The emergent behavior is that followers of the Church of PacMania happily drive back and forth between church, home, work, and shopping, again and again, in the hopes of sacrificing themselves to their God, PacBot. And the PacBot Gods hang out around the Church of PacMania, eating their followers, and raising their scores -- everybody's happy! class MicropolisZone: def generateRobots(self): https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... class MicropolisZone_ChurchOfPacMania(MicropolisZone): https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb...