Citybound Aims To Be What We Wanted From SimCity. Nathan Grayson. 4th March 2014 / 10:00AM. Beneath a mess of half-baked systems and massively detrimental online requirements, SimCity actually had some pretty cool ideas. Simulation of individual people and entities? Community options for those who want them? Stream CityBound 2014, a playlist by 687 from desktop or your mobile device.
I had a nice comparison because I first tried to do a native implementation in C and - wanting to do some custom low-level 'stuff' for my simulation actor system (related to allocation and networking) - I ran into so many footguns that it slowed me tremendously. As soon as I tried to do the same with Rust, it was a breeze and I was able to write a lot of unsafe code that does very particular things that I need, while exposing a completely safe API for the rest of the engine and game. Being then able to also use Rust in the browser quite seamlessly with WASM allowed me to have a super straightforward and high-perf communication channel between the simulation backend and browser UI. The only real Rust disadvantage that hurts a lot is compile times.
Sometimes I do fight types/the borrow checker, but only when I try to do weird things, in general I perceive it as a huge help in scaffolding things.and I’ve been looking at Elixir to generate the necessary actor simulation engine. Looks to me like you have that here in Rust.I will caution that Elixir's runtime performance, particularly with simulation type code, is abysmal. Also, last time I was using Elixir, the available profiling infrastructure was really terrible; I had to buy a new workstation with 64GiB of RAM just to be able to fit the profiling artifacts from one iteration of our small model in memory, which was required in order for it to complete in less than infinite time. It was a really great talk, thank you for that!One direction that I've seen a lot of game engines heading in lately is the Entity Component System model for a lot of the same performance reasons (cache locality of data being the big one) that you've landed on the Actor model.I'd be curious to know if you'd looked into the ECS model at all, and if you have how you view the tradeoffs between that model and the Actor model proposed in the talk. At a gut level, I get the feeling that your model seems much better suited to the distributed nature that you accomplish in your talk, and that ECS might be slightly more effective at allowing composition in an effective way. You've got so much more experience with both, though, that I'd love to hear you take if you've got one.
Ah, I'd love to hear more about this! I like it as well a lot, but after several hours of playing with it I started focusing too much on some things that I consider core flaws of the game and now I'm not motivated very much anymore to keep playing.Examples:- utility services: I keep having problems with e.g. Ambulances or trash collectors that are spawned very very far from the area where they're actually needed, even if a hospital or incinerator is just around the corner.- size of buildings: I don't like the approach of having tall buildings / high-rise in developed high-value zones by default. In my opinion the size of a building should mirror only the density of the population living in that particular area, so it should be possible to have as well tall buildings in low-value zones. As well the amount of people living in tall buildings is for my taste not a lot different from the one of med/low-buildings, taking into consideration the height of the building.
= how tall is a building should be a function of the people inhabiting it and not related to the value of the zone.- deaths/births waves: once my cities got big, I kept getting each time waves of people dying and later a lot of births. There is a plugin that fixes this, but this should really be part of the basic game.- traffic: this is actually already working veeeery well on multiple levels (e.g. Very nice/interesting to observe how queues generate - I can observe that for hours hehe) but I do miss a logic that says e.g. Kind of the same. Loved Cities: Skylines to death but the traffic AI killed it for me. It gets to the point where you're stuck building unrealistic designs to workaround the flawed AI pathfinding.
It's true you can mod it but it requires a ton of extra manual work to reassign lane routing in each and every city intersection, on top of killing performance.I'm just waiting for the sequel to the game where they may open up the traffic AI to modders more, or fix some of the stuff broken with the existing engine. That said, it's become kind of the gold standard for city sims so OP should definitely check it out. So, one thing that's broken about traffic is the distribution of population in low-density vs. High-density areas.The short version is that low-density areas are denser than they look, and high-density areas aren't dense enough. For example, if you click on a single-family home and look at the population, there will be over a dozen people living there (TBH, I forgot the exact numbers, but it's way more than a single family's worth of people)! But if you click on a giant skyscraper, there's nothing even close to what would fit in that building if it existed in real life.This has two unfortunate effects:.
The suburbs need more public transit than you think they'll need. Once you hit 50k people or so, you'll be hurting for transit badly. 'But I'm building low-density housing with a street hierarchy, it works fine in real life, so why are my roads clogged in the game?'
Yeah but in real life you're not cramming a dozen people into every single-family home. On the other hand, you can get away with building dense downtown areas with much less transit than would be required in real life.And yes, there are mods to realistically balance population. If you run these mods, you'll have something much more realistic: the suburbs don't really need transit, but if you build any high-density at all, you'll need to get a good transit network up and running ASAP. I agree and I'd like to add that (not related to traffic nor density but just pure spread of population density), from what I saw, there doesn't seem to be in CS (Cities Skylines) any relation between low-density & high-density areas, meaning that I can start right away building high-density areas with no in/direct realtime/historical impact of any kind.We can (proably should?) debate about how these mechanics should work, but I think that it must be true that any city needs in some percentage both areas (e.g. As well the extreme being built now 'on demand' for the World Cup in Qatar - ) must need both, or maybe not if they modeled the city based on CS haha.I think that I could have similar points as well for the 'education' in CS - I never (still don't know) if the elementary schools that I place are a foundation for people that will then go later to College and/or University - I still place them because I personally believe in the scala Elementary=maybeCollege=maybeUniversity, but who knows. (ok, this boils down mainly to a lack of transparency/informations for the user, independently if what CS does is good or wrong from the point of view of the user).
So, according to the Cities: Skylines wiki 0, cims who move into high-density residential areas are younger and less likely to procreate than cims who move into low-density residential.That's an interesting way to differentiate them, but it's also something that's very specific to present-day America. And middle-class America, at that.Kind of odd that Skylines is developed by a Finnish company and published by a Swedish one, given how US-centric that model is.I've also written elsewhere in this thread about how Skylines doesn't have a concept of class stratification, either, and that's a problem: the only way to create neighborhoods with distinct class implications (e.g.
The ghetto) is to use the RICO mod and plop buildings directly.There's no real concept of medium-density, either: the closest it comes is to zone high-density and put it in a district with the High Rise Ban ordinance. Or, again, use RICO. Oh, and growables are limited to no more than 4x4 tiles. If you want bigger buildings (e.g.
A sprawling suburban apartment complex), your only option is RICO.0. The suburbs need more public transit than you think they'll need. Once you hit 50k people or so, you'll be hurting for transit badly.
'But I'm building low-density housing with a street hierarchy, it works fine in real life, so why are my roads clogged in the game?' Yeah but in real life you're not cramming a dozen people into every single-family home.One could argue some cities have low-density housing next to transit though (like Berlin, or Paris). It does have the disadvantage of making metros too easy though, so commuter rail is almost never done because it is too hard to integrate to a city. The thing that impresses me with factorio is how smoothly the game challenges scale with you learning and mastering one game aspect after the other. Basically, you learn something that solves all your current problems, but that directly creates new problems, which you then have to deal with using your newfound powers.The actor architecture makes it very easy to scale the simulation across several machines and indeed run a simulation cluster that you connect to from a simple client.
In fact it already almost works like that. And the only thing that's missing for multiplayer is some UI-level coordination for collaborative planning (basically preventing editing conflicts). Everything else is already 'multiplayer ready'. Please think hard about the design decisions of your game. I grew up with SimCity and later SimCity 2000. Greg hastings paintball 2 character list. It informed many of my young opinions about government policy.
But I later came to find out that SimCity wasn't nearly as objective as it looks. There are a lot of conservative politics baked into the design of the game that I'd argue were potentially damaging to the kids who played it back in the 90s.This article from 1992's LA Times quotes Maxis president Jeff Braun saying how they're pushing a political agenda.
Specifically pro-mass transit and anti-nuclear power.What really opened my eyes, though, was this excellent article from LOGIC magazine about how Will Wright based the entire simulation on the work of Jay Wright Forrester. I don't know if it was a conscious choice to adopt Forrester's extremely conservative social policies, or if Will Wright just happened upon a bunch of ready-made algorithms he could use. But the result is the same. SimCity teaches us many fallacies about urban planning and finance that Republicans have historically used to justify certain policy choices.My point is just to be very conscious of the biases you're encoding into the logic of your game.
What may just be a game to you may be someone's first lessons in politics. I don't believe Jeff Braun was saying SimCity is bad. As he was the CEO of the company that made it at the time, that would be a very foolish move.I think he was trying to deflect criticism directed towards the game. Keep in mind that the media was presenting SimCity not as just a game, but as a clever teaching tool for children to understand finance and local government. Whatever sells the game, right?Then actual economists and city planners start to comment about how the game isn't realistic at all and fudges the numbers in such a way to incentivize certain play styles without showing the trade-offs that are involved in real life.
At that point, Braun has to admit to the biases in the game, but he can't say anything so extreme to lose the free advertising his product is getting from schools and teachers and parenting magazines that are telling parents to buy the game for their children.And although I'm a proponent of mass transit, it's not perfect. I believe SimCity only represents the upfront cost of mass transit and discounts the recurring maintenance costs, while road maintenance costs are inflated. But now were debating specific mechanics of a game other than the one this thread is about.I mentioned Magnasanti in another part of the thread. In Magnasanti, there is only mass transit.
No roads at all. I don't think I'd like living in a place like that where government-owned transportation decides where and when I can travel.But that's exactly my point. There are two sides to every coin and I think it's important to represent the pros and cons of the choices the player is presented.
There's no such thing as a purely positive or negative decision when it comes to city planning. I regret calling out any particular political ideology by name. It's true that not all of the biases baked into the game are conservative with the bias toward mass transit being a great example of liberal bias.
I meant those as two separate thoughts, but I failed to properly express that.Although I think many American cities could benefit from more mass transit choices, I agree that I certainly wouldn't want to live in a city where mass transit was the only option. It would mean a government-controlled entity would be dictating when and where I could travel. I don't like the sound of that.
' it was always made clear to me that games and television do not reflect reality'And to me it was allways clear that this is just a legal disclaimer.Of course games and videos reflect reality. Not 100% accurate, no, and some allmost 0% but btw. No scientific model does 100%, even though they are obviously more accurate and I would like more games to be based on scientific models.But for example angry birds, very succesful, obviously fiction, but the core game mechanic is a physic simulation(Box2D) which works as realistic as a 2d computer can work in a game, so you can learn about kinetics with it. While this is certainly clear for media like cartoons, action movies, Mortal Kombat, and Doom, SimCity was touted as an educational tool for children and an accurate model of reality throughout the early to mid 1990s. I was in elementary school at the time. Parenting magazines and journals as well as the broader media claimed as much. A friend of mine growing up who absolutely loved SimCity is a real life city planner now.
I have fond memories of playing SimCity 2000 with my father.If you really want to know when I realized that the real world doesn't work like SimCity, it was when I was in college and I started actually paying attention to the news and what was going on in the cities and towns I lived in. You're welcome.
I can't really recommend any specific books. I don't want my personal views on politics to be the focus, though. I'm just wary of biases hidden in supposedly unbiased algorithms.If that topic interests you, I can recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble.I'm a programmer myself, so I understand if people are initially defensive about these topics.
But it's important to me that I never write software that's harmful to people, so I try to check my biases as I create software to avoid these more insidious issues. It's easier to spot issues that may arise due to programming machinery that could crush a person, for example. Or software designed to estimate fuel usage for an airplane. It's much more difficult to spot inequity of minorities in software.There's plenty of examples out there of biased AI in response to biased training sets.If you're more interested in the dystopia that must be created in order to 'win' SimCity, here's a couple of interesting articles. (I think they've been shared here before.) By taking the game to its absolute extremes, it becomes clearer what the simulation considers most important and valuable, thereby laying bare some of the biases inherent in the game's design. Every opinion on complex reality makes assumptions that are not 100% certain to be correct. Yeah, while HN is about the code-wonkery, I had to jump over to your main site to see it at work.It's beautiful.
Totally agree on the flat-shaded aesthetic. A nice stylized low-fi without giving into pixel-art.I'm always suspicious about simulation-driven games because they can get lost in the wonkery of it in ways that don't actually provide gameplay to players - my understanding was that Master of Orion 3 was ruined by this kind of design.
But it looks like your 'simulation driven' thing is about the citizens, which is wonderful.Your current vids are very rural. Are you planning on getting into transit and bike-lanes and the like, or is this primarily going to be about roadways?
If you do add those things, please don't give them magical benefits.Transit should be outrageously expensive to add. (see the recent subway expansion in New York and in San Francisco) It should be outrageously expensive to operate.Transit should shut down often for floods, strikes, the 'wrong type of snow', 'leaves on the tracks', crowds of people (good job San Francisco, LOL), maintenance, terrorist attacks, and many other random reasons.Transit should increase crime.Transit should go to the wrong places.
You ask for it to be installed where it is needed, but instead it ends up a mile away because that was where it is possible to build. One of the truly awful things about SimCity was that transit was unrealistically beneficial. It was some sort of awful joke, the sort you might roll your eyes at and say 'oh brother, this is idiotic'. It felt like somebody was pushing a transit agenda hard.Similarly, pollution was unreasonable. Coal power may be dirty, but SimCity made it absurd.
There was also the nuclear plant explosions that pretty much never happen in the real world. Both the failure rate and the failure consequences were way above normal.
Despite the name, Skylines is really a traffic management game more than anything elseThe developer, Colossal Order, is also responsible for 'Cities In Motion' and 'Cities in Motion 2', both of which task the player with improving public transit systems. I haven't played either of those, but having played Skylines, I can only assume that the developer's prior games heavily influenced the game mechanics of this one.There's an insane amount of mods available for Skylines too, and the ones that expand the traffic management mechanics are very enjoyable. Despite the name, Skylines is really a traffic management game more than anything else.
Part of the fun of Skylines is just how cool your city looks.Unfortunately, traffic management is the only part of the game that really holds up as a simulator.Public services and pollution, in particular, are basically skeletons without any real depth to them, and they have considerably less depth than SC4. Cities: Skylines is mostly good as a) a traffic and transit simulator, and b) a sandbox game for using mods to create beautiful urban artwork. If you go to /r/CitiesSkylines or look at a number of YouTubers (I strongly recommend Infrastructurist), you'll see lots of gorgeous cities that were created by using mods like RICO, Move It!, and various forms of Anarchy (among several others) to plop down assets in ways that resemble real cities.
An infinite money mod is, of course, a given. There's no real simulation going on here: you have a bunch of very talented, creative individuals using the game as a specialized canvas.But let's talk a bit about just how public services and pollution are skeletons.Public services are very simple: citizens want a service, and you plop down buildings that provide that service. What little depth they have comes from the traffic management sim: the service needs to be accessible, so either citizens need to be able to get to the buildings in a timely fashion, or the buildings need to be able to send their vehicles out to various parts of town in a timely fashion. If traffic flow gets bad enough that this fails to happen, citizens get upset. All you need to have effective public services is enough capacity + traffic flow for your citizens to make use of them.There is no concept of range. If you put a school down in a city, children from all over the city will go there to get educated. If you have multiple schools, there is no correlation between where your kids live and where they go to school.
Of course, there are mods that can help a little: you can easily find a mod that limits use of public services to the district they're planted in. But that's it.Compare SimCity 4, on the other hand, where every building has a range, and each service has two funding sliders: one that controls effectiveness, and one that controls range (and you can override these sliders on a per-building basis, too). With range, you have to be careful to not let your buildings overlap too much, because then you're throwing away money. And you can overfund your services, but that's a hard choice: overfunding has diminishing returns and, more interestingly, can cause negative externalities. For example, overfunding your police can create a situation where police officers harass the community and thus make your citizens unhappy. No such complexity exists in Cities: Skylines.
Nothing has externalities in Cities: Skylines. There's no disadvantage to throwing in more of everything. Well, except for water. I'll get to that later. And if you underfund your services in SC4, you have a chance to wind up with an actual, honest-to-goodness strike on your hands. And money often gets tight enough that you will periodically have to underfund something just to stay in the black, so you have to choose which service you can most afford a strike at.
No strikes are in Cities: Skylines.Education, too, is way too easy. In SimCity 4, developing an educated workforce that can support high-tech industry takes several generations of cultivating your citizenry.
No such problem in Cities: Skylines, just throw down enough elementary schools, high schools, and universities, and you've got an educated workforce in no time! And you really want your workforce to be educated, too, because having an uneducated population means you're stuck with dirty industry, which sucks. The pollution is awful, and the jobs don't pay well, so your sims stay poor and live in slums.Oh yeah, and there's basically no class stratification in Cities: Skylines. SC4 divides properties into low-wealth, medium-wealth, and high-wealth, which is determined by property values, with visually-distinct buildings at each position.
This is a completely separate axis from building level, which mostly has to do with the size of your buildings, bounded by the density of your zoning (low density is levels 1-3, medium is 4-6, high is 7+). So slums look like slums, nice parts of town look nice, etc. Cities: Skylines just has building level. So in CS, your buildings will become bigger and nicer as you grow, but there's no such thing as 'a poor neighborhood', 'a middle-class neighborhood', or 'a rich neighborhood', unlike in SC4.Before I get to pollution, let's talk garbage. There are a number of garbage facilities in Cities: Skylines, including a recycling center introduced with the Green Cities expansion.
The recycling center is just a strictly-better landfill. It does everything a landfill does, only more so. There is no reason to build landfills if you own Green Cities. In SimCity 4, on the other hand, they serve different purposes. In SC4, landfill zoning provides a place for your sims' trash to go, and a recycling center reduces the amount of trash your sims produce in the first place. Thus, you can't deal with garbage on just recycling centers alone. You still need landfills, but a recycling center will let you get away with zoning less landfill than you'd normally need.
So you really want both recycling centers and landfills, just like in real life. But Colossal Order wanted people to buy Green Cities, so they made everything in that expansion completely overpowered and strictly better than what's in vanilla.Pollution is easily-avoidable in Cities: Skylines to the point where it might as well not exist unless you screw up dramatically. Air pollution isn't even a thing at all. You can have all the dirty, smoggy factories you want, and your citizens won't care. Let's just say that, in SimCity 4, air pollution is a huge thing, and you'll be spending a good chunk of your game trying to mitigate it. What you do have in Cities: Skylines, though, is ground pollution. Dirty buildings pollute the ground, and if people live on polluted ground, they get sick and die.
But ground pollution has a teeny-tiny radius, so it might as well not exist. Just don't build right next door to dirty industry or coal plants, and certainly don't bulldoze your dirty industry and coal plants and build residential where they used to be, and you're fine. I wish pollution was that simple in real life.Water pollution is even more avoidable. You only have water pollution at all if you have a water pump downstream from a sewage outlet. This is trivially avoidable. It's one of the first things the tutorial hammers into you.
Unless you're going out of your way to screw up, you won't have water pollution. But what if you do screw up? Well, if even the slightest bit of sewage gets in your water supply, your whole city undergoes a massive die-off. That's right, if you ever have nonzero water pollution, you might as well start a new city. Is there a way to mitigate it? Sure, build a water treatment plant!
But the water treatment plant just lowers your water pollution, it doesn't take it all the way down to zero. And any nonzero amount of water pollution will kill your city, so you might as well just save your money.
Oh, and this is literally the only thing a water treatment plant does, so unless you've screwed the pooch and killed your city, you will never have any reason to build one. There is no concept of range. If you put a school down in a city, children from all over the city will go there to get educated.AFAIR, public services in Skylines do indeed have range.
It is indicated by green shading on the city roads. For example:This image shows the range that the medical facilities have in the city. The purple buildings are hospitals/clinics, and the green shading on the roads indicates the reach that those buildings have. Not sure where you got the above fact, unless I am misunderstanding something. From what I can tell looking around on Steam forums, this isn't the range of the service.
There are two things going on:People who live close enough to services get an additional happiness bonus for living close to the service on top of getting their needs fulfilled. The service still operates citywide, and people will still get all the benefits of having that service no matter where they live, but living close to one gets them an additional bonus.There is also a traffic flow element here: people who live past a certain distance from the building have to deal with longer than expected travel times, so their ability to make full use of the service starts to degrade outside of the green. They're still covered by it, but it's not as efficient. People who live close enough to services get an additional happiness bonus for living close to the service on top of getting their needs fulfilled. The service still operates citywide.I agree - and here is where things start getting indirectly complicated/irrealistic:1) e.g.
The ambulance or the garbage truck get deployed from the opposite part of the map and then they get into traffic and they needs ages until they reache the target location, which is when my citizen is already because of 'natural' causes or was choked to death by garbage.2) I honestly don't understand how living just next to a hospital should increase the property value. 'Nearby', yes. 'Next-to-it' no (noise & lights & people in weird situations targeting the hospital walking by all night long? Definitely not an area where I'd like to live, hehe.).
To 1, yes, that happens. Makes it impossible to have cities where not every area is connected by roads. It's also why it is so important in this game to not have traffic jams. There is a recent mod for this however:, Most Effective Traffic Manager. It changes how the routing works and tries to combat exactly this. Though I could not just add it to my current rather large city, it dies with null pointer exceptions.
It might work better now that it got some patches or when starting from scratch.The 'too close is bad' is done by noise pollution. I think hospitals do not emit noise in Skylines, but the cars going to and from do, and other buildings have that built in, especially monuments, malls and metro stations. City Skylines does have one form of pollution you didn't mention: Noise pollution. People next to busy streets get sick and die from the noise.Water pollution generally only happens when a player starts sucking out too much water from a river and reverses its flow.I do agree that the mass dieoffs from a single drop of polluted water are probably too much.
A significant production drop as people are under a boil water advisory at first might be better, and only becoming a major die off if you neglect to fix the problem. The water treatment plant could be more interesting if people were always dying at a low/modest rate from even 'clean' river water until you built it. Education in C:SL is actually more realistic then sc4.
In sc4 the difference between different levels of schools is just that they boost the education level of sims of different ages. So a elementary school increases the education level of 20 and 30 year olds, but not sims in their 60s 1. While in c:sl people need to actually go through the schooling system, and you can see the education level of each of them.Also, is air pollution a huge problem in sc4? My experience is that you just put dirty industry in a faraway place, like you would do in c:sl. You can say that the air pollution generated by traffic in sc4 is simulated in c:sl as noise as well.1.
To be fair, Cities Skylines is very much a sandbox game. Outside of maybe 2 or 3 scenarios, nothing in it is very hard, or meant to challenge you a whole lot.I don't build Water Treatment plants because I'm worried about losing, I build them because I don't like looking at the gunk in the water.Same with a landfill vs recycling center. I build a dump when I feel that it suits the city (young city, or new rural area) Later as that place builds up I will relocate the dump outside of city limits, plop a recycling center in the dense part of town, and build an incinerator somewhere else. That’s pretty neat.
I remember when SimCity (5) came out and being extremely disappointed that the underlying agent system was a complete farce. If I recall correctly, think they had to “cheat” because they couldn’t scale performance on lower end hardware. With this you can just spin up a faster EC2 instance if you want a bigger city or region. I can totally see small groups of hardcore players coming together to pay for a dedicated host.It sure beats swapping SC4 files on file sharing services for “region play”. For some inspiration about adaptive traffic routing, check out this Distributed City Generation rule for the Moveable Feast Machine.Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: A rough video demo of Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast Machine simulator.
See for more information.The link for more information is to the paper 'Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture' by Trent Small:Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments.
We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources.In a nutshell, the route destinations send out a 'smell' along channels in the sidewalk, and the intersections look at the different roads coming into them, and steer cars towards the direction with the strongest smell that they're looking for. (There are some more nuances, but routing information flows along sidewalks to intersections, and the city adaptively learns to route traffic, and can gracefully recover from failure and change.). With origins in biological life forms we are the product of their technological evolution. We exist not as one but rather two beings in symbiosis. The name we are called is 'dialogi' and we are the synthesis of human and machine.
Inside of us there is an artificial vessel that houses the chemical computer. This computer has vast computational and storage capacity wich is used to realize two functions. First it overrides the senses providing for a perfect virtual reality. Second it controls the body to provide for the needs of both symbionts. With great efficiency the synthetic intelligence is capable of feeding and sheltering the biological body. Inside the virtual reality we have a replica of our human body as avatar.
With directed movement of the virtual arms and hands we are capable of feats of movement like sending objects that are out of reach between locations. Or sending ourselves instantly to a spot in the distance.
Flying is natural and efficient. The whole environment is programmable and interactions with others are strictly optional.
We have done away with crime since a person is free to opt out of any interaction at any time. Safeguards exist to prevent any kind of sudden violence. The dialogi are a society of artists and our standard of living is perhaps beyond improvement. No resource is scarce since physical reality has become information. We spend our time walking the world and enjoying the beauty all around us. I personally still enjoy using my legs even if they are not really mine.