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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

271 points by amelim 14y ago

wmf 14y ago
I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.
- baddox 14y ago
  I suspect it would be at least slightly more fun than not being able to play at all.
  - xymostech 14y ago
    Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.
    - ericras 14y ago
      Given the small size, the typical request is to be able to play/control an entire region offline.
      - joesb 14y ago
        The question would be whether a single PC has enough computing power to run the entire region. It looks like the new SimCity engine actually simulate behavior of each car/person and resource transportation. Would simulating all the agents of the entire region works?
        wmf 14y ago
        I don't know if that argument works economically. EA has to support something like 100,000 simultaneous users, so if the server side needs more than one PC worth per user then their EC2 bill would be off the charts. (I see nwh made this argument earlier.) I suspect that inactive cities in a region are simulated with a lower level of detail.
        anonymous 14y ago
        Since players can run at different speeds, I'm going to say that inactive cities are simply not run and exist in a paused state. They probably produce/consume resources at a steady rate from their neighbouring cities, based on a statistical average.
        joesb 14y ago
        EA does not have to simulate the cities now, each cities are already simulated/view only by the owner of that cities. EA only have to relay information between cities. But they would have to do it if you can actually control other cities in the regions. If you play one city and then switch to another city for, say, 1 game year, what's going to happen to your previous city? Does its time stop? Would AI have to take good care of all cities?
        thatswrong0 14y ago
        It doesn't seem like the game is that taxing on decently good processors. It seems like you should easily be able to do those calculations if you have some extra cores lying around. One thing to keep in mind is that even in big, 16 city regions, only subregions of 4 cities each are actually connected by roads and rail. In fact, these subregions are practically autonomous, except maybe for air travel (I don't know). This is why you have 4 great works per 16 city region. So first thing to do would be, if there are actual calculations taking place between these subregions, cut that off. Now we only have the interconnections of 4 cities to deal with. Only 1 of these cities is 'active' at a time (the one you're currently playing on). I don't see why you couldn't do a rougher simulation of what is happening between your active city and the three other cities. You don't have to track agents from other cities to the active one, just have a counter that keeps track of total population. I may just be a naïve computer science student, but this doesn't seem terribly hard to do if you already have everything else in place. And it couldn't possibly be slower than what they currently have: I've watched one streamer have 3 cities within a subregion all have different values for progress on a great work. They weren't synced up at all. It was just silly. On one local machine, there's no way this could happen.
- idunno246 14y ago
  It really seems like this is the point they decided that social play is core to the gameplay. I imagine the conversation is something like 'how hard would it be to implement regions locally?' 'a lot of work' which gets translated into nothing works locally to the press.
- throwaway420 14y ago
  Don't worry. I'm sure Sim City "Megatropolis" DLC is soon coming that doubles the default city size. Only $19.95 or whatever they think people will pay. And don't worry about the traffic jams from bigger cities. Sim City Subway edition will comes out soon after. Only $15.95. (yes I am very cynical and angry about this and making bitter sarcastic comments. This is a game I've wanted for a long time but is so flawed because of bad decisions)
  - meric 14y ago
    I'll wait till I get the "Gold Edition" or whatever that includes all these expansion packs and the original game for the same price as the game costs now, a year down the road.
    - pseudonym 14y ago
      I think you might be waiting in vain. Unlike most other franchises, The Sims in particular seem to have an extraordinarily long half-life when it comes to DLC cost. I'd be rather surprised if Sim City was any different, given how well it's sold despite terrible PR work.
    - bentcorner 14y ago
      I'd love that too, but have you seen Sims 3 and its DLC? One of the reasons I cancelled my pre-order was because I realized that EA would undoubtedly milk SimCity customers for as much as they could. I wanted no part of that.
- uptown 14y ago
  Or perhaps the city sizes are kept small due to the "connecting" stuff they're doing, and stand-alone cities could be larger if they didn't need to live online.
  - estel 14y ago
    The agent-based simulation is probably much more CPU expensive than the statistical model in older SimCitys, which might also have informed the size limit.
jiggy2011 14y ago
So, if it's not much engineering effort for EA to make the game single player it shouldn't be too much engineering effort for people who are not EA..
- manmal 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code, and they really have this simulation thingy figured out. Most probably some really good and generic engine, or else they could not pump out Sims extensions every other month. I have quite some respect for this, it certainly took years.
  - MBCook 14y ago
    What makes you think SimCity reuses code from Sims 1-3?
  - inafield 14y ago
    They didn't. It uses a new engine, Glassbox. There's a difference between Sims and Sim City.
  - zevyoura 14y ago
    > I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code You made this assertion elsewhere in this thread also. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, do you have any evidence in favor of this theory? There's a huge amount of PR from them saying this is not the case, and from my minimal experience with game development it makes no sense.
    - manmal 14y ago
      The same amount of PR of them saying that you need to be online because servers manage these "massive" simulations. No, I have no evidence, would be cool if someone from Maxis explained the differences between Sims and Glassbox. What they say here [1] also applies to Sims, only on a bigger scale. I have yet to see a feature that does not somehow exist in Sims. [1]: http://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/7/4/3135209/simcity-reboot-glassbox-maxis http://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/7/4/3135209/simcity-reboo...
manmal 14y ago
Given that Sims 3 runs on my old Windows machine (on low graphics settings), it's not that surprising that servers are not actually needed to run SimCity. I don't know if they really use the same simulation engine, but I'd say the scale is on the same order of magnitude.
- MBCook 14y ago
  They don't. SimCity runs on a new engine called Glassbox. They've been releasing videos and articles about it for months to get people pumped up.
  - manmal 14y ago
    That's what they say, but I don't buy the marketing speak, especially now that they have been proven liars. Would you throw away all this code and start from scratch? What they describe about Glassbox was already used in Sims - agents, resources,... except multiplayer which seems to be just an occasional sync, right?
larrydavid 14y ago
As usual with 'anonymous sources/insiders' it's all complete conjecture. The only people that truly know are EA/Maxis. EDIT: Seems people disagree that this isn't complete guesswork. Yes the game runs for a while without a connection, but that doesn't prove that servers aren't necessary as the headline claims. There is no hard, undeniable evidence. It's the same story that has been rehashed since the game was released. And since the Xbox 720 'leak' fiasco I take these 'sources' with a pinch of salt, regardless of how reputable the site is. http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-leak/ http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-l...
- amelim 14y ago
  Well, it's plausible seeing as how multiple people have reported to be able to play the game while lacking internet connections for up to 20 minutes. Additionally, the methodology of the code seems to fit with several of the changes made by Maxis to improve performance (disabling cheetah speed for example). Regardless, Maxis has stated they will respond shortly to the article. https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561 https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561
  - eridius 14y ago
    The main thing the article proves is that the servers aren't needed for any real time calculations. What's to say the servers don't provide valuable data based on previous events in the game, data that's needed for future simulation?
- chc 14y ago
  This isn't really conjecture. There are firm claims here (e.g. an inside source provided this information, players have been able to play without a connection to the server) that are either true or false. It may not currently be within our power to prove all of them one way or the other, but that does not make it conjecture.
- devindotcom 14y ago
  Well, you have to choose your level of trust. I don't think RPS would post this unless they were reasonably sure. "Complete conjecture" isn't really an accurate description, I think, although "unconfirmed and incomplete" is certainly something you could say.
scottchin 14y ago
Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.
- seanalltogether 14y ago
  I think the anonymous source perfectly illustrates why other players have been able to handle playing offline for up to 20 minutes without any hiccups in the simulation. If indeed the server is simply processing the messages between cities, it makes sense that they have a time constraint on how long a city can operate without hearing from other cities in the region.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  RPS is generally credible.
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  OK, so get out Wireshark and have a peek for yourself. Figure out how to decode the data in the responses returned from the server (I'm sure it's not much more than maybe binary packages of metadata transmitted over SSL) and examine it until you're confident. http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/16788/wireshark-decrypt-ssl-traffic http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/16788/wireshark-decrypt-s... http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/03/10/pulling-binaries-from-pcaps/ http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/03/10/pulling-b... should help get you started. "The great thing about facts is that they're true whether you believe them or not" Also, Notch has "confirmed" this (if you trust him more than a sketchy anon source that RockPaperShotgun has stated that they've verified) https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896 https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896
  - scottchin 14y ago
    Thanks for the links. I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that what the source was saying is not possible. Since I wasn't familiar with the credibility of RPS (which I now hear is very credible), I just felt like reading the article didn't tell me anything concrete.
MBCook 14y ago
The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before. Two servers? It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to move them between servers. Was it all intertwined? Did the regions, stats, achievements, and DRM all run out of the same database? Were they not separate services? They had to know this game would be popular, they've been pushing it for months (to great effect). It's a major property and the first release in about a decade. Then there is EA. Even if Maxis couldn't figure this out (and I doubt that), EA has online experience. They're the publisher for Mass Effect, Madden, Fifa, NCAA, and more. They should have the resources, the people, and the experience to have prevented this. If you completely ignore the DRM or the seemingly unimportant always-online requirement, it this whole thing still seems botched. There were multiple groups who should have known better and prevented this. My understanding is that they got some warning signs during the beta. I would kill for a postmortem blog or article on Gamasutra explaining why they couldn't scale out faster; to know what decision was the lynchpin that held them back.
- throwaway420 14y ago
  While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines. Small websites operate with more servers than that, let alone a AAA title from a major studio. I don't think they literally mean two servers - it sounds like they're trying to make the explanation simpler for consumers. What they're probably referring to is a self-contained cluster of machines that runs all of the necessary services that the game relies on - databases, notifications, social rankings, etc. That being said, all of this wouldn't be needed if they'd just release an offline mode. The upcoming DLC content to unlock expected features (bigger cities, more transportation options, etc) is bad enough, but the always on requirement just makes this game impossible for me to buy.
  - eridius 14y ago
    Your explanation sounds more plausible. It could be more akin to Blizzard adding 2 new realms to their realm list, rather than 2 physical computers.
chrisacky 14y ago
"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team." I'm going to point a finger and say that this is clearly untrue, and very easy to disprove just from basic network monitoring over 5 minutes of playing the game. I would immediately fire a systems architect that designed a single player game to compute significant calculations on our expensive [buzz word] cloud servers. Unless we use different definitions of the word significant... It's a little ridiculous to suggest that?... plus, for zero benefit (above DRM), it would have a non-negligible affect on their bottom line if they are computing time cycles for SimCity on their own servers... Anonymous source or not, conjecturally, it's hard to not agree with what the insider has said.
- nwh 14y ago
  It's clear that the quoted text was a lie from the start. There's nothing you could do in an EC2 instance that I couldn't do on my quad core i7 at many times the speed and a fraction of the cost. Even if you matched users one-for-one with large EC2 instances, you'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour (and that many don't exist).
  - kostya-kow 14y ago
    One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.
    - nwh 14y ago
      What reasonable company would justify spending tens of thousands an hour on server costs, when they could optimise their code a little more and run it for free?
      - samstave 14y ago
        You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one. The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week. There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells me the teams are not having the experience/schedule/man-power to create scalable architectures to back it. Massive multiplayer gaming is certainly a hard problem.
- tolmasky 14y ago
  If their vision was for this game to be an MMO/social game "from day one", then they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way. The social/multiplayer aspects of Diablo, WoW, and SC are obvious to me, which is why Blizzard's move never really concerned me that much. Add on top of that the truly well done matchmaking system and I hardly think about it all. Doing things well goes a long way in convincing naysayers. However, when I think SimCity, all I can think of is single player. And the vague things I've heard about interacting with others seem really lame. Again, maybe there are some awesome multiplayer aspects, but I have not heard of them and it sounds like most people aren't that interested in them.
  - cbs 14y ago
    they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way. In a market where some game's design decisions for online focus and/or online passes are driven by an effort to reduce piracy and the secondary sales market, it becomes very hard to convince people that any one game isn't. Good luck selling that: "No, not in this case, our design just happened to support them by coincidence, and, oh, we're also part of EA and even though the cynics have been right about our motives in the past, we're totally not doing it this time."
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  If it isn't about DRM and is in fact about the MMO/Social aspects, then why are EA and Maxis at pains to describe it as something else?
ghurlman 14y ago
A friend of mine put it this way: let people run disconnected, offline, and in the UI show a big glass dome over their city cutting them off Simpsons Movie style[1]. Over time, gas, food, and water run out, necessitating a reconnection. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Duh? The top comment here is more elegant, but EA is clearly lying. Their "apology" was a joke and amounted to "Sorry we've had so much success, it's your fault for assaulting our servers."
jasonlingx 14y ago
Wow people must want to play this game so bad seeing the amount of aggro it's generated. Makes me want to go out and buy a copy!
- thefreeman 14y ago
  I'm pretty much waiting for the "offline" release, the 100% all clear that noone is having issues, or the crack. whichever comes first.
  - imissmyjuno 14y ago
    I've been waiting for years and i'll wait until the day there is an offline mode or a patch. It's the principle.
- Kiro 14y ago
  Yup. I bought one copy because of all the rage!
cookiecaper 14y ago
Patiently waiting for the re-implemented game server and attendant crack that will let us point SimCity to our own networks.
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  Yep. I assume that the game has fallbacks for "failed save" and "bad data from server" that you could exploit / patch / use in a work-around here. Worst-case, you'd make a real server that accepts save game data and stores it, and maybe does some "verification" of client data packages (AKA "discard client response and return a big thumbs up in all cases"). It might be more complicated than that if they're implementing a challenge / response, but I have no idea how much effort they're going through for DRM these days when it's been shown to NEVER work.
  - robinh 14y ago
    I've done some reversing, and this is EA, so... let's say it's not going to be something that'll be cracked in a weekend.
drivingmenuts 14y ago
In respect to the graphics, it looks awesome and I was expecting to be just as great as previous iterations. I actually wanted to play the game until I found out it was social multiplayer with cloud-based saves. That just killed it. I have since bought a copy of SimCity 4 and plan to be quite happy with it for another decade or so.
- andypants 14y ago
  > That just killed it. Really? Not the terrible launch? This says nothing about the game, only your preference of playing single player games over multiplayer games. There are plenty of great games out there with 'social multiplayer' or 'cloud-based saves'. These are not problems that drive away players.
  - yebyen 14y ago
    Ostensibly they are, if they are the root of EA's issues. I don't complain about the servers being down because I don't play games that require servers' constant attention like that. If they were any other than 'social multiplayer' then they would be a real-time strategy game, and oddly while those games tend to sink or swim on the balance, playability, and fun of their multiplayer side, I too generally prefer to play single player on those games as well as I would tend to get my ass handed to me by Koreans. I would rather play Starcraft today than buy SC2. OK so that is stretching, but I haven't tried the new StarCraft, and it's mostly because of this DRM situation.
    - yebyen 14y ago
      OK. Today I went out and tried Jurassic Park Builder which is basically Sim City Lite for Android. I am frustrated because I can't start a new game without destroying my current progress. I took a slow route, spent all of my coins trying to evolve my Triceratops too soon, and now I can't use it to progress faster. But this is only the first day. It's not as bad as Vector, that makes it clear I won't be able to complete the game without a purchase. They could be lying. It might be worth the bling just to own the special tricks. Meanwhile I have come up with some great ideas for how to use the bitcoin in new and exciting ways. I'm drunk!
mattquiros 14y ago
I could be wrong here, but if Bradshaw's claims were true--that a significant amount of calculation is offloaded on their servers--wouldn't the game be unplayable for people who have shitty internet connections anyway? It's easy for me to imagine SimCity making so many computations to simulate the game, but for those data to be sent back and forth from the gamer's PC to their servers? It has got to strain the player somehow.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- ajanuary 14y ago
  Your local machine could be doing coarse grain calculations while their server did fine grain calculations, and periodically sync up, in the same way FPS's do (which is why you get laggy players jumping about). But from what others have said, that doesn't seem to be the case.
jellyksong 14y ago
Anyone notice the interesting old-school-text-adventure error page? It wasn't 404 but some other 4xx page (forgot which) -- it seems to be resolved and gone now though.

271 points by amelim 14y ago

wmf 14y ago

I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.

baddox 14y ago
I suspect it would be at least slightly more fun than not being able to play at all.
- xymostech 14y ago
  Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.
  - ericras 14y ago
    Given the small size, the typical request is to be able to play/control an entire region offline.
    - joesb 14y ago
      The question would be whether a single PC has enough computing power to run the entire region. It looks like the new SimCity engine actually simulate behavior of each car/person and resource transportation. Would simulating all the agents of the entire region works?
      - wmf 14y ago
        I don't know if that argument works economically. EA has to support something like 100,000 simultaneous users, so if the server side needs more than one PC worth per user then their EC2 bill would be off the charts. (I see nwh made this argument earlier.) I suspect that inactive cities in a region are simulated with a lower level of detail.
        anonymous 14y ago
        Since players can run at different speeds, I'm going to say that inactive cities are simply not run and exist in a paused state. They probably produce/consume resources at a steady rate from their neighbouring cities, based on a statistical average.
        joesb 14y ago
        EA does not have to simulate the cities now, each cities are already simulated/view only by the owner of that cities. EA only have to relay information between cities. But they would have to do it if you can actually control other cities in the regions. If you play one city and then switch to another city for, say, 1 game year, what's going to happen to your previous city? Does its time stop? Would AI have to take good care of all cities?
      - thatswrong0 14y ago
        It doesn't seem like the game is that taxing on decently good processors. It seems like you should easily be able to do those calculations if you have some extra cores lying around. One thing to keep in mind is that even in big, 16 city regions, only subregions of 4 cities each are actually connected by roads and rail. In fact, these subregions are practically autonomous, except maybe for air travel (I don't know). This is why you have 4 great works per 16 city region. So first thing to do would be, if there are actual calculations taking place between these subregions, cut that off. Now we only have the interconnections of 4 cities to deal with. Only 1 of these cities is 'active' at a time (the one you're currently playing on). I don't see why you couldn't do a rougher simulation of what is happening between your active city and the three other cities. You don't have to track agents from other cities to the active one, just have a counter that keeps track of total population. I may just be a naïve computer science student, but this doesn't seem terribly hard to do if you already have everything else in place. And it couldn't possibly be slower than what they currently have: I've watched one streamer have 3 cities within a subregion all have different values for progress on a great work. They weren't synced up at all. It was just silly. On one local machine, there's no way this could happen.
idunno246 14y ago
It really seems like this is the point they decided that social play is core to the gameplay. I imagine the conversation is something like 'how hard would it be to implement regions locally?' 'a lot of work' which gets translated into nothing works locally to the press.
throwaway420 14y ago
Don't worry. I'm sure Sim City "Megatropolis" DLC is soon coming that doubles the default city size. Only $19.95 or whatever they think people will pay. And don't worry about the traffic jams from bigger cities. Sim City Subway edition will comes out soon after. Only $15.95. (yes I am very cynical and angry about this and making bitter sarcastic comments. This is a game I've wanted for a long time but is so flawed because of bad decisions)
- meric 14y ago
  I'll wait till I get the "Gold Edition" or whatever that includes all these expansion packs and the original game for the same price as the game costs now, a year down the road.
  - pseudonym 14y ago
    I think you might be waiting in vain. Unlike most other franchises, The Sims in particular seem to have an extraordinarily long half-life when it comes to DLC cost. I'd be rather surprised if Sim City was any different, given how well it's sold despite terrible PR work.
  - bentcorner 14y ago
    I'd love that too, but have you seen Sims 3 and its DLC? One of the reasons I cancelled my pre-order was because I realized that EA would undoubtedly milk SimCity customers for as much as they could. I wanted no part of that.
uptown 14y ago
Or perhaps the city sizes are kept small due to the "connecting" stuff they're doing, and stand-alone cities could be larger if they didn't need to live online.
- estel 14y ago
  The agent-based simulation is probably much more CPU expensive than the statistical model in older SimCitys, which might also have informed the size limit.

jiggy2011 14y ago

So, if it's not much engineering effort for EA to make the game single player it shouldn't be too much engineering effort for people who are not EA..

manmal 14y ago
I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code, and they really have this simulation thingy figured out. Most probably some really good and generic engine, or else they could not pump out Sims extensions every other month. I have quite some respect for this, it certainly took years.
- MBCook 14y ago
  What makes you think SimCity reuses code from Sims 1-3?
- inafield 14y ago
  They didn't. It uses a new engine, Glassbox. There's a difference between Sims and Sim City.
- zevyoura 14y ago
  > I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code You made this assertion elsewhere in this thread also. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, do you have any evidence in favor of this theory? There's a huge amount of PR from them saying this is not the case, and from my minimal experience with game development it makes no sense.
  - manmal 14y ago
    The same amount of PR of them saying that you need to be online because servers manage these "massive" simulations. No, I have no evidence, would be cool if someone from Maxis explained the differences between Sims and Glassbox. What they say here [1] also applies to Sims, only on a bigger scale. I have yet to see a feature that does not somehow exist in Sims. [1]: http://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/7/4/3135209/simcity-reboot-glassbox-maxis http://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/7/4/3135209/simcity-reboo...

manmal 14y ago

Given that Sims 3 runs on my old Windows machine (on low graphics settings), it's not that surprising that servers are not actually needed to run SimCity. I don't know if they really use the same simulation engine, but I'd say the scale is on the same order of magnitude.

MBCook 14y ago
They don't. SimCity runs on a new engine called Glassbox. They've been releasing videos and articles about it for months to get people pumped up.
- manmal 14y ago
  That's what they say, but I don't buy the marketing speak, especially now that they have been proven liars. Would you throw away all this code and start from scratch? What they describe about Glassbox was already used in Sims - agents, resources,... except multiplayer which seems to be just an occasional sync, right?

larrydavid 14y ago

As usual with 'anonymous sources/insiders' it's all complete conjecture. The only people that truly know are EA/Maxis. EDIT: Seems people disagree that this isn't complete guesswork. Yes the game runs for a while without a connection, but that doesn't prove that servers aren't necessary as the headline claims. There is no hard, undeniable evidence. It's the same story that has been rehashed since the game was released. And since the Xbox 720 'leak' fiasco I take these 'sources' with a pinch of salt, regardless of how reputable the site is. http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-leak/ http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-l...

amelim 14y ago
Well, it's plausible seeing as how multiple people have reported to be able to play the game while lacking internet connections for up to 20 minutes. Additionally, the methodology of the code seems to fit with several of the changes made by Maxis to improve performance (disabling cheetah speed for example). Regardless, Maxis has stated they will respond shortly to the article. https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561 https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561
- eridius 14y ago
  The main thing the article proves is that the servers aren't needed for any real time calculations. What's to say the servers don't provide valuable data based on previous events in the game, data that's needed for future simulation?
chc 14y ago
This isn't really conjecture. There are firm claims here (e.g. an inside source provided this information, players have been able to play without a connection to the server) that are either true or false. It may not currently be within our power to prove all of them one way or the other, but that does not make it conjecture.
devindotcom 14y ago
Well, you have to choose your level of trust. I don't think RPS would post this unless they were reasonably sure. "Complete conjecture" isn't really an accurate description, I think, although "unconfirmed and incomplete" is certainly something you could say.

scottchin 14y ago

Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.

seanalltogether 14y ago
I think the anonymous source perfectly illustrates why other players have been able to handle playing offline for up to 20 minutes without any hiccups in the simulation. If indeed the server is simply processing the messages between cities, it makes sense that they have a time constraint on how long a city can operate without hearing from other cities in the region.
mkr-hn 14y ago
RPS is generally credible.
seanp2k2 14y ago
OK, so get out Wireshark and have a peek for yourself. Figure out how to decode the data in the responses returned from the server (I'm sure it's not much more than maybe binary packages of metadata transmitted over SSL) and examine it until you're confident. http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/16788/wireshark-decrypt-ssl-traffic http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/16788/wireshark-decrypt-s... http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/03/10/pulling-binaries-from-pcaps/ http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/03/10/pulling-b... should help get you started. "The great thing about facts is that they're true whether you believe them or not" Also, Notch has "confirmed" this (if you trust him more than a sketchy anon source that RockPaperShotgun has stated that they've verified) https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896 https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896
- scottchin 14y ago
  Thanks for the links. I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that what the source was saying is not possible. Since I wasn't familiar with the credibility of RPS (which I now hear is very credible), I just felt like reading the article didn't tell me anything concrete.

MBCook 14y ago

The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before. Two servers? It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to move them between servers. Was it all intertwined? Did the regions, stats, achievements, and DRM all run out of the same database? Were they not separate services? They had to know this game would be popular, they've been pushing it for months (to great effect). It's a major property and the first release in about a decade. Then there is EA. Even if Maxis couldn't figure this out (and I doubt that), EA has online experience. They're the publisher for Mass Effect, Madden, Fifa, NCAA, and more. They should have the resources, the people, and the experience to have prevented this. If you completely ignore the DRM or the seemingly unimportant always-online requirement, it this whole thing still seems botched. There were multiple groups who should have known better and prevented this. My understanding is that they got some warning signs during the beta. I would kill for a postmortem blog or article on Gamasutra explaining why they couldn't scale out faster; to know what decision was the lynchpin that held them back.

throwaway420 14y ago
While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines. Small websites operate with more servers than that, let alone a AAA title from a major studio. I don't think they literally mean two servers - it sounds like they're trying to make the explanation simpler for consumers. What they're probably referring to is a self-contained cluster of machines that runs all of the necessary services that the game relies on - databases, notifications, social rankings, etc. That being said, all of this wouldn't be needed if they'd just release an offline mode. The upcoming DLC content to unlock expected features (bigger cities, more transportation options, etc) is bad enough, but the always on requirement just makes this game impossible for me to buy.
- eridius 14y ago
  Your explanation sounds more plausible. It could be more akin to Blizzard adding 2 new realms to their realm list, rather than 2 physical computers.

chrisacky 14y ago

"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team." I'm going to point a finger and say that this is clearly untrue, and very easy to disprove just from basic network monitoring over 5 minutes of playing the game. I would immediately fire a systems architect that designed a single player game to compute significant calculations on our expensive [buzz word] cloud servers. Unless we use different definitions of the word significant... It's a little ridiculous to suggest that?... plus, for zero benefit (above DRM), it would have a non-negligible affect on their bottom line if they are computing time cycles for SimCity on their own servers... Anonymous source or not, conjecturally, it's hard to not agree with what the insider has said.

nwh 14y ago
It's clear that the quoted text was a lie from the start. There's nothing you could do in an EC2 instance that I couldn't do on my quad core i7 at many times the speed and a fraction of the cost. Even if you matched users one-for-one with large EC2 instances, you'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour (and that many don't exist).
- kostya-kow 14y ago
  One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.
  - nwh 14y ago
    What reasonable company would justify spending tens of thousands an hour on server costs, when they could optimise their code a little more and run it for free?
    - samstave 14y ago
      You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one. The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week. There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells me the teams are not having the experience/schedule/man-power to create scalable architectures to back it. Massive multiplayer gaming is certainly a hard problem.

tolmasky 14y ago
If their vision was for this game to be an MMO/social game "from day one", then they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way. The social/multiplayer aspects of Diablo, WoW, and SC are obvious to me, which is why Blizzard's move never really concerned me that much. Add on top of that the truly well done matchmaking system and I hardly think about it all. Doing things well goes a long way in convincing naysayers. However, when I think SimCity, all I can think of is single player. And the vague things I've heard about interacting with others seem really lame. Again, maybe there are some awesome multiplayer aspects, but I have not heard of them and it sounds like most people aren't that interested in them.
- cbs 14y ago
  they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way. In a market where some game's design decisions for online focus and/or online passes are driven by an effort to reduce piracy and the secondary sales market, it becomes very hard to convince people that any one game isn't. Good luck selling that: "No, not in this case, our design just happened to support them by coincidence, and, oh, we're also part of EA and even though the cynics have been right about our motives in the past, we're totally not doing it this time."
andrewfelix 14y ago
If it isn't about DRM and is in fact about the MMO/Social aspects, then why are EA and Maxis at pains to describe it as something else?

ghurlman 14y ago

A friend of mine put it this way: let people run disconnected, offline, and in the UI show a big glass dome over their city cutting them off Simpsons Movie style[1]. Over time, gas, food, and water run out, necessitating a reconnection. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Duh? The top comment here is more elegant, but EA is clearly lying. Their "apology" was a joke and amounted to "Sorry we've had so much success, it's your fault for assaulting our servers."

jasonlingx 14y ago

Wow people must want to play this game so bad seeing the amount of aggro it's generated. Makes me want to go out and buy a copy!

thefreeman 14y ago
I'm pretty much waiting for the "offline" release, the 100% all clear that noone is having issues, or the crack. whichever comes first.
- imissmyjuno 14y ago
  I've been waiting for years and i'll wait until the day there is an offline mode or a patch. It's the principle.
Kiro 14y ago
Yup. I bought one copy because of all the rage!

cookiecaper 14y ago

Patiently waiting for the re-implemented game server and attendant crack that will let us point SimCity to our own networks.

seanp2k2 14y ago
Yep. I assume that the game has fallbacks for "failed save" and "bad data from server" that you could exploit / patch / use in a work-around here. Worst-case, you'd make a real server that accepts save game data and stores it, and maybe does some "verification" of client data packages (AKA "discard client response and return a big thumbs up in all cases"). It might be more complicated than that if they're implementing a challenge / response, but I have no idea how much effort they're going through for DRM these days when it's been shown to NEVER work.
- robinh 14y ago
  I've done some reversing, and this is EA, so... let's say it's not going to be something that'll be cracked in a weekend.

drivingmenuts 14y ago

In respect to the graphics, it looks awesome and I was expecting to be just as great as previous iterations. I actually wanted to play the game until I found out it was social multiplayer with cloud-based saves. That just killed it. I have since bought a copy of SimCity 4 and plan to be quite happy with it for another decade or so.

andypants 14y ago
> That just killed it. Really? Not the terrible launch? This says nothing about the game, only your preference of playing single player games over multiplayer games. There are plenty of great games out there with 'social multiplayer' or 'cloud-based saves'. These are not problems that drive away players.
- yebyen 14y ago
  Ostensibly they are, if they are the root of EA's issues. I don't complain about the servers being down because I don't play games that require servers' constant attention like that. If they were any other than 'social multiplayer' then they would be a real-time strategy game, and oddly while those games tend to sink or swim on the balance, playability, and fun of their multiplayer side, I too generally prefer to play single player on those games as well as I would tend to get my ass handed to me by Koreans. I would rather play Starcraft today than buy SC2. OK so that is stretching, but I haven't tried the new StarCraft, and it's mostly because of this DRM situation.
  - yebyen 14y ago
    OK. Today I went out and tried Jurassic Park Builder which is basically Sim City Lite for Android. I am frustrated because I can't start a new game without destroying my current progress. I took a slow route, spent all of my coins trying to evolve my Triceratops too soon, and now I can't use it to progress faster. But this is only the first day. It's not as bad as Vector, that makes it clear I won't be able to complete the game without a purchase. They could be lying. It might be worth the bling just to own the special tricks. Meanwhile I have come up with some great ideas for how to use the bitcoin in new and exciting ways. I'm drunk!

mattquiros 14y ago

I could be wrong here, but if Bradshaw's claims were true--that a significant amount of calculation is offloaded on their servers--wouldn't the game be unplayable for people who have shitty internet connections anyway? It's easy for me to imagine SimCity making so many computations to simulate the game, but for those data to be sent back and forth from the gamer's PC to their servers? It has got to strain the player somehow.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ajanuary 14y ago
Your local machine could be doing coarse grain calculations while their server did fine grain calculations, and periodically sync up, in the same way FPS's do (which is why you get laggy players jumping about). But from what others have said, that doesn't seem to be the case.

jellyksong 14y ago

Anyone notice the interesting old-school-text-adventure error page? It wasn't 404 but some other 4xx page (forgot which) -- it seems to be resolved and gone now though.