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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#101

Post by abcd_f »

nwh wrote: post #36
chrisacky wrote: post #16

"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 ove…

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).

It's clear that it's a lie because if it were true it would've been delivered in a form of an awesome tech demo and not an excuse for broken game.

That said however...

If there's a shared world, then running its simulation server-side makes sense. Not the game minutiae, but global state. Something like weather, simulated stock markets, etc. The environment, basically. That's not to say that SimCity has any of this, because it doesn't.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#103

Post by manmal »

MBCook wrote: post #14
manmal wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#104

Post by robinh »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #76
cookiecaper wrote: post #58

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

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 implementin…

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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#105

Post by manmal »

zevyoura wrote: post #28
manmal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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-reboo...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#106

Post by tirant »

Kaali wrote: post #98
ekimekim wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds plausible. Again, I'm not a windows guy, but unless they've statically linked the SSL libraries, you should just be able to inject your own dll and capture the data on the way into the library.

I would think that they have statically linked it, which is why I thought about using a debugger to catch the data. With dynamically linked library, such as OpenSSL, it would be quite easy to capture the data.

You could just search for the certificates in the code, and update them with your own.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#107

Post by lhnz »

nwh wrote: post #63
kostya-kow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.

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?

The richest games company makes decisions which benefit them...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#108

Post by belorn »

firebones wrote: post #61
nwh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

While I agree that this is likely not truthful, I do wonder if part of the strategy of offloading more work to the cloud be to make an easier transition to allowing mobile clients (iOS/Android) where local processing capacity is more of an issue, or to platform-neutral approaches, or to a "take your city anywhere" play model? (I doubt this is the case because unless they have a motivation to keep it secret, it would…

you can only offload processing that has barely any requirement on latency. If you send of loot or hit calculations (like d3) onto a cloudy server and it takes minutes for it to finish, the game would become unplayable.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#109

Post by [deleted] »

mattquiros wrote: post #91

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…

[deleted]

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#110

Post by wereHamster »

chaz wrote: post #69
mbell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is likely in engineering, like a database that isn't scaling. If it were that simple, just cut the number of users per cluster and throw 10 more up. > I think if they could cut a decent size check to fix the issues Doubtful within the context of a quick fix, but it is likely the root issue. See above simple solution that takes 30 minutes to roll out. EA is not a company run by engineers, its not a compa…

I've met enough people who worked at EA to know they have competent engineers and managers -- they are not completely inept. When hundreds of millions of dollars are suddenly at risk, you have a clear channel straight to the CEO to get the resources that you need. I'm giving EA the benefit of the doubt that they ruled out 30-minute fixes. I can't see how any of us can really speculate as to how long it should take to…

> I've met enough people who worked at EA to know they have competent engineers and managers -- they are not completely inept.

Nope, nope, nope. Nobody in their right mind will believe you that. If they fabricate such a game launch then they are complete morons. You simply can not claim that they are competent after that clusterfk.

Under "competent" I understand "Having sufficient skill, knowledge, ability, or qualifications." (definition from wiktionary). Their engineers clearly have neither the skill nor ability to fix the problems in timely manner. Nor did (or do) they have enough knowledge how the servers behave under such high load, otherwise they'd fix it before the launch. And if the problems were known, then the managers failed to delay the launch. A company which knowingly releases such a game is not run by competent people.

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