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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#111

Post by joesb »

wmf wrote: post #78
joesb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#112

Post by estel »

uptown wrote: post #77
wmf wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#113

Post by Tzunamitom »

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).

In other news, the Pope is Catholic...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#114

Post by cdmoyer »

wereHamster wrote: post #110
chaz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clusterf k. Under "competent" I understand "Having sufficient skill, knowledge, ability, or quali…

I believe it. All it takes is one higher up executive to pick a launch date and mandate that it happens, damn the torpedoes. This says nothing about the competence of the engineers and their managers in the trenches.

I mean, you could question their willingness to work at the company. But, working on the latest sim city sounds like a fun project and people like paychecks.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#115

Post by billpg »

Tzunamitom wrote: post #113
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).

In other news, the Pope is Catholic...

Right now (checks the news) this is technically false.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#116

Post by bluedino »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #71
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.

So let's assume that the average person wanting to play SimCity is running a Core2Duo (released 7 years ago). It's hard to find benchmarks directly comparing a Core2 E6600 to something like an Ivy Bridge Xeon that you'd expect to find in a modern dual-socket 1U server, but even looking at a TomsHardware chart of x86 core performance can tell you that an i7-2600k is only about twice as powerful as a Pentium 4 HT660 (c…

It's a little closer to 3x as fast

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#117

Post by andypants »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #89

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.

> 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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#118

Post by cdmoyer »

gt565k wrote: post #92
chaz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Diablo 1 and 2 were launched, the single player was 100% client-side. As a result, there was rampant cheating. Jump online with your character, and you had an unfair advantage because of your infinite gold, stacked character and rare inventory. Diablo 3 went always-online to help solve this problem. Loot discovery, inventory, and fighting outcomes are entirely controlled server-side. While it's possible that the…

Nope nope nope. I'm sorry but you are wrong here. Diablo 2, while it had online realms where you could bring your single player character, most people chose to play on the battle.net realms where all character info was stored online. The servers where you could bring your single player character were just a show off for people who used character / item editing programs to create insanely stacked gear and characters,…

I think that there were a lot of players that were frustrated when they made a character offline, and then got invited to play with a friend on battle.net and had to start from scratch. I assume that frustration was part of the reason (among others) that they made all characters online/battle.net characters.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#119

Post by ZachPruckowski »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #67
firebones wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

EA's claim struck me as really odd too; this just isn't the way that games are made [yet?] and if they did manage to get something like they claimed running, there would be much more interesting technical aspects of it that they probably would have done press releases for. In this day and age, standing up a system like that is still a major accomplishment, and the details of how they got around things like processing…

Forget Wireshark, the article implies that some of the critics tried the good old fashioned "yank the Internet cord and see how long it takes to break" method and got 20 minutes of playability.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#120

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

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.

But haven't they been rushing updates out the door? They may have been careless given the situation.
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