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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#121

Post by wuest »

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,…

In addition to your point, Diablo 3 also introduced a real-money auction system, which necessitated a need for far deeper control over inventory etc. Online-only for such a system is a fairly obvious choice.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#122

Post by ajanuary »

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…

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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#123

Post by mkr-hn »

NoPiece wrote: post #80
scottchin wrote: post #9

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.

He isn't anonymous to RPS - they say they know who he is, and verified he worked on the project just aren't publishing his name. That's a lot different than an "anonymous tip." "Our source, who we have verified worked directly on the project but obviously wishes to remain anonymous, has first-hand knowledge of how the game works." Either RPS is being duped, or it strongly adds validity to the story. RPS has a great r…

It's possible RPS isn't known by many on HN. Gaming journalism doesn't often make its way to this place.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#125

Post by chaz »

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,…

Thanks for clarifying.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#126

Post by rmrfrmrf »

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,…

> The reason Blizzard went online only with Diablo 3 and SC2, was because the Diablo 2's battle.net was reverse engineered, and there was an abundance of servers that could be played on with a fake CD Key all over the world.

I don't think that's the only reason. Diablo II is plagued with bots and duping. While the balance between client-server data on the Battle.net closed realms is much better than it was with Diablo (where you could just edit your character data locally to increase gold/upgrade inventory online), Diablo II still has the problems of 1) loading the entire level map into memory at once, giving bots the opportunity to path their way to POIs with no effort and 2) reconciling local inventory with the server's inventory after lag spikes and server crashes, which is hypothesized to be the main method dupers use.

But, as could be expected, both botting and duping happen on D3 anyway. And, to your point, during the D3 beta period, there were several devs that were able to reverse-engineer the D3 protocol anyway and create a local server. shrug

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#127

Post by mncolinlee »

chaz wrote: post #87
weareconvo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys are all raising good points, but, at a higher level, did anyone really believe EA to begin with?

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…

Single player cheating a.k.a "God Mode" was considered a feature for early versions of SimCity. Multiplayer requires a network connection either way. As long as multiplayer is optional, cheating issues should not be an impediment to single player.

There are gamers who prefer to play with unlimited resources and complete control of the situation. Many prefer a sandbox where other gamers cannot mess with their experience. Are you telling me Maxis is in the business of getting between the consumer and their game? That's a losing business proposition if it's true.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#128

Post by yebyen »

andypants wrote: post #117
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.

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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#129

Post by bsenftner »

cdmoyer wrote: post #114
wereHamster wrote: post #110

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. 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.

Bingo! As a former EA senior engineer, my money is on someone in EA marketing setting the dates and forcing an 80-hour week crunch time for the duration of this title's production. They probably even brought in "experts" who ignored foundation code and slammed in their own logic "'cause it works" and now they have a clusterfuck of logic no one understands. Been there, been screwed by their managers, and left for good. EA can rot in hell.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#130

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

The core-for-core thing makes a huge difference in the real world that doesn't show up on single-core benchmarks. The HT660 was a good chip in its day, but it's at a four-to-one disadvantage for code that's multithreaded and/or running on a busy PC.

I think Sandy Bridge is my favorite CPU of all time. It does a truly massive amount of work without consuming significantly more power than the part it replaced.

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