Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary • Hacker News Board

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#31

Post by eridius » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:39 AM UTC

throwaway420 wrote: post #18

MBCook wrote: post #13

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…

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…

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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#32

Post by jaggederest » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:40 AM UTC

fennecfoxen wrote: post #26

throwaway420 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines." I can totally imagine that. Be afraid. Be very afraid. :)

I've actually seen entire companies and universities run on two physical machines, for sufficiently large values of two physical machines.

When I was working there, the University of Oregon ran almost all of the routine computation and webpages on one big Sun box that was about as fast as my calculator, and one enormous Vax box that was about 8086 level speed.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#33

Post by eridius » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:42 AM UTC

amelim wrote: post #8

larrydavid wrote: post #7

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 release…

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…

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?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#34

Post by Zimahl » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:42 AM UTC

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #21

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…

There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games

Maybe for something like Diablo 3 but there's a level of solo play that defines a game like Sim City.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#35

Post by ghurlman » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:46 AM UTC

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

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#36

Post by nwh » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:47 AM UTC

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).

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#37

Post by ihuman » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:48 AM UTC

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…

People have been able to play if offline for a limited time. This just makes it look worse for EA's claims.

http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-fo...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#38

Post by jaggederest » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:49 AM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #30

MBCook wrote: post #13

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…

Each game "Server" for SimCity is actually an Amazon EC2 cluster of servers, with 1 central master DB server. Even when the servers were "full" on game launch, all of the EC2 servers were responding to requests normally - it was the cluster's master DB server that was slow. All of the "servers" are actually in the UK Amazon EC2. This brings us to the scalability problems and why regions/cities are not shared to all s…

That makes it even more baffling why they couldn't bring up more servers.

If it's all just a chef/puppet based infrastructure in EC2, you should be maybe 20-30 minutes away from pumping out a new 'server'. One is as easy as ten, at that point.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#39

Post by edraferi » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:52 AM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #30

MBCook wrote: post #13

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…

Each game "Server" for SimCity is actually an Amazon EC2 cluster of servers, with 1 central master DB server. Even when the servers were "full" on game launch, all of the EC2 servers were responding to requests normally - it was the cluster's master DB server that was slow. All of the "servers" are actually in the UK Amazon EC2. This brings us to the scalability problems and why regions/cities are not shared to all s…

a DB bottleneck and lousy regionalization seem like exactly the kind of thing EA's experience in this area would prevent. What gives?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#40

Post by peterwaller » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:56 AM UTC

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…

I'm on your side, I think this is stupid, but I can't let this stand:

> 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.

c'mon. The amount of computation done can be completely uncorrelated to the number of bits sent over the network, in the same way that the effects of your saying something offhand to someone could have a massive effect on the final state of the planet.