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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#41

Post by nwh »

ihuman wrote: post #37
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...

You can apparently play for even longer if you change your computers clock.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#42

Post by Fargren »

peterwaller wrote: post #40
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 som…

If you send a small amount of bits over the network, the amount of responses you can get is commensurately small. So if you aren't sending a lot of bits, it would be possible to simply have a local mapping of inputs to outputs. There is a certain size the message has to have for it to be worth it to send it instead of solving the problem locally; obviously, I don't know what that size is or whether SimCity's packages where smaller than that size. But the claim of the OP isn't totally absurd.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#43

Post by pseudonym »

meric wrote: post #22
throwaway420 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

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.

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.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#44

Post by cbs »

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…

A guy with an axe to grind tricked some websites that either aren't focused on games or are just desperate for page views? That's not going to change my view of Rock Paper Shotgun's editorial chops.

Maybe you're right, I'll wait for the Maxis PR statement, that's where the truth will lie!

Those with an editorial reputation in the gaming press are (perhaps even uncomfortably) close to the guys in the industry they cover. They knew better than to run with that hoax, and Rob Crossly even called the hoaxer out on it (read the emails he posted to twitter if you want to see the hoxer have a hissy fit).

If RPS says they got a Maxis duder, they probably got one. One has to be suspicions of all reporting, but even though the NYTimes fucks the pooch sometimes, its not really grounds to handwave away every bit of reporting ever.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#46

Post by mbell »

jaggederest wrote: post #38
Afforess wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're talking about EA here. You need to include the latency required to go through enough bureaucracy layers to approve the expenditure of funds on another cluster.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#47

Post by rz2k »

Fargren wrote: post #42
peterwaller wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

If you send a small amount of bits over the network, the amount of responses you can get is commensurately small. So if you aren't sending a lot of bits, it would be possible to simply have a local mapping of inputs to outputs. There is a certain size the message has to have for it to be worth it to send it instead of solving the problem locally; obviously, I don't know what that size is or whether SimCity's packages…

You don't have to transmit many bits to perform an internet search.

When you perform an internet search are you all by yourself consuming more computing resources than the i5 processor in your computer? That's unlikely, but you'd also have a difficult time replicating the functionality of Google with your CPU alone and only the storage on your own laptop.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#49

Post by chaz »

mbell wrote: post #46
jaggederest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're talking about EA here. You need to include the latency required to go through enough bureaucracy layers to approve the expenditure of funds on another cluster.

Not to say that there isn't bureaucracy in a company their size, but the launch of a game this size is a really big deal. There's a tremendous of PR, and they're getting scathed. Polygon downgraded their review of 9.5 down to 4.0 because of the server issues. I think if they could cut a decent size check to fix the issues, they would. The problem is likely in engineering, like a database that isn't scaling.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#50

Post by kostya-kow »

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).

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