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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#51

Post by niggler »

kostya-kow wrote: post #50
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).

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

One can also argue that not everyone has google fiber, and running locally enables it to run when internet access is slow or unreliable

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#52

Post by rubinelli »

rz2k wrote: post #47
Fargren wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google is matching your query against a humongous database. In Maxis' case, the only relevant data is some aggregate data from the other cities in your region.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#53

Post by stcredzero »

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…

> If you send a small amount of bits over the network, the amount of responses you can get is commensurately small.

Oh, come on! You can entirely specify a cosmically hard problem in just a few kB. Prime factorization, anyone? Use discrete logarithms in finite fields, and you get down to handfuls of bytes.

Your conclusion is probably right, but your theoretical basis for it leaves a lot to be desired.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#54

Post by ericras »

xymostech wrote: post #29
baddox wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it would be at least slightly more fun than not being able to play at all.

Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.

Given the small size, the typical request is to be able to play/control an entire region offline.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#56

Post by mbell »

chaz wrote: post #49
mbell wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 company run by people that understand anything about engineering. What sounds like a simple solution to us that can easily be implemented by throwing money at it and reaping the customer goodwill is completely foreign to a company like that. You may as well be speaking Klingon when you make the recommendation to just throw new clusters at it.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#57

Post by adeaver »

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…

How hard would it be to stick a proxy between the game and the servers (on the players machine), capture some data, and configure the proxy to listen for message 'X' from the game and return response 'Y'.

If that could be done (by someone with far greater skills that myself, I can do it for Web dev but not this) fairly easily and the game play went on for several hours would that not put a very big hole in EA's argument?

I mean other than the one already sitting there...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#59

Post by tedks »

adeaver wrote: post #57
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…

How hard would it be to stick a proxy between the game and the servers (on the players machine), capture some data, and configure the proxy to listen for message 'X' from the game and return response 'Y'. If that could be done (by someone with far greater skills that myself, I can do it for Web dev but not this) fairly easily and the game play went on for several hours would that not put a very big hole in EA's argum…

Presumably, it would be as hard as breaking the DRM scheme that they're using to prevent people from doing that to play illicitly shared copies in offline-only mode.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#60

Post by mparlane »

cbs wrote: post #44
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 cov…

"the truth will lie"

This is probably accurate.

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