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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#61

Post by firebones »

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).

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 make for a much better explanation for why they'd want to keep state in the cloud, given the trends towards more mobile gaming.)

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#62

Post by mikeryan »

firebones wrote: post #61
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).

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…

Even if you want to offload to the cloud for mobile you'd still only want to do it for the clients which need it.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#63

Post by nwh »

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.

What reasonable company would justify spending tens of thousands an hour on server costs, when they could optimise their code a little more and run it for free?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#64

Post by hawleyal »

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…

There are several games and simulators which send messages to the server for processing and stream video/images back from the server. A game like this functions as a terminal of sorts. It allows the servers to farm out the complex calculations/rendering.

Also, many network multiplayer games rely on a server for calculations like timing, collision detection, bullet-hits, race position, and the like.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#65

Post by joesb »

ericras wrote: post #54
xymostech wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#66

Post by dudus »

hawleyal wrote: post #64
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…

There are several games and simulators which send messages to the server for processing and stream video/images back from the server. A game like this functions as a terminal of sorts. It allows the servers to farm out the complex calculations/rendering. Also, many network multiplayer games rely on a server for calculations like timing, collision detection, bullet-hits, race position, and the like.

It doesn't apply to sim city. Sim city is not a real time game, you can even pause and accelerate time, so you don't ned servers to synchronize position or detect collisions with objects rendered on other machies. and the requirements make it clear that rendering is done on client side.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#67

Post by seanp2k2 »

firebones wrote: post #61
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).

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 power and network bandwidth on consumer connections would be really interesting to the tech community.

TL;DR easily-verifiable claim by EA that stunk from the beginning proven wrong by anyone who knows how to use Wireshark

Que even worse consumer backlash at EA.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#68

Post by _delirium »

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).

Approaching the question from the opposite direction, it's also clear if you have any familiarity with the kinds of per-player CPU budgets that server-side games allocate. The norms for games like WoW aren't anywhere near enough to run even something close to the last-gen Sim City simulations, even though that's a 10-year-old game. Unless EA decided to allocate unprecedented levels of per-player server-side CPU, it's unlikely they're doing any significant percentage of the simulation on the server side.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#69

Post by chaz »

mbell wrote: post #56
chaz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

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 fix when we don't really know any details. For example, if it was a database bottleneck, would you commit to walking in and fixing it in 30 minutes? Or even 30 hours? I think you'd want to know the details, because the scope can easily be off by 1-2 orders of magnitude.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#70

Post by cbs »

tolmasky wrote: post #23
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…

If their vision was for this game to be an MMO/social game "from day one", then they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way. The social/multiplayer aspects of Diablo, WoW, and SC are obvious to me, which is why Blizzard's move never really concerned me that much. Add on top of that the truly well done matchmaking system and I hardly think about it all. Doing things w…

they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way.

In a market where some game's design decisions for online focus and/or online passes are driven by an effort to reduce piracy and the secondary sales market, it becomes very hard to convince people that any one game isn't.

Good luck selling that: "No, not in this case, our design just happened to support them by coincidence, and, oh, we're also part of EA and even though the cynics have been right about our motives in the past, we're totally not doing it this time."

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