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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#71

Post by seanp2k2 »

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.

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 (core-for-core) http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/x86-core-performance-comp...

Bottom line, the total cost of ownership doesn't at all make business sense to do right now. In 10 years, it very well might.

See also: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 ("Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know"). TL;DR

Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache vs Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns 150 ms

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#72

Post by weareconvo »

_delirium wrote: post #68
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).

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…

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

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#73

Post by seanp2k2 »

nwh wrote: post #41
ihuman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And now knowing this, we'll have a working fake DRM server in 3...2....1...

(because I'm sure that crackers took until now to figure out that it only needed the EA server for saved game storage and DRM verification)

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#74

Post by seanp2k2 »

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.

See also:

http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lag_Compensation http://www.mousepad-feet.com/2012/07/21/battlefield-3-hit-de...

Games like WoW / PlanetSide / EVE Online ("MMOs" in general) also do lots of server-side calculation: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/planning-fo...

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#75

Post by Afforess »

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…

I tried that days ago with Wireshark. SimCity uses SSL for server communication and it has hard coded certificates - it does not use the OS SSL certificates. This prevents you from using a self signed cert to decrypt the data, at least without complicated patching of the game exe.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#76

Post by seanp2k2 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #58

Patiently waiting for the re-implemented game server and attendant crack that will let us point SimCity to our own networks.

Yep. I assume that the game has fallbacks for "failed save" and "bad data from server" that you could exploit / patch / use in a work-around here. Worst-case, you'd make a real server that accepts save game data and stores it, and maybe does some "verification" of client data packages (AKA "discard client response and return a big thumbs up in all cases"). It might be more complicated than that if they're implementing a challenge / response, but I have no idea how much effort they're going through for DRM these days when it's been shown to NEVER work.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#77

Post by uptown »

wmf wrote: post #3

I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.

Or perhaps the city sizes are kept small due to the "connecting" stuff they're doing, and stand-alone cities could be larger if they didn't need to live online.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#78

Post by wmf »

joesb wrote: post #65
ericras wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know if that argument works economically. EA has to support something like 100,000 simultaneous users, so if the server side needs more than one PC worth per user then their EC2 bill would be off the charts. (I see nwh made this argument earlier.) I suspect that inactive cities in a region are simulated with a lower level of detail.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#79

Post by seanp2k2 »

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.

OK, so get out Wireshark and have a peek for yourself. Figure out how to decode the data in the responses returned from the server (I'm sure it's not much more than maybe binary packages of metadata transmitted over SSL) and examine it until you're confident.

http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/16788/wireshark-decrypt-s... http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/03/10/pulling-b... should help get you started.

"The great thing about facts is that they're true whether you believe them or not"

Also, Notch has "confirmed" this (if you trust him more than a sketchy anon source that RockPaperShotgun has stated that they've verified) https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#80

Post by NoPiece »

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 reputation, and if they say they verified it, I think that puts the burden of proof now on EA to show that that the claim is incorrect.

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