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Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#81

Post by thatswrong0 »

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?

It doesn't seem like the game is that taxing on decently good processors. It seems like you should easily be able to do those calculations if you have some extra cores lying around.

One thing to keep in mind is that even in big, 16 city regions, only subregions of 4 cities each are actually connected by roads and rail. In fact, these subregions are practically autonomous, except maybe for air travel (I don't know). This is why you have 4 great works per 16 city region. So first thing to do would be, if there are actual calculations taking place between these subregions, cut that off.

Now we only have the interconnections of 4 cities to deal with. Only 1 of these cities is 'active' at a time (the one you're currently playing on). I don't see why you couldn't do a rougher simulation of what is happening between your active city and the three other cities. You don't have to track agents from other cities to the active one, just have a counter that keeps track of total population.

I may just be a naïve computer science student, but this doesn't seem terribly hard to do if you already have everything else in place. And it couldn't possibly be slower than what they currently have: I've watched one streamer have 3 cities within a subregion all have different values for progress on a great work. They weren't synced up at all. It was just silly. On one local machine, there's no way this could happen.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#82

Post by thefreeman »

jasonlingx wrote: post #55

Wow people must want to play this game so bad seeing the amount of aggro it's generated. Makes me want to go out and buy a copy!

I'm pretty much waiting for the "offline" release, the 100% all clear that noone is having issues, or the crack. whichever comes first.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#83

Post by Retric »

weareconvo wrote: post #72
_delirium wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I assumed they where talking about the 'world' economy and if that's the case it may be both true and irrelevant.

Ex: ~20,000 player city's are uploaded into a model. They do a simple calculation based on excess energy, pollution, ect. The result's of that are fed back down and then they run the model again adjusting for new city's and client city updates. Now even if 10mhz per city is used your talking about a 200GHz worth of processing which is far more than an i7 but shared and mostly irrelevant in single player as you could just as easily fake the global numbers.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#84

Post by res0nat0r »

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.

Databases many times are the bottlenecks of infrastructure. You can't just spin up new instances easily to fix the problem. Many times you have to completely re-architect your database schema and architecture to handle to increased demand .

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#85

Post by eyuelt »

rubinelli wrote: post #52
rz2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, Maxis probably isn't doing much computation. rz2k is simply pointing out that Fargren's argument is incorrect. Same as what stcredzero said, "Your conclusion is probably right, but your theoretical basis for it leaves a lot to be desired."

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#86

Post by Kaali »

Afforess wrote: post #75
adeaver wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about catching the packets before SSL? I have no knowledge about modern Windows debugging, or how Simcity might block a debugger. But I guess you could pinpoint the location of the messages just before SSL encryption, and just dump them out?

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#87

Post by chaz »

weareconvo wrote: post #72
_delirium wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When Diablo 1 and 2 were launched, the single player was 100% client-side. As a result, there was rampant cheating. Jump online with your character, and you had an unfair advantage because of your infinite gold, stacked character and rare inventory.

Diablo 3 went always-online to help solve this problem. Loot discovery, inventory, and fighting outcomes are entirely controlled server-side. While it's possible that they could have forced separate online-only and offline characters, it's reasonable for them to have decided online-only for all characters and not duplicate the logic and engineering. Not to mention DRM.

With Sim City, it's conceivable that they went this way as well.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#88

Post by bentcorner »

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'd love that too, but have you seen Sims 3 and its DLC? One of the reasons I cancelled my pre-order was because I realized that EA would undoubtedly milk SimCity customers for as much as they could. I wanted no part of that.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#89

Post by drivingmenuts »

In respect to the graphics, it looks awesome and I was expecting to be just as great as previous iterations. I actually wanted to play the game until I found out it was social multiplayer with cloud-based saves.

That just killed it. I have since bought a copy of SimCity 4 and plan to be quite happy with it for another decade or so.

Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

#90

Post by prodigal_erik »

stcredzero wrote: post #53
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…

> 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.

If a response is too small to describe the changes to the state of your city at that time, clearly it's a thick client which mostly knows how to simulate the city.
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