I could be wrong here, but if Bradshaw's claims were true--that a significant amount of calculation is offloaded on their servers--wouldn't the game be unplayable for people who have shitty internet connections anyway? It's easy for me to imagine SimCity making so many computations to simulate the game, but for those data to be sent back and forth from the gamer's PC to their servers? It has got to strain the player somehow.
Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
91–100 of 134 posts
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
Nope nope nope.
I'm sorry but you are wrong here. Diablo 2, while it had online realms where you could bring your single player character, most people chose to play on the battle.net realms where all character info was stored online.
The servers where you could bring your single player character were just a show off for people who used character / item editing programs to create insanely stacked gear and characters, and like I said no one really played on those.
The reason Blizzard went online only with Diablo 3 and SC2, was because the Diablo 2's battle.net was reverse engineered, and there was an abundance of servers that could be played on with a fake CD Key all over the world. I remember specifically in Eastern Europe, we had quite a few servers and obviously with the average monthly salary being like less than $200, no one could afford to buy a PC game. Even LAN centers had cracked versions of all of the games and hosted their own servers.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd
Anyway, my point is that you cannot have locally stored game information that can be imported in an online realm and have a direct impact. People will edit that information to create whatever they want. But if a game requires you to be online, it must be an online game period. If a game can be played offline, there is no reason whatsoever for it to have to force you to use online authentication in order to play in a local environment.
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#93"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…
There is precedent for this, it's how the Assassin's Creed II DRM was bypassed. (And simple versions of it were done quickly)
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That sounds much better -- less like some pseudo information theory or complexity nonsense.
That said, I would put some small calculations on a server if I thought cheating was an issue. This wouldn't necessarily apply to single player games, though.
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#95Wow 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.
I've been waiting for years and i'll wait until the day there is an offline mode or a patch. It's the principle.
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Since players can run at different speeds, I'm going to say that inactive cities are simply not run and exist in a paused state. They probably produce/consume resources at a steady rate from their neighbouring cities, based on a statistical average.
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That sounds plausible. Again, I'm not a windows guy, but unless they've statically linked the SSL libraries, you should just be able to inject your own dll and capture the data on the way into the library.
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That sounds plausible. Again, I'm not a windows guy, but unless they've statically linked the SSL libraries, you should just be able to inject your own dll and capture the data on the way into the library.
I would think that they have statically linked it, which is why I thought about using a debugger to catch the data. With dynamically linked library, such as OpenSSL, it would be quite easy to capture the data.
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#99"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).
Maybe not the case for SimCity, but for Diablo 3 a lot of game calculations are done server side to prevent hacks in the item drop rate and item duplication. Because Diablo 3 has a real money economy, it's crucial to ensure that the items in the game are authentic and not acquired through mods/trainers/cheat programs.
Anyway, offloading processing to the server does have its benefit and uses, just maybe not the case here with SimCity (though I'm not sure about this having no experience with the series)
Re: Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)