Sim City 5 (2013) - Sim<parameter: string>

[Trichocyst]

From what I'm reading, the simulation is a lot more simple than had been described. Sims have no home and no job, at least not long-term. In the morning, they wake up, leave the house they are in, and go to the nearest job they are qualified to fill. Once that location fills, they move onto the next closest, on and on. If they do find a job, at the end of the day they will go to the nearest residence in their wealth group until it fills, then onto the next.

Lazy programming or thinly veiled existential statement on the value of our lives in the world today?

[Korialstrasz]

I'd like to think they have something far more complex available, but have it dumbed down while they fix the server clusterfuck. Wishful thinking though.

[Lucavi]

^ I'd like to agree, but when has EA ever done that? When you've got members of the dev team calling out EA for its own BS, you can glean all the information you need to know from that. Its like a school of piranhas devouring themselves.

[Waraji]

Am I the only one jumping in this thread day to day, gleefully watching EA/Maxis burn for this?

[dejet]

Am I the only one jumping in this thread day to day, gleefully watching EA/Maxis burn for this?

I hate to say it because I think iv given maxis like $500+ with all the Sims games. But the way se is doing shit I'm am happy to see then burn. I'm having such an hard time not buying it.

[Prothescar]

EA? Absolutely.

Maxis? No not really, why is there any need for malice toward Maxis?

[Ksandra]

The plot thickens?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...not-necessary/

In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.

A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.

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. He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on. Our source explains:

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

People were already perplexed by EA’s explanation of the impossibility of offline play. Kotaku ran a series of tests today, seeing how the game could run without an internet connection, finding it was happy for around 20 minutes before it realised it wasn’t syncing to the servers. Something which would surely be impossible were the servers co-running the game itself. Markus “Notch” Persson just tweeted to his million followers that he managed to play offline too, despite EA’s claims. And now with the information from our source, it would seem the claims just don’t hold water.

So what are the servers doing? Well, alongside the obvious, of being involved in allowing players to share the same maps for their cities, and processing imports and exports between them, they’re really there to check that players aren’t cheating or hacking. However, these checks aren’t in real-time – in fact, they might take a few minutes, so couldn’t be directly involved in your game.

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue.”

Clearly an offline game that included a single-player simulation of the region system derived from multiplayer would be more challenging to develop, but our source assured us that it was far from impossible.

So how difficult would it be for EA to create a single-player game that simply did away with the multiplayer-derived aspects and just let us build? It seems that lies somewhere between “easy peasy” and Bradshaw’s claims of “significant engineering”. According to our source:

“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

EA’s claims about the necessity of online play – claims that more people are seeing for themselves not to be true, just by running the game with the internet cable yanked out – seem inexplicable.

We’d obviously be very interested to hear a proper explanation.

Fuck you EA for ruining what was a very very beautiful thing.

[Arkanna]

I could've told you this right after the game launched. Last week, the problem was logging in/authenticating with the servers.... once you were past that, the game would complain of the servers being offline for about 8 minutes out of every 10, but the game was perfectly playable (albeit with regional stuff not working correctly). I played for many hours this way right after launch.

I really hope EA fixes this the right way (by adding single player via patch) but YEAH RIGHT.

[Shiyo]

The plot thickens?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...not-necessary/



Fuck you EA for ruining what was a very very beautiful thing.

This was literally posted a day ago, 14 posts before yours, in this exact thread.

[Ksandra]

lucavi will still love me.

I'm not reading this thread heavily as I bought TR over this. Just kinda keeping an eye out to see where things go since I'd like to get it eventually.

[Deader2818]

I havent really played Sim City since Sim City 2000 lol. I got Sim City 4 during the winter sale and was interested in this but seems like its good to wait on this.

Guess ill just play Tomb Raider and God of War: A till Bioshock comes out.

[Necronus]

Depressing. You can build cities where every single inhabitant will drive into the same dead end street in an attempt to enter the same house.

[Lucavi]

You guys will love this. More chinks in the flimsy armor of EA.

Reddit thread to moddable highways that save and moddable "disconnection" time:

http://http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCi...ty_boundaries/

You can lie, EA, but you cannot hide the truth. Hackers and tinkerers out there are smarter than your workers, and far more numerous.

[djzombie]

As soon as a server emulator crack is released ea is going to patch the game to be playable offline, just like ubi did with assassin's creed. Otherwise they're just fucking their customers in the butt while pirates play anywhere anytime laughing at people who paid for this.

AC took a month, I'm betting simcity will take 2-3 weeks.

I'm having such an hard time not buying it.

also this.

i have no internet at my house, tethered to a cell phone. so i probably wouldn't even be able to play it. dont really even have the money to spend on a 60 dollar game. but god damn if i dont have a hard time resisting buying this game every day i see it.

[Aevis]

Like falloutboy already mentioned, the main problem is the incredible simplistic sims AI. More details:

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneo...737060#U737060

Thank god we have the EA server farms to do all the required calculations for this sophisticated system.

//edit: wow @ the Reddit thread. Can put the game into a semi dev mode, which is enough to build highways outside of your city borders and they save. There's also a teramodding tool.

[djzombie]

i am taking joy in ea burning, but maxxis not so much, they have always produced great games

wow at that thread.

[Karbuncle]

just read over that AI Problem, and, jesus, thats terrible. My head hurts at this. A lot.

[djzombie]

i have to think though that this online drm was entirely ea's idea and the lazy programming for ai is a result of their unrealistic deadlines.

[Insanecyclone]

[Hank]

Addendum to Insanecyclone's post.

SimCity modded so it can be played offline indefinitely
Edit freeway outside city boundaries.
By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 14/03/2013

The controversy around SimCity looks set to continue: a modder has tweaked the always-online game so it can be played offline indefinitely.

UKAzzer published a video to YouTube (via Reddit) that shows him playing around in the game's debug mode.

From there, he was able to edit the highways that connect cities together outside of the city boundaries. The game's city sizes have been criticised by some for being too small.

"You can edit the highways ANYWHERE - even outside of your city boundary," UKAzzer said, "and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it's all saved safely on the server.

"This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too."

Meanwhile, UKAzzer modded out the "fluffed population count" so the game shows the real population count - a disparity players have complained about since launch.

Most importantly, UKAzzer was able to disable SimCity's disconnection timer, thus setting it to unlimited. Tests have shown SimCity kicks you out after around 20 minutes of offline play.

There are restrictions when doing this, of course. Access to SimCity's region features isn't possible, as you'd expect, and if you want to save your city you have to reconnect to the servers. But the video is our clearest indication yet that some kind of offline mode might be possible for the controversial game.

EA will no doubt be keen to address this as quickly as possible. "EA does not comment on rumour and speculation," is all the publisher would say when contacted by Eurogamer this morning.

EA has come under fire for making SimCity require an internet connection to work. Developer Maxis maintains it was a design decision sparked by a desire to encourage connected play, and have insisted that the servers are required for performance issues.

"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," Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw explained to Polygon. "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

But critics have claimed the always-online requirement is nothing more than DRM aimed at combating piracy and have called on Maxis to enable an offline mode after the game's disastrous launch.

A source close to the project told Rock Paper Shotgun earlier this week that the SimCity servers aren't integral to the game's performance.

"The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing," the source explained. "They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they're doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they're not doing anything."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...e-indefinitely