4 ms·

It would be an interesting project to offline the game - but I do wonder how hardcore the calculations are that run it. Would it be realistic to run the game it

It would be an interesting project to offline the game - but I do wonder how hardcore the calculations are that run it. Would it be realistic to run the game itself and the server-side simulation stuff (nulling input from other cities) on an ordinary desktop computer? Or would you definitely need a secondary machine?

nwh 14y ago
I highly doubt there's any significant calculation. If there was, EA would have to rent hundreds of thousands of EC2 instances to cover the running of the game.
- thristian 14y ago
  On the other hand, if there's no significant calculation on the server, why would EA pretend they were having massive load problems? Sure, maybe they wanted to get some headlines about 'SimCity is so popular it's having launch shortages', but there's got to be a happy medium between "friendly headlines talking about SimCity's popularity" and "seething EA hatred plastered across the Internet".
  - thethimble 14y ago
    I think it was just poor scalability engineering. They didn't expect that many users on launch and they didn't implement a system that could scale upwards.
    - bluedanieru 14y ago
      They knew exactly how many users to expect, I'm sure. But you aren't going to pay for a solution to handle all of them when you expect the demand to taper off after a few days.
- anonymous 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure the server is running some, if not all, of the simulation code, in order to prevent cheating. If they just blindly trust client updates, I can simply send an update that gives me another million simoleons.
  - jtms 14y ago
    And this wouldn't matter that much because it's not truly a multiplayer game. You would be cheating at your single player , non-competitive game... big deal.
k3n 14y ago
I think it's worth noting that older versions ran completely fine executing the totality of the required code...
- spartango 14y ago
  Note also that the last version of SimCity was launched in 2003, running on a completely different engine with a completely different simulation model. The Maxis team has talked quite a bit about the challenges in making their agent-based simulation engine, Glassbox, performant on low- and medium-spec PCs.
  - rurounijones 14y ago
    The bit that stands out for me is that the last SimCity was single-threaded so even on modern multi-core machines it chugs. SimCity is one of those games that would benefit hugely from multi-core computers so I find the whole "We moved core functions to our servers because your computers are too puny" reasoning to be lacking. It seems obvious that the only reason they moved processing functionality to their servers is because they have to calculate the inter-region stuff which they cannot reliably farm out to untrusted clients. Basically they decided that the new SimCity would be a "Social" game from the outset and architected around that, the DRM side-effect is just an added "bonus" for Maxis/EA. Of course many people (Myself included) just want a new single-player SimCity... Hell I would even take the last SimCity with corrected routing and multi-thread support.
    - spartango 14y ago
      Indeed, many people are unhappy that this is not an upgraded SimCity of old. Perhaps that would have been a good thing, perhaps not, but that is certainly a different product than what they shipped. Either way, SimCity (2013) is an entirely different game from SimCity 4, even though the name is shared. I'm not sure to what degree exactly the new SimCity was optimized for multicore, but just a cursory glance suggests that is making use of all 4 cores in my machine. In terms of what they actually shipped to be calculated in the cloud, my guess would be macro-economic and trade conditions, as well as regional dynamics. These require a view of all the data from the region, and are thus best computed live centrally.
icebraining 14y ago
People have been saying that they could play for hours after the servers were offline. I think it's pretty safe to say there isn't much running on the server.
UberMouse 14y ago
According to this (http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19xx7d/trying_some_technical_analysis_of_the_server/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19xx7d/trying_some_...) the game runs completely fine without being connected to the server, just all the mp features won't work. All the server does is handle trading, leaderboards, regions and validation etc

nwh 14y ago

I highly doubt there's any significant calculation. If there was, EA would have to rent hundreds of thousands of EC2 instances to cover the running of the game.

thristian 14y ago
On the other hand, if there's no significant calculation on the server, why would EA pretend they were having massive load problems? Sure, maybe they wanted to get some headlines about 'SimCity is so popular it's having launch shortages', but there's got to be a happy medium between "friendly headlines talking about SimCity's popularity" and "seething EA hatred plastered across the Internet".
- thethimble 14y ago
  I think it was just poor scalability engineering. They didn't expect that many users on launch and they didn't implement a system that could scale upwards.
  - bluedanieru 14y ago
    They knew exactly how many users to expect, I'm sure. But you aren't going to pay for a solution to handle all of them when you expect the demand to taper off after a few days.
anonymous 14y ago
I'm pretty sure the server is running some, if not all, of the simulation code, in order to prevent cheating. If they just blindly trust client updates, I can simply send an update that gives me another million simoleons.
- jtms 14y ago
  And this wouldn't matter that much because it's not truly a multiplayer game. You would be cheating at your single player , non-competitive game... big deal.

k3n 14y ago

I think it's worth noting that older versions ran completely fine executing the totality of the required code...

spartango 14y ago
Note also that the last version of SimCity was launched in 2003, running on a completely different engine with a completely different simulation model. The Maxis team has talked quite a bit about the challenges in making their agent-based simulation engine, Glassbox, performant on low- and medium-spec PCs.
- rurounijones 14y ago
  The bit that stands out for me is that the last SimCity was single-threaded so even on modern multi-core machines it chugs. SimCity is one of those games that would benefit hugely from multi-core computers so I find the whole "We moved core functions to our servers because your computers are too puny" reasoning to be lacking. It seems obvious that the only reason they moved processing functionality to their servers is because they have to calculate the inter-region stuff which they cannot reliably farm out to untrusted clients. Basically they decided that the new SimCity would be a "Social" game from the outset and architected around that, the DRM side-effect is just an added "bonus" for Maxis/EA. Of course many people (Myself included) just want a new single-player SimCity... Hell I would even take the last SimCity with corrected routing and multi-thread support.
  - spartango 14y ago
    Indeed, many people are unhappy that this is not an upgraded SimCity of old. Perhaps that would have been a good thing, perhaps not, but that is certainly a different product than what they shipped. Either way, SimCity (2013) is an entirely different game from SimCity 4, even though the name is shared. I'm not sure to what degree exactly the new SimCity was optimized for multicore, but just a cursory glance suggests that is making use of all 4 cores in my machine. In terms of what they actually shipped to be calculated in the cloud, my guess would be macro-economic and trade conditions, as well as regional dynamics. These require a view of all the data from the region, and are thus best computed live centrally.

icebraining 14y ago

People have been saying that they could play for hours after the servers were offline. I think it's pretty safe to say there isn't much running on the server.

UberMouse 14y ago

According to this (http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19xx7d/trying_some_technical_analysis_of_the_server/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19xx7d/trying_some_...) the game runs completely fine without being connected to the server, just all the mp features won't work. All the server does is handle trading, leaderboards, regions and validation etc