6 ms·

"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 mov

"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 over 5 minutes of playing the game. I would immediately fire a systems architect that designed a single player game to compute significant calculations on our expensive [buzz word] cloud servers. Unless we use different definitions of the word significant... It's a little ridiculous to suggest that?... plus, for zero benefit (above DRM), it would have a non-negligible affect on their bottom line if they are computing time cycles for SimCity on their own servers... Anonymous source or not, conjecturally, it's hard to not agree with what the insider has said.

nwh 14y ago
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).
- kostya-kow 14y ago
  One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.
  - niggler 14y ago
    One can also argue that not everyone has google fiber, and running locally enables it to run when internet access is slow or unreliable
  - nwh 14y ago
    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?
    - samstave 14y ago
      You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)
    - lhnz 14y ago
      The richest games company makes decisions which benefit them...
  - seanp2k2 14y ago
    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-comparison/SiSoftware-Sandra-2010-Pro,2755.html 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 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
    - bluedino 14y ago
      It's a little closer to 3x as fast http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-benchmark,2974-14.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b...
    - CamperBob2 14y ago
      The core-for-core thing makes a huge difference in the real world that doesn't show up on single-core benchmarks. The HT660 was a good chip in its day, but it's at a four-to-one disadvantage for code that's multithreaded and/or running on a busy PC. I think Sandy Bridge is my favorite CPU of all time. It does a truly massive amount of work without consuming significantly more power than the part it replaced.
- firebones 14y ago
  While I agree that this is likely not truthful, I do wonder if part of the strategy of offloading more work to the cloud be to make an easier transition to allowing mobile clients (iOS/Android) where local processing capacity is more of an issue, or to platform-neutral approaches, or to a "take your city anywhere" play model? (I doubt this is the case because unless they have a motivation to keep it secret, it would make for a much better explanation for why they'd want to keep state in the cloud, given the trends towards more mobile gaming.)
  - mikeryan 14y ago
    Even if you want to offload to the cloud for mobile you'd still only want to do it for the clients which need it.
  - seanp2k2 14y ago
    EA's claim struck me as really odd too; this just isn't the way that games are made [yet?] and if they did manage to get something like they claimed running, there would be much more interesting technical aspects of it that they probably would have done press releases for. In this day and age, standing up a system like that is still a major accomplishment, and the details of how they got around things like processing power and network bandwidth on consumer connections would be really interesting to the tech community. TL;DR easily-verifiable claim by EA that stunk from the beginning proven wrong by anyone who knows how to use Wireshark Que even worse consumer backlash at EA.
    - ZachPruckowski 14y ago
      Forget Wireshark, the article implies that some of the critics tried the good old fashioned "yank the Internet cord and see how long it takes to break" method and got 20 minutes of playability.
  - belorn 14y ago
    you can only offload processing that has barely any requirement on latency. If you send of loot or hit calculations (like d3) onto a cloudy server and it takes minutes for it to finish, the game would become unplayable.
- _delirium 14y ago
  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 unlikely they're doing any significant percentage of the simulation on the server side.
  - weareconvo 14y ago
    You guys are all raising good points, but, at a higher level, did anyone really believe EA to begin with?
    - Retric 14y ago
      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.
    - chaz 14y ago
      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.
- jd007 14y ago
  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)
- abcd_f 14y ago
  It's clear that it's a lie because if it were true it would've been delivered in a form of an awesome tech demo and not an excuse for broken game. That said however... If there's a shared world, then running its simulation server-side makes sense. Not the game minutiae, but global state. Something like weather, simulated stock markets, etc. The environment, basically. That's not to say that SimCity has any of this, because it doesn't.
- Tzunamitom 14y ago
  In other news, the Pope is Catholic...
  - billpg 14y ago
    Right now (checks the news) this is technically false.
    - CapitalistCartr 14y ago
      Not any more. Your idioms are once again safe.
    - sesqu 14y ago
      Technically, the Antipope is Catholic. Inconsistent systems prove everything.
ihuman 14y ago
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-for-19-minutes http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-fo...
- nwh 14y ago
  You can apparently play for even longer if you change your computers clock.
  - seanp2k2 14y ago
    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)
peterwaller 14y ago
I'm on your side, I think this is stupid, but I can't let this stand: > I'm going to point a finger and say that this is clearly untrue, and very easy to disprove just from basic network monitoring over 5 minutes of playing the game. c'mon. The amount of computation done can be completely uncorrelated to the number of bits sent over the network, in the same way that the effects of your saying something offhand to someone could have a massive effect on the final state of the planet.
- Fargren 14y ago
  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 where smaller than that size. But the claim of the OP isn't totally absurd.
  - rz2k 14y ago
    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.
    - rubinelli 14y ago
      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.
      - eyuelt 14y ago
        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."
adeaver 14y ago
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 argument? I mean other than the one already sitting there...
- tedks 14y ago
  Presumably, it would be as hard as breaking the DRM scheme that they're using to prevent people from doing that to play illicitly shared copies in offline-only mode.
- Afforess 14y ago
  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.
  - Kaali 14y ago
    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?
    - ekimekim 14y ago
      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.
      - Kaali 14y ago
        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.
hawleyal 14y ago
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.
- dudus 14y ago
  It doesn't apply to sim city. Sim city is not a real time game, you can even pause and accelerate time, so you don't ned servers to synchronize position or detect collisions with objects rendered on other machies. and the requirements make it clear that rendering is done on client side.
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  See also: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lag_Compensation http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lag_Compensation http://www.mousepad-feet.com/2012/07/21/battlefield-3-hit-detection-netcode-and-network-smoothing/ 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-for-war-how-the-eve-online-servers-deal-with-a-3000-person-battle http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/planning-fo...

nwh 14y ago

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).

kostya-kow 14y ago
One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.
- niggler 14y ago
  One can also argue that not everyone has google fiber, and running locally enables it to run when internet access is slow or unreliable
- nwh 14y ago
  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?
  - samstave 14y ago
    You do know what c-suite we are discussing, correct? ;)
  - lhnz 14y ago
    The richest games company makes decisions which benefit them...
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  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-comparison/SiSoftware-Sandra-2010-Pro,2755.html 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 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
  - bluedino 14y ago
    It's a little closer to 3x as fast http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-benchmark,2974-14.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b...
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    The core-for-core thing makes a huge difference in the real world that doesn't show up on single-core benchmarks. The HT660 was a good chip in its day, but it's at a four-to-one disadvantage for code that's multithreaded and/or running on a busy PC. I think Sandy Bridge is my favorite CPU of all time. It does a truly massive amount of work without consuming significantly more power than the part it replaced.
firebones 14y ago
While I agree that this is likely not truthful, I do wonder if part of the strategy of offloading more work to the cloud be to make an easier transition to allowing mobile clients (iOS/Android) where local processing capacity is more of an issue, or to platform-neutral approaches, or to a "take your city anywhere" play model? (I doubt this is the case because unless they have a motivation to keep it secret, it would make for a much better explanation for why they'd want to keep state in the cloud, given the trends towards more mobile gaming.)
- mikeryan 14y ago
  Even if you want to offload to the cloud for mobile you'd still only want to do it for the clients which need it.
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  EA's claim struck me as really odd too; this just isn't the way that games are made [yet?] and if they did manage to get something like they claimed running, there would be much more interesting technical aspects of it that they probably would have done press releases for. In this day and age, standing up a system like that is still a major accomplishment, and the details of how they got around things like processing power and network bandwidth on consumer connections would be really interesting to the tech community. TL;DR easily-verifiable claim by EA that stunk from the beginning proven wrong by anyone who knows how to use Wireshark Que even worse consumer backlash at EA.
  - ZachPruckowski 14y ago
    Forget Wireshark, the article implies that some of the critics tried the good old fashioned "yank the Internet cord and see how long it takes to break" method and got 20 minutes of playability.
- belorn 14y ago
  you can only offload processing that has barely any requirement on latency. If you send of loot or hit calculations (like d3) onto a cloudy server and it takes minutes for it to finish, the game would become unplayable.
_delirium 14y ago
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 unlikely they're doing any significant percentage of the simulation on the server side.
- weareconvo 14y ago
  You guys are all raising good points, but, at a higher level, did anyone really believe EA to begin with?
  - Retric 14y ago
    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.
  - chaz 14y ago
    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.
jd007 14y ago
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)
abcd_f 14y ago
It's clear that it's a lie because if it were true it would've been delivered in a form of an awesome tech demo and not an excuse for broken game. That said however... If there's a shared world, then running its simulation server-side makes sense. Not the game minutiae, but global state. Something like weather, simulated stock markets, etc. The environment, basically. That's not to say that SimCity has any of this, because it doesn't.
Tzunamitom 14y ago
In other news, the Pope is Catholic...
- billpg 14y ago
  Right now (checks the news) this is technically false.
  - CapitalistCartr 14y ago
    Not any more. Your idioms are once again safe.
  - sesqu 14y ago
    Technically, the Antipope is Catholic. Inconsistent systems prove everything.

ihuman 14y ago

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-for-19-minutes http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-fo...

nwh 14y ago
You can apparently play for even longer if you change your computers clock.
- seanp2k2 14y ago
  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)

peterwaller 14y ago

I'm on your side, I think this is stupid, but I can't let this stand: > I'm going to point a finger and say that this is clearly untrue, and very easy to disprove just from basic network monitoring over 5 minutes of playing the game. c'mon. The amount of computation done can be completely uncorrelated to the number of bits sent over the network, in the same way that the effects of your saying something offhand to someone could have a massive effect on the final state of the planet.

Fargren 14y ago
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 where smaller than that size. But the claim of the OP isn't totally absurd.
- rz2k 14y ago
  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.
  - rubinelli 14y ago
    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.
    - eyuelt 14y ago
      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."

adeaver 14y ago

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 argument? I mean other than the one already sitting there...

tedks 14y ago
Presumably, it would be as hard as breaking the DRM scheme that they're using to prevent people from doing that to play illicitly shared copies in offline-only mode.
Afforess 14y ago
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.
- Kaali 14y ago
  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?
  - ekimekim 14y ago
    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.
    - Kaali 14y ago
      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.

hawleyal 14y ago

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.

dudus 14y ago
It doesn't apply to sim city. Sim city is not a real time game, you can even pause and accelerate time, so you don't ned servers to synchronize position or detect collisions with objects rendered on other machies. and the requirements make it clear that rendering is done on client side.
seanp2k2 14y ago
See also: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lag_Compensation http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lag_Compensation http://www.mousepad-feet.com/2012/07/21/battlefield-3-hit-detection-netcode-and-network-smoothing/ 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-for-war-how-the-eve-online-servers-deal-with-a-3000-person-battle http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/planning-fo...