Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary

by amelim • 13 years ago

271 132 13 years ago

manmal4• 13 years ago

Given that Sims 3 runs on my old Windows machine (on low graphics settings), it's not that surprising that servers are not actually needed to run SimCity. I don't know if they really use the same simulation engine, but I'd say the scale is on the same order of magnitude.

MBCook3• 13 years ago

They don't. SimCity runs on a new engine called Glassbox. They've been releasing videos and articles about it for months to get people pumped up.

manmal4• 13 years ago

That's what they say, but I don't buy the marketing speak, especially now that they have been proven liars. Would you throw away all this code and start from scratch? What they describe about Glassbox was already used in Sims - agents, resources,... except multiplayer which seems to be just an occasional sync, right?

wmf2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.

baddox• 13 years ago

I suspect it would be at least slightly more fun than not being able to play at all.

xymostech• 13 years ago

Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.

idunno246• 13 years ago

It really seems like this is the point they decided that social play is core to the gameplay. I imagine the conversation is something like 'how hard would it be to implement regions locally?' 'a lot of work' which gets translated into nothing works locally to the press.

throwaway4202• 13 years ago

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 because of bad decisions)

meric• 13 years ago

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.

uptown• 13 years ago

Or perhaps the city sizes are kept small due to the "connecting" stuff they're doing, and stand-alone cities could be larger if they didn't need to live online.

estel• 13 years ago

The agent-based simulation is probably much more CPU expensive than the statistical model in older SimCitys, which might also have informed the size limit.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

So, if it's not much engineering effort for EA to make the game single player it shouldn't be too much engineering effort for people who are not EA..

manmal4• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code, and they really have this simulation thingy figured out. Most probably some really good and generic engine, or else they could not pump out Sims extensions every other month. I have quite some respect for this, it certainly took years.

MBCook3• 13 years ago

What makes you think SimCity reuses code from Sims 1-3?

inafield• 13 years ago

They didn't. It uses a new engine, Glassbox.

There's a difference between Sims and Sim City.

zevyoura• 13 years ago

> I'm pretty sure they reused lots of Sims 1-3 code

You made this assertion elsewhere in this thread also. I don't see any reason to believe this is the case, do you have any evidence in favor of this theory? There's a huge amount of PR from them saying this is not the case, and from my minimal experience with game development it makes no sense.

larrydavid• 13 years ago

As usual with 'anonymous sources/insiders' it's all complete conjecture. The only people that truly know are EA/Maxis.

EDIT: Seems people disagree that this isn't complete guesswork. Yes the game runs for a while without a connection, but that doesn't prove that servers aren't necessary as the headline claims. There is no hard, undeniable evidence. It's the same story that has been rehashed since the game was released.

And since the Xbox 720 'leak' fiasco I take these 'sources' with a pinch of salt, regardless of how reputable the site is.

http://www.gamefront.com/tech-sites-fall-for-fake-xbox-720-l...

amelim• 13 years ago

Well, it's plausible seeing as how multiple people have reported to be able to play the game while lacking internet connections for up to 20 minutes. Additionally, the methodology of the code seems to fit with several of the changes made by Maxis to improve performance (disabling cheetah speed for example).

Regardless, Maxis has stated they will respond shortly to the article. https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561

eridius2• 13 years ago

The main thing the article proves is that the servers aren't needed for any real time calculations. What's to say the servers don't provide valuable data based on previous events in the game, data that's needed for future simulation?

chc• 13 years ago

This isn't really conjecture. There are firm claims here (e.g. an inside source provided this information, players have been able to play without a connection to the server) that are either true or false. It may not currently be within our power to prove all of them one way or the other, but that does not make it conjecture.

devindotcom• 13 years ago

Well, you have to choose your level of trust. I don't think RPS would post this unless they were reasonably sure. "Complete conjecture" isn't really an accurate description, I think, although "unconfirmed and incomplete" is certainly something you could say.

MichaelGG• 13 years ago

To get an actual bayesian estimate, you'd need to check the reliability of the site (RPS) with respect to past "leaks" being correct or not. A single incorrect leak does not necessarily completely change the priors.

cbs2• 13 years ago

A guy with an axe to grind tricked some websites that either aren't focused on games or are just desperate for page views? That's not going to change my view of Rock Paper Shotgun's editorial chops.

Maybe you're right, I'll wait for the Maxis PR statement, that's where the truth will lie!

Those with an editorial reputation in the gaming press are (perhaps even uncomfortably) close to the guys in the industry they cover. They knew better than to run with that hoax, and Rob Crossly even called the hoaxer out on it (read the emails he posted to twitter if you want to see the hoxer have a hissy fit).

If RPS says they got a Maxis duder, they probably got one. One has to be suspicions of all reporting, but even though the NYTimes fucks the pooch sometimes, its not really grounds to handwave away every bit of reporting ever.

mparlane• 13 years ago

"the truth will lie"

This is probably accurate.

scottchin2• 13 years ago

Although I'm not thrilled with the launch experience and DRM of SimCity, I don't think that this article adds any validity due to everything coming from an anonymous source.

seanalltogether• 13 years ago

I think the anonymous source perfectly illustrates why other players have been able to handle playing offline for up to 20 minutes without any hiccups in the simulation. If indeed the server is simply processing the messages between cities, it makes sense that they have a time constraint on how long a city can operate without hearing from other cities in the region.

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

RPS is generally credible.

seanp2k26• 13 years ago

OK, so get out Wireshark and have a peek for yourself. Figure out how to decode the data in the responses returned from the server (I'm sure it's not much more than maybe binary packages of metadata transmitted over SSL) and examine it until you're confident.

http://ask.wireshark.org/questions/16788/wireshark-decrypt-s... http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/03/10/pulling-b... should help get you started.

"The great thing about facts is that they're true whether you believe them or not"

Also, Notch has "confirmed" this (if you trust him more than a sketchy anon source that RockPaperShotgun has stated that they've verified) https://twitter.com/notch/status/311535572596432896

scottchin2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links. I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to imply that what the source was saying is not possible. Since I wasn't familiar with the credibility of RPS (which I now hear is very credible), I just felt like reading the article didn't tell me anything concrete.

NoPiece• 13 years ago

He isn't anonymous to RPS - they say they know who he is, and verified he worked on the project just aren't publishing his name. That's a lot different than an "anonymous tip."

"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."

Either RPS is being duped, or it strongly adds validity to the story. RPS has a great reputation, and if they say they verified it, I think that puts the burden of proof now on EA to show that that the claim is incorrect.

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

It's possible RPS isn't known by many on HN. Gaming journalism doesn't often make its way to this place.

MBCook3• 13 years ago

The thing I don't understand about all this is why they were unable to new servers online. After everything hit the fan, they announced they were working on it and had gotten two new servers up the day before.

Two servers?

It just seems unbelievable to me that the backend was designed in a way that it couldn't be scaled out any faster than that. Since each region is a discrete unit, you'd think they should be able to move them between servers.

Was it all intertwined? Did the regions, stats, achievements, and DRM all run out of the same database? Were they not separate services?

They had to know this game would be popular, they've been pushing it for months (to great effect). It's a major property and the first release in about a decade.

Then there is EA. Even if Maxis couldn't figure this out (and I doubt that), EA has online experience. They're the publisher for Mass Effect, Madden, Fifa, NCAA, and more. They should have the resources, the people, and the experience to have prevented this.

If you completely ignore the DRM or the seemingly unimportant always-online requirement, it this whole thing still seems botched. There were multiple groups who should have known better and prevented this. My understanding is that they got some warning signs during the beta.

I would kill for a postmortem blog or article on Gamasutra explaining why they couldn't scale out faster; to know what decision was the lynchpin that held them back.

throwaway4202• 13 years ago

While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines. Small websites operate with more servers than that, let alone a AAA title from a major studio. I don't think they literally mean two servers - it sounds like they're trying to make the explanation simpler for consumers. What they're probably referring to is a self-contained cluster of machines that runs all of the necessary services that the game relies on - databases, notifications, social rankings, etc.

That being said, all of this wouldn't be needed if they'd just release an offline mode. The upcoming DLC content to unlock expected features (bigger cities, more transportation options, etc) is bad enough, but the always on requirement just makes this game impossible for me to buy.

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

"While I don't know for certain, I can't possibly imagine that they've just added two physical machines."

I can totally imagine that. Be afraid. Be very afraid. :)

eridius2• 13 years ago

Your explanation sounds more plausible. It could be more akin to Blizzard adding 2 new realms to their realm list, rather than 2 physical computers.

Afforess2• 13 years ago

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 servers. The database is the bottleneck, so sharing regions between servers would only worsen performance.

jaggederest2• 13 years ago

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.

edraferi• 13 years ago

a DB bottleneck and lousy regionalization seem like exactly the kind of thing EA's experience in this area would prevent. What gives?

chrisacky• 13 years ago

"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.

nwh3• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

One can argue that not everyone has an i7, and offloading work to the server enables it to run on weaker computers.

firebones• 13 years 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.)

_delirium• 13 years 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.

jd007• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

In other news, the Pope is Catholic...

ihuman• 13 years 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-fo...

nwh3• 13 years ago

You can apparently play for even longer if you change your computers clock.

peterwaller• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

adeaver• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Afforess2• 13 years 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.

jordanthoms• 13 years ago

There is precedent for this, it's how the Assassin's Creed II DRM was bypassed. (And simple versions of it were done quickly)

hawleyal• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

seanp2k26• 13 years ago

Games like WoW / PlanetSide / EVE Online ("MMOs" in general) also do lots of server-side calculation: http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/planning-fo...

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one.

The problem stems more from their failure at scaling than not supporting an offline mode. Diablo was the same crap on launch week.

There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games, but something tells me the teams are not having the experience/schedule/man-power to create scalable architectures to back it. Massive multiplayer gaming is certainly a hard problem.

tolmasky• 13 years ago

If their vision was for this game to be an MMO/social game "from day one", then they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way.

The social/multiplayer aspects of Diablo, WoW, and SC are obvious to me, which is why Blizzard's move never really concerned me that much. Add on top of that the truly well done matchmaking system and I hardly think about it all. Doing things well goes a long way in convincing naysayers.

However, when I think SimCity, all I can think of is single player. And the vague things I've heard about interacting with others seem really lame. Again, maybe there are some awesome multiplayer aspects, but I have not heard of them and it sounds like most people aren't that interested in them.

cbs2• 13 years ago

they should have done a way better job sharing that vision and framing the discussion that way.

In a market where some game's design decisions for online focus and/or online passes are driven by an effort to reduce piracy and the secondary sales market, it becomes very hard to convince people that any one game isn't.

Good luck selling that: "No, not in this case, our design just happened to support them by coincidence, and, oh, we're also part of EA and even though the cynics have been right about our motives in the past, we're totally not doing it this time."

andrewfelix• 13 years ago

If it isn't about DRM and is in fact about the MMO/Social aspects, then why are EA and Maxis at pains to describe it as something else?

lmkg• 13 years ago

> People are complaining as if DRM was the reason they made it like this, EA is evil, yada-yada. It isn't. It's pretty clear they had a vision for this game to be a MMO/social game from day one.

These two statements don't contradict each other.

People are complaining because EA changed the fundamental premise of the game from single-player to multi-player, and (people think) that change was driven by business goals and not from design goals. "DMR" is no longer a strictly accurate term, because it's now a design principle rather than a technology, but that's exactly what has people so riled up. They perceive that the principles of DRM are working "up the stack," so to speak, and are now infecting not just the game technology, but the game vision as well, making it a more insidious and existential threat than it was previously.

The decision to shift a fundamentally single-player franchise in a fundamentally multi-player direction is questionable at best. While it may not be so black-and-white as EA handing down a mandate, and I'm certain that business interests at least influenced the decision.

Zimahl• 13 years ago

There's an apparent pressure from publishers to create always-online games

Maybe for something like Diablo 3 but there's a level of solo play that defines a game like Sim City.

ghurlman• 13 years ago

A friend of mine put it this way: let people run disconnected, offline, and in the UI show a big glass dome over their city cutting them off Simpsons Movie style[1]. Over time, gas, food, and water run out, necessitating a reconnection.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kPUGLt1DWQ

drivebyacct2• 13 years ago

Duh?

The top comment here is more elegant, but EA is clearly lying. Their "apology" was a joke and amounted to "Sorry we've had so much success, it's your fault for assaulting our servers."

jasonlingx• 13 years ago

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!

thefreeman• 13 years ago

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

imissmyjuno• 13 years ago

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.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Yup. I bought one copy because of all the rage!

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

Patiently waiting for the re-implemented game server and attendant crack that will let us point SimCity to our own networks.

seanp2k26• 13 years ago

Yep. I assume that the game has fallbacks for "failed save" and "bad data from server" that you could exploit / patch / use in a work-around here. Worst-case, you'd make a real server that accepts save game data and stores it, and maybe does some "verification" of client data packages (AKA "discard client response and return a big thumbs up in all cases"). It might be more complicated than that if they're implementing a challenge / response, but I have no idea how much effort they're going through for DRM these days when it's been shown to NEVER work.

robinh• 13 years ago

I've done some reversing, and this is EA, so... let's say it's not going to be something that'll be cracked in a weekend.

drivingmenuts• 13 years ago

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.

andypants• 13 years ago

> That just killed it.

Really? Not the terrible launch?

This says nothing about the game, only your preference of playing single player games over multiplayer games. There are plenty of great games out there with 'social multiplayer' or 'cloud-based saves'. These are not problems that drive away players.

yebyen2• 13 years ago

Ostensibly they are, if they are the root of EA's issues. I don't complain about the servers being down because I don't play games that require servers' constant attention like that. If they were any other than 'social multiplayer' then they would be a real-time strategy game, and oddly while those games tend to sink or swim on the balance, playability, and fun of their multiplayer side, I too generally prefer to play single player on those games as well as I would tend to get my ass handed to me by Koreans.

I would rather play Starcraft today than buy SC2. OK so that is stretching, but I haven't tried the new StarCraft, and it's mostly because of this DRM situation.

mattquiros• 13 years ago

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.

ajanuary• 13 years ago

Your local machine could be doing coarse grain calculations while their server did fine grain calculations, and periodically sync up, in the same way FPS's do (which is why you get laggy players jumping about).

But from what others have said, that doesn't seem to be the case.

jellyksong• 13 years ago

Anyone notice the interesting old-school-text-adventure error page? It wasn't 404 but some other 4xx page (forgot which) -- it seems to be resolved and gone now though.

Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary

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