Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary(rockpapershotgun.com) |
Maxis Insider: SimCity Servers Not Necessary(rockpapershotgun.com) |
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.
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).
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)
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.
> 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.
http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-fo...
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...
Also, many network multiplayer games rely on a server for calculations like timing, collision detection, bullet-hits, race position, and the like.
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Lag_Compensation 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-fo...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
But from what others have said, that doesn't seem to be the case.
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.
There's a difference between Sims and Sim City.
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.
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."
"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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
I can totally imagine that. Be afraid. Be very afraid. :)
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.
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.
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."
Maybe for something like Diablo 3 but there's a level of solo play that defines a game like Sim City.
Regardless, Maxis has stated they will respond shortly to the article. https://twitter.com/rockpapershot/status/311618456640450561
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.
This is probably accurate.
(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)
[1]: http://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/7/4/3135209/simcity-reboo...
I am frustrated because I can't start a new game without destroying my current progress. I took a slow route, spent all of my coins trying to evolve my Triceratops too soon, and now I can't use it to progress faster. But this is only the first day.
It's not as bad as Vector, that makes it clear I won't be able to complete the game without a purchase. They could be lying. It might be worth the bling just to own the special tricks. Meanwhile I have come up with some great ideas for how to use the bitcoin in new and exciting ways. I'm drunk!
When I was working there, the University of Oregon ran almost all of the routine computation and webpages on one big Sun box that was about as fast as my calculator, and one enormous Vax box that was about 8086 level speed.
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.
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 ("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
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-b...
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.
One thing to keep in mind is that even in big, 16 city regions, only subregions of 4 cities each are actually connected by roads and rail. In fact, these subregions are practically autonomous, except maybe for air travel (I don't know). This is why you have 4 great works per 16 city region. So first thing to do would be, if there are actual calculations taking place between these subregions, cut that off.
Now we only have the interconnections of 4 cities to deal with. Only 1 of these cities is 'active' at a time (the one you're currently playing on). I don't see why you couldn't do a rougher simulation of what is happening between your active city and the three other cities. You don't have to track agents from other cities to the active one, just have a counter that keeps track of total population.
I may just be a naïve computer science student, but this doesn't seem terribly hard to do if you already have everything else in place. And it couldn't possibly be slower than what they currently have: I've watched one streamer have 3 cities within a subregion all have different values for progress on a great work. They weren't synced up at all. It was just silly. On one local machine, there's no way this could happen.
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.
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.
There are gamers who prefer to play with unlimited resources and complete control of the situation. Many prefer a sandbox where other gamers cannot mess with their experience. Are you telling me Maxis is in the business of getting between the consumer and their game? That's a losing business proposition if it's true.
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.
If it were that simple, just cut the number of users per cluster and throw 10 more up.
> I think if they could cut a decent size check to fix the issues
Doubtful within the context of a quick fix, but it is likely the root issue. See above simple solution that takes 30 minutes to roll out. EA is not a company run by engineers, its not a company run by people that understand anything about engineering. What sounds like a simple solution to us that can easily be implemented by throwing money at it and reaping the customer goodwill is completely foreign to a company like that. You may as well be speaking Klingon when you make the recommendation to just throw new clusters at it.
But they would have to do it if you can actually control other cities in the regions. If you play one city and then switch to another city for, say, 1 game year, what's going to happen to your previous city? Does its time stop? Would AI have to take good care of all cities?
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that's the only reason. Diablo II is plagued with bots and duping. While the balance between client-server data on the Battle.net closed realms is much better than it was with Diablo (where you could just edit your character data locally to increase gold/upgrade inventory online), Diablo II still has the problems of 1) loading the entire level map into memory at once, giving bots the opportunity to path their way to POIs with no effort and 2) reconciling local inventory with the server's inventory after lag spikes and server crashes, which is hypothesized to be the main method dupers use.
But, as could be expected, both botting and duping happen on D3 anyway. And, to your point, during the D3 beta period, there were several devs that were able to reverse-engineer the D3 protocol anyway and create a local server. shrug
I'm giving EA the benefit of the doubt that they ruled out 30-minute fixes. I can't see how any of us can really speculate as to how long it should take to fix when we don't really know any details. For example, if it was a database bottleneck, would you commit to walking in and fixing it in 30 minutes? Or even 30 hours? I think you'd want to know the details, because the scope can easily be off by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
Nope, nope, nope. Nobody in their right mind will believe you that. If they fabricate such a game launch then they are complete morons. You simply can not claim that they are competent after that clusterfk.
Under "competent" I understand "Having sufficient skill, knowledge, ability, or qualifications." (definition from wiktionary). Their engineers clearly have neither the skill nor ability to fix the problems in timely manner. Nor did (or do) they have enough knowledge how the servers behave under such high load, otherwise they'd fix it before the launch. And if the problems were known, then the managers failed to delay the launch. A company which knowingly releases such a game is not run by competent people.
I mean, you could question their willingness to work at the company. But, working on the latest sim city sounds like a fun project and people like paychecks.