SimCity 5 - Launch Discussion

[Vespian]

EA really has to start working on controlling this crisis and the only way to do it, would be to go beyond what their critics expect. This includes bringing that offline mode and fixing all these AI issues they have. They need to admit they lied.

EA simply does not understand that "Hey, have a free game with your Sim City" is not the same as fixing the mess that this game is.

[SirRobin]

I think it's just simply called "EA" at this point. I don't like the fact that I feel like I'm always knocking on them, but they consistently make design decisions that make them easy to hate.

I'm not sure I would even call EA Maxis trying the Jedi hand wave and saying "you can't play SimCity offline," a design decision. More like Lucy and company thinking to themselves before every interview, "what do I need to say to make sure I still have a job after this interview."

---------- Post added 2013-03-14 at 10:56 AM ----------

EA really has to start working on controlling this crisis and the only way to do it, would be to go beyond what their critics expect. This includes bringing that offline mode and fixing all these AI issues they have. They need to admit they lied.

EA simply does not understand that "Hey, have a free game with your Sim City" is not the same as fixing the mess that this game is.

Hehe... Then they wouldn't be EA now would they.

Their DRM ended up introducing many people to "piracy" in Spore because of how offensive it was. If I recall correctly, it wasn't until the community cracked Spore in retaliation, that EA finally relented. I'm not seeing anywhere near that level of backlash with this dumbed down reboot yet. Now that may change as veteran SimCity gamers realize just how shallow this reboot is. For now though its cuteness, and workarounds like cities with no intersections, is compensating for just how lazily this game was made.

I'm actually wondering if Will Wright is going to chime in at some point.

[llDemonll]

If EA just took one for the team, made a patch for Sim City that made it so that you could play offline 100% of the time and have larger cities and save them on your local machine, and then keep online play with smaller cities with friends and require the server just to save the game (no simulation crap like they're saying) I would go out and buy it immediately.

It's been proven time and time again the servers aren't needed, so why not bite the bullet and give gamers what they want? It would be a huge benefit to EA at the current point in time, and in future releases.

[Squadz]

If EA just took one for the team, made a patch for Sim City that made it so that you could play offline 100% of the time and have larger cities and save them on your local machine, and then keep online play with smaller cities with friends and require the server just to save the game (no simulation crap like they're saying) I would go out and buy it immediately.

It's been proven time and time again the servers aren't needed, so why not bite the bullet and give gamers what they want? It would be a huge benefit to EA at the current point in time, and in future releases.

I believe this is their attempt to combat piracy.

Either way, looks like an offline mod was developed, but he was unable to save the city. He's working on that next.

So, it will be possible soon.

[Remilia]

Eh, also mention from the cracker / modder's vid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmce9oIxJag

Other things I have modded out with a quick change: Unlimited time to remain disconnected (won't get booted at 20 minutes, can now be disconnected "forever"). Population count now shows REAL figure, not the "artificially inflated" figure. My large cities have a population of about 15k now, not 100k :P

This one confuses me. If my own memory serves, even Kalypso manages to give its population "memory" in the Tropico games. So how Maxis completely failed too when that was sort of the point behind adding "sims" to SimCity... I'm not even sure "inept" is an accurate enough word at this point.

Lazy? Ineffectual? Incompetent? Deluded?

It does bring down system requirement, but not THAT much. It adds a few MB to RAM and save data, and potentially the same amount of steps for CPU, instead of retrieve closest ____, it'd be retrieve data from the object.

[Ishu]

It does bring down system requirement, but not THAT much. It adds a few MB to RAM and save data, and potentially the same amount of steps for CPU, instead of retrieve closest ____, it'd be retrieve data from the object.

I'd say it would take even less steps that way, since currently it needs or perform an additional check every time the car arrives at a full house.

[Vespian]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...&postcount=746

Masher8559
Anyone notice the motorbike turn into a car when it parked up at 0:11 ? LOL

LOL!

Epic thread is epic:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthre...523158&page=17
->
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yySa34R0D_4

[Edge-]

So clearly this 'Region' play that requires the servers doesn't do anything. Good to have confirmation, finally.

"Obviously this hack doesn’t allow saving, loading or regional features when playing offline"

Quote from the article. Region play can not be simulated offline, nor can you save your city. This confirms that single city simulations take place on your computer, but it does not confirm or debunk the need for EA servers for the region simulations.

[SirRobin]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...&postcount=746

Like this line.

What were they doing for the past 5 years?!

Probably making a SimCity reboot that EA changed their minds on and so got stuck ripping almost everything out of it until all that was left reminded John Riccitiello of a Zynga game? Or considering that it took Will like eight years to make Spore? Five years might be no where near long enough for Maxis to make a good game.

---------- Post added 2013-03-14 at 02:27 PM ----------

Don't you love those deep simulations like... Well, not this game.



Apparently that was without a single other city in the region too.

[Sephiracle]

"Obviously this hack doesn’t allow saving, loading or regional features when playing offline"

Quote from the article. Region play can not be simulated offline, nor can you save your city. This confirms that single city simulations take place on your computer, but it does not confirm or debunk the need for EA servers for the region simulations.

Requiring a save on a 'cloud' isn't something I believe their powerful servers are really needed, which was my point. Single city (micromanaged) simulations realistically should be the most processor heavy on resources due to the information they should require, however, as proven throughout this thread, individual sims have no AI or logic, they fill in the first available job/house/business for what they're assigned to do(worker or shopper). Region play is no more than a chat box and city-city interaction through traffic, pollution, etc.

However, due to the delay between those city-city interactions, in many instances resources shared between cities don't show up for several minutes after actually being done, and the fact that the game doesn't actually have sims that exist, since they have no logic about jobs/housing, it's therefore fair to assume they also don't have a way to determine their travel from one city to another, the servers are relatively unnecessary and EA/Maxis forced these interactions to go through server side rather than client side for an extremely bloated method of ensuring a 'always online' type of game.

Overall the complexity of this game is extremely overexaggerated. Pollution and traffic was already simmed in SC4, and I don't believe there needs to be any increase in 'logic' for pollution. Also, since sims don't have a memory of what goes on, it wouldn't be surprising that EA/Maxis treats traffic from cities as this:

20k sims from this city(15k workers/5k shoppers)-> that city

And that's it. There is no logic to what each of those 20k sims are going to go do, they're just going to fill the closest available job/shop.

As stated, they're already working on hacking it to where they can save locally. Having to mod a game like The Sims takes some time to crack into the restrictions and coding they've already put in place, so it's not like the servers are even or ever necessary.

Just because the game was coded to use the servers doesn't mean it was required to do so, they just forced it to be online only. It's pretty clear due to the lack of logic and AI that isn't even used for Sims that there likely isn't a lot being done for pure data or statistical information.

[Edge-]

Requiring a save on a 'cloud' isn't something I believe their powerful servers are really needed, which was my point. Single city (micromanaged) simulations realistically should be the most processor heavy on resources due to the information they should require, however, as proven throughout this thread, individual sims have no AI or logic, they fill in the first available job/house/business for what they're assigned to do(worker or shopper). Region play is no more than a chat box and city-city interaction through traffic, pollution, etc.

The entire game is designed to function in regions. While you can make a single city self sufficient, that's now what the rest of the gameplay systems reinforce. So while we know that single city simulations are absolutely done on the computer (we've "known" that for a while but it's 100% confirmed now), we don't know if it's possible for that same level of region play to be simulated in a single computer.

I'm not arguing in favor of the DRM (I hate it), but we have no proof that a single computer can continue to run the region simulations, a core gameplay element, in addition to the single city simulation.

For the citizen AI, yeah, it seems pretty dumb from what we've seen and far from as complex as EA/Maxis made it out to be. We don't however, know how the AI works with regards to simulating everything else.

[SirRobin]

Considering EA Maxis's other "exaggerations," and the double-back I heard about, I'm not entirely convinced SimCity even needs the servers to save.

[rhorle]

It's been proven time and time again the servers aren't needed, so why not bite the bullet and give gamers what they want? It would be a huge benefit to EA at the current point in time, and in future releases.

But that would requires a significant investment to create the same game that is online in an offline only mode. Because regional features are needed for the servers, and the EA source even confirms that. As they said Maxis could quickly and easily do a limited offline mode.

---------- Post added 2013-03-14 at 04:24 PM ----------

Either way, looks like an offline mod was developed, but he was unable to save the city. He's working on that next.

Its not really a mod because the person mostly just enabled part of the Dev tools which allowed the editing of things outside the region.

---------- Post added 2013-03-14 at 04:31 PM ----------

Apparently that was without a single other city in the region too.

It was also with sandbox mode activated which could skew the results. It appears they gave themselves 1 million simoleans at the start so there is no telling if they did something else to make it work.

[SirRobin]

It was also with sandbox mode activated which could skew the results. It appears they gave themselves 1 million simoleans at the start so there is no telling if they did something else to make it work.

If you read the comments it is mentioned that it works outside sandbox mode as well. Sandbox mode just shortens how long it takes to get too 200k because you can start with a lot more money.

[Sephiracle]

The entire game is designed to function in regions. While you can make a single city self sufficient, that's now what the rest of the gameplay systems reinforce. So while we know that single city simulations are absolutely done on the computer (we've "known" that for a while but it's 100% confirmed now), we don't know if it's possible for that same level of region play to be simulated in a single computer.

I'm not arguing in favor of the DRM (I hate it), but we have no proof that a single computer can continue to run the region simulations, a core gameplay element, in addition to the single city simulation.

For the citizen AI, yeah, it seems pretty dumb from what we've seen and far from as complex as EA/Maxis made it out to be. We don't however, know how the AI works with regards to simulating everything else.

We don't have proof that a single computer couldn't run the region simulations either. While I'd like to think this game is really complex we keep stumbling across things that paint a different picture than what EA/Maxis makes us believe about Sim City.

When you consider a simulation type of game, anything that is a micromanaged simulation, individual sim decisions and interactions, usually take the most processing to do especially when you have literally hundreds of thousands of sims to keep track of. However, nothing regarding those people are tracked, in fact it seems population is inflated when it comes to large density buildings.

While the region data isn't more than just that, data. I know x amount of traffic/pollution/tourists is going to y city. It doesn't take much simulate such sweeping information, especially when the micromanaged simulations mentioned above aren't even tracked.

[SirRobin]

But that would requires a significant investment to create the same game that is online in an offline only mode. Because regional features are needed for the servers, and the EA source even confirms that. As they said Maxis could quickly and easily do a limited offline mode.

Not sure where you are coming from here. The mechanics already exist. You just move and run them on the client instead.

[Edge-]

We don't have proof that a single computer couldn't run the region simulations either.

Which is my point. It may very well be possible, but we don't know yet. We do know that single cities work just fine without connecting to their servers, but beyond that we can't get 100% verifiable proof. We have some evidence that suggests that the servers are completely unnecessary DRM (and I tend to lean that direction), but I'm not going to state so unequivocally until we see it simulated on a single computer.

[Sephiracle]

Not sure where you are coming from here. The mechanics already exist. You just move and run them on the client instead.

But EA said they can't

[SirRobin]

Its not really a mod because the person mostly just enabled part of the Dev tools which allowed the editing of things outside the region.

Reads almost like all he is really doing is putting it into debug mode. If its actually that easy to disable? Then a mod, because you may not even really need a crack, may be coming out very soon.

[Sephiracle]

Which is my point. It may very well be possible, but we don't know yet. We do know that single cities work just fine without connecting to their servers, but beyond that we can't get 100% verifiable proof. We have some evidence that suggests that the servers are completely unnecessary DRM (and I tend to lean that direction), but I'm not going to state so unequivocally until we see it simulated on a single computer.

I'm just highly skeptical of anything this game does at this point. Not having the sims with any sort of AI to speak of is what I thought would actually require computing power, without even simple tracking for jobs/housing the regional features just feel like fluff to add to the game.