They moment they cut out the crap and let me play my single player experience the way I want it, saving games locally, I'm really all too willing to throw some cash at them, despite EA.
Maxis Developer Denies Need For Single-Player SimCity Servers
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
Recommended Videos
DVS BSTrD said:
Yeah I stopped preordering games a few months ago. I just wait for them to go down now. I don't respect developers that don't respect me
.Saves me on cash too.
I'm reminded of Hanlon's Razor- Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but I have a hard time believing it with EA's track record. Maybe Bradshaw is simply misinformed and I've noticed a lot of her quotes that I've read sound kind of strange but I can't quite put my finger on it.
It sounds like to me that they are trying to save face. They caused this fiasco with always on DRM and now they're trying to justify that the DRM had a point other than to just authenticate and send some other trivial data. Plus, added to that they don't want their game pirated so they feel they need it.
It sounds like to me that they are trying to save face. They caused this fiasco with always on DRM and now they're trying to justify that the DRM had a point other than to just authenticate and send some other trivial data. Plus, added to that they don't want their game pirated so they feel they need it.
bear in mind this is coming from the pretty much same people that said that implementing coop in Dead Space 3 was "hard work", while borderlands 2 laughed at them from the cornerStormtyrant said:
Is there a competitive nature to simcity that necessitates cheat checking? All I ever wanted to do in that series was quickly make a city and spam disasters(I really sucked at the actual game) so I would cheat for the cash to build. The premade maps didn't feel as satisfying since I didn't make them.
I refuse to believe the kitten in your avatar is real, this world cannot contain that density of cuteness.Evil Smurf said:
That said Borderlands 2 could have had a better loot sharing system other than 'first one to grab it, gets it.'Ix Rebound said:
One could also beg the question of why Dead Space 3 needed co-op in the first place.
I was initially supportive of offloading some of the pathfinding computation onto mystical cloud computers.
Like the idea. Not a bad one. Gives me a chance to have a little more city, right?
I started getting skeptical before release, when little information on this tidbit had come out. You start thinking about the logistics-- every agent in a city being a unique entity that has to then upload information and download information from the central server in order to find his way around town... every time they move. I thought thats why they shifted to smaller cities.
BUT NO, no, it doesn't make sense at all to do it that way. And it doesn't do it that way at all.
Like the idea. Not a bad one. Gives me a chance to have a little more city, right?
I started getting skeptical before release, when little information on this tidbit had come out. You start thinking about the logistics-- every agent in a city being a unique entity that has to then upload information and download information from the central server in order to find his way around town... every time they move. I thought thats why they shifted to smaller cities.
BUT NO, no, it doesn't make sense at all to do it that way. And it doesn't do it that way at all.
If or when that does happen I hope that all the developers they own either get to stay open and go their seprate ways or get picked up by better publishers like 2K Studios or CD Projekt Red. I would love to see CD Projekt Red purchase Bioware and Obsidian and hire all the old staff for those two developers back.Evil Smurf said:
On Topic: I have seen my sister and her boyfriend playing the new SimCity and while it does look interesting and a bit fun and I do want to play it. I refuse to purchase it until they add in an offline option. If people want to play online with others that is fine but that should be a choice players are given instead of everyone being forced to play online.
Took the words out of my mouth.Desert Punk said:After reading some things from people who played observed and dug into the game the 'agents' pretty much dont do jackthiosk said:
About as advanced as they get is wondering around, then they go to work at the first workplace in need of employees they find, then when they leave for the day they go into the first home they find that has room, so it is rare that a sim will ever work at the same job two days in a row or live in the same house two days in a row.
Games from ten years ago had better AI agents than the new Sim City
But to illustrate, check this shit out:
(ABOVE):Glassbox AI "First come, First serve".
Combined with...
(BELOW): "Shortest Path, no Weighting"
These create a scenario that is completely batshit insane....and quite hilarious to watch.
But the point is: These are some of the biggest computations (not?) being made on their servers, and they're both being done on what appears to be the simplest and sloppiest algorithm possible for the job.
And EVERYTHING that travels uses that same algorithm.
Cars. Pedestrians. Garbage. Sewage. EVERYTHING.
You will watch conga-lines of buses do donuts constantly recalculating routes.
Lines of garbage trucks all fighting over the same route while leaving most of the city unserviced.
Cop Cars swarming out from ALL stations to the first crime on the map regardless of proximity, while letting all others go uncontested until the first criminal is brought in.
Biblical Traffic jams causing Firetrucks to literally get stuck for hours while the city burns.
Now I don't know about you, but none of this particularly screams "WE NEED EA'S SERVERS TO DO THIS!" to me.
EDIT: Oh, and just as a bit of trivia I dug up: Most Sims don't keep their Education level when they travel inter-region. So don't plop down any Nuclear Power Plants until you can get the city's HIVE MIND up to snuff.
Wow. That is...impressively lazy.Desert Punk said:
Not only did they use the worst algorithms for the job (which would make sense if you were trying to save processing on the server-side), they exaggerated the necessity of their cloud system (and thus, the DRM).
Every time I learn some new fact about SimCity, the worse it gets.
Well, at least some calculations must be done on the server service because otherwise a pirated version would be out already, and its not. Heck, they cracked AC2 on day1, and that one used online checkups. there certainly are some calculations that they still need to clone, and possibly cant because the servers are down
when you lack knowledge, always attribute it to malice. thats how our brain works, and thats what allowed us to survive. thinking its malice and finding out stupidity has far less consequences than thinking its stupidity and finding out its malice.porous_shield said:
theultimateend said:DVS BSTrD said:
Yeah I stopped preordering games a few months ago. I just wait for them to go down now. I don't respect developers that don't respect me
Saves me on cash too.
Me too. I wait till games are out now. A:CM and now Simcity are like consumer trainers, teaching you the folly and the short sightedness of pre-ordering.
I always wonder just how much of these kinda chenanigans are because of the publisher and how much the developer, and exactly what their agreement is when everything goes tits up.
Still can't stop imagining Maxis employees with explosive collars on, though.
Still can't stop imagining Maxis employees with explosive collars on, though.
They didnt have much problem redirecting save files from online in games like GTA4, so unelss this saves games in some strange way (like copying whole city and keeping it alive in the server like a MMO client that never shuts down) this should not be much problem. the biggest problem with such cracking is to make your computer sumulate the calculations that are done server-sided as the client doesn ot have them and there is no basis for creating new calculations that work the same. of course the simplest way is to ahck into the servers and take a look, something that Ubisoft had to deal with (whole Ubisoft serverside was copied at one point, though that is long outdated now) but it is very likely EA wont allow a all-in hackers here. so we are left with the hardest part, trying to force the game to ask the server for enough information to be able to simulate the result accurately (or accurately enough, like i saw some formulas in MMOs that players determined from thousands of trials and they would be around 0,1% incorrect with developer formulas, but that was good enough for players to plan their actions). however if the servers are crashing as it is, you can spam the server by asking it to perform same operation 100000 times, especially of the server is smart enough to realize its a request spam and ignore all but 1 request.Desert Punk said:I am far from an expert at such things but if I had to hazard a guess the real thing holding up the crack would be trying to redirect the save location and to get cities owned by you in your own region to talk to one another without the EA server there.Strazdas said:Well, at least some calculations must be done on the server service because otherwise a pirated version would be out already, and its not. Heck, they cracked AC2 on day1, and that one used online checkups. there certainly are some calculations that they still need to clone, and possibly cant because the servers are down
sorry, train of thought, interrupted by a boss twice, so yeahDesert Punk said:Holy god man, paragraphs!
yeah this sniffing does seem to indicate that. which makes it quote odd, as that would mean that high profile crackers are taking a moral stand by not making a version of it available yet. That is not to be expected of them though. Unless it really is some strange machinarium thing that they finally managed to make just enough online service to make it hard to crack. then again the servers may be crashing due to some crackers trying to find some algorithm overloading it, we never know. not like EA would tell us you know.
Are you serious? Have you ever actually been in the real world? It's standard business practice to take advantage of the "black box" nature of software in this way. Source: more than a decade in software development for blue chip companies.Andy Chalk said: