SimCity Offline Mode Took More Than Six Months To Make

[Covarr]

That is some impressive incompetence... This was moded in less than a few days. Do you really want to come out and declare that you are so incompetent you were unable to figure out how to make your game run without checking into servers?

You remove the line of code that requires it to check into a server. Done.

Either the laziest employee in existence got this job or they stretched it over 6 month to collect paychecks.

It's like you didn't read the source article. It says things like "So yes, while someone was able to remove the ?time check? shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities" and "And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play."

Yes, it ran, and didn't crash or anything. But you completely lose all region features. On top of that, they had to compensate for the absence of global market, redo a bunch of UI stuff, and generally make the single-player game not a completely gimped experience. The modder who only had to change a tiny bit didn't do any of that.

P.s. Thanks

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Yeah, I can see how having to create a whole new save state mode and figure out regional trading and all that stuff would take 6 months of work.

They shouldn't get any flak for it taking 6 months to create, the point of order is still that it wasn't included as a mode in the original release. They royally screwed the pooch on this one, I just hope EA have learned some sort of lesson about always on DRM.

 

[1337mokro]

That is some impressive incompetence... This was moded in less than a few days. Do you really want to come out and declare that you are so incompetent you were unable to figure out how to make your game run without checking into servers?

You remove the line of code that requires it to check into a server. Done.

Either the laziest employee in existence got this job or they stretched it over 6 month to collect paychecks.

It's like you didn't read the source article. It says things like "So yes, while someone was able to remove the ?time check? shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities" and "And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play."

Yes, it ran, and didn't crash or anything. But you completely lose all region features. On top of that, they had to compensate for the absence of global market, redo a bunch of UI stuff, and generally make the single-player game not a completely gimped experience. The modder who only had to change a tiny bit didn't do any of that.

P.s. Thanks

Soooooo your point is that regions didn't work.... did they before?

Have you actually played this game? Regions are a fucking mess! Yes I trivialized it to one line of code... but guess what. I tried the mod version of this... regions worked fine. Or as fine as they ever did, which is barely.

 

[Covarr]

Soooooo your point is that regions didn't work.... did they before?

Have you actually played this game? Regions are a fucking mess! Yes I trivialized it to one line of code... but guess what. I tried the mod version of this... regions worked fine. Or as fine as they ever did, which is barely.

My point is that every single feature which required online had to be removed or otherwise accounted for. Sure, regions never worked very well, but they did do things. Cities did affect each other, albeit often in stupid ways. What's more, a whole bunch of stuff central to the game's design needed to be rebalanced, because it was originally made on the assumption of being affected by the outside world.

Honestly, I don't think it should've taken six months. I think the changes necessary (and yes, it IS more than just disabling an online check), should've taken maybe a month or two, tops. But the idea that the mod version was even remotely enough for an official update is ridiculous.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Johnson McGee]

In This Thread: People who have never patched anything in their life saying "How hard could it be?"

I'm not a modder but considering that a modder did manage to make an (admittedly quick-and-dirty) offline mode of Simcity a couple weeks after its release then I think it's safe to say that EA's Maxis team is full of crap about this taking six months.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122702-Modder-Proves-That-SimCity-Works-Offline

 

[List]

"We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines"

chances are a person would have a good computer than a reliable/stable internet connection, so that excuse is complete BS

 

[lacktheknack]

In This Thread: People who have never patched anything in their life saying "How hard could it be?"

I'm not a modder but considering that a modder did manage to make an (admittedly quick-and-dirty) offline mode of Simcity a couple weeks after its release then I think it's safe to say that EA's Maxis team is full of crap about this taking six months.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122702-Modder-Proves-That-SimCity-Works-Offline

This was addressed in the OP. -___-

Yeah, the modder "fixed" it, but doing so disabled a whole whackload of features. With my tree analogy, that's like cutting the damn thing down, sticking the cut-off end in the dirt and expecting it to live.

As I said: Proper implementation of offline mode is harder than you would ever guess. I don't say that lightly, and I say it as someone who's assisted in official (and time-sensitive) patchwork. It's hell.

 

[Buccura]

Well, EA's got one up on Blizzard now. Time for them to make Diablo III work offline.

 

[Blachman201_v1legacy]

Unless they get around to fix that utterly broken agent system, I'd still say that the game is a lost cause.

Still, it is at least a step in the right direction regarding always-online systems.

 

[EHKOS]

*looks at integrated graphics chip*

...screw the fire hazard I want this.

 

[RJ Dalton]

The headline of the article alone was enough to raise my eyebrow through the roof. I can't believe it's taken them this long to fix the problem that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

 

[Mik Sunrider]

Glad they fixed the problem they created but oh well, too little too late. I'm not going to reward stupidity with my cash. I gave up on EA/Bio-ware with SWTOR, I refuse to buy anything from EA/anyone but they almost had me with SimCity ... almost. Like the raven said 'nevermore'.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Considering that someone disabled the Always Online check-in script with a sodding JAVA EDITOR after a couple of days of SimCity's launch I doubt it was as hard as Maxis claims.

And that workaround revealed that everything but the world market and city save data ran on the game client. So all they had to do to fix this was change a pointer and possibly provide whatever encryption model they used to deter hackers from reverse-engineering the save system so that the client can use the save data locally.

That's it.

So methinks what really happened over those 6 months, EA issued a mandate to Maxis to hold off on deploying the patch, see if the negative buzz would drop off and sales pick up. When sales didn't pick up, that's when they decided to do something drastic. I have no doubt that somewhere in EA's boardroom there was the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth over shooting their Always Online Baby.

...Either that, or Maxis's programmers are incompetent to an astonishing degree. Though, given how their pathfinding and AI systems were so badly borked on launch, maybe that was the case.

 

[Andy Chalk]

A perfect opportunity for a classic:


But to be fair to Maxis, having dug this hole for itself you can't blame the developers for wanting to be super-extra-ultra-really-and-for-true CERTAIN that this patch is going to work as intended right out of the gate. I'm a little dubious about the statement that they got on the job as soon as possible - if they knew people hated the connectivity requirement, and they knew they were working on an offline update, why not tell the world about it immediately in order to take some of the heat off? - but I am willing to accept that this job would take longer and more work than a lot of people might think.

 

[Braedan]

Lots of people with no coding experience trying to comment on things they don't know here. Just think, some programs take thousands of years of manhours to create. Now we don't know how many people were assigned to create an offline mode. The odds of it being the whole team are stupidly low.

I agree that putting online only in a typically single player game was monumentally stupid, but to say some modder with a two week hack job is the same amount of work as a source code overhaul is laughable.

 

[Smooth Operator]

I don't doubt it, did a few source rewrites myself and it really isn't so much the work but a whole lot of running in circles redoing what has already been done in a slightly different way... whole bunch of busy work with microscopic changes on the outside.

Of course none of that would be necessary if your design wasn't apocalyptically stupid when making the damn game.

 

[Cliff_m85]

I'm more upset that people are considering financially supporting them by buying the game now that it finally works.

Ummmm..... no. You don't reward incompetence with money. This game doesn't deserve another chance.

It's like you order soup, the waiter brings it, you complain that there's a fly, and the waiter takes 6 months removing the fly.... and expects you to still eat and pay for the meal.

 

[Johnson McGee]

In This Thread: People who have never patched anything in their life saying "How hard could it be?"

I'm not a modder but considering that a modder did manage to make an (admittedly quick-and-dirty) offline mode of Simcity a couple weeks after its release then I think it's safe to say that EA's Maxis team is full of crap about this taking six months.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122702-Modder-Proves-That-SimCity-Works-Offline

This was addressed in the OP. -___-

Yeah, the modder "fixed" it, but doing so disabled a whole whackload of features. With my tree analogy, that's like cutting the damn thing down, sticking the cut-off end in the dirt and expecting it to live.

As I said: Proper implementation of offline mode is harder than you would ever guess. I don't say that lightly, and I say it as someone who's assisted in official (and time-sensitive) patchwork. It's hell.

I get your point, any time I've ever had to patch or bug-fix it seems to generate 2 problems for every one solved. However, I still think that, given the evidence, the whole Maxis team, already intimately familiar with the code, should've been able to generate the offline mode with less work than what they're claiming. In my opinion, I believe they're exaggerating the amount of work so they don't have to backtrack on their claims that the always-connected functionality was critical to the game. But of course there is the possibility that there were significant issues.

At this point though, I think the time would have been better spent fixing the ai and pathing issues since those that refused to buy the game on the basis of it being online probably won't bother at this point, just on the principle of it having been always-online in the first place.