Sim City V

[J epworth]

There was a Reddit AMA with the developers of the new Sim City today:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...om_maxis_amaa/

[Muffins]

uggh....internet connection required to play

[worth]

How large can one region be?

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by Muffins

uggh....internet connection required to play

Just curious, but what percentage of time when you are using your computer/laptop are you not connected to the internet?

[Muffins]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

Just curious, but what percentage of time when you are using your computer/laptop are you not connected to the internet?

almost never.

But what happens when if my internet goes down?.....nope cant play.

What if i'm on a long flight and want to kill some time? No wi-fi on the plane?...nope cant play.

The chances of it affecting me are slim to none. The fact is that I've paid for a game, and at any time want to play single player, I still have to get "permission" from them (which is basically what requiring an internet connection is).

This is almost more of a WRGMG post

[photon]

I bet the pirated version won't require an Internet connection...

[To Be Quite Honest]

Originally Posted by Muffins

almost never.

But what happens when if my internet goes down?.....nope cant play.

What if i'm on a long flight and want to kill some time? No wi-fi on the plane?...nope cant play.

The chances of it affecting me are slim to none. The fact is that I've paid for a game, and at any time want to play single player, I still have to get "permission" from them (which is basically what requiring an internet connection is).

This is almost more of a WRGMG post

There will be a third party fix for that.

[3 Justin 3]

Originally Posted by photon

I bet the pirated version won't require an Internet connection...

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by photon

I bet the pirated version won't require an Internet connection...

would it even be pirateable? Diablo 3 has been out for a long time now and it still hasn't been cracked. if they make online play and logging into an account fundamental to even starting the game like D3, i don't see how they could get around that

[photon]

Good point, I was thinking more like regular games that the data is all or mostly stored offline, but this might be closer to Diablo 3 which is basically an MMO with little (and likely completely untrusted) local data.

[Nehkara]

I believe SimCity games will be saved to the cloud, so cracking it will be... difficult.

[photon]

That would be unfortunate, being able to cheat in a Sim game is a key component of the game! Taking that away takes away 25% of the fun of the game (the screwing around part).

[FlameOn]

I read somewhere that the backlash to the DRM scheme has been huge. Seriously why is EA moving towards more DRM when Ubisoft, one of the most restrictive game companies at one point, went the opposite direction after finding it didn't work well for them.

What happens when EA decides to shut down the DRM servers for the the thing? Will everyone instantly stop being able to play their games? Their earlier games only had their DRM servers up for like a couple of years. I simply don't trust EA to maintain their products. Just take Simcity Deluxe for example for Android. I bought the stupid app on Gingerbread and a year and a half later it still hasn't been updated for ICS!

[Nehkara]

The Senior Vice President of Maxis, Lynn Bradshaw, has put out a blog with some explanation of the always-connected requirement.

Part of the reason at least is that apparently the GlassBox engine is so CPU heavy that some of the computational tasks are off-loaded from the local PC to the servers in the cloud.

MaxisKip also jumps in with some answers in the comments section of the blog.

Here it is if you would like to read it:

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/ar...f-Live-Service

[Kavvy]

could someone explain tto me what the CRY game engine is and why it isn't being used?

To large?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm7Bb55f-cA

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Kavy

could someone explain tto me what the CRY game engine is and why it isn't being used?

To large?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm7Bb55f-cA

it's the engine in the Far Cry and Crysis FPS games, and while beautiful can absolutely murder even a good gaming rig when all the settings are turned up. i can only imagine the system requirements if something as complex as SimCity were to use it

[photon]

Originally Posted by Nehkara

Part of the reason at least is that apparently the GlassBox engine is so CPU heavy that some of the computational tasks are off-loaded from the local PC to the servers in the cloud.

Complete and utter baloney, at least that part of it.

To offload CPU from the PC to the cloud would mean the cloud would have to have more computational power than the PC, and to get a server that has the same CPU as one equivalent PC costs more (sometimes LOTS more) than that same PC.

How many copies are they going to sell? 1 million? 5 million? Probably more over time. And they have to have a cloud more powerful than all those computers (or at least more powerful than the maximum possible concurrent users). Lets be generous and say that they sell only 500,000 in the first few days, and only half of those will want to try it when they get it, so 250,000 concurrent users.

Each concurrent user needs 2GHz of dual core CPU (as per the system requirements), and that's not enough so the cloud needs more, but we'll go with that. A 2GHz quad core intel server CPU is $250, so $125 per CPU per user.

So 250,000 concurrent users, $125 per cpu, $31 million just in processors (and they're only grossing $25 million for 500,000 copies). That's ignoring any server, any memory, bandwidth, power, everything. To house 125,000 quad core CPUs would actually cost more like $100-$200 million, let alone run them.

One way that offloading from the PC to the cloud might make sense is if it's not actually CPU limited at all, but storage limited.. in that they've traded CPU for storage (imagine massive lookup tables that wouldn't reasonably fit on a game install, so that instead of using a CPU to calculate it every time it's a lookup table to look up a pre-made calculation that only had to be done once). And even then I'd be surprised if that was actually the answer in this day of 15GB game sizes.

Or possibly simulating a whole region is what is prohibitive and a region is so integral to the game it can't not have them, as it would have to simulate not one city but all the cities in a region. EDIT: Even then they'd have to have somehow that simulating a region is applicable for a LOT of cities, not just yours.

I think the real answer is more what she said after, it's just designed to be part of the game to start with and to run a region it needs data from all the cities in the region to give the city a meaningful context.

[photon]

So here's a question, what happens when you don't log into your city for a while.. regions depend on the city, if I take a vacation or get busy for 2 months and don't play I expect my game to be where I left it.. but sounds like this will be always on and I'll come back to find huge unemployment and garbage because the cities around me have changed.

Or are the other cities in your region simulated and not real people? Or maybe you have the choice of either?

[Brannigans Law]

I remember when Sim City used to be fun. You could build a giant ass city on a huge map if you wanted with no internet connection. Now it's like anything else.. huge unnecessarily complicated bloatware garbage. I passed on the last SimCity looks like I'll be passing again. Bollocks.

[DownInFlames]

I love sandbox games, and the previous SimCity games are some of my favorite. But if they've really reduced the playability and fun for the sake of DRM they've lost me as a customer. There are so many good games out there, so there's no reason to put up with this B.S.