Sim City V

[TorqueDog]

Patch 1.2 for SimCity released: https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-patch-notes-1-2

This update to SimCity, released on March 7th, 2013 contains the following updates and fixes:

• Fix for a crash that occurred when claiming a city in a new region on a server that was experiencing lag
• Fix for an issue where server select would not display the last server played on if that server was currently unavailable
• Cheetah speed has been disabled, selecting it will not cause your SimCity to run any faster than at Llama speed.
• Implemented a fix for crashes related to the road system finding the closest point on a road
• Fixed crashes caused by transport and pedestrian code
• Identified and resolved a processing problem for cities with helicopters

WTF @ Bolded point.

[QuadCityImages]

Its not like they need truckloads of servers piled into their HQ. I would imagine they use cloud based stuff like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace. Its just a matter of sending them an extra big check for the first month of any game launch.

I just heard the mailbox! Despite all my complaints, I shall now eagerly tear into my copy.

[metallicat]

Yeah how do you disable cheetah speed? That's brutal.

[QuadCityImages]

...except my copy was not delivered as the tracking made it seem it would be. I ordered this early enough I should have gotten it on Tuesday, not Friday...

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by oilers_fan

Yeah how do you disable cheetah speed? That's brutal.

I'm assuming there's a bug related to Cheetah speed that is leading to other issues.

I would hope they'll re-enable it once everything is corrected.

[SebC]

When does it release in Europe? Sometime today, but I'm not sure what time. If I understand correctly, they had all the servers up for NA launch and are about to or have just added a huge chunk of players. Good luck with that.

[Esoteric]

Originally Posted by Esoteric

Sim City V - always on internet connection, only available through Origin. http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2012/03/...et-connection/

There's another one that bites the dust.

Yup, I was definitely worried about this one from the start.

I ended up purchasing it, but I've been working too much to have a chance to play it. Sounds like I'm not missing due to the issues - hopefully, it works this weekend!

[QuadCityImages]

Does it tell you when its autosaving, or does it constantly save the state? If that's the case, Cheetah speed would tax the servers that much harder than the others because of the faster changes to everyone's cities.

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by QuadCityImages

Does it tell you when its autosaving, or does it constantly save the state? If that's the case, Cheetah speed would tax the servers that much harder than the others because of the faster changes to everyone's cities.

Much like using Google Docs or apps on a cloud, it's constantly saving.

Hopefully everyone jumping ship will allow it to stabilize for the coming weekend!

[photon]

Originally Posted by QuadCityImages

Its not like they need truckloads of servers piled into their HQ. I would imagine they use cloud based stuff like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace. Its just a matter of sending them an extra big check for the first month of any game launch.

I'd be a bit surprised if they used a cloud based service, for very large scale things cloud becomes enough of a challenge that it becomes more bother than it is worth sometimes. I know someone who's done this large scale kind of thing and they tried EC2 but basically outgrew them.

I looked at some of the traffic from SimCity.exe and as expected it's all over the place. There definitely is some traffic going to Amazon EC2, that's via HTTPS so that could be authentication type info.

There's http traffic going to Edgecast, which is probably static information that needs to be streamed.

And there's traffic going to 1e100.net which is owned by Google, not sure what they'd be doing with Google, but there were a lot of ports open for that. Maybe google providing network connections for their servers?

Also some unencrypted traffic going to EC2.

I'd have to use wireshark and look at content to try and figure out what was what. Or at least if I could actually play I could see where the majority of traffic was going while playing.

But it looks like they definitely have a lot of different things involved, and that could be a factor.. the more external services you use the more you are dependent on their ability to provide a service.

Originally Posted by oilers_fan

Yeah how do you disable cheetah speed? That's brutal.

The game seems to communicate constantly with the servers to augment whatever the PC is doing (the simulation depends on the server so to speak), so simulation speed would be a huge factor in load. More than just saving, specifics about what can or does happen constantly depend on the server (or so they've claimed).

[woob]

Originally Posted by photon

... bunch of network sniffing stuff

I'd be curious to see what kind of data amounts are going back and forth once someone is in game and playing normally.

[worth]

FFS, every server in the world is busy...have to queue to play a single player game.

[photon]

Originally Posted by woob

I'd be curious to see what kind of data amounts are going back and forth once someone is in game and playing normally.

In Windows 7 (and 8 I assume, not sure about lower versions) you can use the Resource Monitor to track network activity overall or by app.

EDIT: It's actually interesting to watch, you can see the huge # of apps that connect to the Internet, maybe even find things that you didn't know or want to do so!

[Slacker]

I have a feeling they need more servers. I'm not too sure what gave me that idea...

[photon]

If they are on EC2 then it should just be a matter of spooling up more servers, but it looks like a "server" (i.e. NAWest1) is a bunch of different things together, and that the issues are more than simple load and maybe interactions between different servers.

Kind of like how with WoW for a while it wasn't the game server so much as it was the login server.

Who knows, probably hard enough to debug when knowing what's there instead of trying to debug it as a black box

[HOOT]

Originally Posted by worth

FFS, every server in the world is busy...have to queue to play a single player game.

The worst part is you wait to get on and then when you do it either won't load the city up or it will crash moments into the game. Almost pointless to keep trying at this point. I'm not too sure why they can't figure out the cap for the amount of people they can handle for now and start a queue. It would be better than nothing.

[photon]

Originally Posted by HOOT

The worst part is you wait to get on and then when you do it either won't load the city up or it will crash moments into the game. Almost pointless to keep trying at this point. I'm not too sure why they can't figure out the cap for the amount of people they can handle for now and start a queue. It would be better than nothing.

Barring everything else you'd think this would be standard practice for any game that depends on remote servers.

Though with the Available/Busy/Full maybe it's supposed to, but if that itself is flawed (i.e. whatever information you use to feed those values isn't actually reflective of the state), then you're back to square 1.

[Canuck-Hater]

Why the hell do you need to be online for single player? That seems silly.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Canuck-Hater

Why the hell do you need to be online for single player? That seems silly.

Because EA.

[Nehkara]

Ocean Quigley ‏@oceanquigley
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