SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment

SimCity Update #4 is penned by EA Maxis SVP Lucy Bradshaw, who is "happy to report that the core problem with getting in and having a great SimCity experience is almost behind us," saying they have "reduced game crashes by 92% from day one." She admits she's not able to offer the "all clear" for the game she'd hoped to, but seems optimistic that they've turned the corner from the game's rocky launch. There's also a new tweet on the SimCity account quickly walking back from this tweet they posted over the weekend which said: "We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon but we'll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts." It seems there is a disagreement among the operators of their twitter account, because the new update states this isn't actually possible: "The game was designed for MP, we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible."
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Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment
Mar 11, 2013, 12:38
36.
Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment Mar 11, 2013, 12:38
Mar 11, 2013, 12:38
 
Beamer wrote on Mar 11, 2013, 12:25:
Sepharo wrote on Mar 11, 2013, 12:20:
It's not as simple as he's making it look but he's right about it probably being coded in way that should've been "easy" to switch offline. I'm imagining there is a region service interface on the client which is implemented on the server.

They could take that service and instead implement it on the client and I see no reason that most home machines couldn't handle simulating the traffic/commerce in a single region. The cities don't run when you aren't playing them so they essentially just become an assortment of stats that govern their interactions with the currently live city.

I'd say the reason they're doing it on EA's servers (other than DRM/DLC) is not so much for the region simulation (well they'd have to for public/MP regions) but for the "world" components like leaderboards and commodity prices.

There's almost definitely no reason why they couldn't handle it.
But coding something for a server and coding something for a home system tends to be very, very different. It isn't as simple as just flipping a switch.

If you never intended to turn off server-side calculations, why have someone put a few weeks into putting that ability in?

I'm not saying it's a switch. I'm saying it's an exposed interface. There's really not much difference. Whether the service is running remotely or locally doesn't really matter. If you're able to tear out all the overhead (auth, communication packaging) it'll actually run better anyway.

"Easy" is always relative anyway. It's not flipping a switch but it (shouldn't) be a huge re-write either. I'm not saying they should code that region stuff into the client but they could certainly run the service (or a new lighter one) on the client and have them communicate somewhat like they did before.
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    Re: SimCity: Now With 92% Less Crashing; Maxis Walks Back from Offline Comment