Hacker News Reader

Comment by undergroundhero | Hacker News Reader

I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

View on HN

The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power than I had for SC4), are they going to put up 50W of processing power while I'm playing?

I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way, using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.

I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's everything else that I'm hearing that scares me.

I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.

It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.

That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.

The game can actually go on for a few minutes when you lose connection. So I don't think there is much of the simulation happening server-side.

Yep, one of the developers mentioned that everything is verified server side, but the temporary offline mode indicates that its not that important.

I'm just curious, why are you using Watt as a unit here? Is that like, half the TDP of your CPU or something?

Something like that, yes. Watts seemed like the most universal unit to use. The point being that even if they're really efficient, they'd still be using 25W x the number of concurrent clients in power, which is just absurd especially since they're not charging monthly. They're not doing any kind of complicated simulation on the server side.

So it's fine to save your game into /dev/null as long as the game is lighting fast? How does that justify DRM?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com