Maxis explains what went wrong with SimCity & how they're fixing it | Hacker News Reader

Maxis explains what went wrong with SimCity & how they're fixing it

polygon.com

20 pointselisee17 comments

This explains very little that would actually be of interest coming from hacker news.

I expected a technical analysis and got PR bullshit.

"We test and work out the capacity load of each server in load testing and through our beta events," she continued. "We have seen play behavior and load in areas that have stressed our game server [databases] in ways that we did not experience in Beta or Load Test."

They didn't use chaosmonkey? http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...

Chaos monkey simulates servers going down. That wasn't the issue here. This was just too much demand (i.e., not enough servers deployed) combined with what sounds like terribly inefficient algorithms...

Ok, using chaosmonkey maybe more complicated than just increasing what a load tester throws at your servers, but the end state is the same. You have less functioning servers to meet the demand. I think it's still relevant. IMO The whole point of chaosmonkey to force your organization to expect the unexpected.

"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

I'm running a 2.6 quad core with 16gb of ram and a ssd hd they're saying they have better than that (to overcome the internet latency) on their end for each user playing the game? I could understand needing to sync lots of actions with other players to need the server, but calculations? I call BS, that can't be right. Sounds more like a profit driving decision than a technical one.

It is BS, of course. I was disconnected and was able to play for hours. Literally all they need to add is local saving of your city.*

*When I quit the game and came back the next day, my city was gone.

Actually I suspect something more like this is happening: your local copy is running the simulation, while it's also being run on the server. Running it locally means you get no lag at all and running it on the server prevents cheating. The two simulations sync from time to time.

Preventing cheating might make sense in competitive PvP games, but makes no sense at all in a single player game that has traditionally been played offline.

Depends on what the computations are. Pathing, for example, could be shared among multiple clients and even if your PC is powerful enough to do it without degrading performance, not everyone's PC is as same as yours.

PS. I understand the rage against EA. I have not bought an EA game since 2002. I also had been laid off from a studio acquired by EA. So please don't imagine I am Johnny Riccitello trying to save his "reputation" or something. I am just addressing technical misconceptions. EA is evil and has to be put down.

One of the uses is to prevent piracy. If computation is offloaded to the server, writing a crack means reimplementing part of the game.

"A lot more people logged on than we expected"

So? The whole idea of 'the cloud' is that you are able to quickly (automatically) add capacity to handle temporary high demand for computing resources. With a capable provider like Amazon or Windows Azure, computing resources should not be a problem if you are actively taking care of provisioning.

They are using EC2

That's assuming their architecture is horizontally scalable like that. What if the bottleneck was at the db layer? If they didn't architect that out to be easily horizontally scalable, then simply adding more servers isn't really going to do much.

(I'm also assuming here that when they say "more people logged on than we expected", the bottleneck wasn't on the login servers, but on whatever it is Glassbox does with all the accumulated city data. Because login/auth severs are relatively simple to scale out horizontally)

It seems totally insane to not build a gaming system to be infinitely partitionable as priority #1.

Have users pick a realm (continent) that their region (and hence city) lives on. Only allow X cities per realm. Announce only less-loaded realms to people trying to create a new city . More demand? More realms.

Or in shorter form: copy Blizzard. I'm struggling to think of a reason why this wouldn't be not only doable but the obvious default. Eve gets (deserved) props for violating this default of course but I think EA wants a slightly broader consumer base than Eve for this one.

Anyway I can't wait to read a detailed tell-all from an ex-dev.

Why is the game online-only in the first place?

Don't see why this is getting downvoted.

There is an online component, but from what I've read about the game it's probably fair to say that most people will focus most of their time on the single player experience.

what a crock of shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com