Sim City is back in 2013!

[Silent_Buddha]

Has anyone reported any CPU performance issues with the game though? I think I've seen pretty much everything except that particular complaint mentioned so far. Indeed, what is the CPU load when playing this incarnation of simcity on a modern multicore processor...?

One guy that did an "impressions" video on his Press copy noted that once maxed out it could slow down a bit on lower end CPUs. And on budget systems can tend to chug along.

When he asked EA about the small city size, they basically told him it was due to trying to make sure the game could run on even your "dad's computer."

Which is quite likely as players of SimCity include people in their 50's and 60's who are less likely to be upgrading their computer every 4 years.

Anyway, the EA contact that he had stated that they could increase the city size but because of the above reason chose the 2km by 2km size. To which the person doing his video on the game questioned why they couldn't have put in larger sizes with appropriate in game warnings that it may run slowly unless you had a very powerful machine.

He then speculated that the small size was probably more deliberately chosen as a hard limit in order to make online play feel more important (by requiring multiple cities in order to provide everthing). If you were able to build a large city like in previous Sim City games, you wouldn't have to specialize, you could build everything in one "city." As it is, you have to specialize your "city" which means reliance on other cities for "things" you aren't specialized in.

Regards,
SB

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

You should quote the bit from Tycho's blog too:

Gabriel wasn’t able to get into SimCity last night to play, because the server wasn’t working and single player games don’t exist anymore, even if you are playing a private city and nobody can come in anyway. So I would remember it, because it was important, I said here in the post a long time ago that “EA games come with free misery.” This is why I stopped being an annual purchaser of Tiger Woods games: because this company has a serious, serious problem with execution at launch. You would only fix it if it meant more sales. But it doesn’t, because everybody already bought it. Well, except me.

 

[Mize]

A lot of people say that, but I fail to see the point. My computer is on, and online, 24/7 anyway. Even if I play a game "offline", the system itself is always online. What's the big deal?

Hey, I got a brilliant idea... how 'bout we discuss the game instead of business decisions made by the publisher?

It's 14 hours from Detroit international to Beijing without Internet. What could be a great way to pass the time becomes utterly useless. 24/7 online DRM kills my largest blocks of gaming time.

 

[Jedi2016]

Size limits may just be cpu performance due to the agent model?

Well, it doesn't strain my system in the slightest, but I can't see how many cores it's using, just overall performance (around 10%).

Given that they've had to do things like turn off Cheetah speed to reduce the amount of data you're hammering their servers with, it seems at this point that the city size limitation may be more because of their servers than our PCs. They counter it with the excuse that "it can run on any PC".

Right now, it seems that inter-city interaction is broken for some people. I'm having to build all of my cities as completely self-sustaining because I can't buy power or commute workers from the other cities I've built in the region for that very purpose.

By all accounts, the game runs perfectly fine when you're disconnected from their servers for a while, so it doesn't appear to be doing any server-side simulation. At this point, I don't see any real reason why they couldn't do a "Megalopolis" DLC that gives you the ability to spread a single-player city across an entire region. Kind of like.. you know.. the SimCity game from ten years ago.

 

[Orion]

what are sys requirements on this?

 

[BRiT]

what are sys requirements on this?

An always connected to the internet PC/MAC with the following specs:

PC Minimum requirements:

• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better or Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better
• Operating System: Windows XP/Vista/7
• RAM: 1.5 GB (XP) / 2 GB (Vista / Windows 7) / 2 GB (built-in graphical chipset)
• Hard Drive: 12GB HD Space
• Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 2×00 or better*, nVidia 7800 or better*, Intel Series 4 integrated graphics or better*
• Disc Drive: DVD-ROM 8x or better
• Broadband Internet: Minimum 256 kbps download, 64 kbps upload

*Minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM and Shader 3.0 or better support.

PC Recommended requirements:

• Processor: Intel Core i5 or faster
• Operating System: Windows 7/8
• RAM: 4GB RAM
• Graphics Card: nVidia GTX 275 or better, or ATI 5850 or better
• Broadband Internet: Minimum 256 kbps download, 64 kbps upload

Mac Minimum requirements:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better
• Operating System: Snow Leopard 10.6.4
• RAM: 4GB RAM
• Hard Drive: 12GB HD Space
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA 9400M/ Intel HD3000
• Broadband Internet: Minimum 256 kbps download, 64 kbps upload

 

[RedVi]

I'm horribly disappointed by so many aspects of this launch. I would give the game some time and buy it when cheaper/server issues and bugs are all sorted, but I really don't think I like the limitations currently applied to the game. I can't see them 'fixing' any of those in a free patch, either.

Time to go back to hoping someone else manages a worthy successor to SC4.

 

[mcsven]

The thing I just don't understand about the whole server debacle is why they didn't stagger the launch. Make the first 100,000 players digital only and then unlock 20,000 installs every 2 days or something. The die-hards who pre-ordered would have understood and most of the bad press would have been avoided.

After Error 37 you'd think software houses that want to roll out online-only games would be a little more cautious.

 

[Arwin]

Also pretty disappointed. I thought I'd like this a lot, especially with my kid, but I really don't care about the social part - I could have liked it though if my wife played as well, then I could imagine the two of us playing this together, one city each. But I really wanted to have a go at building something like the city I live in, and altough that's a small city, the way this is setup with a square which limits your build area, hmm.

But I may still give it a go, like Tomb Raider.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The thing I just don't understand about the whole server debacle is why they didn't stagger the launch. Make the first 100,000 players digital only and then unlock 20,000 installs every 2 days or something. The die-hards who pre-ordered would have understood and most of the bad press would have been avoided.

After Error 37 you'd think software houses that want to roll out online-only games would be a little more cautious.

That would be horrible to give the middle finger to the people who had enough faith in your game to pre-order it without seeing a single review.

If there's early access, people that pre-order should always get first slots, IMO.

Regards,
SB

 

[Jedi2016]

Some interesting info coming up.. people are starting to look at the data that the game is sending back to the servers, and it's pretty much nothing, not much more than a log of what's happening in your city. So that whole line about "the game is offloading simulation to the server" is pure BS.. it's running entirely locally. This is gonna get interesting.. now that someone's mentioned it, more and more people will start looking into it.

 

[3dilettante]

Was there a strong consensus that any significant simulation was being done on the servers? I was under the impression from the outset that such an arrangement was impractical and contradicted by the stated asynchronous design that allowed cities to run during periodic disconnects.

At some point, the expectation is that the server load problems will be handled, on way or the other.
We are starting to see issues coming up now that people are playing.

The agent system is showing some serious rough edges, now that enough people are able to play it.

I was wrong in my earlier assessment that the agent traffic system was big departure from all SimCity games. It apparently lifted the shortest-path algorithm from the initial release of SimCity 4. This may have been modified in a recent patch, since there have been reports of changes in traffic behavior, but no clear rhyme or reason to what it was changed to.

Trade, utilities, services, traffic, and public transport have spontaneous and frustrating failure modes related to their base function being so tied up in the proper movement and interaction of AI agents, and those agents are frequently very dumb.
Street car routes can intersect, but then they pick random directions. The agent apparently just rolls the dice.
Low-level things like sewage and power rely on agents, and there are problems with power delivery and sewage flow that don't make sense unless you are using agents whose rule sets break down.
Sewage may be using a similar shortest-distance algorithm, which doesn't help if the nearest sewage treatment plant is maxed out.
I saw a poster elsewhere talking about building a city that was one long serpentine road, and with power delivery being tied to roads, it seemed to uncover a problem with a fully-specced power plant being unable to overcome the "resistance" of the long road, with buildings being out of power at the further end.
City connections, which should bring these utility services across the border, may have capacity limits related to the small number of connections.

Server issues still constrain a lot of the gameplay, which may explain extremely unreliable nature of cross-city trade and services, which has badly damaged the point to a large chunk of the gameplay.

 

[pcchen]

Was there a strong consensus that any significant simulation was being done on the servers? I was under the impression from the outset that such an arrangement was impractical and contradicted by the stated asynchronous design that allowed cities to run during periodic disconnects.

I think that's quite clear though. I don't understand why some may think the server is doing some simulation works. AFAIK only interactions between cities are handled on the server (for the obvious reason that cities could be played by different people). You can see the effect when you try to start a "great project," and the server tells you that it's "fighting bureaucracy" which really is just a fancy way of saying "the server is processing the request." Also, you can see that the amount of materials you sent to a great project is not updated in real time, as it takes time for the server to process these requests.

Inter-city relationships are likely not to be agent based. Basically, a city tallies the number of agents going out to a nearby city, and tells the server something like "100 workers are looking for works in city 2" or "50 shoppers coming from city 3." It then tells clients for each city these numbers for them to generate agents for these "out-of-towners."

 

[3dilettante]

It's likely that the update process for region-level data isn't broadcast to active clients.

There was a reddit where some people familiar with database server setup speculated on the idea that there's at least two separate server paths, a master write server that takes updates from clients, validates the actions taken by the user, and updates a master list.
A second read path processes data queries from the clients.

A likely bottleneck in this scenario would be the input validation and updates to the per-server master list. Syncing errors and the lag time we see for things like great work progress would be evidence of the lag time in processing updates on the write path and getting them back on the read path, particularly if instances are being migrated in the cloud.

Getting updates from the server probably means the client periodically makes a read request and checks a mailbox that represents the most recently validated state on the master side, and that can be as simple as a set of integers for a bunch of simulated slot values for things like tourists per hour and market prices, which the client simulation can run with for some period of time. The time it takes for the master to validate and store the update and the time it takes for the read server to receive the client request and fetch the data is what we see as the delay.

Some of the rollback errors would be where a client request somehow gets stale data and runs on it, and then the validation phase on the master server rejects the result, or the validation logic itself has problems.

 

[mcsven]

That would be horrible to give the middle finger to the people who had enough faith in your game to pre-order it without seeing a single review.

If there's early access, people that pre-order should always get first slots, IMO.

Sorry, I was perhaps unclear - I totally agree. When the game went up for pre-order, your unlock date should have been set based on how many pre-orders had already been taken. Thus the first x punters got day 1, the next x got day 3 and so-on, where x is a number that EA/Maxis felt comfortable would have allowed them to cope but still feed data on real-life demand.

 

[Jedi2016]

Jim Sterling brought up a good point in his video today.. "Always online" is a door that swings both ways. It's not just us that has to always be connected.. EA has that obligation as well, one that they haven't been keeping up with.

 

[Davros]

Yay for jim
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/6978-SimShitty

 

[orangpelupa]

wow watching that guy yelling like that...

btw he said about delaying buying game a week or two to annoy publisher. But does the 1st and 2nd week sale really that important?

doesnt game sold as a service should have a long tail?

 

[Grall]

it's pretty much nothing, not much more than a log of what's happening in your city. So that whole line about "the game is offloading simulation to the server" is pure BS..

Lol OMG. And just the other day I read that some Maxis talking head (or maybe even dev, I'm not sure) claimed creating an offline mode would be "impossible" because so much of the simulation ran on their servers.

That's just what you'd expect from EA... Blatantly lying straight to your face.

Edit:
Here's the link, for the lulz: http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/10/maxis-simcity-offline-mode-is-just-not-possible/

 

[orangpelupa]

When the offline patch released by community, i wonder what EA PR people face will look like