SimCity offline mode took more than six months
Maxis says that the upcoming offline mode for SimCity needed considerable reworking to the core structure, and that the studio required more than six months to complete the project.
Despite fan requests, Maxis seemed hesitant to stick an offline mode in SimCity. Even with launch server troubles and mods fanning the flames, the most it had committed was to look into it. Now we know offline mode is coming in the next update, so what took so long? According to Maxis, actually building it accounted for more than half a year of the wait.
In a post on the game blog (via Polygon), Maxis lead engineer Simon Fox said the process took six-and-a-half months altogether. Fox says the primary problem was reworking how an offline mode would work with all of the core game architecture, like how the simulation checks in with servers and communicates the city status to others.
"We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines," Fox said. "We wouldn't want someone who was enjoying the multiplayer game to find the single player game crippled due to poor optimization. And it's not just adding, we had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to multiplayer include code and UI supporting trading, social features, global market, leaderboards and achievements. And, all without crippling the multiplayer game."
Maxis had circulated a survey in July regarding an offline mode, so given the timing the team must have hit the ground running right afterwards. That would also explain why it said it was exploring the possibility in October, which would have been in the midst of the process.
-
Shacknews
replySteve Watts posted a new article, SimCity offline mode took more than six months.
Maxis says that the upcoming offline mode for SimCity needed considerable reworking to the core structure, and that the studio required more than six months to complete the project.-
to be honest, I got over the always online DRM. It was simply a poorly made Sim City overall.
-
yup offline mode won't fix it... the game was broken in the design docs. It would need a full rewrite to fix it I'd bet.
-
Exactly, launch issues are understandable as everyone is connecting to the servers at the same time; but after the dust settled, the game was mediocre at best.
Small cities that required you to either connect with others or manage multiple cities at once; and if you chose to play with others, you had to hope that they stayed with the game until you no longer wanted to play, otherwise you were stuck with no way to evict other players.
-
-
[deleted]
-
Between this and C&C4, there was probably a corporate mandate at EA for PC-only games to somehow require online engagement, whether via MMO, always-on, microtransaction free-to-play, etc. As for how well it was implemented technically, that seemed secondary.
This is different from Origin, which is something I don't want to use out of principle, but I've heard it's become far better of a marketplace and online experience in the past 2 years.-
What I heard from a friend at Maxis is that this wasn't an EA mandate, but that Maxis insisted on it and said it would be ready.
-
-
[deleted]
-
-
[deleted]
-
-
[deleted]
-
Frank Gibeau is heading the EA Mobile division now, though. Speculation is that he's likely on his way out all together.
-
-
-
-
probably a corporate mandate for online engagement?
http://www.develop-online.net/interview/ea-s-leap-of-faith/0116927-
Thanks; this is what I was thinking of. Couldn't search for it at the time.
-
-
-
[deleted]
-
Yeah, someone over there said a while back it's never going to happen. http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/10/04/simcity-wont-get-bigger-city-sizes/
-
well the fact it's offline now means it'll be easier to hack / mod so I wouldn't be surprised if something unofficial comes out to allow larger cities
-
-
This is exactly why I did not get the game. Always online is annoying, but wouldn't stop me from playing the game. Removing it does nothing for me to make me want to play it.
-
City size wasn't the only thing broken. The agent simulation/AI was horrible as well. Have they fixed that in all the patches?
I really should go back and give this game a try again. I basically gave up on it after not being able to play for a month or however long it took for the servers to be stable.-
[deleted]
-
seemed like part of the problem was how agents just traveled to the nearest location for work/home until it was full, which caused agents already in route to find the next closest not-full location.
Seems like it was a computationally inexpensive solution that lead to horrible traffic problems in the game.
It's too bad that they took that approach. The agent simulation idea sounds really neat, but they would have needed to target higher end computers so that they could have spent more CPU time to do a better job with the agent simulation.-
[deleted]
-
-
It probably took most of the development to get it even functional at all. The decisions they made at the outset couldn't be reversed. Most importantly they either overlooked or decided against the unreserved destination for complexity/memory reasons? It is the wrong decision in hindsight, but the engineer testbeds with 10s or 100s probably worked well enough.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
