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Hacker Skips SimCity Full-Time Network Requirement
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Geek.com: "Ever since SimCity launched, there has been a suspicion that the need for the game to always be connected to a server was mainly a form of DRM, not for social game features and multiplayer. Then a Maxis developer came forward to confirm the game doesn't actually need a server to function, suggesting the information coming out of EA wasn't the whole truth. Now EA and Maxis have some explaining to do as a modder has managed to get the game running offline indefinitely." The writer names a few small ways in which the game is actually improved by being offline, too.
Not a huge surprise... Though I wonder how they're going to wriggle their way out of that one. I'm guessing they'll just try to ignore it and hope it goes away.
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
This is probably the best thing that could have happened to SimCity 5 in order to save the SimCity franchise.
It's a pity how corporate greed can ruin an otherwise excellent product. Management at EA/Maxis was obviously incredibly detached from the product. Comments such as how surprised and unprepared they were for the massive response they got to the new product speaks volumes to the fact that the people in charge had absolutely no clue about the products they make, nor what it takes to make them successful.
The good news? At least there is one team out there that gets it!
Whew! This water sure is cold!
According to TFA you still need to go online to save your progress. So, no, he did not skip the requirement. At most it is not full-time, but "so many times itis easier to keep it on full time"
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
There's a YouTube video at the top of the article. Here's a direct link: SimCity Super Debug Mode.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I just don't care to spend that much effort fixing something that should have had the option out-of-the-box. EA is a big company, if they want sales, sell a finished game. Getting upset and spending my TIME trying to hack it or pirate isn't worth the $60 anymore... The have created a situation where even FREE is losing me money.
The solution is that the servers needed to JUST WORK. As a grown up, waiting twenty minutes even twice has wasted more of my money/time than the price of the game... They're jerks, fix it.
Here is what Lt. Cmdr Data thinks about this.
I was a big fan of the game since the original and thought it odd it was one of the few mega-popular EA franchises that did not get updated frequently. I was anticipating the release, but I have learned not to pre-order any video game, nor buy it until it has been out a number of months for it either to be "fixed", for customer reviews to roll in, and beta test NDA's to expire. The bigger the game company the worse the lies become.
Professional game reviewers and magazines can simply not be trusted. Shorly after release metacritic scores showed the "professional" critics giving 90's and 100's, while no customer aside from a stockholm syndrome candidate gives a good review at all. Now that it is popular to bash the title, magazines being rolling in with the poor reviews.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Well, as politics and marketing have shown, careful word choice has a massive impact on people's reactions.
that is exactly how the skidrow crack for Ubisoft's Anno 2070 city builder works also.
they were saving to the "cloud" (hate that buzzword)
skidrow crack uses a mini server emulator so that when you go to save it checks localhost and drops the save file in a /user/%appdata%/skidrow/ folder
They were probably finally able to login to the game last night.
This horrible DRM has created a huge amount of negative press, and prevented piracy for around a week. Now that a hack exists, not only is piracy not prevented, but the pirates get a clearly superior version of your product. As a result, many kids will be driven to try the pirated version, and thus educated on how easy torrenting and patching a game can be. You may even have inspired some burgeoning young hackers to learn how to crack your future games!
Why do you assume he's white? ;)
But it wont matter anyway, in a few months after this whole fiasco the very people who condemn EA for lying to them will still buy the next shiny AAA game from them anyway. They're happy being ripped off and lied to, and I can see them everywhere. Such spineless people who cant make a stand would only pretend joining the "so called game vendor is bad" bandwagon to get their "gamer" cred. They don't really care about gaming, they only identify themself as one because right now it is cool to be a nerdy gamer.
I enjoy playing games and I don't even bother to pirate *ANY* new titles, that's how much disgusted I am to gaming industry right now. The last game that I bought was released at 2006, been what.. 7 years? and I'm not even going to entertain the idea of buying or pirating any games because I've drawn my line many years ago.
For others, welcome to the future of gaming! It's a multi-billion dollar industry, you better have the money and willing to shed your principles 'cause otherwise you're not going to get your fix.
There is another surprise: that anyone ever believed that a *significant amount of the calculations.* would run on the server. Seriously, it doesn't pass the sniff test that they would offload calculations from the clients onto their own servers.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
so easy to do it. so very easy. (if you know how to read that is)
The article noted that you can do everything, and better, offline except "save" and "socialize". I would bet that you can work around the save issue simply by running a virtual machine and saving the session using the virtual machines capability to preserve memory state. Unless this thing is actually monitoring gaps in the wall clock time record for DRM puproses it should be possible to use a memory image.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"Well that's fantastic, a really smart decision. We can put a DRM requirement into a traditionally single-player game, then we'll require a permanent internet connection to thwart piracy aaaaaand it's gone."
"Uh, what?"
"It's gone. It's all gone."
"What's all gone?"
"The DRM on your game - it was circumvented, it's gone."
"What do you mean? The game is social and computational. It requires servers to make all of those calculations and connections!"
"Not anymore it doesn't. POOF."
"Well, well what can I do to get back my customers?"
"I'm sorry sir, but this release is for DRM-employing, user-abusing companies only."
"But we're EA!"
"Do you have any DRM on your game?"
"No, you just hacked it!"
"Then please stand aside for companies who actually have a poorly-implemented DRM scheme on their game. Next please."
This is the top positive review on Amazon:
You'd think I'd be mega unhappy like everyone else at the constant waiting and lack of actually being able to play a game I purchased.
Well, you'd be wrong.
The hours upon hours since launch that I haven't been able to log in, whether it be sitting in queues, or server busy messages, or just plain old not working screens, I've managed to do a heap of things that I never do when I'm locked in my man cave playing video games.
I've washed the dishes, the laundry, changed the oil in the car, mopped the floors, dusted, did a spot of gardening, greeted my children who I hadn't really seen since Christmas, walked the dog, asked how my wife's day has been and listened to the entire response, restocked the groceries and many more things! My family has never been happier that they've got a father and husband again.
In fact, I feel like Simcity has given me a new lease on life. This wouldn't have been possible without the seemingly crazy decision to have constant online connections and server side save points even for single player.
So I can only thank EA and Maxis. Your failures have been my rewards. 5 stars!
"Is it even fun?"
The answer is "no."
I'm embarrassed to say I purchased this game. The goddamn digital deluxe edition for $80 goddamn dollars. I should probably click the "Post Anonymously" box to hide my shame, but I won't. I'll wear my scarlet EA.
Now, I knew about the "you have to be online" thing, but I thought that was just for authentication, like StarCraft 2. I do not like DRM, I run Linux on most of my computers, and I'm a donation-making member of the EFF (got the t-shirts and everything) but I will, on occasion, fork over cash for a DRMed video game and roll my eyes when I have to sit through "verifying with server..." bullshit. I'm weak.
I read pre-reviews of the game, and I watched gameplay videos. I have fond memories of SimCity 2000, and thought this game looked awesome.
I was annoyed when I couldn't play for the first two days because of 'server load' issues. They were right about the "multiplayer experience." Not being able to play a video game because "servers are unavailable" is definitely part of the multiplayer experience.
But, I'm a patient person, and I wanted to play this game. So when the servers stabilized and I had time over the weekend, I played. And it was great! It was a ton of fun drawing and planning my city.
Until.
Until you hit about 100k population (which, as the decompiled ui code shows is only actually 15000 sims because they inflate the pop to make it seem like they're doing more). When you get about that big, all of a sudden, the city collapses because of incredible traffic jams on the roads. No one can get to work or back, a building catches fire and the fire trucks can't get to it so the building burns down. Sims get sick and the ambulances can't reach them because of traffic, they die, people become unhappy and leave, no money from no taxes, city collapses etc etc.
And at first you think, "Oh, I have clearly been mistaken with regards to my city planning abilities! What an interesting challenge! Let's look closer at the traffic patterns to see what I've done wrong, and what I can do to fix my city that is being simulated in exciting and challenging ways!"
So you start looking closer. You turn on the traffic map and see, "hey wait a minute. Why are all cars using that one narrow side street instead of the massive 4 lane highway right next to it..?"
So you think, "perhaps I've overloaded that street, or have failed to understand the population density along it?" So you look closer. So you follow a single sim to see what he does to get to and from work.
And when you look at an individual sim, an "Agent" in the GlassBox lingo, you see that he is stupid, and does not behave in any way like a real denizen of a city. Which is what you're trying to simulate.
You follow the sim and discover that when he leaves his house at 6AM to go to work, he does not know where he is going. It isn't even correct to call it "his" house, as it's not his house, it's the first open house he came across when he left work the night before. When a sim goes to work, he becomes aware of the closest building with an available job. And closest means "shortest path" routing, not "least cost." So he will take a .99999 mile long dirt road instead of 1 mile long super highway, because it's shorter. So he travels to this closest building, and if when he arrives, there is still an available job there, he will go inside and fill up a job slot. If by the time he reaches the building, some other sim has arrived first and TOOK HIS JERB he will pick the next closest building with a currently available job and try his luck there instead.
However. Every other sim that spawned is following the same process. Which results in the city-ending traffic jams.
And this is when it happens. There's an word for it, "anagnorisis." It's an element of greek tragedy. It's the moment when the protagonist realizes the clearer, fuller picture of the situation and of his destiny, in all of its horror.
Because you think, "so how
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I think you were not online when you clicked [Submit]
it doesn't pass the sniff test that they would offload calculations from the clients onto their own servers.
A Super NES console has a ~3 MHz* single-threaded processor and 128 KiB of RAM and can run the Micropolis model that powers SimCity. A modern server is clocked about a thousand times faster than that, CPUs like the Bulldozer have eight cores, and servers have sockets for multiple CPUs. So I'll guess that each server can simulate at least sixteen thousand cities at once.
* The Super NES CPU can operate at 2.7 MHz or 3.6 MHz depending on what part of memory is accessed. Early games always ran at 2.7 MHz; as yields of faster mask ROMs increased, newer games accessed ROM at 3.6 MHz and RAM at 2.7 MHz.
TOOK HIS JERB
You, sir, win one internet. Use it wisely.
It isn't even correct to call it "his" house, as it's not his house, it's the first open house he came across when he left work the night before. When a sim goes to work, he becomes aware of the closest building with an available job.
Wait...that's not normal where you live?
What I got out of that was the following:
Seriously? They didn't fix the traffic model from SC4?
SimCity 4 has a similar fundamental flaw in its traffic model that you describe. The SHORTEST route always won out, regardless of whether or not it was the FASTEST route, or HIGHEST-CAPACITY route. Every city you make in SC4 will have that same issue.
Well, they do until you have enough of that nonsense and install the Network Addon Mod ("network", in this case, meaning "traffic network"). Just ignore all the neat-looking highway and other traffic stuff they give you; the mod's MAIN draw is fixing the damn traffic model so that speed and capacity are more heavily weighted than just distance. I've had SC4 cities where I was getting constant traffic problems related to stupid sims, most roads entirely in the red density, and then I installed NAM and found everything right back to green. Now if I have problems on roads, I can trace down logical reasons why (so it turns out an onramp near an industrial center is a commuter hotspot, big deal).
What I'm saying is that apparently whatever dev team EA forced to wear Maxis's rotting corpse as a disguise STILL can't figure out traffic models worth a damn (SC4 was the first SimCity post-buyout). And that someone will make a mod that fixes it. Still, not a good scenario for EA.