

Maxis explains what went wrong with SimCity & how they're fixing it - elisee
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/9/4081464/simcity-interview-ea-maxis-lucy-bradshaw

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

I expected a technical analysis and got PR bullshit.

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chaostheory
"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...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-
released-into-wild.html)

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tobyjsullivan
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...

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chaostheory
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.

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wavesounds
"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.

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jquery
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.

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anonymous
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.

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manicdee
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.

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michielvoo
"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.

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thedz
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)

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skorgu
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.

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

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norswap
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.

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Oxxide
what a crock of shit.

