Our source, who we have verified worked directly on the project but obviously wishes to remain anonymous, has first-hand knowledge of how the game works. He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on. Our source explains:
“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities.
As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that.
But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”
Our source, who we have verified worked directly on the project but obviously wishes to remain anonymous, has first-hand knowledge of how the game works. He has made it absolutely clear to us that this repeated claim of server-side calculations is at odds with the reality of the project he worked on. Our source explains:
“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities.
As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that.
But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”
Honestly i don't think anyone swallowed that. It just didn't make sense that some powerful computation was being done elsewhere. It's just a stupid drm thing, nothing more.
P.S: Can't find nfohump regions. Where's Boner, i want in ...
This is slowly but surely turning into something akin to the derp-Journo shitstorm that happened a while back, I have no idea why but I just love seeing all these lies and smelly business practices come out into the public. ^^
I want to believe that but is there any site that has covered that besides (and as consistently as) RPS?
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
This is slowly but surely turning into something akin to the derp-Journo shitstorm that happened a while back, I have no idea why but I just love seeing all these lies and smelly business practices come out into the public. ^^
I want to believe that but is there any site that has covered that besides (and as consistently as) RPS?
The other sites are all like "the 92% percent of the issues have been resolved, durr" "new servers availability, hurray", so I guess it's a no
Pl@tinum wrote:
Honestly i don't think anyone swallowed that. It just didn't make sense that some powerful computation was being done elsewhere. It's just a stupid drm thing, nothing more.
Yep, we knew that already (sort of ), but there's a great percentage of users/ casuals who don't have a clue of how things really work and somehow manage to swallow every lie that is fed to them.
well explained on the EA forum why this game is broken
Quote:
Traffic "AI"... This is why services and traffic are broken!
One of the biggest problems people are having with the game is the massive traffic-jams that seem to clog the entire system up. Now, this is responsible for the ineffective coverage of ANY traffic-based services (Fire, Police, Garbage, Medical, Education, Mass-Transit.) There are also a number of smaller complaints that may also be directly related to how Glassbox handles traffic.
"Workers aren't commuting."
"There aren't enough workers, even though I have plenty of population."
"Tourism is broken."
"Emergency services are slow/unresponsive/broken."
The agent system that is used for utilities (power, water, sewage) seems to be identical to the system that handles traffic.
The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.
"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.
Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"
The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.
Sharing resources and services gets to be a joke, because all the vehicles ("agents") get bound up with the busses at the entrances to cities.
TL;DR: Fixing the way the game handles traffic and "sims" will fix 90% of the problems plaguing players!
My second attempt at a city is now heading down the toilet because of traffic. As soon as I reach about 60-70k mass gridlock and no services getting through. Was all going so well
well explained on the EA forum why this game is broken
Quote:
Traffic "AI"... This is why services and traffic are broken!
One of the biggest problems people are having with the game is the massive traffic-jams that seem to clog the entire system up. Now, this is responsible for the ineffective coverage of ANY traffic-based services (Fire, Police, Garbage, Medical, Education, Mass-Transit.) There are also a number of smaller complaints that may also be directly related to how Glassbox handles traffic.
"Workers aren't commuting."
"There aren't enough workers, even though I have plenty of population."
"Tourism is broken."
"Emergency services are slow/unresponsive/broken."
The agent system that is used for utilities (power, water, sewage) seems to be identical to the system that handles traffic.
The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.
"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.
Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"
The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.
Sharing resources and services gets to be a joke, because all the vehicles ("agents") get bound up with the busses at the entrances to cities.
TL;DR: Fixing the way the game handles traffic and "sims" will fix 90% of the problems plaguing players!
Sounds like a complete disaster. The game needs more than an offline patch to make it playable.
I manually ripped and edited the Prima eGuide (the premium one) so that it's at least partly navigable offline. I also have access to the print version (can't scan it as I'm in the middle of a move) and it actually seems identical, so you won't miss much by just having the eGuide. PM me if you're interested but keep in mind it's almost bedtime here so I might not get back to you until tomorrow. It's only missing one tiny section on the Heroes & Villains Set because I consider that DLC and only wanted the base version covered.
I manually ripped and edited the Prima eGuide (the premium one) so that it's at least partly navigable offline. I also have access to the print version (can't scan it as I'm in the middle of a move) and it actually seems identical, so you won't miss much by just having the eGuide. PM me if you're interested but keep in mind it's almost bedtime here so I might not get back to you until tomorrow. It's only missing one tiny section on the Heroes & Villains Set because I consider that DLC and only wanted the base version covered.
well explained on the EA forum why this game is broken
Quote:
Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.
"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.
Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"
well explained on the EA forum why this game is broken
Quote:
Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.
"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.
Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"
I wouldn't be surprised if they told us that sims are reskinned automatically every time and we don't know how it works
So it's just another false advertisement from EA.
They just made it that way because probably there was no way that any computer could handle what they promised - every sim in the city being individual. Computing that amount of data (with thousands of sims) would require a computer cluster and not a single gaming desktop.
sar·casm | \ ˈsär-ˌka-zəm \
1: a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2a: a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual
b: the use or language of sarcasm
So it's just another false advertisement from EA.
They just made it that way because probably there was no way that any computer could handle what they promised - every sim in the city being individual. Computing that amount of data (with thousands of sims) would require a computer cluster and not a single gaming desktop.
don't think so. Its not like the cpu would have to handle some complex ai behavior or anything. It would be as simple as "sim1 , assign habitat, assign workplace" and then a simple pathfinding from habitat to workplace. Done.
Its not like it has to simulate behavior or anything. Its simply lazy coding, nothing else.
Last edited by Sin317 on Wed, 13th Mar 2013 09:56; edited 1 time in total
Well, the server-side issue wasn't a surprise since I was still able to play the game when I got a message the server was down.
My city also got clogged up with traffic so I bulldozed it down and left the NFO2 region to move on to NFO3. (So slots open people). It seems you can't zone massive areas of the map like in 1989. I guess you just have to mix the zones more to prevent traffic from clogging it up. Not sure how to handle things with industrial then. Not sure if it's technically possible, but having 50k-100k unique ai sims with their own house, job, transport etc sounds like a huge amount of data that needs processing. Is that even possible on a 1 year old PC?
Edit: Sins response makes sense though.
Never argue with a fool, he will only drag you down and beat you on experience...
I thought that they said somewhere that each sim will be an individual with different needs but I guess I am wrong.
sar·casm | \ ˈsär-ˌka-zəm \
1: a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain
2a: a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual
b: the use or language of sarcasm
The most efficient city and beautiful design I made so far.
As Dxwarlock said earlier, avoid multiple avenue crossing at all cost !
My main avenue is still fluid as its traffic keeps priority over the simple roads crossing.
So hopefully my delivery trucks wont be stuck in traffic later on like in my over cities.
Also I found out keeping an eye on the people tab for RCI demands and developping the city accordingly helps a lot.
Before I did my zoning randomly and always ended up with industry or commercial building collapsing.
For those who don't want to buy this game and support EA DRM thingy blahblahblah :
Tropico 4 collector bundle is on -75% on steam (9.99€)
And it really worths the price !
Serious Rig: CPU : Ryzen7 9800X3D | GC : NVIDIA RTX 5080 FE | Mobo : MSI MPG Carbon X870E | RAM : 64GB DDR5 TridentZ5 Neo 6000 | Case : Fractal Define 7 XL | Cooler : Fractal Celcius S28 Prisma | PSU : Corsair RX1000 Shift | Monitor : LG Oled C2 42" 4K/G-Sync
Mobile Rig : Asus ROG751 JT | i7-4720HQ | GTX 970m | 16GB DDR3 \ G-Sync
Just for the LUL: PS4 Pro / Nintendo Switch / Wii U
$team, Orishit, Upay, PSN : Athlonic
So it's just another false advertisement from EA.
They just made it that way because probably there was no way that any computer could handle what they promised - every sim in the city being individual. Computing that amount of data (with thousands of sims) would require a computer cluster and not a single gaming desktop.
Nah, you can EASILY simulate thousands of people. I once built an entire ant colony simulator which had 100.000+ ants, all with their own AI and tasks. They built 'houses', gathered food, mated , fought with other colonies, guarded the food, shared the food, the lot. Nothing that much more special than what SimCity is doing. It worked fine even on my old laptop back then.
I've ALMOST started to look forward to waking up and read the latest news about ea and simcity. Another lie, what else is new? Unbelievable...well actually its what many have been saying all along. So online only is mainly DRM after all
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So what if it's broken, you should feel grateful that they even bothered to make it for PC 
A never ending circle of doom and gloom lol....next
, fought with other colonies, guarded the food, shared the food, the lot. Nothing that much more special than what SimCity is doing. It worked fine even on my old laptop back then.
