Rumour: SimCity Servers Not Necessary, Single-Player an Easy Inclusion
Anonymous developer goes against Maxis' public line.
For all of the confusion that has cursed SimCity since its release, an apologetic Maxis studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has held true to one compromise: that an offline mode cannot be implemented, due to the "significant amount of the calculations" that the game pushes to servers. According to an anonymous colleague though, this isn't necessarily true.
A SimCity developer, who has apparently worked directly on the project, has approached Rock Paper Shotgun to reveal that the game doesn't rely on server computations nearly as much as Maxis is suggesting. According to the source, the servers are only handling social elements of the game, and shoehorning a single-player offline mode would be a relatively simple process.
"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," the tipster told the blog.
"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.
"It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff."
Kotaku and Minecraft creator 'Notch' were able to play SimCity for a limited time in an offline state before they were kicked off the game. The anonymous developer revealed that the servers amount to nothing but a queuing system for keeping all players' cities in sync, and that performance suffered as city updates started to create a monstrous queue.
"The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue."
Recently, Maxis' studio head Lucy Bradshaw said that including an offline single-player mode in the game would be next to impossible as it would require "a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game."
A SimCity developer, who has apparently worked directly on the project, has approached Rock Paper Shotgun to reveal that the game doesn't rely on server computations nearly as much as Maxis is suggesting. According to the source, the servers are only handling social elements of the game, and shoehorning a single-player offline mode would be a relatively simple process.
"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," the tipster told the blog.
"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.
"It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff."
Kotaku and Minecraft creator 'Notch' were able to play SimCity for a limited time in an offline state before they were kicked off the game. The anonymous developer revealed that the servers amount to nothing but a queuing system for keeping all players' cities in sync, and that performance suffered as city updates started to create a monstrous queue.
"The amount of time it could take for you to get a server update responding to something you’ve just done in the game could be as long as a few minutes. This is why they disabled Cheetah mode, by the way, to reduce by half the number of updates coming into the queue."
Recently, Maxis' studio head Lucy Bradshaw said that including an offline single-player mode in the game would be next to impossible as it would require "a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game."
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