SimCity servers not needed to run game simulation: report

A SimCity developer has contacted RockPaperShotgun (RPS) to inform them that Maxis/EA servers are not handling the calculations for the non-social aspects of the game. The source also claimed that creating a single-player variant of the game would not be too much of a challenge.

This is contrary to statements issued by Maxis and EA.

RPS is a veteran trusted source in PC gaming news and they say that they have verified the integrity of their source who has worked directly on SimCity, but wants to remain anonymous.

A direct statement from the Maxis inside source:

“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.”

As cited by RPS, Kotaku recently published results of tests they conducted, with the conclusion that SimCity can run without a server connection for about 20 minutes before realising something is amiss. Venerable coding legend and Minecraft creator Markus PErsson also tweeted about his similar experience with the game.

All this rather undermines the claims by EA and Maxis that a server connection is entirely necessary to process the simulation aspects of the game.

SimCity 2013 region view

The RPS source describes what the servers are actually doing:

“Because of the way Glassbox was designed, simulation data had to go through a different pathway. The game would regularly pass updates to the server, and then the server would stick those messages in a huge queue along with the messages from everyone else playing. The server pulls messages off the queue, farms them out to other servers to be processed and then those servers send you a package of updates back. 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.”

RPS suggests that the other obvious calculations taking place server-side include region map sharing, import/export economy processing, and anti-cheating/hacking.

RPS’s source offers one final indictment of the EA/Maxis claims, which they described the game as being built from the ground up to be a multiplayer experience and that implementing single-player would be a significant challenge:

“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”

With the number of questions arising around this issue, and the always-underestimated tenacity of gamers in sniffing out a ruse, the ball seems to be firmly in EA’s court to respond.