Cities XL online playing

[Didytz 0]

Hello,

I am opening this topic because I was inspired by other topic The Unofficial Official Petition to Reinstate MMO. This post could fit to that topic but i don't want to go offtopic there  so i am opening new one.

I must admit that I didn't try MMO version of CXL and for that was only one reason: I didn't want to pay for such service. I don't have nothing against higher price for game but then let me play with community for free.

And i think that this is not impossible to achieve. As i understood Monte Cristo shut down its MMO offer because they couldn't maintain server costs because of low interests for it. Ok i understand that, but I also ask: Why run own server and spend time and money on it? Why don't let community maintain servers and MC make profit on game sale and addon packs.

Example for this could be IVAO (or VATSIM). Everyone who like to fly around in MS Flight Simulator (or X-Plane) already knows what I am talking about.

IVAO (www.ivao.aero - i am not advertising but it is easier to get whole picture of what i am talking about)  is online community where people from whole world can connect and fly together with thousands of pilots and ATC. You have to buy Flight Simulator or X-plane but you don't have to pay for flying online.

IVAO servers are located in whole world and they are maintained by community and not Microsoft.  And i think that model could be ideal for Cities XL. Monte Cristo develop game and addons and make profit on that but why not make it possible to use that game in similar way as you can use Flight Simulator on IVAO.

 

English is not my first language so i have little difficulties to explain everything what i want to say but i think that you can get idea from above example. Maybe someone said this before but i didn't find it... so if this is double topic i apologize.

And to conclude:

-Playing Cities XL with other players is great idea for me. Solo playing is just not realistic enough. (Same as flying in Flight simulator. You can fly offline, with AI driven airplanes as you can build city and make deals with AI mayors and sell them water or power but it is not same as when you have human "on the other side")

-Paying for this option is just not sound good to majority.

-Making it possible to play "online" would for sure boost game popularity.

[kingBosko15 1]

i'm agree what u are telling.

If monte cristo do the same as by microsoft flight simulator it will be great.

i played cities xl online only the 7 -days trial, and i enyoed to playing with other players.

i realy miss planet offer. singleplayer is not as fun as online.

i hear that they are working on cities xl 2011.

what exactly will be cities 2011?

will it be a completly new game or just an add-on pack that u must pay or something else?

[IntoxiNation 0]

You're dealing with two totally different gaming scenarios. In FS, you are actively playing with other people as you are connected. In CXL, the trading system depends upon being able to trade even if another city is offline. You would still need some centralized database to keep track of all the ongoing and pending trades.

To better illustrate, take this scenario. You and me are both playing at the same time on Sunday. You take a trade from me for so much oil at 500 tokens, or whatever. Now on Monday you decide to delete your city. I don't come back on until Thursday and you stay offline for a week or two. There has to be a mechanism so that my city now knows that the contract we initiated on Sunday is now history.

You can see how quickly things would get fubared. If online was solely limited to trading, and saving of the actual city was done locally and you couldn't visit cities, then all this could feasibly be handled on a single server with the proper development and planning (good database design, using good caching like memcache and lightweight web servers light Nginx or LightHTTPD). After all, you would be talking about simple text transfers instead of the huge binary files that make up the actual cities.

[Didytz 0]

Yes I agree that FS and CXL are totally different games but i used that example just to illustrate idea of comercial game than can be played in "multiplayer" mode for free on servers that are maintaned by comunity and not game publisher.

I don't have technical knowledge so i can't talk about technical details of those servers but i am sure that there would be interested people for running one server at his/her home 24/7 and create network of those servers for other to connect.

As i understand IVAO works on same principles, members that have good enough connection, spare PC and will to turn it into server can join the network.

Again i talk about IVAO just as example and I am aware of all differences between those games.

Maybe, if MC give its code which they used for planet offer and allow its usage and adaptation in similar way that i described this would be relatively easy to make at least in theory.

[mr-tom 2]

I'll admit that I may be missing something, but I imagine that servers cost money to build, run on electricity and that bandwidth isn't free. I also suspect that a cities xl server would need to be quite a beast.  Finally, I'm not sure why MC would give away code that they spent years writing and which they clearly still hope to obtain financial salvation from.

Whilst I like the idea of a community project, I'm not sure that I really understand how the fact that it's "community" somehow makes it free. Somebody's still got to cover the costs.

[Aspire 3]

I agree with reinstating PO, but what i was thinking was that it should be like FS, online based connection, but then i thought... GFWLive is also free, and maybe they could somehow get or port the game to that system, Probably add more acheivements too.

[IntoxiNation 0]

Originally posted by: mr-tom

I'll admit that I may be missing something, but I imagine that servers cost money to build, run on electricity and that bandwidth isn't free. I also suspect that a cities xl server would need to be quite a beast.  Finally, I'm not sure why MC would give away code that they spent years writing and which they clearly still hope to obtain financial salvation from.

Whilst I like the idea of a community project, I'm not sure that I really understand how the fact that it's "community" somehow makes it free. Somebody's still got to cover the costs.quote>

Big big costs. I know one time playing around I found 6 different US servers I connected to on the PO and 4 in France.

[Garek Maxwell 1]

There was someone...or someones who posted in the earlier days of Cities XL about why they needed such large servers and possibly why it took a long time to save. Things of that nature.

From what I read, the reason why MC needed such powerful servers is because the entire city was stored on their database. I know this was probably done to cut down on cheating and to make avatar system work, but I honestly believe that was a terrible move to make. Instead of using the equivalent of a tiny text file to keep track of trades between cities and just gutting the avatar system in favor of a first person camera mode, they went with something that ...well, it required a lot of power to pull off. Yeah, it's nice walking around player cities and such, but that could have been alleviated by allowing players to put up their cities for download somehow in something equivalent to the Sims 2-3 neighborhoods. Heck, they could even turn that into a highly compressed file for easy sending that contains minimal data (no graphics, etc...) making it possible to store those things on their own servers. If this was done, then their server costs would never have been so high.

Anyway, had it failed in spite of these things, then it would probably be really easy for players to do the same thing on their own. Just trying to point out the problems of doing it on your own with the way the game was currently designed.

I should mention though that this isn't meant to bash MC at all, merely to point out that had they done it slightly differently the PO could have been cheaper for them to run and maintain...Possibly even making it a success financially due to it probably cutting down on server costs. I know it sounds negative, but it's not a positive situation for MC right now. I hope the best for them and their future plans.

[mr-tom 2]

Slightly off topic, but not massively given the point about games being stored on servers in order to prevent cheating.

It seems to me that the only reason to prevent cheating was to allow cities to climb the rankings legitimately.

But did you ever see the higher ranked cities? They were just massive blocks of buildings. No beauty.

To me, CXL is about creating somewhere jaw-droppingly beautiful. Somewhere you'd want to call home. It would be nice if the city managed to balance the books, but since that's a question of market prices, really, who cares? Other than to climb rankings, what value legitimate play?

Of course the other reason to store cities in the servers is to allow avatars to tour them. If you take away that, then all you have is an on line trade function, and frankly that could easily be simulated.

[IntoxiNation 0]

Originally posted by: Garek Maxwell

There was someone...or someones who posted in the earlier days of Cities XL about why they needed such large servers and possibly why it took a long time to save. Things of that nature.

From what I read, the reason why MC needed such powerful servers is because the entire city was stored on their database. I know this was probably done to cut down on cheating and to make avatar system work, but I honestly believe that was a terrible move to make. Instead of using the equivalent of a tiny text file to keep track of trades between cities and just gutting the avatar system in favor of a first person camera mode, they went with something that ...well, it required a lot of power to pull off. Yeah, it's nice walking around player cities and such, but that could have been alleviated by allowing players to put up their cities for download somehow in something equivalent to the Sims 2-3 neighborhoods. Heck, they could even turn that into a highly compressed file for easy sending that contains minimal data (no graphics, etc...) making it possible to store those things on their own servers. If this was done, then their server costs would never have been so high.

Anyway, had it failed in spite of these things, then it would probably be really easy for players to do the same thing on their own. Just trying to point out the problems of doing it on your own with the way the game was currently designed.

I should mention though that this isn't meant to bash MC at all, merely to point out that had they done it slightly differently the PO could have been cheaper for them to run and maintain...Possibly even making it a success financially due to it probably cutting down on server costs. I know it sounds negative, but it's not a positive situation for MC right now. I hope the best for them and their future plans.quote>

IMHO that was a major killer for them. When I did my testing I noticed about 30mb transferred between my computer and the CXL servers in under 20 minutes for a city with a population less than 40,000. Networks are like plumbling in your house - they can only handle so much information being pushed through them. Then you have hard drives storing the cities, and those can only write information so fast. Having these huge city files automatically save to their servers every few minutes was a huge price impact.

[Didytz 0]

Well, i think that problem of running server at home/office today is not big problem for lot of people. Lot of us now have really fast connections that can handle traffic. Also, i don't think that for server of this kind you have to run some beast of machine.

If i am concerned i would make it something like this: Cities XL made for "single player" upgrade with some kind of addon or something that would allow us to connect to server and communicate, do business and etc with other connected people. All data (cities) store locally on clients hd.

Visiting other peoples cities are not so important (if you ask me) or that could be done by some kind of P2P download of city directly from user before visting...

In this way, servers would not be some strong machines with TB hard drives, everything what would be shared is simple data and small files. This can't be more complicated than IVAO servers or some Counter Strike server and as we are all aware this can be done for free usage.

[Mootilda 76]

That might be the way that it should work, but it's not the way that MC coded it. If they wanted to do it your way, they'd have to rewrite the entire online system. Lots of work, with no benefit to them at all.

To convince a company to do this kind of work, you really need to make a business case for it.  Expenses have to be significantly less than expected income.  MC closed down the online component because they had far less income than they expected, so it stopped making business sense to run it.

Now, you're asking them to do even more work with no expectation of income at all; it's just not realistic.

[Didytz 0]

Yes , Mootilda it is true but what MC has right now with all that code (originally written for planet offer) used for nothing? So it is irelevant how many hours they spent to write code for planet offer if that code and whole system is not used and there is interest for online playing but not in the way MC wants it...

I own few (relatively popular) web sites, and sometimes i make "mistake" as MC did with its planet offer but when i see that it will not work as i intended i try to make out of it what ever i can but i definitely don't throw it away. Even if it means that i will give something for free (it is already written, no commercial use - give it for free and make money on something else)

If i am "addicted" to some game i will buy any addon that come out and i believe that lot of players would do the same. But MC has first to give me opportunity to become addicted. So this will not bring money immediately to their pocket but it would be long term profitable. Again i will use my FS example. If i put on paper all money i spent on all kind of addons it would probably overcome original price of game, and there i see opportunities for profit.

Now i feel like advocate of this free server idea and trying to convince you in its benefits. I really don't care that much what MC will do but would like to help those guys with constructive discussion and maybe inspire them (if they follow this forum) for new ideas and make us all happy.

[mr-tom 2]

Originally posted by: Didytz

Yes , Mootilda it is true but what MC has right now with all that code (originally written for planet offer) used for nothing? So it is irelevant how many hours they spent to write code for planet offer if that code and whole system is not used and there is interest for online playing but not in the way MC wants it... quote>

I think it's called cutting your losses.

Originally posted by: Didytz

I own few (relatively popular) web sites, and sometimes i make "mistake" as MC did with its planet offer but when i see that it will not work as i intended i try to make out of it what ever i can but i definitely don't throw it away. Even if it means that i will give something for free (it is already written, no commercial use - give it for free and make money on something else)

quote>

I doubt it would be a trivial exercise to separate the PO code from the rest of the code and just give that bit away.  I imagine it would take a lot of work and again they would be throwing good money after bad.