Offline Mode Coming Soon

[Hoipus 292]

I'd like to see some sort of region maker, if terraforming in game is out of the question.

[ebalosus 19]

I think that the top priority when it comes to modding will be to increase the city sizes, because that will address the other major criticism of the game.

 

After that, the simulator itself needs to be fixed and optimised, since it still doesn't, y'know simulate a city!

[YukiEiriKun 29]

Oh nooo .. EA just wants to steal your IP/mods without giving you any credit whatsoever.

 

And no, you can't (according to the guidelines) do anything interesting. But new skins! (whichs EA then steals and re-sells)

[ebalosus 19]

Oh nooo .. EA just wants to steal your IP/mods without giving you any credit whatsoever.

 

And no, you can't (according to the guidelines) do anything interesting. But new skins! (whichs EA then steals and re-sells)

 

That seems to be contradicted by what was said here: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/01/14/maxis-simcity-online-opposition-was-clear-ahead-of-launch

[GrayAnderson 6]

A few thoughts:
(1) I'm now prepared to consider buying the game.  I was among the many who refused to buy the game after the "online-only" decision was made.  I had a whole host of reasons for this, but at the core was the fact that I'm a regular long-distance train traveler and I can be cut off from reliable internet for several days at a go.  I do not appreciate being denied what is still fundamentally a single-player experience because I don't have an internet connection.
(2) Note "consider" above.  I'm still reticent because of the map size issues...and the fact that EA is EA.  The latter is a bit less of an issue for me than for others, but it's still there as an annoyance.  Ultimately, it affects my price point more than anything.
(2a) As to the map size issue: Look, I get that some systems won't be able to handle it...but there's a wide gulf between a 2-3 year old system with 1-2 GB of RAM and an "integrated graphics card" and something with a brand new GPU and 32-128 GB of RAM.  What is doable with an "average" computer is not the same as what is doable with a high-end one.  
(3) As to the mod restrictions: I'm going to put a hunch out there that there will be mods made which (A) aren't distributed through whatever system EA puts into place as a mod exchange and (B) which bend and/or break the T&C.  Folks using mods which fall into the latter category may get locked off the servers...but I'm sure there will be a workaround to any attempts to disable the game for personal use if EA tries to go that far.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

Having abandoned Simcity (2013) after a year or so of playing...

 

Quibble - It came out in March 2013.  That's just ten months, can't really be "a year or so yet".

[Herdervriend 46]

Do wonder, how will they di it with Origin? You still need to login to actually be able to play the game. Which ask you to have internet. So how will they manage that? Otherwise no problems will be stopped.

And what about illegal downloading? (Though Cities XL was in online mode also illegally downloadable btw). How will they stop that from happening? (I only download music, because it's allowed here).

 

For me it doesn't matter if the game is online or offline. I just care about the fact that region play must be make better and then I can live with the small map sizes. But yeah with offline play modding will be possible and I cannot wait to actually having NAM again, though I do not really thing this game needs NAM. Mean, I always got online connection and do never play the game anywhere else then on my computer. Funny btw that I read this when I, a few days ago, decided to stop playing alone and try out the play with other people.

[Hoipus 292]

I see no problem with people who purchased SimCity downloading it from other places if they dislike Origin or Origin stops working/ want to be able to play the game without having to connect to the internet later to login to Origin (does Origin have an offline mode? I know Steam does.).

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

 

Having abandoned Simcity (2013) after a year or so of playing...

 

Quibble - It came out in March 2013.  That's just ten months, can't really be "a year or so yet".

 

 

If you include the playing with the beta version then it's more or less a year.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Ouch. They could have had that a lot easier and actually generated some good press for a change. Now they face the danger that their product is actually evolving into something good, but a large portion of the potential customers has already been scared away for good.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Ouch. They could have had that a lot easier and actually generated some good press for a change. Now they face the danger that their product is actually evolving into something good, but a large portion of the potential customers has already been scared away for good.

 

It hasn't scared me. I will patiently wait over these next couple of years and watch how Simcity will evolve as hard core modders attempt to improve the game. Hopefully during that time terraforming, contiguous city tiles, a more efficient Glassbox and thus larger city tiles will arise from all of this tinkering. Add in new textures, transit options, flora, buildings and civics... Well at that stage Simcity 2013 will be my preferred medium for virtual landscaping/urban development.

[Larks2242 251]

I got this E-Mail in my inbox, Glad to see they are still making improvements to the game rather then just abandoning it giving up and shutting it down.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

 

Ouch. They could have had that a lot easier and actually generated some good press for a change. Now they face the danger that their product is actually evolving into something good, but a large portion of the potential customers has already been scared away for good.

 

It hasn't scared me. I will patiently wait over these next couple of years and watch how Simcity will evolve as hard core modders attempt to improve the game. Hopefully during that time terraforming, contiguous city tiles, a more efficient Glassbox and thus larger city tiles will arise from all of this tinkering. Add in new textures, transit options, flora, buildings and civics... Well at that stage Simcity 2013 will be my preferred medium for virtual landscaping/urban development.

 

That's fine, but I was primarily thinking about "normal folks" (unlike the ST crowd ) who may check out a new game, read a review or two, maybe play a demo or look at the game at a friend's and then move on to other stuff if they're not convinced. Not everybody is part of a geek community and follows the development of a game franchise for many years, after all.

[NCGAIO 562]

Exactly which reinforces the assumption that strategies of releases to bring back the  supposed MMO public  still did not work.

 

If the  launch of the off-line  come as promised will remove the only imposition to maintain online contact with the servers ie save in cloud 

 

This is certainly a position of the own publisher, already aware  that is unlikely  the social part get a reversal of the negative expectation and thus  maintenance costs of the service will inevitably go to uncovered if not already so.

 

Then remembering the saying ... "Go away the rings, but staying fingers"... The game can still be a good source of income with less expenses. (A much smaller service)

 

The problem is that the game was developed for this scenario and therefore all its limitations are more project constraints of than techniques  ie to change the essential things will not suffice only small patches.

[Xenocity 343]

Hi, I’m Simon Fox, lead engineer on the Single Player Mode for SimCity, and I’m here to tell you more about how we engineered Offline gameplay for SimCity.

When the game released, our fans were calling for Offline. I rallied the team to start making that happen as soon as practical after launch.

REENGINEERING A CREATIVE VISION

The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player’s PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the “time check” shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.

My team did, however, see a path forward towards Offline, one that would maintain the integrity of the simulation. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn’t be possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”, and she’s right. By the time we’re finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly.

REWRITING KEY PIECES

I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly.

SimCity was written to rely on the servers. The game routinely pings the servers for critical pieces of data (region status, workers, trading etc.) and it relies on that information to keep the simulation moving. This meant rewriting the entire system, which previously existed in Java, and putting it into C++. We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff. There’s lots of code that hits the servers looking for information. We’ve had to write a lot of code to produce that data locally, specifically for region information.

Our game routes pieces of data from one city to another as data flows through the regions. All of that code exists on the server, and now we’ve brought all of that down into the client. The client processes the region box, which is what all of the cities pushes their data into. We’ve brought that down into the client as well.

And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines. We wouldn’t want someone who was enjoying the Multiplayer game to find the Single Player game crippled due to poor optimization.

And it’s not just adding, we had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to Multiplayer include code and UI supporting Trading, Social Features, Global Market, Leaderboards and Achievements. And, all without crippling the Multiplayer game.

So where are we at right now? We’ve been working on this since August and now, we’ve hit Alpha and are in the final stages of testing before we release it as part of Update 10 in the future. On behalf of the engineering team, thank you for your patience on this one. We know you want Offline play in SimCity and we are really happy that we are finally getting ready to deliver it to you.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/engineering-offline-play-for-simcity

Hopefully this will fix alot of things.

[Miscguy 0]

Its nice to see the offline mode they once said couldn't be done being done. Now if they could only fix the broken simulation aspects. Such as people occupying the first job/house they run into. This will perhaps warrant me trying to get this reinstalled since I moved where there is no internet. Such places do exist, and I like many never thought I'd live there. So this means at least I can play my broken game.

[Xenocity 343]

Its nice to see the offline mode they once said couldn't be done being done. Now if they could only fix the broken simulation aspects. Such as people occupying the first job/house they run into. This will perhaps warrant me trying to get this reinstalled since I moved where there is no internet. Such places do exist, and I like many never thought I'd live there. So this means at least I can play my broken game.

Most of the issues have been fixed.

Though there are still a few sizable issues that still need to be addressed.

[SAGGG 47]

"Sizable" issues. Heh--like the Freudian slip there concerning the city size...

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Well, the statistical simulator of SimCity 4 used "shortest distance route." That was one of the reasons for the "no work zot."

--Ocram

[NCGAIO 562]

Finally the rewrote the game into a better language.

 

Hopefully this will fix alot of things.

Dear friend .... here there is a misinterpretation of the text .

Nobody said the game was essentially rewritten and much less something that has been done has to do with solving problems .

To be more specific...

 

Rewriting KEY PIECES

I wish it were the simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with the client dummy rather than our server , but it's more than that . Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function Correctly .

SimCity was written to rely on the servers . The game routinely pings the servers are critical pieces of data (region status , workers , trading etc. . ) And it Relies on que the simulation information to keep moving . This meant rewriting the entire system , Which previously existed in Java, and putting it into C + + . We've had to knock out the internet pipe stuff . There's lots of code que hits the servers looking for information . We've had to write a lot of code to produce locally que date , Specifically for region information .

This part of the text only states that everything that was in the project and needed to be shared between the service and the local executable that was a language WEB service had to be written as executable to run locally .

It would be foolish to believe that this was not so at the beginning of the project development and the most disastrous part of this launch was exactly the conversion to the client-server model which is the reason why those responsible were the first to go out

If the game's release had been successful and the servers were full of happy users using the social mechanic that wished to impose on a game typically stand alone certainly us would not be talking about the availability of a offf-line mode at this moment.

So despite being a good news it does not come to solve anything about the shortcomings of the design and subscale on the simulator and this certainly is beyond correction by small patches, is intrinsic to the model RenderWare + new_languageR.

[The_Balm 4]

 

Hi, I’m Simon Fox, lead engineer on the Single Player Mode for SimCity, and I’m here to tell you more about how we engineered Offline gameplay for SimCity.

When the game released, our fans were calling for Offline. I rallied the team to start making that happen as soon as practical after launch.

REENGINEERING A CREATIVE VISION

The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player’s PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the “time check” shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.

My team did, however, see a path forward towards Offline, one that would maintain the integrity of the simulation. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn’t be possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”, and she’s right. By the time we’re finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly.

REWRITING KEY PIECES

I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly.

SimCity was written to rely on the servers. The game routinely pings the servers for critical pieces of data (region status, workers, trading etc.) and it relies on that information to keep the simulation moving. This meant rewriting the entire system, which previously existed in Java, and putting it into C++. We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff. There’s lots of code that hits the servers looking for information. We’ve had to write a lot of code to produce that data locally, specifically for region information.

Our game routes pieces of data from one city to another as data flows through the regions. All of that code exists on the server, and now we’ve brought all of that down into the client. The client processes the region box, which is what all of the cities pushes their data into. We’ve brought that down into the client as well.

And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines. We wouldn’t want someone who was enjoying the Multiplayer game to find the Single Player game crippled due to poor optimization.

And it’s not just adding, we had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to Multiplayer include code and UI supporting Trading, Social Features, Global Market, Leaderboards and Achievements. And, all without crippling the Multiplayer game.

So where are we at right now? We’ve been working on this since August and now, we’ve hit Alpha and are in the final stages of testing before we release it as part of Update 10 in the future. On behalf of the engineering team, thank you for your patience on this one. We know you want Offline play in SimCity and we are really happy that we are finally getting ready to deliver it to you.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/engineering-offline-play-for-simcity

 

Finally the rewrote the game into a better language.

 

Hopefully this will fix alot of things.

 

They just rewrote the server side code for communicating data inside the region in C++ not the whole game. The core game isn't in Java.

[Xenocity 343]

If the game's release had been successful and the servers were full of happy users using the social mechanic that wished to impose on a game typically stand alone certainly us would not be talking about the availability of a offf-line mode at this moment.

So despite being a good news it does not come to solve anything about the shortcomings of the design and subscale on the simulator and this certainly is beyond correction by small patches, is intrinsic to the model RenderWare + new_languageR.

 

Even if the everyone who owned the game as happy as a lark with the game, it would not quell the even greater amount of people who hate the fact this game is online and is not a 3D remake of Simcity 4 (which is odd since Smicty 4 was EA's doing).

 

No new Simcity would ever be good enough to warrant acceptance by the majority because it is an EA game.

 

IF this game was released by any other publisher (except for Nintendo) it would have been accepted as a good game and the launch issues would have been ignored as growning pains.

 

Hell Activision could have made this Simcity into a shooter and there is greater chance it  would have been accepted  without a second thought.

 

Yet Bethesda was given a free pass, even though Skyrim was suffering from near game breaking bugs at launch and it took 6 months of patching to get the base game fully functional. The Game wasn't fully fixed until the end of its first year.

The PS3 version on the other hand was unplayable at launch and was never fully fixed.

This happens to be the case with nearly every game Bethesda releases...

 

There is something wrong that Bethesda's games are more buggy and broken than EA's games, but no one hates on them.

 

Blizzard was given a free pass even though Diablo 3 was made unplayable due to servers being overwhelmed the first few weeks ( they didn't even compensate the launch users with anything).

Bilzzard is still fixing the game and remaining issues won't be resolved for a few more weeks.

[spiritbw 111]

 

That's fine, but I was primarily thinking about "normal folks" (unlike the ST crowd ) who may check out a new game, read a review or two, maybe play a demo or look at the game at a friend's and then move on to other stuff if they're not convinced. Not everybody is part of a geek community and follows the development of a game franchise for many years, after all.

 

 

 

Pretty much.

 

What they set out to do was to catch the casual, facebook type gamers.  That is a group with a short attention span, and yes, they probably all left to do their own thing within a couple months.    Everything about this was a fiasco in that regards.  They blew that chance big time and got hammered for it.

 

All that's left are the hardcore fans, who now have to decide if they will give EA/Maxis a chance as they slink int he backdoor promising to mend their ways.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The price was certainly off-putting for the facebook and mobile gamers. The games that appeal to them are usually free or less than $5 with some micro-transactions.

--Ocram

[Xenocity 343]

 

 

That's fine, but I was primarily thinking about "normal folks" (unlike the ST crowd ) who may check out a new game, read a review or two, maybe play a demo or look at the game at a friend's and then move on to other stuff if they're not convinced. Not everybody is part of a geek community and follows the development of a game franchise for many years, after all.

 

 

 

Pretty much.

 

What they set out to do was to catch the casual, facebook type gamers.  That is a group with a short attention span, and yes, they probably all left to do their own thing within a couple months.    Everything about this was a fiasco in that regards.  They blew that chance big time and got hammered for it.

 

All that's left are the hardcore fans, who now have to decide if they will give EA/Maxis a chance as they slink int he backdoor promising to mend their ways.

 

You know simulation genre of gaming is classified as casual based on market data over the past decade.

Simcity is the flagship title of this genre and has always been labeled as a casual and kiddy game.

Most of the hardcore Simcity fans are casual gamers including most posters on this site, thanks to the definition of what casual gamers and games are.

 

So please learn the official definitions of what casual games and gamers are this day in age.

(I can repost the graph showing where each gaming genre falls and who plays them.)

 

At EA's last quarterly earnings report showed the majority of players were still regulary playing the game.

[jaredh 195]

Here is the problem before them....the user base is a fraction of what SC4's was when Rush Hour was pushed and the modding scene exploded.  There were hundreds of bats per DAY going up on their exchange, and no, I do not exaggerate.  It was insane for about 3 months.  Best case, we are looking at a hundred mods a month for SC2013.  I think that is way over estimating...probably more in the 30-50 range.  The final mod count for this game might not hit 5,000. SC4 had that many in a few months following Rush Hour.  
 
There simply isn't the critical mass of players left to see the mod scene explode like SC4's did.  Somebody is going to have to do something revolutionary to the game in the modding scene to get people interested...and EA probably isn't going to like what that would be.

 

As much as I would love to see this game become what it should have via the modders...it's a pipe dream to believe it has more than a very small percent chance of happening.  It's going to take a team of highly skilled devs that simply decide to fix it (like the NAM team did) and give up 2 years of their lives doing it in the process.  

 

I don't see it happening.

[The_Balm 4]

 

 

 

That's fine, but I was primarily thinking about "normal folks" (unlike the ST crowd ) who may check out a new game, read a review or two, maybe play a demo or look at the game at a friend's and then move on to other stuff if they're not convinced. Not everybody is part of a geek community and follows the development of a game franchise for many years, after all.

 

 

 

Pretty much.

 

What they set out to do was to catch the casual, facebook type gamers.  That is a group with a short attention span, and yes, they probably all left to do their own thing within a couple months.    Everything about this was a fiasco in that regards.  They blew that chance big time and got hammered for it.

 

All that's left are the hardcore fans, who now have to decide if they will give EA/Maxis a chance as they slink int he backdoor promising to mend their ways.

 

You know simulation genre of gaming is classified as casual based on market data over the past decade.

Simcity is the flagship title of this genre and has always been labeled as a casual and kiddy game.

Most of the hardcore Simcity fans are casual gamers including most posters on this site, thanks to the definition of what casual gamers and games are.

 

So please learn the official definitions of what casual games and gamers are this day in age.

(I can repost the graph showing where each gaming genre falls and who plays them.)

 

At EA's last quarterly earnings report showed the majority of players were still regulary playing the game.

 

This is partially true, but it's too polarizing. For example, do you think X-Plane is a game geared towards casual gamers?

[NCGAIO 562]

If the game's release had been successful and the servers were full of happy users using the social mechanic that wished to impose on a game typically stand alone certainly us would not be talking about the availability of a offf-line mode at this moment....

Even if the everyone who owned the game as happy as a lark with the game, it would not quell the even greater amount of people who hate the fact this game is online and is not a 3D remake of Simcity 4 .... blah,blah,blah

 

I do not see where the whole text of the post which is certainly useless to the topic has to do with what  quoted?

 

Furthermore the fact of writing about what it not knows and then edit to suppress the own mistake  cited by others, without  justified, leaves the impression of someone that wants never be wrong

 

It would be nice also avoid comments like "So please learn ..." because no one needs to be interested for the same subjects  in  that other someone else loses their time

 

I think the basic basic question here is whether the availability of offline mode will bring more interest for modding  which does not seem very likely.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The thing is that SimCity 4 is very much a Niche game while SimCity 2013 is more mainstream. The fact of the matter is that SimCity 2013 is more profitable than a 3D version of SimCity 4 ever would be. Personally, I bought SimCity 2013 at a discount and enjoyed playing with my friend. SimCity 4 was fun for me for years, but a decade is a bit long. The only people bashing SC2013 and praising SC4 are a small group of SC4 fanatics. Anyway, I am glad that modding is coming to SimCity 2013.

--Ocram

[jaredh 195]

The thing is that SimCity 4 is very much a Niche game while SimCity 2013 is more mainstream. The fact of the matter is that SimCity 2013 is more profitable than a 3D version of SimCity 4 ever would be. Personally, I bought SimCity 2013 at a discount and enjoyed playing with my friend. SimCity 4 was fun for me for years, but a decade is a bit long. The only people bashing SC2013 and praising SC4 are a small group of SC4 fanatics. Anyway, I am glad that modding is coming to SimCity 2013.

--Ocram

 

If SC4 is so niche (as you claim) and the people bashing it (the "small group of SC4 fanatics") are really as small a group as you claim, then why are there so many naysayers, everywhere?  (and by everywhere, I mean every site that ever mentioned the game that I have seen).  All the SC4 people are not out trolling every game site on the planet bashing away at SC2013.  You may have an argument that a small number of them are, but that would not even be close to half of the people out there bashing 2013.

 

I suggest to you that the remaining group of SC4 players is much bigger than you theorize.  I might go so far as to suggest the SC4 player base is bigger than the SC2013 player base.  Of course that number cannot be substantiated in any way, but just perusing the Simcity Reddit stream will show you the 2013 activity died down over the past few months as the SC4 activity ramped back up.  Certainly activity on this site suggests that (but this site never caught on as a 2013 site)

 

I also doubt your assertion that SC2013 is mainstream.  It had a chance to be...but the tremendous amount of problems it had in the first month ended the mainstream train.   EA made a mistake...they went after the facebook/iphone/ipad crowd with SC2013, but they created a game that 1) cost way too much for that crowd, 2) didn't work for at least a month, 3) and in the process alienated all the old school SimCity base (which is a VERY big group) by dumbing it down well below acceptable for them and essentially trying to MMO it.  In essence, they decided the facebook crowd was bigger and dumb enough to spend $10 per BAT and to do it by the millions.  That crowd didn't bite.  The established, dependable SimCity crowd didn't either, but they would have if it had been SC4 made better.  That established crowd would never pay $10/BAT though, and EA's profit engine REALLY wants to make millions and millions off trivial content, so they abandoned their steady revenue crowd for the pie in the sky and now they are paying for it dearly....and trying to get that established crowd to buy the game.

 

As far as profits go...EA probably made 3-4 times as much off SC3 and SC4 (individually) as they did with SC2013 (probably more), and that was in 2003 and older money...which means they made even less than that when you convert 2003 to 2013 money.  I know at least 3 gamers IRL who never touched 2013 because it wasn't a better version of SC4...if every person who bought 2013 can say they even know one person in that category, that would suggest far more units sold of a new SC4 vs 2013.

 

The issue is perceived profitability vs actual.  EA perceived the SC2013 change would equate to massive profits vs a real SC5.  In actuality, it equated to probably massive losses as a result of the enumerated list I gave above. 

 

Back on topic of modding....I finally read through their list of requirements, and it certainly doesn't give me any hope.