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by lmkg
1434 days ago
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EA claimed that it needed a server connection because a desktop computer couldn't run the simulation. This claim was absurd on the face of it; EA couldn't possibly turn a profit if each copy of the game required dedicated beefy-ass server hardware to support it. But of course, on launch it was quickly discovered the game ran just fine without an internet connection. After 30 minutes, the game would complain the server would time out and shut down voluntarily. But all it took was patching the "30 minutes" magic number. Poof, problem solved. Long story short, it is an ongoing problem that pirates receive a superior product. (A problem for publishers anyways, not one for pirates.) |
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I think the charitable interpretation of EA's (fantastical) justification, was that they were planning to have some shared agent-based simulations being run in the cloud (one per "region" — where the whole point of the SC5 "regions" was that they were a sharding boundary for this shared simulation); where your updates to your city would be (asynchronously) incorporated into that shared agentive model; and then the interactions of the agents flowing through that shared model, would get reflected back into your city.
In other words, it wouldn't have been an O(N) computing-power thing, but more like O(N^0.5). Something that would greatly benefit from economies of scale, insofar as a region with 16 tenants wouldn't require much more computation than a region with a single tenant — and likely there'd be a per-region cap on the total number of agents to limit total simulation complexity.
Of course, this isn't what they did; but I think it's what they were claiming they did. Maybe it was even what their marketing department had been misled into thinking they had already done (or would do soon after launch day), because it was something their engineering department had tried to do, but just never got operational "yet".