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SimCity Going Offline Soon

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  • SimCity Going Offline Soon

    It's finally happened. SimCity is finally getting an offline mode over a year after its release. This upcoming update has supposedly taken Maxis over six and a half months to program and get working.
    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.

    Unfortunately, the idea of larger cities is still dead in the water. Hey, at least the offline mode is something to celebrate! I still doubt I'll reinstall this game.

    Look forward to Update 10 with the offline mode to be released soon.
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