• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

SimCity modded so it can be played offline indefinitely + editing of highways

N

nickcv

Member
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-03-14-simcity-modded-so-it-can-be-played-offline-indefinitely

UKAzzer published a video to YouTube (via Reddit) that shows him playing around in the game's debug mode.

From there, he was able to edit the highways that connect cities together outside of the city boundaries. The game's city sizes have been criticised by some for being too small.

"You can edit the highways ANYWHERE - even outside of your city boundary," UKAzzer said, "and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it's all saved safely on the server.

"This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too."

Meanwhile, UKAzzer modded out the "fluffed population count" so the game shows the real population count - a disparity players have complained about since launch.

Most importantly, UKAzzer was able to disable SimCity's disconnection timer, thus setting it tp unlimited. Tests have shown SimCity kicks you out after around 20 minutes of offline play.

There are restrictions when doing this, of course. Access to SimCity's region features isn't possible, as you'd expect, and if you want to save your city you have to reconnect to the servers. But the video is our clearest indication yet that some kind of offline mode might be possible for the controversial game.
Click to expand...

http://youtu.be/Bmce9oIxJag
 
K

KojiKnight

Member
And no one was surprised... And a patch will be incoming AND EA will send it's PR squad to spin this all kinds of ways.

Why do companies continue to make false claims about their products when they know that hackers will find out within a day or two?
 
N

Nibel

Member
Incredible development of things, seriously

I thought Diablo 3 couldn't be topped - but this is some next-level stuff that people will talk about years to come
 
P

Peter Bazooka

Banned
KojiKnight said:
And no one was surprised... And a patch will be incoming AND EA will send it's PR squad to spin this all kinds of ways.

Why do companies continue to make false claims about their products when they know that hackers will find out within a day or two?
Click to expand...

They think their customers are idiots and that they're the smartest people in the room.
 
B

Big-E

Member
But it was clear to Polygon's review editor that all this stuff is impossible and that the people doing this know nothing. Polygon should be dissolved over this bullshit.
 
J

jambo

Member
I honestly don't know what EA and Maxis were thinking. This game has been cracked wide open within a week of it being released. They made it so god damn easy.
 
E

elfinke

Member
jambo said:
I honestly don't know what EA and Maxis were thinking. This game has been cracked wide open within a week of it being released. They made it so god damn easy.
Click to expand...

Yep, and the ease with which the always online part was pulled apart does make me wonder if it was added relatively late in the cycle.

And none of this should be a surprise. SC4 is ten years old and still has a thriving, rabid community.
 
Q

Quentyn

Member
Big-E said:
But it was clear to Polygon's review editor that all this stuff is impossible and that the people doing this know nothing. Polygon should be dissolved over this bullshit.
Click to expand...

Time to lower the score again.

Also this quote from Lucy Bradshaw is amazing.

"We offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud," Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw explained to Polygon. "It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."
Click to expand...
 
G

GeoGonzo

Member
KojiKnight said:
And no one was surprised... And a patch will be incoming AND EA will send it's PR squad to spin this all kinds of ways.

Why do companies continue to make false claims about their products when they know that hackers will find out within a day or two?
Click to expand...

Because fooling everyone for a day + fooling most people forever is good enough. And most gamers will never know this.
 
B

Bedlam

Member
It was pretty clear from the start that all that's being done on the servers is a few values such as "city x produces/needs product x" receiving updates in regular intervals, plus the message stuff.

How some people bought into the "we need you to be online for complex server-side simulation" crap was always beyond me.

This game never needed the always-online treatment. They just needed a few excuses for their DRM.
 
P

Piggus

Member
This is awesome news. My buyers remorse will be dramatically reduced if I am able to make cities larger than my home town of 20k people. -_-

I don't really mind the online DRM (as long as it works, which it obviously never does for a few days) but the region sizes are reeeeaaaaalllly lame. Only ONE of my four CPU cores was being utilized and it was around 50%. My GPU was at around 40% utilization at max settings. I know Maxis likes to create their games with lower end hardware in mind but COME ON. The region sizes are pathetic. It's not like you need super crazy framerates in a game like this anyway... SC4 runs like tit dirt on my OC's i5, SSDs, and 7970 yet it's still been enjoyed by many for years.
 
J

jambo

Member
Quentyn said:
Time to lower the score again.

Also this quote from Lucy Bradshaw is amazing.
Click to expand...

One thing I never understood about this is, if you disconnect you can play for 20 minutes before getting booted.

If there were a tonne of server side dependent parts of the game, how would it work for those 20 minutes?!?
 
R

Recall

Member
I love this. Individuals who figure out how to implement the changes the PR team say aren't possible.

How long till we see a patch that tries to "fix" this?
 
J

Jac_Solar

Member
I'd like to think Maxis intentionally made it easy to do this for the fans.

But now EA will most likely disable the ability to synchronize an offline game.

I assume the statement regarding server-side work by EA/Maxis is about the regional play, since it sounds like that is more or less required to keep progressing after 2-3 hours (Or something like that.) of play. But it sounds like that component could be somewhat easily integrated into the client, if it's already working on their servers. Might require some work, but that's what patches are for.
 
M

markot

Banned
jambo said:
One thing I never understood about this is, if you disconnect you can play for 20 minutes before getting booted.

If there were a tonne of server side dependent parts of the game, how would it work for those 20 minutes?!?
Click to expand...

The game is actually running 20 minutes in the future on their servers.
 
Z

zomgbbqftw

Banned
If it is cracked for offline saves and larger city sizes I will definitely buy it (and then crack it). Hopefully some clever modder can fix the sim parts of it as well and go back to SC3000/SC4 style mass simulation rather than individual sims being simulated as agents.
 
K

Ken

Member
Recall said:
I love this. Individuals who figure out how to implement the changes the PR team say aren't possible.

How long till we see a patch that tries to "fix" this?
Click to expand...

Patch Notes

Patched out exploits that allow players to have more fun than intended.
 
A

ambientmystic

Member
This is amazing!

The hits keep coming and coming, and I'm just grinning ear to ear right now. :D

Thread is gonna explode when US Gaf wakes up.
 
R

ruttyboy

Member
Peter Bazooka said:
They think their customers are idiots and that they're the smartest people in the room.
Click to expand...

Given the number of preorders there were, they might just have a case for thinking that way. Just sayin...

Personally I don't believe they will patch it to offline, not because they can't but because it would affect their DLC plans.
 
N

nickcv

Member
zomgbbqftw said:
If it is cracked for offline saves and larger city sizes I will definitely buy it (and then crack it). Hopefully some clever modder can fix the sim parts of it as well and go back to SC3000/SC4 style mass simulation rather than individual sims being simulated as agents.
Click to expand...

i'm with you!
the sad part is that we both want a game that is completely different from what was released...
 
S

Slygmous

Member
This game has had more drama over the past week than a soap opera.
If they can mod the city size and fix the pathfinding, I will actually consider a purchase. Hopefully EA don't patch it out.
 
J

jambo

Member
ruttyboy said:
Personally I don't believe they will patch it to offline, not because they can't but because it would affect their DLC plans.
Click to expand...

They could patch it to authenticate on launch, but that would still mean if you had no Internet or were on a plane or something you would be stuffed.
 
R

rockx4

Member
I can't believe the SimCity release turned out to be such a clusterfuck. Did Maxis\EA really think people wouldn't figure any of this out?

perfectchaos007 said:
I'm starting to think EA is just trying to defend their title of Worst Company in America. They beat Bank of America in the finals last year.
Click to expand...

It sure looks like it, I wouldn't be surprised if they won for a second year.
 
Q

Quentyn

Member
Sethos said:
You have to consider they are a bunch of incompetent monkeys. Maybe the work being done by modders right now was a steep task for the developers. Just maybe.
Click to expand...

I can't remember a studio, that lost so much creditably in such a short amount of time. The Sims was not for me, but I always thought Maxis was a respectable studio.
 
R

ruttyboy

Member
jambo said:
They could patch it to authenticate on launch, but that would still mean if you had no Internet or were on a plane or something you would be stuffed.
Click to expand...

It's not about piracy though, it's about advertising. It's about shoving their DLC down your throat whenever you play, it's about ensuring that anyone who is playing is capable of buying and downloading the DLC.
 
S

Sethos

Banned
Quentyn said:
I can't remember a studio, that lost so much creditably in such a short amount of time. The Sims was not for me, but I always thought Maxis was a respectable studio.
Click to expand...

Well, it kinda went downhill after Spore.

When you release two crappy joke products in a row, credibility takes a massive hit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Finally, I played Witcher 3: Complete Edition - my simple review with reference to Skyrim
LTTP
35
3K
Tunned replied
Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 2.1 Patch Notes Released
News 2 3
117
9K
DanEON replied
Wild Hearts Will Have Offline Play, No Microtransactions, Performance & Quality Mode Revealed & More
News
5
1K
Superkewl replied
Cyberpunk 2077: Patch 2.0 Patch Notes
News Hype 2 3 4 5 6
250
20K
Sgt.Asher replied
Dragon's Dogma II |🐉| You done fucked it up, Capcom
Opinion Analysis 2 3
110
7K
Chiggs replied
Top Bottom