SimCity‘s lead engineer Simon Fox to to the game’s blog to explain how EA and Maxis made the impossible attainable: he said that Maxis had to rewrite “core parts of the game” in order to support an offline, single-player mode.
Fox said that the game’s original code would “routinely ping” severs to maintain necessary data, such as regions status, workers and trading.
“[SimCity] relies on that information to keep the simulation moving,” Fox said. “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.”
Fox argued that the change to single-player meant the game needed “major optimizations” to keep the sim running locally.
“We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines,” Fox continued. “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.”
EA Maxis announced SimCity‘s offline, single-player mode yesterday.
This news comes almost a full year after modders claimed to be able to tweak SimCity to feature offline play alongside larger city boundaries.
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