SimCity offline play just a line edit away.

chyyran

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A few days ago, Gahars reported that modders got SimCity to run offline. Turns out that it didn't take much effort at all. See, it seems that all it takes for someone to make offline play work indefinitely, is commenting out a single line in one of the game's package files. That's it.

Someone now has posted what appears to be code for the game that orders a shutdown after a disconnection exactly that long. That allegation further punctures the talking point that SimCity is necessarily an online game, or would take a great deal of work to make it so.

The code is here. "Simply commenting out Line #22 defeats the force disconnect," says the person who posted it. The removal allows offline play indefinitely.

Source (Kotaku)
NeoGAF Post

That's some complex engineering there EA.

Obviously, saves won't work, but that's only a matter of time.
-insert mandatory pun here-
 
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Jamstruth

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*sigh*
THat doesn't stop it needing online. Everything is saved to the cloud. In order to make SimCity offline without official support you probably need to make a small server to run on the computer behind SimCity that catches all the calls meant for the server and saves the files locally.
 

chyyran

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*sigh*
THat doesn't stop it needing online. Everything is saved to the cloud. In order to make SimCity offline without official support you probably need to make a small server to run on the computer behind SimCity that catches all the calls meant for the server and saves the files locally.


Well no shit. Though, if you keep the computer running, you could theoretically play offline "forever", but the point is that you can "play" offline, saves not included.
 

Zetta_x

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Is it possible to edit the host file to redirect the cloud server to a local server?
Edit: Use Wireshark to see where saving data goes to?
 

Rydian

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Is it possible to edit the host file to redirect the cloud server to a local server?
Edit: Use Wireshark to see where saving data goes to?
Without the actual program running locally to format the save data, a redirect isn't much use.

In the case of earlier online-only DRM things like Assassin's Creed 2 or whatever, that was just HTTP streaming assets on request, which is why they could just stick apache in the crack.
 
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Zetta_x

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I wonder if it's possible to create a modified way of saving like save states. A way to take a current snapshot of memory and load it later?
 

Rydian

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I wonder if it's possible to create a modified way of saving like save states. A way to take a current snapshot of memory and load it later?
Hourglass is a program made to allow TASing Windows games via something akin to save state, but it currently only works with a very limited set of software.
 
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Zetta_x

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Hourglass is a program made to allow TASing Windows games via something akin to save state, but it currently only works with a very limited set of software.
Not even sure how much memory would need to be captured to do this either. Well I'm out of ideas lols
 

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Not even sure how much memory would need to be captured to do this either. Well I'm out of ideas lols
I've done some experiments with dumping RAM and uploading it again (to get past a certain level in Mega Man X8), but it was very messy and rarely worked due to Windows programs relying on the OS for a lot of things, which is why wrappers are often needed to fake/interpolate the info so programs don't realize something's wrong, etc.

It shouldn't be too hard for saving to come about. After all the save is sent to the user's PC and back, it could be logged and stored/retrieved as-is with a little server thing I assume.
 
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Blaze163

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This story just gets better and better. It's seriously just one line of code needing alteration? Sweet jesus, EA. What little remained of your reputation just got slammed in the ring like a prison bitch.

I'm guessing the hacker's next priority is to create some sort of save system akin to the Real Time Save system my old CycloDS Evolution used, only more advanced? Sounds like give it a few more days and they'll have screwed EA over completely.
 

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Removing a variable assignment. Hah.

Doesn't make saving local, but still.

It still baffles me as to why they can't just accept that the game should be playable offline but all content has to be uploaded to the server in order to keep on playing, and the data has to go through authentication when you save. EA is constantly trying to cover up the fact that the always online functionality is for the core of the game, when clearly that isn't the case. So it's high time they stop treating players like they are stupid and just accept that they were forcing DRM down our throats. They aren't doing themselves any favors by just trying to pretend that always online isn't a DRM requirement, better to save face and admit that they lied.


Money? Fans? Stockholders?


Not for much longer. The way they have been continually pissing on the fans of franchises that they own, or fans of franchises that they are publishing like they have been the last few years, it's only a matter of time before they start losing money by the truck load. Companies can only go on for so long pissing people off before they just get fed up and stop caring, hopefully gamer's start adopting this policy and stop trying to give EA the benefit of the doubt when it comes to this kind of bullshit.
 

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Ahem, ahem...

That's the end of the line for Sim City. :creep:



On a more serious note: this really starts to show a massive lack of internal communications or even disagreements on EA's departments. I really think the one who publicly stated that the game requires to do calculations on the servers believed it to be so (if for nothing else, it's because the only alternative is that EA is evil. And not in a cartoonish sense of the word: literally evil). But that shows a terrible gap of the ones actually making the game and the ones calling the shots.
 
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Qtis

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Interesting read on what is actually being done in the EA servers. It's not like those things are mandatory, but I do see the uses of online servers. On the other hand, online only is not really needed for playing..
 

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I've done some experiments with dumping RAM and uploading it again (to get past a certain level in Mega Man X8), but it was very messy and rarely worked due to Windows programs relying on the OS for a lot of things, which is why wrappers are often needed to fake/interpolate the info so programs don't realize something's wrong, etc.

It shouldn't be too hard for saving to come about. After all the save is sent to the user's PC and back, it could be logged and stored/retrieved as-is with a little server thing I assume.

If it's in the JavaScript somewhere, then it should be really easy. I'm still in shock from knowing they chose JS to handle so much of the game's responsibilities, especially in an unobfuscated form. I'm even surprised it took this long for someone to figure it out. Unless it is obfuscated and the code dumped online has just been run through a beautifier. The presence of a call to setTimeout indicates the code is running in either a browser-based host environment or a small node.js server. If it's the former, then saving might be manageable using localStorage, whereas the latter could dump to and read from files.
 
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they should have made it offline and like oregon tail, visit other cities and cooperate/collaborate with them

forced online has never worked well IMO for a game that was originally offline eg. ff11 was the start of the downfall
 

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