SimCity's "impossible" offline mode has taken over six months to build according to EA.
In March 2013 the official Twitter account's verdict regarding offline play was: "The game was designed for [multiplayer], we sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible."
It's a statement they probably regret making given it's now cropping up all over the coverage of the game's recently announced offline mode.
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As per the original announcement, "Offline is coming as a free download with Update 10 to all SimCity players. When we launch it, all of your previously downloaded content will be available to you anytime, anywhere, without the need for an internet connection. We are in the late phases of wrapping up its development and while we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible, our priority is to make sure that it's as polished as possible before we release it".
The single player mode's lead engineer, Simon Fox, has now gone into further detail regarding the process to explain what took so long. "By the time we're finished we will have spent over six and a half months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly," said Fox. "SimCity was written to rely on the servers. The game routinely pings the servers for critical pieces of data (region status, workers, trading etc.) and it relies on that information to keep the simulation moving. 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."
The process also involved cutting out parts of SimCity: "We had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to Multiplayer including code and UI supporting Trading, Social Features, Global Market, Leaderboards and Achievements. And, all without crippling the Multiplayer game."
The mode has been in development since August and is now at the alpha testing stage. No exact date has been set but offline will be released as part of update 10 in the near future.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
