What's a company secret you can share now that you no longer work there?

CaspianXI@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 1257 points –
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i worked for a hybrid hosting and cloud provider that was partnered with Electronic Arts for the SimCity reboot.

well half way through they decided our cloud wasn’t worth it, and moved providers. but no one bothered to tell all the outsourced foreign developers that they were on a new provider architecture.

all the shit storm fail launch of SimCity was because of extremely shitty code that was meant to work on one cloud and didn’t really work on another. but they assumed hurr hurr all server same.

so you guys got that shit launch and i knew exactly why and couldn’t say a damn thing for YEARS

Not to put the blame on the devs, but the problems might have been attenuated by defining a proper interface layer against the server.

It's a damn single player game 💀

The multiplayer stuff was neat in theory, but any multiplayer thing you did took like 20+ minutes to actually propagate to other players games

I wonder if that's related to "the wrong cloud". Imagine if someone wrote some super slick code that worked really really well in the original cloud, and just couldn't figure out how to make it work in the new cloud, so everything is just an awful workaround.

Unless you're really deep into a particular provider's unique-esque products (Lambda, Azure AD, Fargate, etc), this is exactly why things like Terraform exist.

Oh for sure, but the games industry is one of the few that still does some weird stuff because a lot of the software is only expected to last 5 years or so at most, and needs to get every drop of performance.

I could definitely see some hyper optimized cloud API looking really great and then not having an equivalent in another ecosystem (or at least not one that could be quickly swapped out just before release).

Your comment seems to be related to something else… or I’m stupid, which is entirely plausible, too.

I think it's refering to the fact that the reboot SimCity was a single player game (you could never play with someone else) but that was always online anyway

All this fuss over servers for a single player game. Not only did they handle the migration poorly, it shouldn't need to talk to servers period!

That’s cool to know! I had been wondering what happened with that historically bad launch.

I knew that's gonna be gold after I read that first sentence