EA and Maxis' claim that it would take "significant engineering work" to make a workable offline version of SimCity took another hit today. Hackers have released modding tools that disable the game's periodic server checks without breaking the simulation. The tools also unlock other features not in the final game.
reddit is abuzz with news and guides for installing the SimCityPak, a downloadable package of files that lets players edit many elements of the UI and underlying game logic. The tools aren't incredibly user-friendly for the time being, but those with some Javascript experience and patience to learn can do things like disable the online connectivity requirement, fix the "fudged" population display, and even affect how the basic simulation works in some ways.
Hackers are still poring through the code to see what kinds of new features and gameplay can be unlocked (including, potentially, the holy grail of increased city size limits), but one of the most exciting discoveries so far has been a way to easily uncover the developers' debug mode. This mode allows for many features that players have been asking for in the consumer version of the game, including the ability to build highways through city limits and in the regional "dead space" between cities. These changes will apparently stay valid in the wider region after the city is synced to EA's central servers, though other users' cities will not see edits made to the regional landscape.
The debug menus also include references to terraforming tools, such as coastline and waterway building, which are currently disabled even in a hacked commercial copy of the game. Options for editing airplane flight paths, creating new docking points for ships, and creating new city and "great works" sites are also alluded to.
Ars was able to download and install a package file enabling this mode in less than a minute. For those who don't want to go through the hacking hassle, this YouTube video quickly shows how the debug mode works in practice. Another video shows a player using edited package files to bulldoze and cause disasters in other players' cities in the region (though the poster claims this was done without server syncing, to prevent any permanent harm from being done).
Last year, SimCity Creative and Art Director Ocean Quigley said the game was being "built to be moddable" at a GDC panel. He reaffirmed that stance in a tweet just last month, indicating modded package files would be allowed (but maybe not directly supported) once the game was released. Given the potential for menace on public servers being quickly unlocked by players, however, this stance may not last.
It's been rather incredible watching the gaming community's reaction to SimCity's launch over the last week and a half, and it's impressive to see that community taking action to try to fix the myriad disappointments in the game as it was released. We can't wait to see what other interesting modifications to the game the community will be able to uncover in the coming weeks and months.
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