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Massively Multiplayer Games On Consoles
Missionyrd writes: "In an interview on PlanetXbox.com Scott Herrington of Turbine Entertainment discusses the next wave of massively multiplayer games and their possible inclusion on consoles. Up until now MMPGs have been strictly created for the PC. What kind of things could we expect if they came to the consoles such as Xbox and Playstation 2 as well?" Isn't this what all the broadband-and-other network connections being built into or promised for modern console games are for? :)
Yes, there are ways and means of burning a CDR which will boot code on most Dreamcasts (there are rumours of some new models coming out which are not amenable to this method). I suspect this method was reverse-engineered from the commercial Datel product "action replay CDX", which itself is not endorsed by Sega.
Bleem!'s Dreamcast port is also, by all accounts, not sanctioned by Sega. We live in interesting times...
Ah so many choices: X, SDL, SVGAlib, GGI, ClanLib, ngine...
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"Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast and FF11 for the PSX2 are both planned MMRPGs coming relatively soon.
I haven't followed developments on FF11, but I'm fairly sure PSO supports games with up to four cooperating players. PSO will be massive, it will be multiplayer, it'll be magnificent I'm sure -- but I don't think it'll be massively multiplayer.
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"Twitch" games like Quake might require low latency and moderate bandwidth, but there are plenty of games you can design within the constraints dictated by a modem.
Turn-based games like Chess, Backgammon and Whist are easiest of all. Something like Tetris (I yearn for Super Puzzle Fighter online multiplayer) would be doable. A MMRPG is certainly doable, as long as the action sequences were designed not to require too much large data.
Q3A comes out for Dreamcast very soon indeed: I believe it will be limited to 4 players online. Let's see what they can achieve.
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I've heard of being able to play online against people in an arcade, but there was actually a better idea that I have no idea if it ever made it, but they were talking about Memory card ports on Arcade cabinets..
Yes. There are characters in the Japanese Dreamcast release of SNK's King of Fighters 99 which cannot be unlocked without earning them by playing on the coin-op version with your Dreamcast memory card inserted.
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...until the rest of the consoles drop the morally bankrupt licensing arrangements that developers have to conform to, we are not going to be able to release a Free Software MMORPG client that consumers will be able to use on their Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube.
How about Dreamcast? You can develop for Dreamcast without using any leaked or proprietary information at all -- just reverse-engineered stuff. Start here.
Note that there is currently a lot of homebrew Dreamcast development going on under Windows CE. As far as I can tell, this stuff is compiled using pirated devkits, and needs pirated WinCE runtime files in order to run -- as Free Software advocates, I'd expect you to reject these methods, even though it means some extra work reimplementing hardware-specific code.
I understand that NetBSD/SH3 is progressing well on Dreamcast. Perhaps that and a SVGAlib port would be enough to persuade me to get coding?
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This just seems to be away for companies to start charging for time on the serves. Which there is nothing wrong with that as long as they do not over charge people.
Interesting that the classic DIS stuff is so primitive, but these are application issues rather than network ones, and it will be potentially hard to scale up the MMP servers if millions of people start playing these games.
If you are using multicast (which I think modern DISs are aimed at, certainly the IETF LSMA work is) it's crucial to intelligently design the application and make good use of the multicast groups (don't put everyone in one big group, for example).
Some mix of MMP and multicast may be useful - e.g. multicast between servers or to broadband clients, and special protocols to other clients. The big advantage of multicast is that it's just a routing/forwarding technology, so if your client has the bandwidth it's more efficient to use multicast groups where you can.
"I'd sure love to see a multicast that could handle bandwidth overloads, but I don't think it exists yet. "
There is something called layered encoding that works well with multicast, but only really for audio/video rather than gaming/DIS: you send N streams of data for a single input multimedia stream, each on a differerent multicast group. Clients tune in to streams 1 to M, where M = N - stream 1 gives OK quality, adding stream 2 improves quality, stream 3 improves it further, and so on.
The result is that clients on poor connections can reduce the amount of detail. This might work for DIS if you could come up with a 'high detail' type channel that provides extra info for high-end clients on broadband connections. However, the filtering you were talking about it too hard for this sort of mechanism, so server-based filtering is probably still the way to go.
In the longer term, it's conceivable that routers may be able to run downloadable code, or even be programmed by the packets on the fly, which would enable this - however, this is very speculative. Search for tanenbaum and active networks for more info.
DIS is insanely wasteful. That is why the military is going to HLA. They have basically said that 'if you don't use HLA, you can't play'. (Wow, that rhymes). As a result, a bunch of sim makers (including me) are scrambling to introduce HLA into a sim developed with DIS in mind.
:)
That leads to no end of fun... at least its a different group doing it
-- toolie
Imagine the various levels you could have together:
Players are controlling areas in a RTS type environment, operating at a really high level (creating cities and starting/stopping battles, like Civilization).
The cities they create are given directives, which are acted upon either by computer or by human players playing a SimCity kind of game with that city. Money is fed to the city based on how well directives are being carried out (more soldiers! more research!).
Within the cities and surrounding contryside, individual battles (initiated by the people playing the high level RTS) could be managed by a Battlezone type RTS combat.
In the middle of all that, you could have a great game of Carmeggedon going with people racing through cities and battles.
And at the lowest level, you could just be a single person wandering around the cities and countrysides (as a Sim?), perhaps able to steal cars like in GTA. It would even be sort of like lving in a Dark City kind of world, with the cities morphing around you as the Sim City type players made changes.
And of course, above all that are people manageing multiple worlds and space battles in a similar fashion.
Obviosuly there are time scale issues involved - would a high level city/war planning RTS player be willing to wait while battles were carried out by someone else, and cities were managed on a Sim City type timescale? Would city builders be too frustrated when a war blew into town and started blasting huge chucks out of a well-crafted city? I think all those issues are manageable, and would probably add a lot to any of the games.
In a way, you can already see the start of that trend at it's most basic in many games now, where you control things on a high level but can step into a single unit at any time. This just adds a few more degrees of action in either direction.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not a frequent gamer, console or otherwise, but I like the idea of the persistent world that many games create.
...)
What I'm curious about is whether there are any game worlds online which allow multiple games (or rather *types* of games) to coexist and interact on the same network, even if the players are primarily playing only one of them in particular.
For instance (and I know I'm jumping genres, but indulge just for a second, ok?!), are there any gaming systems which would allow the players of a game like Grand Theft Auto to "interact with" the players of an auto racing game? (That is, steal their cars, perhaps complete the race, perhaps put them in hock
Since the Real World is full of people doing different things and with different motivations, I think this would improve the realism and interest of game worlds as well.
I really like this idea, and if there is no such system it would be neat to work toward one. Is there an equivalent (again, leaping from category to category and ignoring an orders-of-magniture change in complexity) to RDF for games, so different games could recognize and accomodate entirely different types of characters?
OK, now you can ridicule me;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
> Who needs patches when you make the game right the first time?
:)
Ever heard of EXPLOITS?
QA does NOT find ALL bugs, as much as we developers wished it did
> On account of the inevitable bandwidth increase, games can mostly be on the central server, and hence most patches can be server side or implemented "real-time" before the game actually begins, also relieving the need for a local storage device.
In an ideal world, server changes wouldn't break clients. But we're not there yet.
Why should such long-reaching standardization be necessary? The way I see it, all that is needed is that the protocol used by any one game, say Quake 3 Arena, is standardized across platforms. To me, as a programmer, that sounds like a no-brainer anyway, so... The purpose of WAP was to create a protocol for wireless applications (doh!), but in the case of consoles and computers connected to the Internet, that protocol already exists--it's called IP. Sure, it could make sense for the industry to form some kind of committe to standardize some higher-level network API (like DirectPlay), but I don't see that happening any time soon. It's all about interoperability, and it's hard to beat good old UDP-over-IP for that. Already standardized and implemented, and rather well-known by programmers. Hardware vendors just need to make sure that an API to access it (not necessarily the traditional "sockets" API, although it might make sense due to experience and documentation etc.) is available, and voila!
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Anyone who's played any serious online games over a modem knows how this is not going to pan out until consoles include an ethernet port for DSL or Cable modems.
But then what console cheapskate (I see lots of talk about about this is great because Consoles are so much cheaper than PCs) is going to pay $40 or more a month for DSL or Cable Modem? (In a world where many people think $30 a month for basic cable is a major burden).
And what else do you get with this highspeed connection? According to Microsoft, the Xbox won't do browsing or eMail, just games. Do any others? Is Joe cheapsake going to pay $40 a month for fast game play only?
As for those who say a console requires storage, they are absolutely wrong. With decent bandwidth, the settings, save games and so on can be kept online. Same with eMail, or Web bookmarks. This is pretty much how WebTV works (and that's modem only!).
I can see it now. "UI specially dumbed down (er, designed) for thumb-buster joypad users."
Take a game like Asheron's Call, made by Turbine, the company mentioned in the article. Their interface is big, and admittedly clunky, out of necessity. Without the keyboard and mouse combination it would be impossible to have the full and detailed control of the game that there is now. I know that they're already making keyboards for these machines, but let's face it, if you're going to start getting into expensive external peripherals and more UI than a joypad can handle, why not get a PC?
Someone in a previous post stated that Consoles make for a larger market for games because they're cheaper. What they didn't take into account is that Asheron's Call will run on a regular old 586/Pentium machine without a 3D card (though a cheap 3d upgrade greatly enhances the experience, but I got one of those from CompUSA for less than $40 U.S. a week or so ago). A machine like that runs less than $150, with 15 inch monitor. Try getting a PS2 or X-Box for that price!
Interestingly Will Wright recently gave an interview where he talked about a new net enabled version of The Sims where every house would be controlled by someone. Aparently in testing it has resulted in some really interesting behaviou as people try to make their character popular. Would be interesting to watch as well, bit like a soap opera.
Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast and FF11 for the PSX2 are both planned MMRPGs coming relatively soon.
Being a MUD player, these excite me =)
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I'm not particularly excited about the idea of "real time translation" between "x" languages, simply because it's a bitch to implement-- and assumes that the player is "speaking" in grammatically-correct, properly spelled sentences (and even then, it's a crap-shoot). Not to mention the difficulties of culture clash.
I'm guessing that the first generation of console MMOGs are either going to be fairly simple, or extremely late. Using PC MMOGs (Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, EverQuest, any number of MUDs) as an example, the more complex these titles are, the buggier they're going to be; if every current and next-gen console was packing a hard drive, this wouldn't be much of a problem-- just download the current patch, and *presto*!
Bear in mind, that despite the fact that they're less of a network hit than Q3 or UT, these games are still hellishly laggy on a dialup connection-- the average MMORPG server has between 500 and 2500 people on at any given point in time; even if everything is calculated on the client side (and it's doubtful that it will be), there's going to be a whole mess of jerking, popping, and stuttering on-screen-- which is something that a lot of console gamers just aren't going to put up with.
Here's a question that the console manufacturers haven't even begun to answer adequately: how do you connect? SEGA has SEGANet, but will that be the only allowed DC provider? What will Sony do? Who will own the server hardware for these games?
And, perhaps most importantly, how will console gamers react to a monthly subscription fee?
Five tons of flax.
No, they don't have to create a brand new genre of games. You can play a RPG in the style of evercrack or baldur's gate on a console - especially when the next generation of them (Represented at the moment by the X-Box and the PS2) will all have mice available and supported. Sure, you could get a mouse for your SNES, but it worked with about two titles.
Also, racing, fighting, and sport games will all translate into a MMOG without too much trouble. As for racing, all you need is a city or five that people can race in, with a customization scheme ala Gran Turismo 2 - Although I'd hope it would be far more powerful than GT. You should be able, at varying costs, to install motors from things like Camaros into cars like MG Midgets, and get a fairly realistic response out of it. Then you take your new car to the streets and race around ditching cops and beating down 'vettes. Don't think it'll sell? Consider the immense success of Interplay and GT Games' Driver. And that wasn't even multiplayer.
Fighting is easy. You're a wandering fighter (or similar) and you fight against other people. Personally, I'd have a three-quarter view as you walked around a world (perhaps like FFVII in the overland, with the rotating view feature and all) and when you encountered someone, a dialogue begins, or they just attack you, or you just attack them, et cetera. Also present in the game would be various locations in which you could train, buy supplies, and so on.
Sports is a little tougher, but you could tie football into a league system, with games played between any two teams that were active at the time. You get more points for beating teams higher on the roster, and you lose less points for losing to them. Trade players, develop new plays, yada yada. You can tell from my description that I'm just not into sports, but you could certainly develop, market, and produce the football thing. No word on whether it would sell, though.
The problem isn't coming up with game ideas. I just thought those up on the instant, and they're certainly less ridiculous (And the first one especially has a great deal of appeal to me; I'd pay for a game like that, and lots of other people seem to share my taste in games) than lots of games which have hit the market *cough*Daikatana*cough*.
The problem is implementing them in a worthwhile fashion. When you are the first to break some new ground, if you fuck it up, then those who come behind you are going to be less likely to succeed. For instance, among those of us who didn't like Descent, Forgiven was a no-go. More telling, if you brought out a monster truck game with real-world physics, a good soundtrack, and less annoying announcers, people would still shun it as a rehash of Monster Truck Madness 2. Well, those of us who actually remember the game.
Here's my pathetic plea to all the game developers out there: If you're going to make a MMOG, don't choke. If you can't pull it off, go make some nice safe title and pull in some more cash until you can hire someone competent. Don't do a half-assed job on a new type of title, because you're going to screw it up for everyone: The developers, the financiers, and the people who are supposed to be most important in this cycle: The gamers.
If you don't believe that the gamers are the most important part of all this, you need to get out of the industry. Now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
While I admit it has a bit of a strange menu system (basically, the player on the other end of the line can move the pointer around on your screen if he wishes. Eerie...) the game play itself is surprisingly smooth, even over a bad modem connection.
Point is, something doesn't need to be "massively" multiplayer to be fun. Sports like football, hockey and baseball are fun with only a few players.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I have been following the Indrema news fairly closely, hoping that we will be able to put together a WorldForge client package for it, but until the rest of the consoles drop the morally bankrupt licensing arrangements that developers have to conform to, we are not going to be able to release a Free Software MMORPG client that consumers will be able to use on their Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube.
In a sense I think this particular war has already been lost. All the companies that allowed free access to their platform have now left the scene due to the lack of control they had on the quality of the games available, and their inability to compete with consoles sold as loss leaders. Does anyone see a bright future for Open console gaming, or are we doomed to put up with expensive licensing agreements, closed hardware and closed markets?
Dreamcast has had a keyboard since release. Its an extra purchase, of course, but its easy enough to get. PS2 and Xbox will also have optional keyboards.
The idea that the new generation of consoles will allow players to enter any number of online worlds in which they can interact with potentially vast numbers of other players is both intriguing and scary at the same time.
It's intriguing because it will bring the technology needed to do this into millions of homes worldwide, in an easy to use format which Joe Sixpack and his wife and kids can all enjoy - just look at the penetration delivered by the Playstation into family homes worldwide. Although games like Ultima Online and Everquest exist at the moment, the numbers using them pale to what these new consoles could bring.
In an interactive world populated by a cast of thousands, who knows what interactions will occur? It'll be like watching a miniture version of this world, but one that can experiment with different scenarios.
And this brings me on to the danger of these developments. With every new technology the potential for immersion grows, and more and more people, especially children, become vulnerable to losing track of the real world in their electronic fantasies. We must never lose track of the beauty that is the Lord's creation, even when false realities seem better to some of us, especially the technically-orientated but socially inept people that /. is primarily made up of. No virtual reality can ever match the real one, and people who lose sight of this are in danger of becoming less than human.
So I'm going to be looking at these with interest, but I'm going to be doing so from a step back.
For a view of what might be needed from the network to handle this sort of application, see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/lsma-charter.htm l - this is an IETF working group that has been documenting and classifying the types of network demands (stringent QoS needs, very large multicast groups, etc) made by distributed interactive simulations (DISs).
DISs can be networked military simulators located around the world (this is how the US Army rehearsed the Gulf War and continues to train its tank crew), or massively multiplayer games.
Such simulations/games may in the future have up to 100,000 simulated objects, representing human or computer-managed players.
Until recently, I'd played MUDs for a long time (about a decade). They started out with small groups of people that were mostly tech-oriented (particularly when the internet wasn't a household word).
As the internet spread, and particularly after AOL was unleashed upon us, more and more people started hitting MUDs. I noticed that more of the immature people became noticable -- though I suspect that the proportion wasn't drastically different. The people that didn't annoy me didn't get noticed, so I didn't note an increase there.
This general trend hit a big bump once MUDs went graphical and mainstream. I played Everquest and Asheron's Call for 2-3 months each, long enough to see that it wasn't just a matter of proportion at work. Something else was making these games have a feel to them that was uncomfortably unlike the MUD communities that I had been used to. There are a lot of different elements behind it, and I haven't spent enough time on the problem to identify even a portion of them.
Some sort of societal transformation happened that is tied up in both the change to the game, and the meta-game (meaning the large number of fansites that a big game will have.... some of the forum discussions on these sites have a tangible impact on the game society itself). There are clans now that weren't there before. These clans have an impact on the game society, yet are largely organized outside of the game proper. There are lots of other things that demonstrate the impact of just the change to graphical mainstream games on the genre.
I suspect that the change to the console will cause large changes of its own -- though I won't be watching anymore.
it lowers the cost of entry for these games. Consoles are cheaper than PCs, so the initial dollar outlay to participate will be less.
I would imagine, given the huge number of consoles out there and their low cost, these online gaming companies are going to see a massive boom in participation when the console players are included.
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Sega (I think) is/was working on a game allows Dreamcast owners to play against people in arcades.
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Imagine: we could all interact with other human beings!
Since the PS2 uses USB, keyboard availability shouldn't be a (hardware) problem. Any standard USB keyboard should work. It's interesting to note that Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to use all parts except the connector of the USB standard for the Xbox. This means that while the machine could communicate with any keyboard, you can't connect it, since the plug won't fit. Also, in a recent interview, they stressed the point that the Xbox is a console, not a slimmed-down PC. Weird. Perhaps they don't know about Turbine? ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}