Posted by
timothy
on from the please-give-me-a-driving-simulator dept.
PokeBlor writes: "Arena.net has an article by Patrick Wyatt, a Blizzard ex, that goes into depth about the creation of multiplayer games, ranging from replayability to lag. He uses good examples from Starcraft and Warcraft 2, two games that Wyatt was a designer on."
Thats pretty amusing, seeing how Blizzard has to sue people to stop them using their own lag-free networks cos the official ones suck so much!
Re:Avoid lag?!
by
Telastyn
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I wouldn't say suck really. They're just overutilized. I'd also assume they come under attack fairly often.
When you get a few hundred thousand users on a server it's going to slow down, no matter the code or connection... While 3rd party server apps might be faster for small groups, I doubt they will be as fast as the 'official' server on compriable equipment with a few hundred thousand users. And if it is faster, I'd be suspicious about what features/preventative measures were not included to get the speed gains.
Re:Avoid lag?!
by
Gailin
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Off Topic:
Figured I would post the email that I received from a Blizzard employee in response to the letter I wrote them regarding bnetd
Hello.
Certain programs have been developed that allow users to bypass Battle.net's CD-key-authentication process. Although these programs might have been made with good intentions, they directly promote software piracy by allowing users who have illegitimately obtained our games to play them as if they'd been legitimately purchased. Furthermore, because these programs allow access without a CD key, they render malicious users unaccountable, thereby eliminating Blizzard's ability to protect legitimate consumers. Therefore, Blizzard has taken an aggressive stance opposing the use of these programs.
Please take a moment to read through our FAQ regarding these issues at http://www.battle.net/support/emulationfaq.sht ml if you have any questions or concerns about Blizzard's stance on software piracy.
{WR655}
Thank you for your email, Kenny Z. Technical Support Blizzard Entertainment PS. If you plan to reply to this message, please include all previous messages between us.
What about a rating
by
asmithmd1
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The article doesn't mention cheating or a peer rating system like Ebay. This is something an online gaming community can add so that when you are tring to find a partner you have some idea how he has behaved in the past
I find that todays game players are spoiled and demand more and more from a game in both graphics and robustness.
You can always judge the quality of a game player by asking if they have ever used a MUD. I honestly think this is a genres of Multiplayer gaming which has been tossed to the wayside by 13 year olds who have never heard of a BBS and want to push the limits of their new GeForce4 as to show off to their friends.
Talk about robustness, anyone who can remember MajorMUD or Tele-Arena know what I'm talking about.
I just honestly think game makers need to look back and reignite the Text Based RPG craze. I honestly feel there's money to be made in it.
Only reason text based was popular was because there wasn't enough horse power for graphics. It was the quality of the game that made it poular. There were probably a few bad text based games. Just like today's graphically rich games. There are good and bad, just like in all products. Text based isn't better than graphics. And what's wrong with trying to see what your new $300 video card is capable of? Some of us can't wait for the day when game graphics will be indistinguishable from real life.
Re:My comment..
by
Zathrus
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
And what's wrong with demanding more robustness and graphics from modern games? Oh, that's right, you have fallen into the delusion that text based games are inherently better than their graphical counterparts. The belief that there will never again be as good of an adventure game as Zork (or Dungeon for that matter), that text MUDs were the apex of the ORPG genre, and that first person shooters are inherently sucky.
Of course, we will ignore the thousands upon thousands of MUDs, text-based adventure games, and so forth that outright sucked because they didn't have a cohesive world, storyline, had a broken interface, impossible-to-decipher riddles, broken code, or any one of a number of other issues. Clearly the fact that successful games usually had all of the above in working order doesn't mean anything.
Do you work for Hollywood? You know, that group of "big brains" that thinks the next Big Thing is to make computer generated movies, since Pixar and Dreamworks have been so successful (and thus ignoring that Toy Story, Bug's Life, Shrek, and Monster's, Inc. succeeded due to a combination of script, acting, direction, AND technology; not technology alone).
Yes, I played a text mud long, long ago. And found it boring and uninteresting. I quit after a couple weeks at best. Verant, on the other hand, has commanded $10/mo from me for nearly three years because EverQuest, despite it's flaws, has proved to be enjoyable for the most part. There are tons of things in EQ that annoy me, but the good bits outweigh the bad most of the time (and when they don't, I take a break, as I'm doing currently).
Future MMORPG designers not only have to get the carrot-stick model right (which is pretty much the only thing I think Verant did), but also incorporate a rich world, an intriguing storyline (as much as you can given the MM part), a good interface, and a rich graphical world. Oh, and yes, it'll have to be robust too. Or you'll have to have deep pockets to run in the red until it becomes robust (c.f. Anarchy Online - I hear it doesn't suck rocks now. I don't care to find out.)
And, slightly offtopic, but one of the biggest challenges they'll find is convincing jaded MMORPG players to come to them. I know that after playing EQ I have no desire to play another MMORPG, since I understand exactly how much of a time investment it implies.
Even the basics are hard
by
SilentChris
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I remember trying to do a simple multiplayer turn-based game in CS class a few years ago (a Risk clone) and even that was hard. Creating the network tools by hand, it was a challenge to get the server to properly handle the back and forth timing required (send move request, wait for request, take in request/send out another one?) I can just imagine a realtime game where every second counts.
Although, I don't think some of the algorhythms in place right now for latency (for example, Quake III Arena) are much better. I don't think it's fair to allow the computer to "judge" modem players' moves, and try to determine "if" the player would have got the hit. Not only is this unfair to the player (when they get to a real LAN tournament they'll be roasted), it's also unfair to the vet with a decent connection, because the newbie in essense gets a free hit. I would propose figuring out better ways to communicate over the network instead of trying to second guess the players' moves with algorhythms.
Re:Even the basics are hard
by
Zathrus
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're still not making sense. In fact, less sense than you were originally.
First you say not to "rely on the existing network code", and then you talk about creating "highly-optimized [...] UDP-based solutions". What do you think UDP is? It's existing network code. The only magic being perfomed is the data inside of the packets. Everything else - from the trivial handshaking to the deeply important things like encoding, transport, routing, etc. utilize existing code. What the previous poster was saying is that you are asking them to rewrite THAT code, and that is outright absurd. Go ahead and do so, but if you expect people to actually use it beyond a home LAN then they're going to stuff it into a TCP/IP packet which is not only going to undo any magic you may've done, but add additional overhead on top of it.
To go back to your original complaint, if you'd like to see how things work without having everyone using prediction, just turn it off. You can you know (and sorry, I'm not enough of a Quakehead anymore to recall the correct variable). Welcome to hell. There's a reason that id, Epic, and everyone else has started using player prediction on both the servers and the clients. Without it you're limited to the lowest common denominator for network traffic. Think back to Doom and how much it sucked when someone with a shitty computer or ethernet drivers connected to the game.
The key to player prediction is the right balance. Too much prediction and you get a lot of silly things like modem players shooting people on OC-3's after they're down the hall and around 3 corners. Too little and you make it unusable for anyone not on an OC-3.
I think the number one problem with online games is cheating. There have been countless times where I have been totally addicted to a game, and then a cheat ruins all the fun. People play online games because it is so much more exciting to compete against a real person. If the game becomes unbalanced, players will either move on to another game or use the cheat themselves.
We hope you have enjoyed this article. Check back in March for our upcoming article on one of the most controversial issues in Internet gaming today: Dealing with Online Cheating.
The idea behind setting up a game and giving it rules to create an artificial constraint that everyone agrees to work within. The important part is that agreement. Sure, you can technologically bend and break the rules, but that doesn't make it right. The idea is to level the field somewhat and then make it a battle of skill and wits WITHIN the constraints of the game.
The big problem with cheating is identification. If you want to go out and duel against other bot builders then it's a fair competition. Other people are out there trying to move and react as quickly as they can but within the rules. If you present yourself as one of those people (the "nearly undetectable" comment) then you should play within those rules.
So, I'm glad that you get a huge power kick out of being able to dupe people trying to play within the bounds, but you've completely missed the point. Note: The Matrix is a horrible example to justify your actions. The Matrix is about revolution and fighting tyranny, not getting the highest number of frags.
-- ---
I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
> I can walk into nearly any deathmatch in the world and win with nearly no effort at all. Like Neo. Like God!
I have a game you'd really like. The UI consists of a "play" button and a high-scorers widget. Every time you click "play" you win, and your name is added to the top of the high-scorers list, with a score one point higher than the highest score already there.
This is the most fun game I've ever played. I've never lost! My score gets better every time I play!!! I feel like God's own God when I played it!!!!!
Well, he might be Neo. Only someone really anal retentive would make a bot. To keep himself regular, he has to eat a liquid diet of that slop they ate on the Nebudchanezzar.
even if games had a 100% solid protocol
you'd still have auto-aimers in FPS games.
Of course, but this is the kind of cheat which
will always be possible.
That is because of the nature of the problem.
Shooting to the target
is the kind of problem which is
better solved by the machine than by a human.
I would solve it in a different way:
characters could be set to automatically aim
to the enemies (as an integral part of the game,
not as a cheat) but when he shoots,
the decision if the target was hit
is made by the server,
depending on many factors
(like if the character and target are running,
if the character is tired, hurt, far from
target, etc.).
It would not only solve the auto-aim
cheat problem, but would also make the game more
realistic.
My point is that when you have online
multiplayer game,
where people from the whole planet
play the game on their own computers,
the only sane assumption is that
sooner or later
(usually sooner than expected)
someone will use a hacked client.
So if you don't want cheats,
you can't depend on strictly manual skills,
which would be extremely easy for a machine,
like aiming to targets.
Otherwise, you'll have big trouble
when someone finally learns your protocol
or alters the client binary.
That could mean the end of fun for many people
and an endless fight against cheaters
for the game developers.
I like the idea of WorldForge project, which I think will be introduced
with Mason
and Werewolf, i.e.
to integrate into the game
the AI scripting of PCs
with identical possibilities as the AI of NPCs.
There'll be lots of ready to use scripts
and some GUI script builder, as well as
a possibility to write the scripts
(currently in Python).
So you'll be able to program your character
to always run away when he's attacked by someone
taller than him,
or otherwise always instantly hit the offender
in the face.
But also more general tasks, like eat when
he's hungry, buy food when he has no food,
find food when he has no money, etc.
That way when you don't play the game,
your character can still do something
useful, unlike most of MMORPGs where the
character usually just stands still or
disappear.
Thanks to that,
there's no point in cheating with
the client by e.g.
setting your character to automatically
train his skills for many hours,
because everyone can
easily program his character to do the same,
probably with just few clicks in the GUI.
Check out the Cyphesis,
WorldForge AI/ALife engine.
There's still not much of documentation,
so the Cyphesis source code is the best reference.
So that's about the client itself.
On the other hand,
from the side of network protocol and
the clean client-server architecture,
the client never gets to much info,
and it's never trusted to make any decisions,
other than just send to the server what the
character wants to do (not even what he actually
does, just what he wants).
I'll quote part of the Atlas protocol summary,
my emphasis:
Atlas is standard protocol between server and client. It should
work with simple/complicated server and simple/complicated
client and with all combinations. ASCII version will use XML.
Server might be thought as body for character and client might
be thought as mind for character and protocol is neurons
connecting these.
Features
Flexible and transparently extensible
Works at the same time with old and new clients
Initially XML used for easy debugging and later
optimized binary format.
Transmits only changed information and server doesn't
need reveal any more it wants.
Usually assumption is
made that clients are hacked and thus are not
trustworthy.
See also the
Atlas Tutorial.
The standard implementation of Atlas is Atlas-C++,
the source code of which
can be great for anyone who wants
to learn multiplayer games related network
programming, and high quality network programming
in general.
For more about Atlas, check out the
Battleplan and
protocols at worldforge.org
mailing list
(see the archives of scripting@ for
discussion before 1999, and protocols@ for later and actual discussion).
So, the point is that not trusting the client is
the fundamental aspect of game design,
not just a feature to be added later.
There are and will be games designed around
open protocols (where you can easily
read and change the client-server traffic in
both ways),
free software clients
(which you can easily change),
and servers (which you can easily read
and find out how they work),
but those games
won't have problems with cheating
because of their design,
not because of
security through obscurity
like in most of games today.
That's why I always talk about WorldForge
when there's a discussion about
multiplayer games design, security and cheats
- these folks do it
exactly the way how it should be done.
A b.net clone can let people with pirated serial numbers for games play a b.net game. Say I run a popular b.net clone server that doesn't check for the game's serial number, a hundred people regularly connect to it and only twenty five of them have valid copies of the game. Blizzard has lost out on seventy five sales of the game and the pirates have no penalties for pirating the game. Blizzard makes megabucks you say and thus seventy five less sales isn't even a market statistic. What happens when there's thousands of people running b.net clones each with a hundred regular users a majority of which don't have valid copies of the game. That amounts to appriciable percentages of revenues being lost. It makes sense to disallow b.net clone servers even if those developers personally aren't infringing on any of Blizzard's copyrights. Warez copies of Warcraft 3 are going to hit servers weeks or days before the game is actually released, if these people can connect their warez copy of it to a b.net server that doesn't give a shit who copies the game Blizzard is going to lose out on a ton of sales because there's thousands of college and high school students with fat connections who don't feel they ought to pay for a video game.
-- I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Other article
by
delta407
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's interesting reading, including "Lesson four: UDP is better than TCP, but it still sucks" and "Lesson five: Whenever you think the Internet can't get any worse, it gets worse". It's good stuff.
Re:Oxymoron...social gamers
by
artemis67
·
· Score: 5, Funny
True, most of the "social interaction" in online games consists of the following statements:
"You f***ing lagger! Relog now!" "Stupid newbie!" "WTF? You hacker!" "Camper!!! Kick that f***ing camper!" "0wned!" "Ha ha you suck!" "You #!@% Q#% @!#%$ piece of @#%$!"
Improved graphics spoiled Ultima series
by
October_30th
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ultima series was not exactly a multiplayer game, but I think it serves as an excellent example of how a brilliant game is destroyed by demands for "realistic" graphics.
With bare-minimum graphics like Ultima III on C64 all the action took place in your own mind -- the best virtual reality/graphics engine ever developed.
When the series moved onto a sort of 3d graphics in Ultima VI the whole atmosphere changed. Suddenly you had these STUPID, squeaky-clean looking characters on the screen instead of the rough bunch of veterans you always had imagined. All the monsters were pitiful caricatures of the nightmares I had fought in the earlier Ultima episodes. In short, the whole game was fucked up because you were being forcefed the (annoying) vision of the game developers.
game graphics will be indistinguishable from real life
Sigh. And what's the point in that when the purpose of the games is to help you to spend some time away from the reality!?
-- The owls are not what they seem
I don't know if StarCraft is 'balanced' . . .
by
stevarooski
·
· Score: 3, Informative
. . . or if it is, its very subtly so and outside the range of your average player. The article makes a great statement as to the importance of balance, and this is exactly what turned me off StarCraft.
Every time I played on Battle.net, anyone with half a brain simply played the Zerg and rushed the hell out of everyone else. Usually, the Zerg won. In a war of 'resource command' it would seem that those who can expand the fastest would win.
Just to convince people I'm not blowing hot air, look at the StarCraft Season III Ladder Tournement results and count the occurances of Zerg versus occurances of other races. By my count, of the top players, there was 1 instance of Humans, 2 of Protoss, and 21 people playing the Zerg.
--
- - - - - - - - Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Unit VS Race Balancing
by
Guru1
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It wasn't until we changed from Warcraft's "unit equivalence" to StarCraft's "race equivalence" that we were able to correct the most egregious play imbalance issues.
I find this to be a very important statement he made in regards to the development of multiplayer and RTS games. After warcraft, the piles of RTS games that came out all had some thing in common. A few races (or civs, etc) that had different units that all did basically the same thing.. the "ranged unit" the "fast unit" the "strong unit that is really expensive", etc. Other than some small games that didn't really make it off the ground, Starcraft was the first mainstream game that said "this race can do this and this other race is completely different". I believe that Starcraft is replayed so often because there is an incredible amount of flexability with each race and when combined with fighting against another diverse race, it creates an incredible amount of possibilities.
What makes this a great money maker for games such as Diablo and Starcraft (if they'd get off their buttocks), is that they can reuse the same engine they already had written, code in another race (or couple classes as in Diablo II LoD), and have people scrambling to buy it, since it adds an exponential amount of excitement to the game. If Starcraft added one single race (sold at the price of $25 in stores), I would instantly buy it.. not only would I be able to learn all about the new "Dotslash" race, but I would be able to figure out piles of strategies about how to fight Dotslashes with Terrans, or Protoss.. Just as the message boards are filled with people asking how to fight Druids with Necromancers, etc etc.
The game industry needs to focus more on additions to their games, instead of starting from scratch every single time. Not only would the players be happier, but I imagine the pocketbooks of the game makers would be happy as well.
Dave
Re:Unit VS Race Balancing
by
Alsee
·
· Score: 3, Funny
the new "Dotslash" race
No, I'm sorry but the "Dotslash" race is intrinsicly unbalanced. The Dotslash Effect incapacitates any target enemy.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
by
No+Such+Agency
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't be a MUD snob. I know it's difficult, we are all snobs about something, but it's not a 13 year old's fault if they haven't played some ancient text game that you liked so much. Hell, I've never played a MUD (I'm 27yo), though I've heard some were *great*. But they weren't necessarily good because they didn't rely on graphics. They were good, because like some cutting edge 3D games, they were designed and coded with care and concern for gameplay.
-- Freedom: "I won't!"
Re:Oxymoron...social gamers
by
alcmena
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I used to run my own Counter-Strike server, and I couldn't agree with your post more. It got so bad that I eventually wrote a program that punishes people when they would complain about laggers, campers, cheaters, etc. The punishment was 50% of your health. Do it three times, you're gagged and can only talk to your team. Three more, you're kicked. Three more, you're banned for an hour.
I'm usually one who is strongly against filters, but I have to admit, this one did wonders. People learned to either be civil towards each other, or they learned to be quiet.
Seems to me you're blaming the developers for what the legal department and the marketing folks are doing. How many Blizzard designers do you think really care which network the gamers use, as long as they play the game?
Aggressive play
by
Broccolist
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That was a bit of a disappointing article. I was expecting some major insights from a developer of such great games, but he mostly just reiterated banalities that any long-time gamer is aware of.
But I would add one more crucial point: gameplay should be fast-paced and aggressive. Sitting in your base and defending against unsuccessful attacks is just boring. In Warcraft 2, defending almost never worked and attacking was always to your benefit. The result was an edge-of-your-seat game where, among skilled players, every unit you pumped out was immediately sent to the battlefield and you were constantly trying to stop one of your bases from being trashed. I have yet to see an RTS which, all balance issues aside, is just plain more exciting than a good game of multiplayer War2. This is why I continue to consider it the greatest RTS ever made.
But Blizzard seems to have lost sight of this in later games. In Starcraft, sitting in your base and defending actually works, which makes for terribly boring games. Am I the only one who finds that games after Quake 1/Warcraft 2 have subtly become more and more slow-paced and boring?
Frankly, I would object to the "balance" business, which seems to be taken for granted by all game developers nowadays. Of course, games should be mostly balanced, but saying that ideally a game should be 100% balanced is going too far. A bit of imbalance serves to focalize the players' energies. E.g., in the original Quake, the most important thing was to control the rocket launcher and red armor, and this made for exciting games where players desperately vied for control of the key resources. In later Quakes, you can just pick up any weapon, since they're all just as good.
In sum, I don't think "balance" is the holy grail modern developers make it out to be. IMHO, the attitude of "balance above all" epitomizes all that's wrong with modern games. If a bit of imbalance is necessary to make a game that's more aggressive, fast-paced and fun, I say game developers shouldn't be afraid to sacrifice the principle.
I've designed many non-computer games for a few years now, and I see all the same issues discussed in this article that we've seen in face-to-face multi-player games. He covers the basics quite well. There are two aspects that he does not discuss which I believe are important.
First, good games are cohesive. The rules and the plot and the mechanics should flow together. The fundamental structure should dictate the higher behaviors in the game. This creates a game world that makes sense and learning a few basic guidelines are all that you need to get started.
Second, many games with three or more players and player interaction can suffer from petty diplomacy. If someone gets ahead in the game, other players can take time to squash the leader. If bad enough, there is a disincentive to get ahead. Balancing this problem can be quite tricky, and I would like to see more discussion about how designers deal with it on-line. IRL, we use hidden information, randomness, or high complexity to keep petty diplomacy from breaking a game.
Still, a good article, and it distills years of game design experience very well.
He has a point
by
Srin+Tuar
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The primary things done by cheats (looking through walls, etc) are things that the game does not prevent.
When you design a game you have to consider the players hardware to be untrusted. You cannot prevent a persons computer from telling him all it knows, nor can you prevent it from obeying his commands.
So to limit the information a person knows, you have to limit the information that is given to his computer. (If you dont want someone to know the location of all the other players in an FPS, you simply dont send them that information.)
Taken to its logical conclusion, The player's PC would end up being thin terminals doing I/O, while all the game logic is hosted on a central trusted server.
For games with a central server, then the game is only as fair as the server is. This does break down a bit with servant-peer topology- such as starcraft. In this, since everyone's computer has total knowledge of the game state knowledges cheats are possible (knowing how many resources everyone has and where they are).
However, if anyone cheats in a detectable way the game is aborted by all.
Re:He has a point
by
j7953
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The primary things done by cheats (looking through walls, etc) are things that the game does not prevent.
So what? A chess board also doesn't prevent you from moving the pawns sideways.
-- Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
He missed the biggest problem of all...
by
EricLivingston
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I find I have zero interest in MMO games. I diddled around in EQ when it first came out, and UO when it first came out, and cancelled both quickly. I've since realized that the key problem I had with both games is an inherent problem in all MMO games: You're just a small cog in a huge machine, with no compelling reason to exist in the world.
After running around killing bats for a while in EQ this realization hit me - my character could come, go, exist, or not and nothing really changes in the world. It just doesn't matter. This is by necessity - the game cannot make anything pivotal happen based on my character, 'cause it can't assume I'll be around or even that I'll exist (as a player).
So, what you wind up with is a bunch of folks running around killing things and so on, but really to no purpose at all ultimately.
yeah, you can gain levels and become some 50th level powerhouse, but who cares? There are hundreds of others just like you. You might even go out with some buddies and kill some big thing like a dragon or whatnot, but who cares? It'll just respawn in a while anyway. The world is essentially unchanged. It just winds up feeling so pointless.
I guess I've just been bred on single-person games that make you feel like you're truly at the center of the universe (such as Deus Ex, where you literally save reality). Even Half-life, which arguably has a lot going on besides your own sorry butt's survival, makes you feel like you're right in the middle of the action all the time. I guess I'm just spoiled that way.
I find in the MMO games I'm just wandering around in a very static world wondering what vermin to kill next or whatever - it's all quite boring really. I suppose guilds might help to some extent, in that they present a nice social environment of bonding, etc, but you really just click the futility up a notch: instead of simply having a character that doesn't matter to the world at all, you have a whole guild that really could exist or not and nothing would really change.
I've read that games like DAOC have a multi-year storyline that will play out some kind of plot, but again, I'd imagine that for 99% of the "population," it just won't matter what they do, find, or accomplish.
Re:He missed the biggest problem of all...
by
ellem
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
the key problem I had with both games is an inherent problem in all MMO games: You're just a small cog in a huge machine, with no compelling reason to exist in the world.
instead of simply having a character that doesn't matter to the world at all, you have a whole guild that really could exist or not and nothing would really change.
I'd imagine that for 99% of the "population," it just won't matter what they do, find, or accomplish.
I don't think it's fair to allow the computer to "judge" modem players' moves, and try to determine "if" the player would have got the hit. Not only is this unfair to the player (when they get to a real LAN tournament they'll be roasted), it's also unfair to the vet with a decent connection, because the newbie in essense gets a free hit. I would propose figuring out better ways to communicate over the network instead of trying to second guess the players' moves with algorhythms.
If my connection to a game is rotten, there's nothing the game client or the game server can do about it.
If you're only getting 4 updates a second from the server, your client *has* to guess what the other players are doing until the server tells it what really happens, because the alternative is to have a 4 FPS update.
Likewise, if the server only gets 4 updates per second from your client, it *has* to guess what you want to do, because it can't read your mind. Most servers guess that you'll keep holding down the keys that you were holding when it last heard from you, which is a tolerable solution. What would you prefer them to do?
The networking code in most games is already as good as it can be. The interpolation code tends to vary from game to game, but the effects are usually the same.
First of all, wrt the Ultima series, are you sure it was the good graphics that ruined it? After all, very few series stay good over long periods of time, they have a tendancy to get worse with each successive game/movie/book/whatever. There are notable exceptions, but claiming that Ultima XXII would kick ass today if they had just kept making games for the C64 seems pretty silly.
The point of game graphics indistinguishable from real life is to make your escape from reality more complete. Just because it LOOKS like real life doesn't mean it has to PLAY like real life. Just look at ID Software's games (from Wolf 3D to Q3A) for an example of games that have gotten progressively more realistic looking without becoming anything more like real life.
-- "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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Thats pretty amusing, seeing how Blizzard has to sue people to stop them using their own lag-free networks cos the official ones suck so much!
Free cell phone tracking
I find that todays game players are spoiled and demand more and more from a game in both graphics and robustness.
You can always judge the quality of a game player by asking if they have ever used a MUD. I honestly think this is a genres of Multiplayer gaming which has been tossed to the wayside by 13 year olds who have never heard of a BBS and want to push the limits of their new GeForce4 as to show off to their friends.
Talk about robustness, anyone who can remember MajorMUD or Tele-Arena know what I'm talking about.
I just honestly think game makers need to look back and reignite the Text Based RPG craze. I honestly feel there's money to be made in it.
Although, I don't think some of the algorhythms in place right now for latency (for example, Quake III Arena) are much better. I don't think it's fair to allow the computer to "judge" modem players' moves, and try to determine "if" the player would have got the hit. Not only is this unfair to the player (when they get to a real LAN tournament they'll be roasted), it's also unfair to the vet with a decent connection, because the newbie in essense gets a free hit. I would propose figuring out better ways to communicate over the network instead of trying to second guess the players' moves with algorhythms.
I think the number one problem with online games is cheating. There have been countless times where I have been totally addicted to a game, and then a cheat ruins all the fun. People play online games because it is so much more exciting to compete against a real person. If the game becomes unbalanced, players will either move on to another game or use the cheat themselves.
Does he go into how to sue people who clone your game servers? Cause that's an important area of Blizzard's business right now too.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
There's another article that sounds similar about is written by Peter Lincroft entitled The Internet Sucks: Or, What I Learned Coding X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter back when multiplayer games were not plentiful.
It's interesting reading, including "Lesson four: UDP is better than TCP, but it still sucks" and "Lesson five: Whenever you think the Internet can't get any worse, it gets worse". It's good stuff.
True, most of the "social interaction" in online games consists of the following statements:
"You f***ing lagger! Relog now!"
"Stupid newbie!"
"WTF? You hacker!"
"Camper!!! Kick that f***ing camper!"
"0wned!"
"Ha ha you suck!"
"You #!@% Q#% @!#%$ piece of @#%$!"
With bare-minimum graphics like Ultima III on C64 all the action took place in your own mind -- the best virtual reality/graphics engine ever developed.
When the series moved onto a sort of 3d graphics in Ultima VI the whole atmosphere changed. Suddenly you had these STUPID, squeaky-clean looking characters on the screen instead of the rough bunch of veterans you always had imagined. All the monsters were pitiful caricatures of the nightmares I had fought in the earlier Ultima episodes. In short, the whole game was fucked up because you were being forcefed the (annoying) vision of the game developers.
game graphics will be indistinguishable from real life
Sigh. And what's the point in that when the purpose of the games is to help you to spend some time away from the reality!?
The owls are not what they seem
. . . or if it is, its very subtly so and outside the range of your average player. The article makes a great statement as to the importance of balance, and this is exactly what turned me off StarCraft.
Every time I played on Battle.net, anyone with half a brain simply played the Zerg and rushed the hell out of everyone else. Usually, the Zerg won. In a war of 'resource command' it would seem that those who can expand the fastest would win.
Just to convince people I'm not blowing hot air, look at the StarCraft Season III Ladder Tournement results and count the occurances of Zerg versus occurances of other races. By my count, of the top players, there was 1 instance of Humans, 2 of Protoss, and 21 people playing the Zerg.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
It wasn't until we changed from Warcraft's "unit equivalence" to StarCraft's "race equivalence" that we were able to correct the most egregious play imbalance issues.
I find this to be a very important statement he made in regards to the development of multiplayer and RTS games. After warcraft, the piles of RTS games that came out all had some thing in common. A few races (or civs, etc) that had different units that all did basically the same thing.. the "ranged unit" the "fast unit" the "strong unit that is really expensive", etc. Other than some small games that didn't really make it off the ground, Starcraft was the first mainstream game that said "this race can do this and this other race is completely different". I believe that Starcraft is replayed so often because there is an incredible amount of flexability with each race and when combined with fighting against another diverse race, it creates an incredible amount of possibilities.
What makes this a great money maker for games such as Diablo and Starcraft (if they'd get off their buttocks), is that they can reuse the same engine they already had written, code in another race (or couple classes as in Diablo II LoD), and have people scrambling to buy it, since it adds an exponential amount of excitement to the game. If Starcraft added one single race (sold at the price of $25 in stores), I would instantly buy it.. not only would I be able to learn all about the new "Dotslash" race, but I would be able to figure out piles of strategies about how to fight Dotslashes with Terrans, or Protoss.. Just as the message boards are filled with people asking how to fight Druids with Necromancers, etc etc.
The game industry needs to focus more on additions to their games, instead of starting from scratch every single time. Not only would the players be happier, but I imagine the pocketbooks of the game makers would be happy as well.
Dave
Don't be a MUD snob. I know it's difficult, we are all snobs about something, but it's not a 13 year old's fault if they haven't played some ancient text game that you liked so much. Hell, I've never played a MUD (I'm 27yo), though I've heard some were *great*. But they weren't necessarily good because they didn't rely on graphics. They were good, because like some cutting edge 3D games, they were designed and coded with care and concern for gameplay.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I used to run my own Counter-Strike server, and I couldn't agree with your post more. It got so bad that I eventually wrote a program that punishes people when they would complain about laggers, campers, cheaters, etc. The punishment was 50% of your health. Do it three times, you're gagged and can only talk to your team. Three more, you're kicked. Three more, you're banned for an hour.
I'm usually one who is strongly against filters, but I have to admit, this one did wonders. People learned to either be civil towards each other, or they learned to be quiet.
Seems to me you're blaming the developers for what the legal department and the marketing folks are doing. How many Blizzard designers do you think really care which network the gamers use, as long as they play the game?
But I would add one more crucial point: gameplay should be fast-paced and aggressive. Sitting in your base and defending against unsuccessful attacks is just boring. In Warcraft 2, defending almost never worked and attacking was always to your benefit. The result was an edge-of-your-seat game where, among skilled players, every unit you pumped out was immediately sent to the battlefield and you were constantly trying to stop one of your bases from being trashed. I have yet to see an RTS which, all balance issues aside, is just plain more exciting than a good game of multiplayer War2. This is why I continue to consider it the greatest RTS ever made.
But Blizzard seems to have lost sight of this in later games. In Starcraft, sitting in your base and defending actually works, which makes for terribly boring games. Am I the only one who finds that games after Quake 1/Warcraft 2 have subtly become more and more slow-paced and boring?
Frankly, I would object to the "balance" business, which seems to be taken for granted by all game developers nowadays. Of course, games should be mostly balanced, but saying that ideally a game should be 100% balanced is going too far. A bit of imbalance serves to focalize the players' energies. E.g., in the original Quake, the most important thing was to control the rocket launcher and red armor, and this made for exciting games where players desperately vied for control of the key resources. In later Quakes, you can just pick up any weapon, since they're all just as good.
In sum, I don't think "balance" is the holy grail modern developers make it out to be. IMHO, the attitude of "balance above all" epitomizes all that's wrong with modern games. If a bit of imbalance is necessary to make a game that's more aggressive, fast-paced and fun, I say game developers shouldn't be afraid to sacrifice the principle.
I've designed many non-computer games for a few years now, and I see all the same issues discussed in this article that we've seen in face-to-face multi-player games. He covers the basics quite well. There are two aspects that he does not discuss which I believe are important.
First, good games are cohesive. The rules and the plot and the mechanics should flow together. The fundamental structure should dictate the higher behaviors in the game. This creates a game world that makes sense and learning a few basic guidelines are all that you need to get started.
Second, many games with three or more players and player interaction can suffer from petty diplomacy. If someone gets ahead in the game, other players can take time to squash the leader. If bad enough, there is a disincentive to get ahead. Balancing this problem can be quite tricky, and I would like to see more discussion about how designers deal with it on-line. IRL, we use hidden information, randomness, or high complexity to keep petty diplomacy from breaking a game.
Still, a good article, and it distills years of game design experience very well.
The primary things done by cheats (looking through walls, etc) are things that the game does not prevent.
When you design a game you have to consider the players hardware to be untrusted. You cannot prevent a persons computer from telling him all it knows, nor can you prevent it from obeying his commands.
So to limit the information a person knows, you have to limit the information that is given to his computer. (If you dont want someone to know the location of all the other players in an FPS, you simply dont send them that information.)
Taken to its logical conclusion, The player's PC would end up being thin terminals doing I/O, while all the game logic is hosted on a central trusted server.
For games with a central server, then the game is only as fair as the server is. This does break down a bit with servant-peer topology- such as starcraft. In this, since everyone's computer has total knowledge of the game state knowledges cheats are possible (knowing how many resources everyone has and where they are).
However, if anyone cheats in a detectable way the game is aborted by all.
After running around killing bats for a while in EQ this realization hit me - my character could come, go, exist, or not and nothing really changes in the world. It just doesn't matter. This is by necessity - the game cannot make anything pivotal happen based on my character, 'cause it can't assume I'll be around or even that I'll exist (as a player).
So, what you wind up with is a bunch of folks running around killing things and so on, but really to no purpose at all ultimately.
yeah, you can gain levels and become some 50th level powerhouse, but who cares? There are hundreds of others just like you. You might even go out with some buddies and kill some big thing like a dragon or whatnot, but who cares? It'll just respawn in a while anyway. The world is essentially unchanged. It just winds up feeling so pointless.
I guess I've just been bred on single-person games that make you feel like you're truly at the center of the universe (such as Deus Ex, where you literally save reality). Even Half-life, which arguably has a lot going on besides your own sorry butt's survival, makes you feel like you're right in the middle of the action all the time. I guess I'm just spoiled that way.
I find in the MMO games I'm just wandering around in a very static world wondering what vermin to kill next or whatever - it's all quite boring really. I suppose guilds might help to some extent, in that they present a nice social environment of bonding, etc, but you really just click the futility up a notch: instead of simply having a character that doesn't matter to the world at all, you have a whole guild that really could exist or not and nothing would really change.
I've read that games like DAOC have a multi-year storyline that will play out some kind of plot, but again, I'd imagine that for 99% of the "population," it just won't matter what they do, find, or accomplish.
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I don't think it's fair to allow the computer to "judge" modem players' moves, and try to determine "if" the player would have got the hit. Not only is this unfair to the player (when they get to a real LAN tournament they'll be roasted), it's also unfair to the vet with a decent connection, because the newbie in essense gets a free hit. I would propose figuring out better ways to communicate over the network instead of trying to second guess the players' moves with algorhythms.
If my connection to a game is rotten, there's nothing the game client or the game server can do about it.
If you're only getting 4 updates a second from the server, your client *has* to guess what the other players are doing until the server tells it what really happens, because the alternative is to have a 4 FPS update.
Likewise, if the server only gets 4 updates per second from your client, it *has* to guess what you want to do, because it can't read your mind. Most servers guess that you'll keep holding down the keys that you were holding when it last heard from you, which is a tolerable solution. What would you prefer them to do?
The networking code in most games is already as good as it can be. The interpolation code tends to vary from game to game, but the effects are usually the same.
The point of game graphics indistinguishable from real life is to make your escape from reality more complete. Just because it LOOKS like real life doesn't mean it has to PLAY like real life. Just look at ID Software's games (from Wolf 3D to Q3A) for an example of games that have gotten progressively more realistic looking without becoming anything more like real life.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD