Breaking Down the Demigod Launch

In addition to the piracy troubles that plagued Demigod's launch (and partly exacerbated by them), Stardock and Gas Powered Games ran into severe networking issues that hampered their ability to accommodate players with a legitimately purchased copy of the game. Brad Wardell has now posted a frank, detailed explanation of what happened and how they dealt with it. Quoting: "Demigod's connectivity problems have basically boiled down to 1 bad design decision and 1 architectural limitation. The bad design decision was made in December of 2008 when it was decided to have the network library hand off sockets to Demigod proper. In most games, the connection between players is handled purely by one source. ... So in Demigod, on launch day, Alice would host a game. Tom would be connected to Alice by the network library and then that socket would be handed to Demigod. Then, Alice and Tom would open a new socket to listen for more players to join in. As a result, a user might end up using a half dozen ports and sockets which some routers didn't like and it just made things incredibly complex to connect people and put a lot of strain on the servers to manage all those connections.

Comments

Failure to build in an idiot margin

[chrylis]

Yes, this probably could have been handled better, but many home NAT boxes are so broken that they ought to be recalled. I'm actually a bit surprised that there's not a WRT54GL equivalent with well-behaved 2.6 wireless drivers that ships with an open-source configuration interface; it seems that it'd be cheaper than constantly reinventing the wheel.

Re:Failure to build in an idiot margin

[jimshatt]

maybe they didn't want to be associated with dick smoking fags

Dick just likes to smoke a fag now and then, what's so wrong about that? You should see what Tom and Alice are up to sometimes...

Re:First post?

[wisnoskij]

I am pretty sure the peer to peer nature of torrents, that require connections to multiple people to get good speed, makes multiple sockets mandatory.

No Stress Testing??

[WeekendKruzr]

How did they not perform any simulations or trial runs with players connecting out over the internet in order to stress test this? If they did, how could their testing not notice that routers in general don't like large numbers of listening sockets on it's clients? This is a serious amateur mistake.

Re:No Stress Testing??

[Tridus]

They did, it was the beta test. The trouble is that not everybody was impacted, and the beta group was not a great cross-section of the entire playerbase. Until they got this fixed, I for example couldn't play, at all. A friend of mine in the US with a similar setup wasn't having problems, except when trying to play me. Now I can, and it's pretty fun.

I followed this throughout the process (because I couldn't play), and a number of times they thought they fixed it but the solution didn't work once they scaled it up to lots of players. If you read the full TFA, the issue was actually something buried pretty deep in the networking library they licensed, it wasn't handling large amounts of traffic. (They had to fly in the lead developer of said library to figure that out, though.)

Stardock are not that experienced when it comes to multiplayer games, so this was something of a mess. They probably should have known better. They didn't. That's just how it goes. They're pretty honest about it, at least.