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John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage
AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"
Thanks game devs for getting those with only lan access in moms baement the shaft.
But given the mess that has grown up around MW2, it should be pretty clear that the attempt to leave dedicated servers behind is not being taken well. The mechanism in use there seems destined to cause problems for users, and the fluidity available from dedicated servers can't be easily replaced by any system that has users hosting servers. It may be that hordes of virtual servers are the future of dedicated servers, but that's still a far better option than things like a five-second pause while the players' systems figure out who is taking over next.
If there's anyone that I trust to come up with a workable technical solution, it's John Carmack, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I wouldn't call ~200,000 people a day between only three games from ONE COMPANY when the most populous of those three games averages ~80-90K a day peak users despite being about 5 years old a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. I'd call that proof of how important dedicated servers and proper mod support are.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
They could give a damn about matchmaking. It's a trojan horse.
They want everyone to use matchmaking, which really means they want everyone to use an authentication system.
Battlefield Heroes uses a similar setup and for the most part servers are a nebulous thing the match making servers put you on. Because for the most part real people don't run the servers admins are less common. There's less incentive to rent a servers (through approved resellers) because the communities that usually grow up around more active servers or more skilled players don't really form. My friends might be good but when we join a game it could be just about anywhere, if we even bother to join. One way I could think of to compensate for all this would be strong team/clan tools because they would cause little communities and host servers their players would spend more time on, but honestly I haven't seen any games with something decent since Tribes 2 (invite system, team management, tag controls, even a messaging system!).
I don't love or hate the matchmaking system, but I would like to see them find a way to do it that doesn't impact the gaming community so much. Until then I'll miss my server browser.
Quack, quack.
I don't pirate games I like and if it curbs cheating central servers is fine with me.
"Thank god I didn't have to figure it out!!"
What happened to Carmack the innovator? Nowdays it seems hes happy to take backseat to bolder devs like Valve and Infinity Ward.
I'm thinking rage will be a tricked up Far Cry 2, FPS with some wafer thin role playing elements, you drive around, shoot some stuff, drive around, repeat. Like any FPS it will have implausibly located exploding barrels, and crates... everywhere. We are long past the era significant innovation in the FPS genre.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A lot of today's FPSes seem to prefer a ping of less than 100ms. Many of them become very frustrating to play at 150ms -- I can only assume this is due to whatever cheat protection they use forcing them to use less and less lag compensation, and forcing them to run less of the simulation locally.
I live on the west coast, and a lot of the people I play with live on the east coast. So when we have the option of buying a server, we get one somewhere in the middle so that we all have pings in the 50-100ms range instead of the 150-200ms range. Taking this option away will really, really suck.
Just sayin'.
forget a petition, if id wants to screw over PC gamers then a boycott of all id games and all games using technology licensed from id is in order.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
My earliest experience with gaming was staying up until the wee hours of the morning playing Action quake2 and rail-instagib CTF with those laser hooks they had. It was punishingly brutal back then, you could die 3 times in less than a second on some servers, and hackers could run rampant until an admin banned his ass. It was all worth it once you got that midair lag-shot on the top player on the server. These were all community supported mods running on dedicated servers. No servers, no mods, no community. This will only end in tears, or pirates, or both.
"It's not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don't think we will have dedicated servers,"
Then we don't think we will be purchasing Rage, Mr. Carmack.
But I stopped playing games a year ago... what a great year its been.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
Really, when was the last time Carmack's games were relevant? Doom 3, maybe? Even that was overshadowed by other, better, games at the time. If anything is a leftover remnant of the 90s, it's id Software.
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
you need a very decent upstream connection (sans throttling by overzealous ISP's - thats a whole different ballgame) to host a game in the way IW, and perhaps Carmack are suggesting... ie this is from the FAQ of Call Of Duty 2
to host a game (upload speed)
128kbps upload: 4 players
384kbps upload: 8 players
768kbps upload: 10 players
Id suggest that alot of people just dont have the upstream speed to cope with hosting a game... especially those of us in New Zealand, and Australia
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
That didn't sound very respectful. I think that JC was implying that there is no technical reason for dedicated servers anymore. With the CPU/GPU horsepower available, there is no reason why you can't host a game and still get stellar framerates. I think you are reading things into his comments that aren't there.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Dedicated servers are the shit.
Remember when gamespy was quakespy? And there was Mplayer?
I used to play q2 tournaments on Mplayer. But all the mods rolled on Quakespy/Gamespy. It gave people from such communities as the Action Quake/Quake 2 group some exposure.
More recently a great example of such a contrast is the early release of Halo 2 and even the lack of multiplayer support in the Original Halo in the beginning.
Before xbox live we had Xbox Connect which allowed me to play online before xbox live was mainstream. Furthermore it allowed for the playing of Halo 2, online, months before it came out.
This includes modified versions of Halo and Halo 2 that would never be realized without dedicated servers.
This culture is not even recognized by the noob gamers that started playing games online through a console portal.
Definitely worth fighting for.
RAGE, from what I understand, won't have anything like deathmatches; last I heard, it would have a two-player co-op mode, and some head-to-head racing. Dedicated servers may simply be overkill in that situation. I think this may be a big ado over nothing.
There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.
The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.
I can just hear the brainless, ovine responses now.
"But we'll still be able to do that! We can just go through the remote service to do so!"
Yeah, and all of your packets have to go through said remote service as well. If said remote service is hosted in another country, guess how much higher your latency is going to be?
Add to that, the fact that you're paying money for no good reason other than your own stupidity and laziness. You should not want to give a company the ability to dictate terms of use to you, and you especially shouldn't want to give said company money when you don't have to.
It doesn't really bother me, though. I don't play contemporary games, and the single main reason why is because they've been dumbed down in order to give the Guitar Hero demographic what they want; something to serve as a centrepiece in the living room on a Friday night, while people are getting drunk and/or stoned with their friends.
If you care about actually having any kind of real challenge in a game now, you're accused of having no life.
You can all thank Microsoft and Xbox Lives reliance on laggy P2P networking for this. Any multiplatform titles that includes Xbox360, will mean all the other platforms that usually have dedicated servers (PC and PS3) will get gimped due to the Xbox's limitations.
THANKS MICROSOFT, YOUR CRAPPY HARDWARE AND CRAPPY SOFTWARE IS SLOWLY DESTROYING GAMING NOT ONLY ON YOUR SYSTEMS BUT YOUR COMPETITORS TOO.
Thankfully I only mostly support PS3 exclusive titles, not only because they are better, but don't have to play to Microsofts gimped P2P networking.
I'm really not sure about this. Carmack has done a lot of great things, but i still think this is a very big mistake. Unless the game has nothing to form communities around (no deathmatch, capture the flag, anything), anyone who buys this game essentially gets no multiplayer. The pings will be way up, with loads of cheaters and hackers on. After all, it's easy to hack your local files and then click "host".
So, if the new trend is to lock PC players into closed matchmaking services, wouldn't it start a trend of disgruntled players moding the game into having a satisfactory multiplayer service with dedicated services? Think about it, PC players have already modded single player games into adding entirely a multiplayer service (and quite successfully at that, I'm thinking about GTA San Andreas' two multiplayer mods, MTA SA and SA-MP).
An hypothetical example : Modern Warfare 2. It has both generated epic levels of interest from players, arguably even historical levels, and simultaneously no less historical and epic levels of discontent from PC players due to the drop of dedicated servers. So imagine the scenario : MW2 is released, discontent hardcore PC gamers boycott it and pirate it en masse, and to get the multiplayer experience they want out of their new favourite game they create their own dedicated servers and the accompanying mod for the original game, resulting in an online community of multiplayer gamers who control entirely the multiplayer aspect.
The net result being everybody pirating the game and running the mod and everybody's happy with it except the game's publishers who lost control of the multiplayer on PC and who lost tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of sales. Could this be a forthcoming counter-trend?
You just got troll'd!
If the system he is proposing is so much better than dedicated servers, where are his details?
If he is suggesting the client/server model is dead... then he's having a stroke. How are you supposed to have lan parties without a dedicated server?
Liberty.
The only reason to get rid of dedicated servers is to kill the community when you want and force people to move on your next game.
Cmdr Taco says no <em>tags</em> in story titles on the /. homepage !
Wooden barrels.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No dedicated servers? Whats next lag that automatically lags with the person with the crappiest connection? No chat features? Sounds like PC gaming is starting to hit the 360 way, I wonder when it will become like the Wii.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
He has sold out his beliefs, his passion, and his work. He once said that DirectX was the worst thing ever (which it is) and now he openly embraces it. He has supported Linux in the past and now they are moving away from that. Now he has betrayed PC gaming completely by going to some stupid console-like gaming model that many other PC games are stupidly going toward. What do you want to bet it will be the absolutely horrible Microsoft Games for Windows thing?
Fuck Carmack and fuck id. They have betrayed PC gaming just like everyone else is. Microsoft flashed id some fucking money and now he's in bed with them. Screw them and don't give them any more of your money. Demand PC gaming that supports multiple OSes, a sane 3d API, and most of all, decentralized servers. You know, PC GAMES, not goddamn console ports.
Of course we don't need dedicated servers anymore! Consoles and home PCs can totally host 64 player games, I mean, consumer grade internet these days totally has up speeds to match their down speeds. Its not like Modern Warfare 2 will be limited to 9v9 players. Wait, I gotta stop being sarcastic, even I'm starting to believe this shit now... Dedicated are the reason we had 64 player multiplayer back in 2002. Now, I'm all for progress, but it takes some pretty huge balls to say that ded servers are a relic of the past, when the current gen local hosting malarky can't deliver anywhere near what deds could.
Would so many people still be playing counter-strike if it weren't for the huge number of highly customized and pimped out servers? I don't think so
Well, a number of them actually. One would be bandwidth. Lots of people don't have good bandwidth on their connection, especially upstream. The majority of consumer connections in the US are highly asymmetric, way more download than upload. So it is easy to find someone without sufficient bandwidth to easily host a game since they are likely to be on a cheap consumer cable connection. Now compare that to a dedicated server. If it is good, and the ones people come back to are, it'll be hosted in a datacenter with plenty of bandwidth. It will have bandwidth guaranteed for it's server slots and thus that'll never be a problem.
Another technical issue is ping time. Again a lot of consumer connections aren't great with this. DSL in particular seems to add a lot of ping at the bridge, but cable isn't wonderful. The providers also are not always well peered, your data can take a long route to get to them. So this leads to high ping times and again less game performance. If you have a 150-200ms ping to a server it does not feel responsive like a 30-50ms server. Dedicated servers again can solve this, not only by being in well peered datacenters, but you can choose their location. You can have an East Coast, Central, and West Coast server so that people in the geographic area can connect to it.
Finally there's the issue of how well people's computer actually handle being the server. Who is to say that they have plenty of resources free? Even if their hardware meets the level that it should, what if they have tons of shit running in the background? Maybe they've got spyware eating up tons of CPU time, etc. Again not a problem on a real dedicated server. It can be configured to ensure adequate CPU time is available for the process.
So there ARE plenty of technical issues. Now while there is the potential for these to exist with a server, after all someone could run a dedicated server on a modem on a slow computer, the good news is you can make lists of good servers and use those. You go back to the servers you like, that work well, and they are always online. Can't do that with player hosted stuff unless they player is one and wants to play with you.
Heck, I've noticed this with Call of Duty World at War. A couple of my friends like to play, and they encourage me to play because it works better when I host. Why? I've got a quad core and a business class cable connection. They've got dual cores and consumer class lines. They find when I host, the game runs much smoother for them.
So there really ARE technical reasons for dedicated servers, and gameplay reasons too.
Every MP game I've played for more than a week I've spent probably 90% of my game time in a single communities' servers. This goes right back to Quake and stands true today (TF2). Probably >99.999% of that time the server had some kind of mod too.
Is I'd think you'd want to go the other way. Not just have dedicated servers, but allow for dedicated servers for consoles too. UT3 does just that, you can get a server that runs on PCs, but is designed to serve the PS3 version of the game. So you can have dedicated servers even for console games. Great idea IMO. You allow for peer to peer games, but support dedicated servers for all platforms. That way people can play how they like. Also dedicated servers are clearly loved by a non-trivial amount of people as there are businesses out there set up for selling servers. You specify what kind of server you want how many slots etc and they make it and bill you for it. Wouldn't be going on if people weren't buying.
Basically to me this indicates that Carmack has lost touch. He's decided to become the console designer, perhaps because he buys in to the arguments that you can't make money on PC games because of piracy (Valve and Stardock beg to disagree). Ok, fine, in that case I'm probalby done with iD's games. No big loss from what I can see, I really didn't much are for Doom 3 and Quake 4. iD Tech 4 really underwhelmed me, even compared to Unreal Engine 2, and certainly compared to Unreal Engine 3.
I think we are witnessing the slow sunset of iD. They aren't going to die, they are just going to become another samey games produces cranking out console titles that generate some minor interest. They don't seem to be interested in trying to forge ahead anymore.
Whatever makes them happy I guess.
Back in the original Doom days, John Cash and his friends who worked for Novell used to play deathmatch games on the corporate network in the evenings. When they discovered that the Doom network code was horrible, Cash sent Carmack an email pointing this out.
Carmack responded by sending over the source code (which had been written for id by a contractor), asking Cash to fix it. Basically a 'put up or shut up' situation. :-)
The result, after a few mostly sleepless nights was a totally rewritten network layer which got used by the later Doom versions.
This experience made Cash figure out how a networked game should work, so over the next 2-3 years he did a presentation every year at Novell's Developer Conference (later called BrainShare), the title was something like "How to write networked games".
Another year later, after Carmack had hired Mike Abrash to help with the low-level optimization of the sw 3D engine for Quake, they hired Cash to write the nextwork and AI code.
After Quake 3 shipped, Cash left id for a more relaxed environment, moving to Blizzard who were working on this new massive multiplayer game at the time.
Afaik John Cash is now the chief programmer for WOW.
Terje
PS. I've known Mike since about 1985 and I worked with John Cash for a year in 1991-92.
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
No dedicated servers = no communities to extend game life = no players = game does not last long = they can do another sequel = same thing all over. Did i just reveal their business plan?
i really liked the single player for the first Quake, complete with nine inch nails and all. Have to keep these things on context though, considering that FPS's were in their infancy at the time. Quake to Bioshock is like the difference between cave paintings and high italian renaissance art.
I hope he enjoys not getting my money as dedicated servers are part of the reason why online gaming is so fun on the PC and utterly boring on the consoles.