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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.'"
It's worth pointing out that the RAGE demo at QUAKECON was done on a 360 controller. That should be a pretty strong sign that this is a console port design decision, that will ultimately affect the PC port. Let's take a look at console games with PC ports that use the "no dedicated server" model!
The downside to no dedicated servers is that you lose the community aspect, community organization becomes MUCH harder, and the game doesn't live on as long. See also: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server. Incredibly frustrating, and I'm not really sure game/community mechanics have progressed far enough to allow the community/communities to grow up around the game that you want to push further away from dedicated servers. The one console game that I saw with a decent community setup was SOCOM 3 for the PS2; it had clans and messageboards, a messaging system and a somewhat steam-like buddy system/join buddy's game function.
Case in point: Rage is a console game, with console server matching system. The fact that it's coming out for the PC means that it's simply going to be a piss-poor PC port of a console game, and last time I checked, PC-ports of console games were fucking terrible (see also: Borderlands).
moox. for a new generation.
I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods so they can shove DLC down our throats. All my favorite games were made favorites NOT by the designers, but by the communities and mods that built up around them and gave me MORE for my money and extended my fun, not screwing me over so they can "maximize profit potential".
No mods? No money from me. No dedicated servers? Again no money from me. If we PC gamers get together and make damned sure that any game that screws us over rots on the shelves, while buying up the ones that treat us right, maybe then we won't end up in x360 hell, which is what they seem to be pushing us towards. I don't want a damned 360, thanks ever so much!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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"