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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.'"
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.
The question is, why not add support for both matchmaking and dedicated servers with a browser? I would imagine it's not *that* difficult to program in a server browser as well, seeing as how companies have been doing it for more than a decade. It might require some more resources, but dedicated servers will almost always offer a better experience than a listen server and that's why it's worth it. Whatever benefits matchmaking may bring to the table are also available for the end user.
I'd rather deal with the occasional cheater than suddenly lose multiplayer because the publisher decided the servers were no longer financially viable. This is really about making games disposable, which, for me at least, negates any inherent value received at purchase.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You have to know the server's unique identifier, type it into the console, choose "best available dedicated", and then the group will follow you to that specific server. Which is what we were doing the other night, since one of our group of 4 only gets a good ping when it's a west coast server. If you simply select "best available" and hit go, it might pick somewhere in Kansas, which is going to ping badly for us in Texas, Florida, and the guy who only pings well to west coast servers. But it's the best averaging ping server valve could find for us. Valve has introduced group servers, where you can associate a server with a group via your group's id number (you have to be a group admin to see it), but that seems to be buggy, or doesn't update very quickly. This is very annoying if you've paid for a private server (or you're hosting your own somewhere) and are trying to run anything other than dead stock L4D. You can technically connect directly to the IP, but that bypasses the lobby system completely.
moox. for a new generation.
I'm probably getting trolled here, but here is a list of stuff based on the Quake III Engine.
Also remember that Source was originally based on Quake II.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
Wooden barrels.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
if you want proper server choice use the console command openserverbrowser to get a classic "internet", "favorites" server listing.
I typically do this to pick one of my favorite servers, then invite friends.
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.
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"
You fit your sig all to well.
Gaming companies don't use millions of dollars and hundreds of people working. They spend millions of dollars to get hundreds of people working for them. Open Source have people volunteer to do the work for free because they enjoy it. What, do you think game companies spend those millions on bricks and steel and machinery and sets for actors?
The main problem with OSS games has been there haven't been enough creative and graphic design people helping out. Have you seen what the modders do? Plenty of them produce similar quality work as game companies, but they also have a more creative edge because they are doing what they think is cool and what they want, not what they think will deliver repeatable profits.
Essentially what modern game companies put out are just crappy FPSs that have had lots of graphic and sound work done on them to make them look really nice and require the most expensive latest and greatest hardware.
It seems great to a superficial person, but normal people think it is stupid and undesirable. They want games which are actually fun, and many of them don't want to spend thousands of dollars every year just so they can play video games. Contrary to what Hollywood says, looks aren't really important.
Almost all the games coming out of the big companies are the same sort of crap in low grade action movies where they end up in the bargain bin a few months after being released to DVD. After which, they disappear into the void never to be seen on store shelves. I suppose this is why if you wait a few months after release, you can't buy the game anymore...