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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.
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.
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
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.
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"