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How Indie Devs Made an 1,800-Player Action Game Mod In Their Spare Time
An anonymous reader writes "Just Cause 2 Multiplayer has been getting a lot of press lately, but this making-of feature points out how the mod raises serious questions about the games industry: if 1,800-player massively multiplayer action games are possible on one server, why did it take a group of modders to prove it? From the article: 'There’s more chaos to come. That 1,800 player limit isn’t maxing out the server or the software by any means. Foote says that the team, who first met online seven years ago playing the similar Multi Theft Auto GTA mod, are "yet to reach any real barrier or limitation preventing us from reaching an even higher player count than the previous public tests." When it’s ready, the team will release the software for everyone to download and run their own servers, wherever they are in the world.'"
My math is old, but with P2P where you update everyone around you of your position with 640k upload, you can do about 50,000 players if your attacks are melee only. The key is not updating people far away as frequently, since they can't get in range and get a hit on you, you only have to calculate a full run between you for the time between sending out data. The biggest trick with P2P as everyone knows is dealing with hackers though... Even games like WOW, I would think you might be able to fly with a hack because their central server probably isn't calculating your collision detection.
God spoke to me
This revives in me an idea a buddy of mine and I had about creating a massively multiplayer online version of joust, after playing it for several hours on xbox live one night in the early 2000's, the game is so simple it should be easy to pile on thousands of players, and would be a fucking blast...unlimited board, unlimited players, would be great. Of course, like any cool idea I wouldn't be surprised if this has already been done by someone.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
Game developers set their limits based on what they can reasonably show to be a supported, stable level for the majority of their expected customer base.
Even though the code could potentially handle more, explicitly supporting it requires additional development resources, additional QA resources to validate that it works, etc., for potentially little to no gain.
Anything over 64 players is going to bump it into the real where it's considered "massively multiplayer" by most suits as well.
Test Cancelled
Published september 15, 2012, 01:29:19 pm
An hour or so after we started the test, we were hit by a DDoS attack that ended shortly after; roughly 2 hours later we were hit by an even stronger attack, leaving us with no choice but to call off the test.
It is a shame for the beta to end just 3 hours after it started, though we did verify that the server performance fixes most definitely worked.
what time did this article get posted?
I've seen the trailer. Basically imaging a massive free for all. Fun? I suppose.
Way to miss the point.
The point? I assume you're talking about the fact that there were a large number of players in the server concurrently?
That may be the point, but it's only half the headline. The rest of the headline emphasizes that the devs are independent (you know, as opposed to professional), and they did this in their spare time (so they aren't getting paid for it).
Remove those elements from the headline, and I have no problem. But as it is, the headline is emphasizing them as if it's some amazing, unheard of feat that PC gamers would create a mod for a game. And I'm calling bullshit on that.
Just 'Cause! (with apologies to Yahtzee)
They wanted to build a game with 1800 online players, whats the point of building that for Linux and having just 10 players in there.
The point is obviously that indie devs were able to do what professional devs have not. (An 1800-player action game).
The point you failed to connect on is:
Indie developers in their spare time did something that the big game houses have been claiming was impossible for decades. "We can only support 4/8/16/32" has been the mantra of gaming companies for decades.
Now here a group of unpaid modders proves them spectacularly wrong.
The point of the article is half lost without factoring in that the people who accomplished it are not "professional, top tire game developers at the pinnacle of game research and captains of the gaming industry" but rather is 7 friends who decided to just do it.
Your combativeness towards this headline suggests that you missed the real point of it all.
What about planetside 2?
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
I think you are looking at it from and upside down viewpoint. It's not just that a large number of players were in the server concurrently, it's also that a group of modders who are not tied to the big game industry, in their spare time demonstrated it was possible.
If this was just about a large number of people in a single server, it probably wouldn't even be news. That happens all the time with other types of servers. Why it is news is because industry dominant forces appear to think it isn't possible or the hardware requirements are too large or something and a group outside the dominant companies proved them wrong by making a game that could do it.
Considering Just Cause 2 doesn't have a Linux port last I checked, this isn't terribly surprising.
No it doesn't. There is no claim that PC gamers creating mods is unheard of.
It is emphasizing that some indie devs pulled off the multi player stuff in their spare time rather than a big budget game company. Which is pretty normal for a headline since part of the article is asking why game companies haven't done this already.
You're just getting desperate, aren't you?
I still don't see what's so special. Dark Age of Camelot topped out around 3000 people per server and a small group of independents recreated their server code from scratch so they could host their own servers. Think it was called Dawn of Light maybe. That was almost a decade ago...
WINDOWS, not Linux.
When even the geeks pass on Linux for games, is there any hope?
Well, from the FAQ on the linked site:
Will there be a Linux build of the server?
Yes, there are both Win32 and Linux builds of the server
So... yeah, troll elsewhere.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Early 1990s MUD games had telnet connections in the three digits. As in, handling raw character input from the players, not nicely aggregated packets from a client GUI. That was on hardware like Sun boxes that pale in processing power and memory size compared to ... oh, your Jesus mobe, and such.
I don't understand what is so incredible about that either...
Planetside had somewhere around 500 on one continent(server) at a time and that was almost 10 years ago and multiple thousands if the articles understanding (or definition) of "a server" being one realm or world is used. The article goes on to talk about how this is the first time there's been a Massively Multiplayer shoot-em' up style game and that it was some genius new idea by these two hobby programmers, I mean EUREKA a shooter MMO. Which is just plain incorrect, see planetside (and upcoming planetside2) and there might be other attempts I don't know about. Planetside wasn't hugely successful, at it's peak it had I dunno something like 4-6 north American "servers" and probably around 3000 players on any one of them at a given time. It was successful enough to eventually get a try at a second which is in beta now and I believe is supposed to end up free to play, pay for your digital character's vanity.
Here's a few problems with them. The Genre, fps/third person shooters, mainly targets 10-25 year old guys...
so there is a limited market.
10-16 or 18 year old guys have to talk their parents into paying for subscriptions to something like an MMO...
which further limits it.
There's about a billion and one games like that on the market who's only difference is that they aren't MMO...
so you might not play with 2000 people in one place, but there's plenty of opponents and a community in most the larger shooters, and a lot less of the "hurry up and wait around" aspect that is doing anything organized in MMOs.
Most shoot-em up style players tend to look down on pay to play or pay to win games, for good reason, when most want you to shell out $50+ for the box/software, then get the privilege of paying another $15 a month.
Large changes to shooters can drive players away in droves, but for MMO's if you aren't updating you aren't adding new people...
Take a look at planetside's BFR updates. Add a game breaking new vehicle set, lost a ton of veteran subscribers. Nerf it, tons of people stayed gone. Added so much anti-air you couldn't organize air attacks anymore, or even fight other air players away from the main battles anymore without lock-on autoaim weapons. Lost the organized air outfits (clans/guilds). Kept some of the bad players people that they would farm.
This is a large problem for MMO's in general now that they are so big (or at least since WoW was) you have a pretty low mean player skill level. Well they and those even worse then the mean need to advance if you want to keep them paying customers. Then you have exceptional hardcore guilds, who find encounters too easy, blow through new content in a month and have nothing to do. That gets magnified in pvp, since you literally pit those two groups against each other. I used to play my dad in quakeworld, it was never especially close, but I ended up getting really good playing online... After a few games at the end of that summer he refused to play me anymore "it's just not fun for me." Which I understood, repeatedly getting beat and not having the ability to do anything about it sucks. That's what would happen in FPS mmos if they didn't dumb it down for the average skill level or below that, they'd hemorrhage the lower end players until there'd be a handful of top players who wouldn't be covering costs...
So no, it's been done before.
Planetside lost some of it's original vision after heavily incorporating changes from forum complaints/suggestions. This had the net effect of removing strategic or skill based methods of achieving goals. Interestingly enough, with quick enough hands and some skill a BFR could be brought down from a hot drop mosquito. That of course was nerfed beyond recognition in the name of only equally classed entities should be able to really interact/combat with each other. No sir, your battle monger 5000 can't shoot the peons because the weapons weren't designed for that!
There are a good deal more examples of what drove away their community, but we don't really need to go into that. Sadly, PS2 is going to re-envision all the poor ideas they contrived throughout the first PS. It will be interesting to see if a vanity approach to sales will function with this game. In most cases, the combat isn't necessarily as face to face as other games which have found that route to be viable.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Could anybody give some details on how this was done? How do you hack multiplayer into a closed source game that doesn't have multiplayer support it? Decompile the thing? Find some unused engine hooks that allow multiplayer? Something completely different?
What about planetside 1? What about Eve Online, with what, 30-60K users in one game-world.
Actually, what about Planetside 2? Why haven't anyone done a real MMOFPS since the first one? It was THE best FPS I have ever played until they royally fucked up the game balance and alienated most of their playerbase, leading to massive and rapid loss of key players in the community.
And yes, I've played large map battles in many of the most popular FPS games today, and they're not even close - the lack of an open game-world makes the battle much less dynamic and much less like being in a real warzone... and more like being in some sort of CS world where all the teens and bots fight for who can be the coolest individual. Little to no strategic planning, absolutely no large picture whatsoever, because you're just 64 people stuck on this little very specific map with a set win-condition.
Planetside wasn't a war anyone could ever win... And that made it a lot more fun to play, and a lot more about the big picture.
Nah, EVE Online will let >2000 people on one node, it will slow down to a 10% real time tho :/
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
That's how the real world works and is why we can't have nice things.
Very True. But that is only if you are insisting on anonymity. If you are willing to lock down a real, permanent identity before allowing someone on your network, then punishing misbehavior becomes trivial. Sometimes is to beneficial to have a network where you know who everyone is.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I took a course in game programming the summer of 2011. There was a guest lecturer who discussed something very much like this.
The idea was to have the playable area of the game divided into zones. Each zone would have a flexible border that could be moved around based on the quantity of the players. I think the idea was that each zone would roughly adjust to have an equal amount of players. Each zone, in turn, was responsible for the players within it. The game was specifically designed to handle FPS games with larger amounts of players. He even discussed some solution to how to handle sniper rifles (as a sniper rifle would have incredible range it might require "accessing" a player who is in an entirely different zone in the game.
I think he said that thousands of players were possible with their solution.
I'll tell you why networking in video games sucks so much, is so easy to hack and scales so badly: it's simply not designed. The proper approach would be to think what should be the responsibilities of the client and what should be that of the server, then design an adequate protocol and write the server-side algorithms with scalability in mind. For example finding all players within one region is logarithmic in nature, and not sending information to clients that shouldn't have it is common sense, but don't expect any server to do that.
That's just not how networking works in video games. They just write the full system as if it were a single application and use an automatic serialization layer to send over whatever they need. It ends up being inefficient spaghetti. When they need to make it more efficient, they just spend money making their networking layer faster instead of fixing the core of the problem.
He build it by stealing off other projects, most notably by stealing source & ideas from the sa-mp project which eclipses that 1800 players test by numbers going above 40.000 players, daily.
Here's a clip of an amusing fellow playing the test, for those who want to see it in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIpGGvq6zH8
The point you failed to connect on is:
Indie developers in their spare time did something that the big game houses have been claiming was impossible for decades. "We can only support 4/8/16/32" has been the mantra of gaming companies for decades.
Now here a group of unpaid modders proves them spectacularly wrong.
The point of the article is half lost without factoring in that the people who accomplished it are not "professional, top tire game developers at the pinnacle of game research and captains of the gaming industry" but rather is 7 friends who decided to just do it.
Your combativeness towards this headline suggests that you missed the real point of it all.
Except that the big companies were limiting these games to 4/8/16/32 people not out of server demands, but most likely due to network constraints. Most of these FPS require you to have low latency with all of the other players in order to have fun. It sucks shooting at someone's head only to find out that you are shooting at where the person was and not where they really are. The more people you add to the game, the higher the chance that someone will have a poor experience due to latency. This is exacerbated when the game companies do not run their own servers, but require one of the players to be host, and therefore everyone has to have a good connection to that single player. That causes NAT and other issues as well.
I was playing Tribes2 on 64 player servers on a ~56K without it being unplayably laggy about a decade ago.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
But you need to look at what proffesional devs have compared to indie devs.
This includes resources, time constraints.. oh and a paid job. Shucks the downsides of having money...
Why is this modded Troll? He's right. I went into a trade because after doing the research in High School I decided I will never work in the game industry. There hasn't been a decent game in ages. Every big release in the last few years has been a radical and outrageous disappointment. I still play video games, but they're all from 3+ Years ago. The last game I bought was Mirror's Edge. Only because it was a well presented, innovative and unique game.
The real problem with the industry is the fact that It's a business. Profit margins are the only concern of the developer's now. It's far easier to make a cookie-cutter shooter or an over-hyped sequel to a franchise that actually succeeded. You know which games I'm talking about and which people are at fault. If you don't then you have no right to be involved. Too many damn suits already.
The only thing we can hope for at this point is the death of the Tyrants at their own hands. Until then I'll just go outside, maybe build a shelf.