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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.
The pay sucks, the hours suck, the management sucks. The industry is risk averse, and is a consumer of research - not a creator. Only moron brogrammers end up stuck in cubicles at game studios. Totally unsurprised that true innovation comes from outside the industry.
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?
How Indie Devs Made an 1,800-Player Action Game Mod In Their Spare Time
Wow, indie devs making mods in their spare time? Holy crap! That would be revolutionary two decades ago!
Sit around, kids, and let me tell you a story about when PC games were expected to be modded, had rich and diverse communities devoted to all the mods, and all of this with the approval and support of the people that made the game!
Of course, back then, there was no concept of "DLC", and an FPS intended for online play with only a handful of maps was dead before it even got started. Games shipped with lots of content, and the game developers would churn out and release new content, for free, in addition to all the stuff the hobbyists made.
Games today, with entirely too few exceptions, are shitty console ports designed to be closed ecosystems so the publishers can charge you for piddly bits of content and you need to be a god damn hacker to even install mods, never mind make them.
WINDOWS, not Linux.
When even the geeks pass on Linux for games, is there any hope?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I've seen the trailer. Basically imaging a massive free for all. Fun? I suppose.
Just 'Cause! (with apologies to Yahtzee)
I need some pussy tonight
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.
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?
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