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Google and Ubisoft Are Teaming Up To Improve Online Multi-Player Video Games (fortune.com)
Google and Ubisoft announced on Tuesday they have a new project intended to improve the performance of fast-paced, online multi-player video games. From a report: The search giant said it teamed with Ubisoft -- the publisher of popular video games like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry -- to create a gaming developer framework intended for coders that work on online video games. The project is called Agones, which is Greek for "contest" or "gathering," and it will be available in open-source, meaning developers can use it for free and also contribute to the underlying technology. Google pitches Agones as a more cutting-edge way for developers to build multi-player games that don't crash or stutter when thousands of video gamers play at the same time.
Each time people want to play their favorite first-person shooter or other computer resource-heavy online video game with others, the underlying infrastructure that powers the online video game must create a special gaming server that hosts the players. The Agones framework was designed to more efficiently distribute the computing resources necessary to support each online gaming match, thus reducing the complexity of creating each special server while helping coders better track how the computing resources are being used.
Each time people want to play their favorite first-person shooter or other computer resource-heavy online video game with others, the underlying infrastructure that powers the online video game must create a special gaming server that hosts the players. The Agones framework was designed to more efficiently distribute the computing resources necessary to support each online gaming match, thus reducing the complexity of creating each special server while helping coders better track how the computing resources are being used.
what about letting us have lan servers and our own hosted ones that can run the mods and maps we want to run?
Google and Ubisoft Are Teaming Up To Improve Online Multi-Player Video Games Data Mining
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Because that's what we needed. Another gaming network library that will once again abstract too many important things, be insufficiently tunable for different game genres, and impose an invasive obnoxious data un/marshalling scheme on every game object.
And have nothing whatsoever to do with anything profitable at Google, and so it will be abandoned a few weeks after it's published.
Don't be ridiculous. How are the supposed to datamine every move we make in game and force unwanted patches on us if we're allowed to run our own servers?
I've said it previously, but this really hammers it home. GOOGLE IS EVIL. Pairing with a purveyor of super obnoxious DRM. Ewwwwwww. Ubisoft is disgusting. I won't play their games anymore, even ones I legitimately purchased.
Those are not two names I usually associate with a good user experience... much less an improved one.
Unless, of course, you define a good user experience by not having to worry about lugging around that darned heavy wallet.
Outside of a few enclaves, there's little push to make games connected online. Those enclaves tend to be centered around large media companies.
Don't get me wrong, I've done plenty of multiplayer, but I don't like it exclusively. I'd rather the devs spend an extra six months polishing gameplay over polishing netcode. Or give the networking funds over to the story devs so I can have some of my in-game actions reflected meaningfully in the story. None of this pallet-swapped outfit or "moral compass" bull. Meaningful reflection.
You must be old, like me. Players in their 10's-20's don't care much for single player games anymore, it's all about online PvP (in whatever form that takes for any given genre) for the vast majority of them. Just look at the top grossing and top played games (including F2P games like LoL, Hearthstone, Fortnite BR, etc). All multiplayer. The last "Huge" single player game I can think of was Zelda BotW. Doom, Fallout 4 before that but none of those have any staying power with the general gaming public.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
a.k.a. Ubishit and "that company that kills 3 out of 2 of their products"
P.S.: the 3rd is from acquisition
Let users have access to their own offical servers all over the world while the game is enjoying sales.
When the game is no longer supported push an update to let people host the game, use p2p. A way to keep multi player working within a user community.
Pushing a big brand party political data mining ad company onto a game is just not useful branding.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ah, the two companies I love the most getting together
Just wait until the collaboration between EA and Comcast, powered by Oracle!
what about letting us have lan servers and our own hosted ones that can run the mods and maps we want to run?
There are still a handful of games which do this. The most recent release of Unreal Tournament does so, as does Civ VI. A great resource is this page:
http://www.langamelist.com/ind...
Which lists out games exclusively by the ability to do LAN-based multiplayer.