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Andromedus1 10/04/08 1:12:12 AM
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Apprentice Member
Joined: 10/01/08 |
I understand that many are skeptical of Darkfall's claims that it can handle 10,000 simultaneous players and battles involving hundreds. They base these opinions on current games and current technologies, and the current level of care (or lack thereof) that the giant corporate MMORPG market has fostered in its community of programmers. Please take the time to read the following quotes, taken from the following links: http://darkfallinfo.com/index.php?page=Info&code=darnvcusyc and http://darkfallinfo.com/index.php?page=Info&code=u1gtj5gd6g If you choose to call these men liars, then it is obvious that nothing will satisfy you until at least open beta is out, to which this community must ask: what are you doing here? If you have the patience to write endless garbage about a game you don't want to play, then you ought to have the patience to read the following page or two worth of explanation.
First Interview
MMORPG.com: Your game boasts the ability to interact with tens of thousands of players simultaneously. Technically, how do you plan to achieve this? Tasos Flambouras: The decision that Darkfall would support a high number of players came early in the technical design process. It was obvious that the numbers we wanted would be hard to support on the server end without clustering, so we started evaluating available clustering technologies. None of them met our requirements at the time, and we soon understood that we would need to do this ourselves. After a lot of brainstorming and experimentation, we arrived at a model for distributed computing which we’ve pretty much stayed with since then. Throughout every part of game development, we’ve designed and programmed using asynchronous communication in between very small, movable modules. This has imposed restrictions on the programmers, but it has also helped error location and debugging immensely. We can spread the game servers across anything in between one and several thousand computers. Additionally, we can move modules in between computers while the game is up and running, making load balancing a simple matter of looking at resource utilization before moving modules around. Another problem with a high number of players is the limited resources of player PCs, and limitations in internet connectivity. There areseveral levels of optimizations intended to reduce lag and problems due to these issues. Among these is what we like to consider a quite innovative mechanism for dynamic level-of-detail adjustment, of course in addition to both context-aware and plain binary compression mechanisms for network data. The combination of a distributed model for servers, which will allow us to always have enough CPU power, and inventive optimizations that can balance CPU usage against network performance, gives us a mechanism where resource limitations could be solved by adding a few more servers. Second Interview MMORPGDotCom: Darkfall will probably be one of the first so-called “ultra mmorpg's”, allowing for about ten thousands of players to be online in a single persistent world at once. At the same time you promise us player collision (you can't walk through other players), an extremely large world with high-quality graphics and world-physics. Without getting too technical, why do you think your team will accomplish all of this, while we see that current mmorpg's like Shadowbane can barely handle the lag already? What's the team's experience with these types of programming? Claus Grovdal: We don’t really want to comment on what other games are doing or not doing, but in layman’s terms what we have done is that we first built the system that makes this possible - from scratch, and then built the game on top of that. It usually happens the other way around. It’s impossible to explain this further without getting a bit technical, so here’s a more detailed explanation by Erik Johansen, our network programmer: Our server and networking technology, which we've dubbed a "Real-Time World Simulator" or RTWS for short, has been built from scratch using a design that's in between the peer-to-peer way of thought, and the newer Grid computing concepts. What the users will see as a single server, will in reality be a series of many similar computers, dynamically and continuously moving tasks around in order to keep the workload evenly distributed and timely processed. We are able to simply add a new preconfigured computer to such a server cluster, and have it join its capacity to the already running world simulation without interruptions for the users. And the other way around, if one of the server computers fails for any reason, the remaining ones will take its workload, distribute it and continue after some seconds of reorganizing. This scalability will be an important asset for us when we work to keep servers as responsive as possible for the users. In addition we do of course have prediction algorithms on multiple levels, from simple dead reckoning to advanced analysis of player behavior. The rest is merely about having enough bandwidth to keep up with the network traffic. Some of Erik’s related experience over the last 10 years includes developing an internal content distribution system for a large industrial company serving thousands of simultaneous users, participation in the development of networked communications software used daily by more than 100K users, and development of software for distributing specific tasks among several nodes within a severely reduced/damaged network, with a focus on redundancy and failover mechanisms.
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Death1942 10/04/08 1:18:48 AM
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Hard Core Member
Joined: 2/24/07 |
i'm sorry but 10,000 at once is just plain rediculous. i dont care how friggen good your programming is there is far too many variables that interfere with the game to make a lag free game with that many players. Battles with hundreds? thats achievable but some cuts needs to be made (graphics and effects mainly).
you can argue all you want but until we get decent connections, better servers and even better programming we wont see lag free games.
good luck to Darkfall and i can see maybe up to 100 at once (damn big fight) could be lag free (with those graphics and sparse landscape) |
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| "The easy way is always mined" |
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Andromedus1 10/04/08 1:25:25 AM
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Apprentice Member
Joined: 10/01/08 |
Originally posted by Death1942
You're telling me that in six short minutes, you spotted my thread, read my entire post, analyzed what it had to say, decided you were gainst it, and then composed and submitted your post...
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Kyleran 10/04/08 2:00:20 AM
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Elite Member
Joined: 9/13/06
"In EVE, no one gives a damn about a fair fight." - chafin |
How about, I'll believe it when I see it in action. Only thing I have faith in is God, Aventurine's going to have to prove to me that this works.
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| "This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon EVE Cult member since May 2007 Regarding EVE: "To be honest, I think God himself created this game." - Shek "Warhammer really is just DAoC gone wrong." Azrile
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altairzq 10/04/08 2:25:30 AM
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Hard Core Member
Joined: 7/05/04
$$$OE$$$ |
Innocence is so cute. Life will take care of erasing it. |
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singsofdeath 10/04/08 2:37:55 AM
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Elite Member
Joined: 1/28/06
"You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity." |
Why not cease any debate about DF then? Obviously, we should all believe whatever is being told to us by Aventurine, since obviously they would never tell us anything but the truth, right? I mean seriously. These guys are in no way interested in selling their game. They are just a bunch of cool dudes who work tirelessly day in and out, having no other goal in mind than to please US, regardless of the cost, work, sweat or blood involved.
Come on. Can't you all see it? There's dozens of companies out there, all money-grubbing, corporate sell-outs. Aventurine is the shining beacon of hope, the dream of MMO-Players the world around and there is NO WAY IN HELL that they could POSSIBLY, be saying ANYTHING but the full truth in all their announcements, updates, and blogs.
P.S.: On a serious note, it's recently become a trend to put up developer interviews and then point to them as proof for features in Darkfall. Dear fans, an interview is not proof of existance...it is proof of intent. I have no doubt Aventurine intends for their technology to work the way they say, but will it? Only time will tell. |
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GrayGhost79 10/04/08 3:29:31 AM
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Advanced Member
Joined: 8/30/08 |
Originally posted by singsofdeath
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. oO
Can Aventurine do all they claim? Yep they could. The possibility is there otherwise none of us would even be in this forum. Will Aventurine do all they claim? No one knows. We "All" have to wait till launch to find out.
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| Awaiting DarkFall |
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singsofdeath 10/04/08 3:33:42 AM
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Elite Member
Joined: 1/28/06
"You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity." |
Originally posted by GrayGhost79 | |
