Chefkoch
2012-07-08, 01:19 PM
with Planetside 2 Beta going to start in a few weeks it feels like a dream come true.
Certainly Planetside was a gamble, and an enormous technical challenge. “Primarily the problem was scale,” Lawrence continues. “We weren’t going to have just 16 or 32 people slugging it out and treat latency as a ‘tough luck and try logging into another server’ issue. We wanted 500 people in battles.” And this is where it gets a bit technical. “There’s the famous ‘N-squared’ issue, in which logic iterates every player in a list then considers every other player for comparison. For 32 people, that’s 1024 comparisons. For 500, it’s 250,000. What was easily within your CPU budget in a 32-player environment completely falls apart with 500.”
What the game achieved in terms of latency management and server responsiveness, “no other product could do at the time, and most people still can’t do to this day.” It's not immodest of Lawrence to say, “I can still crest a hill in Planetside and see a scene of mayhem and destruction that is unparalleled in other games I play. The sense of being in the middle of a huge war, with everybody there a real person is a unique thing."
As for SOE themselves, sadly it doesn't sound like they've got any plans for a Planetside 2. “Well, to be honest, if we had a Planetside 2 sitting right here we’d have told you about it by now,” says Lawrence. “As a company and as a bunch of gamers, we remain really interested in the MMOFPS genre and want to see new product there.” :D
BBC Collective Source (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A13770371)
Certainly Planetside was a gamble, and an enormous technical challenge. “Primarily the problem was scale,” Lawrence continues. “We weren’t going to have just 16 or 32 people slugging it out and treat latency as a ‘tough luck and try logging into another server’ issue. We wanted 500 people in battles.” And this is where it gets a bit technical. “There’s the famous ‘N-squared’ issue, in which logic iterates every player in a list then considers every other player for comparison. For 32 people, that’s 1024 comparisons. For 500, it’s 250,000. What was easily within your CPU budget in a 32-player environment completely falls apart with 500.”
What the game achieved in terms of latency management and server responsiveness, “no other product could do at the time, and most people still can’t do to this day.” It's not immodest of Lawrence to say, “I can still crest a hill in Planetside and see a scene of mayhem and destruction that is unparalleled in other games I play. The sense of being in the middle of a huge war, with everybody there a real person is a unique thing."
As for SOE themselves, sadly it doesn't sound like they've got any plans for a Planetside 2. “Well, to be honest, if we had a Planetside 2 sitting right here we’d have told you about it by now,” says Lawrence. “As a company and as a bunch of gamers, we remain really interested in the MMOFPS genre and want to see new product there.” :D
BBC Collective Source (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A13770371)