SmedBlog: Seamless Continents/Naval Units

[Drakkonan]

Heh, that's the point. I don't expect the tech to be there for 10+ years. That might be an exaggeration, but when it does become possible, I've got to imagine there'd still be a ton of work required to get the engine to support it.

[RoninOni]

Originally Posted by Drakkonan

Heh, that's the point. I don't expect the tech to be there for 10+ years. That might be an exaggeration, but when it does become possible, I've got to imagine there'd still be a ton of work required to get the engine to support it.

I don't think so...

everything is moving into cloud networking... it's what makes this possible in the first place.

Your client isn't tracking every little detail all 2,000 players are doing... only a fraction.... only what is relevant, to you. Most of the players your client is merely aware of their existence and hex location.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a massive project... it would.

Plus they couldn't do it till they had all their main continents finished, and they'd have to make a world map and add isle's, resource nodes and crap too to give the ocean real value.

5-6 years is certainly possible IMO. Optimistic maybe, but possible I think.

[berzerkerking]

I you can do this. my firstborn Son will be named after you

[SixShooter]

This would be the most amazing thing ever!

[vVRedOctoberVv]

This would be fine. Naval units are entirely doable at present, provided they have sufficient water to make it worth messing with. As for the other, large persistent world... Basically talking about Eve, there. One giant concurrently run complex, where each continent or world is divided up amongst "blades" that you pass between as you move. While doable, it isn't something likely to be seen in the short term. Talk about requiring an overhaul of "how things work"... By that I don't mean "game balance" I mean "programming"

[Phisionary]

Originally Posted by RoninOni

Your client isn't tracking every little detail all 2,000 players are doing... only a fraction.... only what is relevant, to you. Most of the players your client is merely aware of their existence and hex location.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a massive project... it would.

Exactly. On the client side of things, it really shouldn't be a big problem. It doesn't care how many players are in the world, as long as you can't see them all at once.

The server side of things... could be a very complicated engineering problem. With the right team of software engineers, very possible. I would imagine you could have multiple co-located servers hosting a single 'super-continent' even, and have the player be transparently passing from server to server all the time. I doubt there are any big reasons that couldn't be done today... just one of needing to sink a $1,000,000 or so into development.

At that point, 50,000 players on the same land-mass, not a problem.

The servers handling it well when two (or three) armies with 2000 players each come together at the same place, that's the tricky part.

[BUGGER]

Are population locks still a problem here? I imagine that wouldn't make ocean travel very seemless...

[Smed]

Originally Posted by NewSith

I would rather have every map border to be a warpgate, so we actually load other continents by crossing the certain line and staying there for a certain period of time instead of making it seamless.

I think having 3 seamless continents may result in extreme stress for server/client.

EDIT: Extreme Stress for Server/Client means more unnecessary glitches, bugs and CTDs, while noby minds the absence of it. In fact it will, in my opinion, become hated if there's any problems (that are destined to be, there's no other way) with it after implementation.


TL;DR, no need for seamless stuff, we're not THAT persistance-twisted.

the way the tech works it doesn't really matter. We stream a lot of stuff anyways.

[Roy Awesome]

Originally Posted by Smed

the way the tech works it doesn't really matter. We stream a lot of stuff anyways.

Curious, are you guys working on location based server instances? I know there is a small team of people doing this in the Unity3d engine with Erlang (the same group that did the 1000 person FPS and took your world record away :P).

Since you have full control over the tech, you could grab all the players in the area and simulate them on one process, while simulating other people in other areas on other processes.

Actually, can you just poke your Tech Director and have him do a technical blog on how you are cramming that many people into the game? There are quite a few people that are very interested in it

[AnamNantom]

Originally Posted by Smed

this tech is possible with our Forgelight engine. It's just a lot of work. We're going to do this. May take a good while though

Smed

Originally Posted by Roy Awesome

Curious, are you guys working on location based server instances? I know there is a small team of people doing this in the Unity3d engine with Erlang (the same group that did the 1000 person FPS and took your world record away :P).

Since you have full control over the tech, you could grab all the players in the area and simulate them on one process, while simulating other people in other areas on other processes.

Actually, can you just poke your Tech Director and have him do a technical blog on how you are cramming that many people into the game? There are quite a few people that are very interested in it

Well, I'm thinking one thing... the mention of streaming makes me think of GaiKai. I've spoken with the guys before, had one of them give me the tech pitch of how it works. It was at one point that I could have had them collocating with a company I worked for at the time, if we had the right locations. I know Sony is buying GaiKai. It's very interesting stuff. I'm sure the tech is not taking anything from them as PS2 was developed before that buy, but it may be related.

I'm quite sure a CDN and strategic clustering of colo may be involved in some of the elements. More than likely, the static content. Though, GaiKai does stream interactive content, and that's very interesting. Come to think of it, SecondLife streams content constantly. They were founded by the former chief tech officer of Real Player (an early adaption streaming video company).

Ok, done pondering

[fod]

this would be so fun if it could be done
it would make planetside 2 feel even bigger than it is now which is great because "size always matters"

[cellinaire]

Originally Posted by IHateMMOs

I doubt they have enough tech to make Planetside 2 take place on an entire planet with no loading screen, but I can see water based battlefield.

This isn't a launch day feature, ya know? He said it as a 'future' plan.

There already are things like 'Infinity : Quest for Earth' or 'Outerra'. So It they can do some serious research, then why not?

I mean, they pulled off the Forgelight and 2,000 players on a single continent. What makes you think it's 100% not possible?


And to Smed : Don't rush it. Take your time for research and I think your programmers and engineers will be more than capable of it. I have faith, you know =)

But just curious about one thing : what about pop migration? I mean, in making the whole planet seamless, there will inevitably be some possibilities of all players converging on a single continent. What way to control their destination?



+ one last thing : If I cared so much about player density, then I would have never paid attention to MMOFPS genre.

[Smed]

Originally Posted by Roy Awesome

Curious, are you guys working on location based server instances? I know there is a small team of people doing this in the Unity3d engine with Erlang (the same group that did the 1000 person FPS and took your world record away :P).

Since you have full control over the tech, you could grab all the players in the area and simulate them on one process, while simulating other people in other areas on other processes.

Actually, can you just poke your Tech Director and have him do a technical blog on how you are cramming that many people into the game? There are quite a few people that are very interested in it

Forgelight has had seamless world support for quite a while now. We don't really discuss how we do a lot of our behind the scenes tech stuff for the simple reason that it's part of what gives us a competitive advantage. We use some pretty interesting techniques to deal with a large amount of players interacting with physics. Look at what we did with DCUO for example. One hero in New York can quite literally throw a bus and have it bounce off a guy in Austin while another guy turns it into a block of ice.

I don't want to make any of this sound easy. it's not. We have some truly brilliant engineers. I see tech demos all the time. I saw that one with 1,000 players. We didn't make a big deal about it but we've had more than that before.

For us it's the whole package. lots of users. supporting that on both the client and the server in a way that allows a great user experience. It's not easy but that's the "secret sauce" for us.

[saltyorange]

The idea definitely sounds extremely awesome. I was thinking the same thing as cellinaire, what happens with the pop limits?

[Tatwi]

I still wish you'd buy these guys,

http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity/index.php

Really, it's just one smart guy doing the programming. The concept has so much potential.