SmedBlog: Seamless Continents/Naval Units

[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.