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From these tech demos to an actual MMO? (technical/server side)

Hey folks,

Game looks great, a lot of efforts has been put on game design, level design, and everything visual.

However at this stage everything is certainly offline, and I heard nothing about you will put this world, unprecedented mechanics and thousands of players online.

I see companies with full technical/server pros stuggling to offer stable experience with only a few dozens/hundreds of players per server (and sometimes these are not even mmos, "only" coop survival-esque games)

In your team,on tech side, I see only 1 Technical Director.

Would you be able to elaborate on your means/plans to make this an MMO ?

Thank you in advance, keep up the good work!

Comments

  • [quote quote=14008]Hey folks,

    Game looks great, a lot of efforts has been put on game design, level design, and everything visual.

    However at this stage everything is certainly offline, and I heard nothing about you will put this world, unprecedented mechanics and thousands of players online.

    I see companies with full technical/server pros stuggling to offer stable experience with only a few dozens/hundreds of players per server (and sometimes these are not even mmos, “only” coop survival-esque games)

    In your team,on tech side, I see only 1 Technical Director.

    Would you be able to elaborate on your means/plans to make this an MMO ?

    Thank you in advance, keep up the good work!

    [/quote]

    +1
  • I am quite curious about this myself,
  • I heard that they are planning on using google servers to run the game, so I'm hoping it will be pretty stable. Still, I've seen too many mmo launches ruined by developers who didn't properly account for the amount of the players who would be logging in on day 1.
  • [quote quote=14091]I’ve seen too many mmo launches ruined by developers who didn’t properly account for the amount of the players who would be logging in on day 1.[/quote]
    But to be fair it is a little bit of a dilemma for devs because they have to pay for the infrastructure that will only be used for a few days around launch or when a new expansion comes out or watever and the rest of the time all those expensive servers go unused
  • The pricing infrastrcuture now days is dynamic i believe.
    You can spin up and spin down servers on the fly.....you only get charged for the ones you spin up.
    How true that is i dont know....word of mouth from a leading supermarkets personnel.
    Much of the cloud based infrastructure is built to be scalable.

    The problem is logical cores per player (parallel concurrency) and attribute variable fragments per player (to allow muti-target AoE through parallel writes).
    Of course all that database bandwidth and shared game RAM has to be available.
    Only the DEVs will decide what infrastructure 'per player' they are willing to fund and how much latency we will suffer.

    I would love to see max cores available and max players
    A live cores in use vs player online chart.
    Also a parameter fragments vs AoE cap chart
    Then we could genuinely gauge what kind of performance we are going to get for our money.
    Responsive or laggy as hell.
  • ''However at this stage everything is certainly offline''

    there are clips where they play online , they talk about other guilds being active on other node's etc. but yeah not 10000 people tho ;)
  • [quote quote=14207]The pricing infrastrcuture now days is dynamic i believe.
    You can spin up and spin down servers on the fly…..you only get charged for the ones you spin up.
    How true that is i dont know….word of mouth from a leading supermarkets personnel.
    Much of the cloud based infrastructure is built to be scalable.

    The problem is logical cores per player (parallel concurrency) and attribute variable fragments per player (to allow muti-target AoE through parallel writes).
    Of course all that database bandwidth and shared game RAM has to be available.
    Only the DEVs will decide what infrastructure ‘per player’ they are willing to fund and how much latency we will suffer.

    I would love to see max cores available and max players
    A live cores in use vs player online chart.
    Also a parameter fragments vs AoE cap chart
    Then we could genuinely gauge what kind of performance we are going to get for our money.
    Responsive or laggy as hell.

    [/quote]

    Yes this is it exactly. They are going with Google cloud servers so the infrastructure will be easy to spin up and down quickly.
  • A lot of games use google cloud servers, this is very accessible, however this does not prevent massive issues as the most important is how the game was developped to interact with them.

    This takes a squad of devs specialized in net/server code, and I see none at intrepid.

    I would love to hear them adress this major concern.
  • [quote quote=14008]
    Game looks great, a lot of efforts has been put on game design, level design, and everything visual.
    [/quote]

    Thanks! The artists and designers have put in a lot of time and effort making this game look visually pleasing.


    [quote quote=14008]
    In your team,on tech side, I see only 1 Technical Director.

    Would you be able to elaborate on your means/plans to make this an MMO ?
    [/quote]

    I'm that dude; I also wear the hat of Principal Programmer. However, I'm not the only person working on code for the game. We have a few folks - currently not listed on the "about the team" page - who are working with me on the codebase. I am also in the process of interviewing additional programmers to fill out the team a bit further.

    It's true that our coding team <strong>seems</strong> a little sparse for such an ambitious project, but I can assure you there's more to the project than just what you see on the surface. We have external partners who have already developed strong systems and utilities that we intend to leverage to a maximal degree. We also intend to set up bi-directional development effort with a few of those partners. Don't forget the epic level (pun intended) of development effort that Epic provides for the Unreal Engine we are using as a base for the game. So, if you tally up the total number of programmers of all the studios we are partnering with and then add in our own, it looks much more like the numbers you might see working in a vacuum on a large AAA title.

    Additionally, the Blueprint language that Unreal Engine provides allows game designers to produce nearly the same quality "code" as a software engineer, thus freeing up actual programmers to work on backend services and native C++ plugins for Unreal (which makes the designers more empowered to make the game they envision).
  • Hey, I got a cool idea! Why don't you introduce the whole team of programmers and let them give a quick overview what they are working on under the surface in the Kickstarter livestream? Also I am kinda curious now who these external partners are and what strong systems and utilities you are outsourcing and not developing in house.
  • Jason, thank you very much for taking the time to adress this concern!
    Precisely the kind of detailed answer I was hoping to get.

    I look forward to learn more about the technical details you may share further during the development. While not everyone will find that interesting, I am sure you measure that sharing about this backs up the credibility of your ambitious project!

    Best of luck, see you around!
  • I hope this game will be a success, and players from all other MMORPGs will come and play this one, so we will have one huge cluster ehem.
    And hopefully game engine will be optimised to deliver great performance even with so many players.

    I do hope this game gets players base like GW2, WoW, BDO and other great MMOs out there.

    It just makes me sad that it will take more than 18 months before we can start playing this game :(
  • [quote quote=15453]I hope this game will be a success, and players from all other MMORPGs will come and play this one, so we will have one huge cluster ehem.
    And hopefully game engine will be optimised to deliver great performance even with so many players.

    I do hope this game gets players base like GW2, WoW, BDO and other great MMOs out there.

    It just makes me sad that it will take more than 18 months before we can start playing this game <img alt="????" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.2.1/svg/1f641.svg" />

    [/quote]

    As long as I can see game feeds as it grows...I am good with that.
  • [quote quote=14364]A lot of games use google cloud servers, this is very accessible, however this does not prevent massive issues as the most important is how the game was developped to interact with them.

    This takes a squad of devs specialized in net/server code, and I see none at intrepid.

    I would love to hear them adress this major concern.

    [/quote]

    I really hope they aren't using googles cloud services. They aren't as geographically dispersed as AWS and Azure. If they are it severely limits them US only servers which for anyone (like myself) living in other countries dramatically decreases the buy-in for this game.
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