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Server strain/Lag concerns
ArchivedUser
Guest
I just found out about this game recently and have been following it closely since. I have some concerns I'd like to voice coming from other games with siege warfare and massive player battles. I am aiming this post at the developers specifically. Let me mention a game that promised many things similar to what this game is promising.
Darkfall: Online was a game that came out many years ago that promised a player driven world, massive siege warfare, and player cities and such. The biggest issue that game had at launch was how poorly optimized the servers were to allow for massive scale PVP. Frame rate dropped to 1 fps within seconds of more than say 30 people on screen. I just want to voice my concern that if this game doesn't spend a huge budget on netcoding and optimization that it will just turn into another forgotten player driven mmo.
TL;DR There have been many games with similar promises made to this one and they have all but been forgotten please don't make the same mistakes. Example: Server lag/client lag affecting players during large scale events.
Darkfall: Online was a game that came out many years ago that promised a player driven world, massive siege warfare, and player cities and such. The biggest issue that game had at launch was how poorly optimized the servers were to allow for massive scale PVP. Frame rate dropped to 1 fps within seconds of more than say 30 people on screen. I just want to voice my concern that if this game doesn't spend a huge budget on netcoding and optimization that it will just turn into another forgotten player driven mmo.
TL;DR There have been many games with similar promises made to this one and they have all but been forgotten please don't make the same mistakes. Example: Server lag/client lag affecting players during large scale events.
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The developers are a team of veterans that have worked on many other titles and they've completed an amazing amount so far in just over a year. So as far as optimization goes I believe this team will have it under control mind you not off the bat because it is still in PRE-ALPHA but definitely down the line.
Also, they've already said that they have the funding needed to make this game already BEFORE crowd funding has even started so as far as putting money into netcoding I don't think that will be an issue and also I'm hoping they'll be investing a good amount in server quality/quantity/maintenance to counter those issues.
I think the Alpha will show if epic scale sieges will actually be possible. I hope they figure it out!
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If you watch most of their assets they pop in and out of existence when you are very close.
Its what they call distance culling.
It is 'A' solution.....and a terrible one to my eyes.
And even so every game with large warfare lags because no one to date has really understood the problem well enough to fix it.
Or don't have the budget to fix it if they do have the savvy.
When you have 100 players peer to peer you have 100 processors working in parallel.
Many of those processors are multicore, so you have multiple processors per player in fact.
MMOs normaly have cluster farms of central servers...but their is hardly every a 1 core per player relationship.
So it is impossible for all the logged on players to play in parallel.
They have to queue for service.
The busier the time of day on the server...the greater the queues..the worse the performance.
The second problem is you cannot have more than one process write to a data area at any moment in time.
So how can 30 players update 1 players data simultaneously ? They cant by most programs.
Because you cant access memory space in parallel.
But there is a fix for this problem too....
Netcode is not the problem is used to be with todays bandwidth unless there is a DDoS attack.
Parallel execution and parallel write access is.
their FAQ specifically states they'll be trying to optimize their network coding. That alone should be a sure-enough sign
And I just watched a dev video yesterday where they mentioned that while the Unreal Engine 4 is not specifically designed out of the box to handle large scale battles, it is completely open ended for Intrepid to tweak and optimize it.
As an aside......I know that CU (Camelot Unchained) is writing their code from the ground up to, "Maintain an absolute minimum of 30 FPS in battles of up to 500 people".