Goblin Squad Member
|
PFO is compared to EvE a lot and not without reason.
An integral part of EvEs legend are massive battle between alliances in which hundreds of players take part.
Now in EvE this works because what you see of the opponents are mostly just little white dots because most of the battles are fought at very long ranges and thus your video card hasn't all that much to render.
But in a classical fantasy MMO you will usually have a lot of people in all their splendid gear up close and personal.
Will that work without lag/slow down?
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
I think they are wanting to try and combat this with the use of formations for large scale battles. However, I read or heard somewhere that a new fantasy MMO coming out (I want to say it was Elder Scrolls Online) intends to have 200+ player battles, so I expect it to be fully possible.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
My experience with AION where, in the time I played, we had tons of lag is not very good. We had like 1-3 thousands players trying to conquer a fortress but lag did it even more deadly as we could die w/o know who kiiled us and how we got killed just because lag was unbearable. I hope in this game we have a solution for that.
|
Goblinworks Executive Founder
|
For reference Ryan's Discussion on using formation to combat load issues.
Server Load
Generally speaking the ideas we've discussed in this blog represent no significant server load issues and may in fact reduce them somewhat.
Determining if a unit is or is not cohesive and is or is not taking cohesive action and to what degree that generates effects and Combat Power is a trivial amount of work. Having that happen in the context of a formation means it may actually be possible to reduce that load somewhat because the formation constraint makes it easy to eliminate a lot of cases where the unit has failed to maintain cohesion.
Loaded servers are almost always a function of the number of active objects on the grid. And the load comes not from processing the movement of those objects or their state changes, it comes from the communication overhead between the server and the clients to keep the client in synch with the server. As I've said before, it's an N^2 problem - the amount of bandwidth consumed increases with the square of the number of communication pipes.
So the battle against server lag is a really a battle to keep that amount of information being exchanged as small as possible, to make the ability to exchange it as fast as possible, to recover gracefully from desynchs and disconnects, and to manage the "heartbeat" of the system - the number of times in any interval that state changes occur.
On the other hand, client lag is almost always a factor of video card processing power. Video cards have a limited amount of memory to hold textures and a limited amount of polygons they can render per time slice. As a battle gets more crowded the demand on the videocard goes up really quickly and when its limits are exceeded the client goes into slide-show mode. Metagaming the quality of your army's video cards is not a bad strategy.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
My experience with AION where, in the time I played, we had tons of lag is not very good. We had like 1-3 thousands players trying to conquer a fortress but lag did it even more deadly as we could die w/o know who kiiled us and how we got killed just because lag was unbearable. I hope in this game we have a solution for that.
WvWvW in GW2 is astonishingly smooth. I think this is an area where some games wanted to do it before the tech was ready.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Ryan commented that it's possible for eg the difference between when wow released and what's more realistically possible now, is significant.
It's certainly a worthwile observation that space provides advantages and those white dots (and time dilation) help with EVE. I think formations has a huge potential and it would seem to make sense that any gameplay have strong basis in working with the tech solution instead of against it.
I posted in another thread some egs of number in RvR... *brb*
Here we go, a little research on mass pvp in other games: Numbers of participants comparison
The information may not be perfectly accurate but the approx. figures are suitable suggestive.
For mass pvp if going >1,000 or even 500, it does seem to make sense that formations are a significant gameplay tool for ALL players to make sense of the battlefield even if they are tethered to a unit in formation. I think after a certain scale and number of avatars displayed on screen, especially the zergy special fx mass combat in other mmorpgs it would be a significant improvement in the experience and the relation of the individual to the scale of armies would be a more realised I guess: eg individual < unit < supporting units < role in the battle.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
There are serious bandwidth improvement arguments to be made for treating a formation as one object as far as the server is concerned. Problem is, this will probably detract from the gameplay for anyone who isn't leading one. This would maybe imply automoving and maybe once in a while hitting a clicky on the screen to follow orders to raise a shield wall etc.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Formation combat may be a solution but it remains to be seen if that can be implemented to be fun.
These should probably be reserved to really large battles that otherwise would get truly chaotic standoffs that are no real fun any more. To prevent such a situation a solution could be made that, although less fun/varied/action packed than 8vs8 skirmishes, are still more satisfying than endless random zergfests.
We will see.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Now in EvE this works because what you see of the opponents are mostly just little white dots because most of the battles are fought at very long ranges and thus your video card hasn't all that much to render.
my understanding is that the problem is not the graphics but the bandwith, is the server synchronizing all the actions and consequences. The heartbeat and pace of combat then matters a lot more than graphic detail, and the reason EVE 'dots' don't give lag isn't because you don't see what they look like, but because you don't see much of what they are doing.
If the video card is indeed the bottleneck, you just need a setting where graphics and animations become very simplified once player density reaches some critical level (or when joining a formation). Stick-figure battles >> zerged by lag monsters
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Yeah, there actually two components of what we call "lag".
Actual lag is when your PC has to wait for a resonse from the servers and thus can't react in a timeframe that you would like.
Slow down is what happens if there are too many fancy looking not-white-dots around at close distance.
EvE does not have a slow down problem that much because unless the ships of your opponents/fellows are quite near, the PC does not need to draw them, so in EvE the only real problem is true lag.
In all MMOs I played so far there has been slow down when a great many players showed up, even on the best PCs.
Also in PFO there will be a big incentive to bring as many players as possible, unless in, f.i. DAoC where your reward is very small if you have to share it with many others. I don't know about guild wars but I guess that even there there are not many battles above 100vs100.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
GW2 battles can be pretty big. I've seen roughly 300 v 300 v 300 or thereabouts, and I've only seen a few battles (I don't play it often).
Usually the battles I've seen were one side versus another, but occasionally all three mix it up.
Performancee is really pretty good for me on my system over cable.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
So far there hasn't been an upper limit asserted but I would have been very surprized to see one this early.
They will need to see much more than they have accomplished yet to know.
They surely have some design estimates, but there are some serious network architecture and database questions they are likely still coming to grips with.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Nihimon is correct. Today's servers are quite powerful, and it could be that by EE, and almost certainly by OE, GW will upgrade to the even more powerful servers that will be available down the road. New technology has recently be tested at Cambridge that will allow the manufacture of chips that function in #D, allowing for stacking of micron sized chips atop each other and allow all of them to pass electrons to one another. This means Moore's Law will continue for some time to come, making even more powerful servers and PC's. Depending upon the architecture of the server build, it could easily accommodate even more massive battles than are being discussed here. Only time will tell.
