/v/ - Video Games

Balancing the game and making sure it's fun. Hardware and bandwidth requirements. Competent developers. Take a look at Planetside 2.

>>15426553

1. The chaos of massive games tends to be fun so balance probably is as difficult as any other game

2. Games already run on servers. How much data is actually being transmitted that could saturate a servers NIC. Look at pic related. Badnwidth, my ass.

3. But it's not really necessary to have very competent Devs. Just increasing max players would seem to run fine. The primary limitations seems to be the required to run a server BUT having more players doesn't massively increase required performance, it only adds a few new objects it needs to track (which seems to be tiny packets of data) and another host to transmit to.

This is boggling my mind. How come no game (except MAG on PlayStation) has had over 200 players in a performance-critical game?

Is it because M.A.G. was such a failure?

wasn't there a ps3 game with 250 players? I forget the name of it was an acronym or something

>>15426687

>can't stop sucking dicks for a minute and read the other THREE POSTS in the thread

Incredible, you make OP seem like a cool straight guy

>>15426764

Like you can even answer the OP's question, bitch.

>>15426764

lmao

Doesn't WoW have hundred of players connected to the same server at one given time? Or MMOs don't count?

>>15426604

>The chaos of massive games tends to be fun so balance probably is as difficult as any other game

You sure about that? A lot of people often find that kind of chaos unenjoyable as it feels like whether you die or not is due to the luck of where you walk into the enemy's spam when walking round a corner.

Not to say that obsessions with really small 6v6 games is any better. That's when players tend to be at each other's throats since the individual's performance can be seen to be more impactful on team's success.

>>15426828

You are right but what if gameplay was modified ever so slightly?

Imagine a dog red "rush" gamemode with 128 players per side where the attackers spawned in waves only when 40+ players were dead. It would be a blast to have huge wave assaults and see teammates decimated.

The alternative game mode could have instant respawns for attackers, revives and the ability to spawn on bots.

The key is to limit explosives and futuristic weapons that have very precise scopes/aiming. This means most kills will have to be personal and you won't constantly get wiped out by random bombs because the enemy team all spawn with grenades.

The only limiting factor here would be the server which would have to be very good to handle the AI BUT because server CPUs tend to be beasts with many cores, AI calculations could be done. This is probably what killed any previous attempt to have massive servers, because most of the time they would probably not be saturated and nobody wanted to run huge servers that could handle all the AI.

>>15426861

And before people say that AI is too limiting, a mediocre computer today can run warband with 500+ bots. A server could easily run twice as many bots with AI twice as complex.

I feel as if the issue is that most games don't want to explore the territory because if your game has a small player base then servers will always be dead BUT people are living in the past and are scared of massive bot counts.

There's also the issue of coordination. Most successful multilayer games are all about jump-in, jump-out while large warband Napoleonic wars battles with 200 players take hours to co-ordinate and only appeal to a special kind of autist.

>>15426548

Long story short: the laws of physics.

Solve faster than light travel and then we can talk.

It seems to me like anyone with a background in networking just said fuck the game industry over a decade ago.

>>15426548

Electrons and atoms have mass. The online information you send has and actual physical form (so does your own thoughts btw). This can clog up the system if too many people are playing. We have not progressed our tech far enough to deal with truly large numbers.

>>15427041

Excuse my english I know its trash.

>>15427041

Following the rules of nature never got anyone anywhere.

>>15426828

fuckin tfc/tf2 was a much different game on 32 player servers. it was all about exploding choke points even if you couldnt see an enemy and grouped ubercharge attacks vs sentry spam.

however the game wasnt really designed around this. if it were, it would hopefully feel more enjoyable.

>>15427058

maybe itll get me into the dryads leafy panties

>>15426828

Then the map is too small.

more players =/= better. would rather play 5v5 in most games. online multiplayer is for faggots however

The main issue with having giant amounts of players is always networking difficulty. Hammering the servers with that much input, and hammering the players with just as much output takes its toll. This is why historically Battlefield games would run at a tickrate of 10, and why PUBG has a tickrate of 30 but used to struggle hard with it (they have improved it a lot since then though).

Also keep in mind there are a lot of people out there using insufficient internet connections, or worse yet are playing on shitty wifi connections that drop packets all the time. I've had momeno where a teammate is lagging, and I tell him to get an Ethernet cable, and he tells me "hurr Durr it's 2018 I'm not using that old shit." Retards, retards everywhere.

>>15427023

Everyone who was talented and gained tons of experience during the formative years of multiplayer games has left. The average time someone stays in the game industry is 7 years before they get burnt out and retire or do something else. Now we are left with a rotating door of college students.

Also, more games use licensed engines instead of engines that were purpose built for the game. Key optimizations can usually be made that will impact your game noticeably. Or management simply does not care.

>>15426828

I find planetside enjoyable even when there's a lot of chaos, if you're good you can pretty much take a lot of kills from the chaos.

>>15427164

>I've had momeno where a teammate is lagging, and I tell him to get an Ethernet cable, and he tells me "hurr Durr it's 2018 I'm not using that old shit."

iktf, i have a degree on telecommunications, cables are underrated

>>15427009

>>15427041

You niggers are retarded. You could mod BF2 to have 200 players if you made it infantry only with no bells and whistles. Project Reality did tests with it and if it wasnt for stuff like shit linux server binaries, PRISM and 100 being good number of players for the mod (unless you count 8k maps) we could have had 200 player servers running right now. This is on a single-threaded game from 2005 mind you.

>>15427164

Battlefield 2 servers run 30 FPS, with the potential for higher if you tinker with the server binaries. Dont know about the newer games.

Planetside 2 used to have higher tick rate with more players than it does today, most likely lowered due to server downgrades. The Forgelight engine lowers the render distance for players when there are too many in one area though, used to have render distances of less than 50m back around release when it used to have regular 300 player 3 way clusterfuck battles.

The Forgelight Engine devs were pretty good, while on the other hand the devs working on Planetside 2 itself were pretty shit, complete with retardation such as the UI being one of the main CPU hogs in a game with massive battles.

>>15426548

What's actually causing this cancerous focus on multiplayer gaming, and how can we go back to the glory days of people playing alone in their basements with no human contact? Fuck multiplayer. Fuck the internet. Fuck everything. Hermit mode should be how EVERYBODY lives.

>>15427452

Sure it can be done in developed countries but most games are bought in 3rd world countries with basic internet such as the USA.

>>15427517

How the fuck did you find 8ch?

Jews. It's always the Jews. Every single time.

Remember Gamergate, the attack on biased media and ""journalists"" that led to the popularization of this hellsite in the first place? The thing that forced corrupt media into the mainstream and proved time and again, Jews were at fault?

>>15427452

Multi-threading a server for something like a shared instance of a game is really a hard thing.

I do think there is no interest for anyone in the industry to do that. If they can get the money without they won't make it.

>>15431993

fucking zoomer games.

>>15426548

Talented engine programmers.

>>15432000

You're missing something here. Something very obvious.

Game with 100+ people requires high popularity to even function, at least 1000 people online every day. You can be satisfied with your 2 people on a free arena fps, but unpopular high player count game is as good as dead.

I remember how i've been reading how healthy battlegrounds game has 10k+ people to function normally, and "dead" one still has 3k+ people every day.

>>15426548

I've no fucking idea OP.

MAG used to allow up 250 players and that was a PS3 game from 2010 so it's definitely doable, it's not an issue of internet connections or networking like some retards are talking about here. Hell, i used to play that game here in South America and never had any major issues with lag.

>>15427425

Because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad

>>15426548

Literally nothing.

>>15427517

Normalfags turning games into social media, stronk ymon coders who can't code, beta rainbowheads who can copy/paste code for the stronk ymons, pajeets shitting up everything, jews pushing a nigger agenda.

Some are symptoms some are causes.

battlefield games are trash tough

its all about niggers with vehicles raping people on foot

>>15426548

>What's actually limiting hundreds of players on a server in a multiplayer shooter?

Pretty much everything.

Thinking about purely technical issues, you run into synchronization issues (more players = harder to keep what they all see roughly the same), bandwidth issues (more players = more info to transmit and more people that need to receive the info), and CPU usage issues (every player in the game takes time to process).

That applies to different degrees if using centralized server or p2p. but eventually both systems run into those issues.

Balance and one-sided games would also be a nightmare, matchmaking would be incredibly harder, server hosting would be more expensive, and you would need a much larger playerbase to stay alive.

>>15426604

>1. The chaos of massive games tends to be fun so balance probably is as difficult as any other game

Getting instagibbed as soon as you leave the spawn is not fun, and it happened regularly in planetside 2 when the enemy stacked a bunch of troops near one of your spawns.

>2. Games already run on servers.

The game also has to run on each individual client, and considering how much bandwidth battlefield games use you can't go much farther for now.

Also servers usually are ran as VMs, so resources are not wasted just because 1 server isn't hogging all the network and CPU by itself.

>>15431993

Blackpilled but true

>>15427517

>Hermit mode should be how EVERYBODY lives.

The world won't change to protect your feelings.

>>15426861

>huge servers that could handle all the AI.

This got me thinking about a situation where 100+ people coop for one of those game modes where you have to defend a position from waves of hostile ai. Alternatively it might be fun to have to storm heavily entrenched ai forces. Players tend to go for the more efficient method. If sniper rifles and explosives can safely get kills, then you're going to see 70 of their 100 play sniper/explosive heavy. Using ai as the enemy means that you can guarantee variety, and you can also make the teams imbalanced. Alternatively, a mass pvp shooter might work pretty well if you just take away the ability to customize and instead add different weapons as bonuses based on map control.

>>15439937

Have you even played a Battlefield game since 2? Because vehicles in every game since 2 have been made of paper and can be destroyed by running at them with the class that has C4 or just shooting at them with rockets since it only takes like three to kill them. Christ in the newest one the gunners can't even look in more than one direction.

>>15426553

I've hosted AoS 0.75 servers with up to 60 players without any problems(ping went up by 9 from empty to 60 players for the ones playing) and I only have 300kb/s upload.

Developers and their masters.

No one is trying to push the mediocre boundaries currently set. It seems developers lack experience and executives as usual are not risking it, not to mention most programmers making video games aren’t the apex of their expertise, because the gaming industry is fucking trash. It doesn’t attract skill as there’s nothing really valuable to gain from it in the current state, although IA research is bringing some actual brains to the equation, so further scientific endeavors could change games being at the bottom of the barrel in software engineering. Maybe they could try spending more on R&D and less in coke and advertisement to make proper online play.

The main issue is that none of the big-name developers really make PC exclusive shooters anymore and you can't sell games that look like early source engine to people with Playstation 4 Pros and Xbox Ones, nor could those consoles handle hundreds of players in a localized area without running like ass.

Outside of that point, you'd have to have appropriately designed areas to hold the battles in. If there is anything you can learn from playing older shooters with bots and console commands, it's that playing 100v100 games quickly turn into terrorist battles where the most successful players swim into hordes of enemies with explosive weapons. We haven't yet reached an era where developers consistently make good or even decent maps. It feels like every single team wants to re-learn the concepts of map-making every time they work on a game.

>>15426861

>>15426883

The human mind is incapable of correlating numbers that large. After a certain point, it's the exact same thing. Whether you're fighting hundreds of zombies with weapons that take them out a few at a time, or fighting thousands of zombies with weapons that take them out a hundred at a time, makes absolutely no difference. And yes, really at the end you'd be playing more of a general than a soldier, and then suddenly you've transformed an FPS into a 4X game.

>>15427128

>>15426553

>>15427164

>>15427517

You 12 year olds don't belong here. Christ.