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Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

redbull.co.uk

31–40 of 45 posts

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#31

Would be great to see some articles on their technical approach, I assume they have used techniques to reach those scales based upon the fact the average pair of players are too far away from each other to be visible

They trust client data. It makes scaling a lot easier (and cheating/griefing).

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#32
post #7

About that 1800 players number. Based on posts by one of the developers, their server doesn't do any sort of calculation: > Our server is basically 'dumb', it doesn't do anything in the sorts of processing bullet trajectory, player line of sight or any hit detection at all. http://www.jc-mp.com/forums/index.php/topic,638.msg4783.html... Unlike other games which run a full simulation on the server-side, their server (…

Can't the server mitigate a lot of this cheating by enforcing a matching checksum? That's how Subspace (AKA Continuum) does it, and cheating seems to be fairly minimal.

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#33
The best part of the article is the response from Avalanche, the studio that developed the original game. Rather than try to shut the project down, they praised the authors and invited them over for a visit. Awesome! When companies act like that, it makes me want to support them.

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#34
Reminds me of the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas multiplayer mod from a few years back. A few fans in their spare time creating a multiplayer mod for a popular game that lacked it. It really makes you wonder, I understand some games don't have multiplayer due to the fact you not only need to find room in the budget to accommodate more development & testing time, you then also have to invest into the server infrastructure to support the game as well as implement some kind of anti-cheating functionality.

I think this modification is proof that even pointless multiplayer games that are essentially just deathmatch on a massive scale are popular and fun, longevity wise if this were a paid mod I'd expect many would get sick of the boring gameplay after a while.

Different game modes like; Racing mode, Team Deathmatch, Police and Bad Guys, Capture The Flag and good old fashioned single deathmatch. Will be interesting to see how they further improve this, I just went and bought the game because of this mod.

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#35

Reminds me of the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas multiplayer mod from a few years back. A few fans in their spare time creating a multiplayer mod for a popular game that lacked it. It really makes you wonder, I understand some games don't have multiplayer due to the fact you not only need to find room in the budget to accommodate more development & testing time, you then also have to invest into the server infrastructu…

The big difference is that this is basically just ad-hoc networking. All of the game logic is still done on the client side, with no synchronization. There is absolutely nothing to prevent speedhacks, wallhacks, aimbots, etc, all of the reasons that the big boys stopped doing it that way a decade ago.

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#36
post #18

I used to play Multi Theft Auto a lot years ago on GTA: Vice City, which was similarly buggy but excellent fun. This just looks completely insane. Impressive work by the developers - even though they've effectively piggy-backed onto an existing game, presumably the engine etc is closed-source and therefore their efforts are worthy of admiration. I wonder if Multi Theft Auto is still going, I still have my Vice City d…

MTA:SA is still going (fairly) strong. I still get on it every so often. Lots of fun.

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#37

Impressive accomplishment, but perhaps the title should read: "How two men made an FPS mod to support 1,800+ multiplayers in their spare time".

It really irritates me when the titles get changed after a submission gets popular. Now comments like this one lose their meaning since the original title has changed to something completely different. If it's a bad title, it's a bad title. Just leave it alone. Bad titles will be corrected in the comments (like here) or won't be upvoted in the first place. Just stop messing with them.

For anyone who is curious, the original title was:

"How two men made an 1,800 player shooter in their spare time"

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#39

I can't stop cracking up watching these videos. It's like a 3D visualization of Reddit or 4chan. "...in the last test players were killed 223,704 times, averaging out at 1.29 untimely ends per second."

Even though it was mostly chaos, I actually find it kind of interesting how people chose to interact with one another in this free for all:

"They turn up to do everything, from monster truck rallies to dragging boats along motorways with a helicopter just because. Some simply chose to roleplay as Panau City’s air traffic controllers"

Re: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack

#40
post #7

About that 1800 players number. Based on posts by one of the developers, their server doesn't do any sort of calculation: > Our server is basically 'dumb', it doesn't do anything in the sorts of processing bullet trajectory, player line of sight or any hit detection at all. http://www.jc-mp.com/forums/index.php/topic,638.msg4783.html... Unlike other games which run a full simulation on the server-side, their server (…

I've been playing in the past few betas.

In my experience, most people are too excited to even be playing the beta to engage in any sort of cheating. There was one guy, out of all the thousands of people who were playing, who was definitely cheating. He had invincibility. It was just the one guy though. In fact, when it does get released and people don't have to worry about losing access in 24 hours, we might even see more cheating since more people will have the time to explore those options.

I honestly don't care if they have not solved the c10k-equivalent problem, or any problem. I just care that they made an extremely fun experience possible.

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