111–120 of 135 posts
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>you might have heard of 4chan? Something Awful is where they came from. It's actually more the other way around.
I'm not very familiar with either site's history, but Something Awful was around for a few years before 4chan.
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AWS has lower upfront cost, doesn't require hardware management, and it's easier to provision consistent servers during growth or temporary peaks. Ideal for an unstable clustered system being run by a startup. I'm mainly talking about EC2, since some other offerings aren't suitable for responsive games. I tried a SimpleDB backend to be hip a couple years back, but it has latency and designed failure rates that are im…
I haven't done the math but I'm guessing that with a popular game the costs of hardware and hiring someone to do server management would be wiped out by EC2 costs pretty quickly. Not sure how spikey game traffic is, but it would seem unlikely that your game is super popular for a day and then drops right off the next as would be the case for many websites. For example if your game business model is charging some nomi…
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Excuse my complete ignorance but I can't resist. Why was everyone trying to stick it to Something Awful ?
They're the most powerful faction and have been for ages. They've also mastered metagaming and have pioneered some new, truly evil tactics. For example, Sovereignty Wars in EVE (taking territory from others) is a long, gruelling process that can go on for months. So the goons started launching their attacks at 3 or 4 AM on a monday, to force their adversaries to wake up and go into work with no sleep. They'd do this…
In a case like this, it seems the non-SA folk got fed up and ganged up on them. As it should be. No dominant force can remain dominant; if they piss off enough folk, either by being evil or just by owning all the things, said folk will band together and take them on.
And that's one part I love about Eve (despite not playing it); the dynamic and self-organizing nature of the universe and its market.
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I haven't done the math but I'm guessing that with a popular game the costs of hardware and hiring someone to do server management would be wiped out by EC2 costs pretty quickly. Not sure how spikey game traffic is, but it would seem unlikely that your game is super popular for a day and then drops right off the next as would be the case for many websites. For example if your game business model is charging some nomi…
Doesn't Sony Japan or Amiga Japan use EC2 for their Playstation 3 servers?
[Edit: this comment turned out not to really be about Eve and more about the difficulty of real time MMOs] This blows my mind. I've been thinking about writing a small multiplayer game for a few weeks. And today I was actually doing back of the napkin calculations. The thing that quickly became clear is bandwidth is O(n^2) where n is the number of players in the same location, since you have to share the location and…
I think one thing Eve has going for it (and this is only an assumption) is that it wouldn't need to sync each player's position on each frame. It could reduce the load dramatically by only sending the acceleration / orientation data for a ship. So if a ship has set a course and has stopped accelerating it doesn't need to send anything else unless that course is changed.
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Have you got more details? Links?
I haven't been public about my process of building the server or its details (I just don't have time), but the game is at: http://firstearthgame.com Someday I'll make time to blog about the server.
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I think one thing Eve has going for it (and this is only an assumption) is that it wouldn't need to sync each player's position on each frame. It could reduce the load dramatically by only sending the acceleration / orientation data for a ship. So if a ship has set a course and has stopped accelerating it doesn't need to send anything else unless that course is changed.
My guess is they only sync location on transaction (when you fire upon/are fired upon).
The report of the battle they link to ( http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/ ) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getti…
Here's a much more in depth report of the battle. http://themittani.com/news/asakai-aftermath-all-over-cobalt-... It's a very fascinating read.
That means that what socially could be called a flash crowd accretes in that sector and drags the servers further and further down.
[Edit: this comment turned out not to really be about Eve and more about the difficulty of real time MMOs] This blows my mind. I've been thinking about writing a small multiplayer game for a few weeks. And today I was actually doing back of the napkin calculations. The thing that quickly became clear is bandwidth is O(n^2) where n is the number of players in the same location, since you have to share the location and…
Can't you do a P2P system when a lot of users are interconnected and then send some information to the prime server?
If you start doing P2P, you're opening yourself to all kinds of hacks, and increasing the amount of duplicate data traveling around.
So if you're in a battle of 3000 people, you would have to somehow connect to 3000 people, send 3000 times more data. This would probably saturate your uplink and get you banned by your ISP as a suspected botnet victim.