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Interested to see how this stands up against alternatives like Akka.
Except both bioware and EA have dismal track record of massive online services. Origin barely works, SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City - you know the story, Battlefield launches are terrible and so on.
> Orbit is a modern Java framework that makes it easier to build and maintain distributed, secure, and scalable online services. It is inspired by a variety of existing frameworks and brings some exciting new things to the table. Except both bioware and EA have dismal track record of massive online services. Origin barely works, SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City - you know the story, Battlefield launches are terrible…
Origin works pretty well (i've seen this echo'd in various internet outlets... reddit, gaming communities, etc), Sim City was launched by maxis a studio that has little (apparent) online knowledge, battlefield launches suffer from buggy gameplay, but their servers are generally solid. Also, most of the BF stuff you interact with is Frostbite, not online (apart from battelog and online connectivity)
Now, how about FIFA and Madden which have userbases that absolutely dwarf those games? All of the news feeds, user statistics, video/image sharing, etc? It works well and consistently. the people who do online at EA studios proper are very knowledgable. I can't speak for Bioware, but you must realize that studios inside EA have a fair degree of autonomy wrt technical decisions.
this is a huge step for EA. I applaud them and am rooting for the active movers inside EA to keep pushing for more OSS.
So this isn't exactly true. EA has many open source projects that are not well publicized. http://gpl.ea.com/ Additionally, EA purchased ESN which also has open source contributions that are maintained after the purchase. It might be fair to say that Orbit is the LATEST EA open source project, but not the first.
The first EA open source project I remember was their own implementation of STL [1] many years ago to deal with STL slow parts. [1] https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL seems to be a clone of it and has commits from 4 years ago
So this isn't exactly true. EA has many open source projects that are not well publicized. http://gpl.ea.com/ Additionally, EA purchased ESN which also has open source contributions that are maintained after the purchase. It might be fair to say that Orbit is the LATEST EA open source project, but not the first.
Those aren't projects developed by EA. They are just source releases of the LGPL components used in EA games.
> Orbit is a modern Java framework that makes it easier to build and maintain distributed, secure, and scalable online services. It is inspired by a variety of existing frameworks and brings some exciting new things to the table. Except both bioware and EA have dismal track record of massive online services. Origin barely works, SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City - you know the story, Battlefield launches are terrible…
citation needed. Origin works pretty well (i've seen this echo'd in various internet outlets... reddit, gaming communities, etc), Sim City was launched by maxis a studio that has little (apparent) online knowledge, battlefield launches suffer from buggy gameplay, but their servers are generally solid. Also, most of the BF stuff you interact with is Frostbite, not online (apart from battelog and online connectivity) N…
Okay.
http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-fo...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2013/03/09/ea-simc...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/simcity-launch-dumb...
http://techland.time.com/2013/03/12/were-ready-for-always-on...
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/8/4079894/ea-suspends-simcity-...
http://www.pcgamer.com/simcity-refund-ea-origin/
In fact, look up 'Battlefield', 'Origin EA' or 'Sim City' on Google News between 2010 and 2014.
Not too many happy people.
I only included Sim City stuff because it was mentioned by your comments' parent.
I just surprised myself with how low my opinion of EA is. My first instinct was that EA would never be so benevolent as to do anything open-source or give anything back to the community and therefore this had to be an April Fool's joke. I see some commits on the github are from 5 days ago, though, so now I'm not so sure.
The first EA open source project I remember was their own implementation of STL [1] many years ago to deal with STL slow parts. [1] https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL seems to be a clone of it and has commits from 4 years ago
> Orbit is a modern Java framework that makes it easier to build and maintain distributed, secure, and scalable online services. It is inspired by a variety of existing frameworks and brings some exciting new things to the table. Except both bioware and EA have dismal track record of massive online services. Origin barely works, SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City - you know the story, Battlefield launches are terrible…
Never had an issue with it.
> SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City
All of them: now fixed. It's not an excuse but online game launches, nearly without exception (most certainly not exclusive to EA), always go like that. The reason is as Blizzard described it with the Diablo launch: during a launch you have a massive influx of players of which a good amount completely lose interest over the next week or two. Buying servers (which, keep in mind, the majority of game publishers still do) would be a huge waste of money.
It's set to improve as the cloud comes into use (e.g. Titanfall, Camelot Unchained, ESO) but there is still resistance against it.
> Battlefield launches are terrible and so on.
Be fair, that had nothing to do with capacity - that was a rushed product. I played it from beta, through early access and into release never being denied a login due to capacity. The game crashed, the sound didn't work, it was extraordinarily buggy and unfinished; yes, but don't claim there was capacity problems.
You are confusing EA's ability to write code and manage infrastructure with their tendency to be greedy and willingness to release unfinished products. The EA greed debate has nothing to do with Orbit.