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Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#61

Post by ljm »

s_kilk wrote: post #22
godelmachine wrote: post #19

Not related, but relatable. I often wonder between Games and Enterprise Software, who has a more complex backend architecture? At the outset, it seems like Games are complex as hell, in the sense that when a gamer shoots another gamer dead, there has to be freeing and re-allocation of processes/ resources, and with tens or hundreds of persons playing the same game over the internet , both the gaming architecture and…

Just a thought : games have the advantage of being constrained by a particular purpose and design, while enterprise architectures are more free to (d)evolve into a sprawling, incoherent mess of systems. Can you imagine anyone at a game company wanting to replatform the hit-detection system onto hadoop?

I've thought about that, but at the same time I wonder just how much of each game (from a single studio) is actually reusable. There's the networking/infra side for multiplayer games, but even the engines themselves seem to get significant rework for each new game. It's all insanely optimised C++ (which I imagine can be reused in many places until the hardware is updated) and then a huge amount of scripting to piece the dialogue, story, cutscenes together, etc. right?

I imagine it must be quite difficult switching careers between games and (particularly larger scale) web projects. Imagine defaulting to Ruby on Rails to handle your multiplayer infrastructure and trying to model the game state through REST.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#62

Post by dijit »

vvanders wrote: post #48
dijit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I can't talk about future developments. sufficed to say: my job is getting easier in future (thanks mostly to Stadia)

Kinda surprised to see some one say a positive thing about Stadia. I did a fair amount of network programming back when I was in the industry and I just don't see how it can work. I see enough congestion on just the local 2.4Ghz spectrum out here it doesn't really matter how fast the data center is. Without some form of dead reckoning you don't have much room for error.

Oh, certainly. It's a serious undertaking for everyone, I'm skeptical to how it can work when we're often measuring screen latency and input latency in nanoseconds. (and obviously not getting sub-millisecond latencies on those significantly faster/less congested subsystems).

However, Stadia is Linux, so if you want to be on stadia, you need a linux version of the game, which means primitives need to be ported. Once primitives are ported for the client, they can be optimised for the server, then you have a linux gameserver. Which is good for me.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#63

Post by dfinninger »

brianpgordon wrote: post #47
speedplane wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I no longer do windows development, but I miss it. It's strengths are greater than you portray. The C# / .NET libraries are really beautiful and well thought out. I most often program in Python, and while the Python language is more concise and elegant than C#, the Python libraries are not nearly as well organized and consistent as C# / .NET. Java libraries are better than Python but worse than C#, and the Java langu…

I share your high regard for C# and the .NET libraries but not your disdain for Java. Java the programming language is pretty ugly but the JVM is robust and there are other languages which compile down to Java bytecode. In your "scrappy startup" scenario I would pick Scala or Clojure long before Python, mainly because I'm skeptical of the idea of using a dynamically typed programming language for large-scale backend…

Python supports gradual typing now, and it's made the experience for me much more manageable. Lots of good IDE integration too. It's not a replacement for Java's or Go's (etc...) type system, but it really increases the amount of Python you can support given the human scalability constraints.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#64

Post by dom96 »

exlurker wrote: post #17
dom96 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd be curious to hear about is how your servers handle simulating the game world. How many players are simulated per world and what are some of the tricks that you use to ensure the simulation doesn't fall behind, or if it does how do you make sure the clients don't notice? I'm currently writing a (much much simpler agar.io-like) multiplayer game and finding it quite challenging to make the experience smooth, I…

I found this article very enlightening: https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architect...

yeah, this is where I got the knowledge about lag compensation from :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#65

Post by scarface74 »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #56
brianpgordon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, you may be the perfect person to ask a question that I've been wondering about. Is .NET Core on Linux viable yet for serious use? I've done some tinkering with it and gotten a project working on MacOS but I did the development in Visual Studio on Windows. Is it realistic to do your development in Rider, with the open source version of msbuild for CI, and have it perform reasonably on Linux in production, without…

The kind of development we do probably wouldn't count as "serious" here on HN, but since the other comment didn't really answer your question, I'll pitch in. We've been developing using .NET Core/Linux/Rider for the past two years. It's been pretty great. Once you get to know the IDE really well, I'd say Rider beats VS in terms of functionality and usability. .NET Core was developed with CLI usage in mind and common…

If you are just running a few static Windows servers the slight cost benefit of running Linux for .Net Core is really not that great. If you are doing anything more dynamic where you are rapidly bringing “servers” up and down is where you see the real cost and performance benefits. Of course you can’t run Windows instances with either Fargate or lambda but even with regular ECS (Docker) or autoscaling EC2 instances where you can, Windows costs more, takes more resources, and is slower to launch.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#66

Post by godelmachine »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #57
godelmachine wrote: post #19

Not related, but relatable. I often wonder between Games and Enterprise Software, who has a more complex backend architecture? At the outset, it seems like Games are complex as hell, in the sense that when a gamer shoots another gamer dead, there has to be freeing and re-allocation of processes/ resources, and with tens or hundreds of persons playing the same game over the internet , both the gaming architecture and…

I never worked with games infrastructure, but I can tell first hand about enterprise software (I am a manager & architect for a ~ 1000 server platform): I think it is easier for us. We have very few cases that are really time-sensitive (mostly in manufacturing execution systems), the responsiveness of the rest of the systems is quite relaxed, nobody cares about a few seconds here and there. In the same time we are se…

I work on BMC Software’s ITSM module and the most time sensitive application is Service Level Management.

For obvious reasons, SLA’s comprise an integral part in IT services industry, and if I am not wrong, BMC Software’s SLM module is still written in C++, at least that’s what the documents say.

So far, I have never really seen any C++ stack trace in any of the log files, but some day hope to. Furthermore, I have never even seen any C++ related file in any of the configuration files.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#68

Post by berdon »

SeanBoocock wrote: post #59
lwansbrough wrote: post #25

Halo 4 and 5 use a project developed “in house” at Microsoft called Orleans. Roughly speaking it is similar to Akka. It’s an actor based distributed system which attempts to hide the implementation of distributed networking. In essence, each match and each player get their own “network attached“ object (a “grain” in Orleans terms.) So: var player = new Player(123); is actually instantiated _somewhere_ on the network…

We used Orleans for our service framework for Breach, a 4v1 asymmetric action RPG built with Unreal Engine 4. While all the real-time simulation was implemented authoritatively as part of an Unreal Engine 4 server, we used Orleans/SignalR for the service backend. Services included: matchmaking, (voice)chat, character/account persistence, quests, microtransactions, customer service, and friends among others. It's a gr…

I actually started putting together a book over Orleans’, it’s use, and best practices. I should probably finish it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#69

Post by Havoc »

dijit wrote: post #10
Slartie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the rationale behind using Windows on the servers? I'm wondering because the argument I usually hear is that someone high up in the ops team hierarchy declares "but we need everything in the AD, including all the servers, otherwise I can't sleep well". In your case however this apparently doesn't apply, as you do not register them in the AD. Is it so the game devs don't need to write cross-platform server cod…

Real reasons for: * One platform to develop on; back-end coders tend to go back and forth between client and server programming. * Faster iterations. (just hit F5 in visual studio) * IOCP Stupid reasons for: * Old IT Director denied the use of virtualisation software. (mac address randomisation wasn't great and it caused a switch crash if two people had the same mac) * Windows licenses are really cheap compared to de…

As a complete noob yet somehow armed with a VS enterprise license...could you elaborate on

>* Faster iterations. (just hit F5 in visual studio)

Is this some sort of code sync to servers/cloud?

Re: Ask HN: What is the ops architecture like for AAA multiplayer game servers?

#70

Post by druerridge »

markmandel wrote: post #51

If you want to learn more about this in person, in 2020 there will be the first "Online Game Technology Summit" at the Game Developers Conference. (Disclaimer: I'm one of the summit advisors) We're trying to grow the education in this space of game development, because currently it is very sparse. AFAIK, this is the only event that is dedicated to the technical aspects of online, connected or multiplayer games. Detai…

So happy to see this happening! I've also been advocating for more community development and knowledge sharing in this space. I believe there's a huge unfulfilled need to connect the industry more on these topics. I've also been organizing an event in the space, and looking at the possibility to land a special interest group in larger organizations that can support our community. I'll drop you a line!
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