John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage 162
AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"
Glad to see he's not charging forward (Score:4, Insightful)
But given the mess that has grown up around MW2, it should be pretty clear that the attempt to leave dedicated servers behind is not being taken well. The mechanism in use there seems destined to cause problems for users, and the fluidity available from dedicated servers can't be easily replaced by any system that has users hosting servers. It may be that hordes of virtual servers are the future of dedicated servers, but that's still a far better option than things like a five-second pause while the players' systems figure out who is taking over next.
If there's anyone that I trust to come up with a workable technical solution, it's John Carmack, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.
Battlefield Heroes.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Battlefield Heroes.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth pointing out that the RAGE demo at QUAKECON was done on a 360 controller. That should be a pretty strong sign that this is a console port design decision, that will ultimately affect the PC port. Let's take a look at console games with PC ports that use the "no dedicated server" model!
The downside to no dedicated servers is that you lose the community aspect, community organization becomes MUCH harder, and the game doesn't live on as long. See also: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server. Incredibly frustrating, and I'm not really sure game/community mechanics have progressed far enough to allow the community/communities to grow up around the game that you want to push further away from dedicated servers. The one console game that I saw with a decent community setup was SOCOM 3 for the PS2; it had clans and messageboards, a messaging system and a somewhat steam-like buddy system/join buddy's game function.
Case in point: Rage is a console game, with console server matching system. The fact that it's coming out for the PC means that it's simply going to be a piss-poor PC port of a console game, and last time I checked, PC-ports of console games were fucking terrible (see also: Borderlands).
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Uhh... just so you know: Dragon Age's lead SKU was the PC version.
The graphics are better on PC, the controls are better on PC, and the online elements integrate nicely on the PC.
-Better graphics?
yes, with PC 2x the speed of Xbox you get better gaphics
-the controls are better on PC
? are you kidding???? until the patch you couldnt use mouse wheel cos it would glitch and block you out of weapon change functionality, not to mention a HUGE controller LAG (even when your gfx hits 60fps) due to mouse input aliasing and a bugged vsync.
-and the online elements integrate nicely on the PC
again WHAT? cant invite friends to my session due to game publisher running ONE overloaded server for
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I'll chime in with this with a non anonymous post, because it needs to be said. Seriously, don't use it. If you're quoting someone else, then fine. But it's just a version. Calling it an SKU reeks of trying too hard.
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See: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server.
We have an INX dedicated server we can switch between Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Actually using it is a pain in the arse though. We haven't used the feature of associating it to our steam group since they added it, because it didn't support grouping up in a lobby and choosing gamemode, level, characters etc before playing. You had to restart the server to change gamemodes! Setting a search key and force_dedicated_servers list seem to work though, so we've been using that.
For Borderlands, only t
What's really funny to me (Score:2)
Is I'd think you'd want to go the other way. Not just have dedicated servers, but allow for dedicated servers for consoles too. UT3 does just that, you can get a server that runs on PCs, but is designed to serve the PS3 version of the game. So you can have dedicated servers even for console games. Great idea IMO. You allow for peer to peer games, but support dedicated servers for all platforms. That way people can play how they like. Also dedicated servers are clearly loved by a non-trivial amount of people
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You have to know the server's unique identifier, type it into the console, choose "best available dedicated", and then the group will follow you to that specific server. Which is what we were doing the other night, since one of our group of 4 only gets a good ping when it's a west coast server. If you simply select "best available" and hit go, it might pick somewhere in Kansas, which is going to ping badly for us in Texas, Florida, and the guy who only pings well to west coast servers. But it's the best ave
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if you want proper server choice use the console command openserverbrowser to get a classic "internet", "favorites" server listing.
I typically do this to pick one of my favorite servers, then invite friends.
Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward (Score:5, Informative)
Just like we need another slashdotter's disproportionate observation as id provided the tech, while Raven provided the fun/or lack of fun factor of the new game. It'd help your argument more if you would read up on who's actually putting their hand into the cookie jar of the new sequels.
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Here's a question, though... and I mean this as a genuine question, having never done game development:
Is the networking/interconnection system part of the engine, and if not, would the former be part of Carmack's responsibilities, too?
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Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is. Most major game engine packages, including IDTech contain a networking layer. In fact, John Carmack was the guy who pretty much pioneered the client-server model for graphical games back when he made Quake.
However I've never had a major problem with his game's network layers. The issue is only that the game itself (content and gameplay wise) has been fairly bland for the last few iterations. If what the grandparent post is saying is correct, John Carmack is only responsible for the technical side, (including rendering and networking) and not the game experience itself. However, if "Masters of Doom" is correct, that is simply not the case as that book attributes most of the decisions as to the focus on recent games to John Carmack. It argues that it is the direct consequence of his conservative policy in game design that lead to Quake2, Quake3 and Doom3 being how they are, for better or worse.
The grandparent is claiming that John Carmack's technical record is unblemished and if he says P2P hosting is the way of the future then he should be given the benefit of the doubt and not questioned until he either recants, delivers a bad implementation or proves not to be able to implement this system in reasonable time. Even if he is responsible for the boring combat of Doom3, that suggests nothing about his ability to write game networking layers. I wrote a lot of the network system of a commercial game engine. My personal reaction towards this statement is to acknowledge that past history suggests that he will be able to deliver something very good and there is nobody who can really call him wrong until they have tested his implementation. I however, have not abandoned the client-server model and neither should anyone simply on the words of John D Carmack without thinking exactly about the priorities and requirements of their game.
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I know nothing about network programming but the benefits of the server/client model are obvious. P2P can only potentially beat server/client in one scenario: 1 on 1 play. Any more players than that, and it becomes inefficient.
If I'm playing a game and say 3 others are in visual range, I have to tell 3 others over the network where I am, what I'm doing etc. You might be able to get by with P2P with say 4 players, but it just does not scale period.
Maybe Carmack can work some magic, some type of optimizati
Quake's network code was written by John Cash (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the original Doom days, John Cash and his friends who worked for Novell used to play deathmatch games on the corporate network in the evenings. When they discovered that the Doom network code was horrible, Cash sent Carmack an email pointing this out.
Carmack responded by sending over the source code (which had been written for id by a contractor), asking Cash to fix it. Basically a 'put up or shut up' situation. :-)
The result, after a few mostly sleepless nights was a totally rewritten network layer which got used by the later Doom versions.
This experience made Cash figure out how a networked game should work, so over the next 2-3 years he did a presentation every year at Novell's Developer Conference (later called BrainShare), the title was something like "How to write networked games".
Another year later, after Carmack had hired Mike Abrash to help with the low-level optimization of the sw 3D engine for Quake, they hired Cash to write the nextwork and AI code.
After Quake 3 shipped, Cash left id for a more relaxed environment, moving to Blizzard who were working on this new massive multiplayer game at the time.
Afaik John Cash is now the chief programmer for WOW.
Terje
PS. I've known Mike since about 1985 and I worked with John Cash for a year in 1991-92.
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Interesting part of the story I'd never heard before. I always think of John Cash and David Kirsch as the network guys.
Anyone curious about networking changes in Quake should also look up Quakeworld and client-side prediction.
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teh stoopid is overrunning slashdot too.
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screenshot of doom4 [wikimedia.org](uses raytracing)
A remnant? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't call ~200,000 people a day between only three games from ONE COMPANY when the most populous of those three games averages ~80-90K a day peak users despite being about 5 years old a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. I'd call that proof of how important dedicated servers and proper mod support are.
Re:A remnant? (Score:5, Informative)
Since you didn't say which company, I'll point out that you're referring to Valve's Steam Stats [steampowered.com] for Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2.
I'll also point out that those numbers are the number of concurrent players, not the number of total players.
Re:A remnant? (Score:4, Informative)
I run a Half Life 2: Deathmatch server [inx-gaming.co.uk]. Looking at the Steam stats, only 2,100 people have played it today. If I look at my stats site [inx-gaming.co.uk], though, I can see over 3,100 people have passed through my server in the past month! Now either every single person that plays deathmatch has used my server, or the number of deathmatch players is a hell of a lot higher than daily peaks would suggest.
I will also say that without the community generated by having enthusiasts run their own servers, many people wouldn't bother to play the game.
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It's 1.6 million, according their current stats. That's down a bit from their actual peak, which was over 4 million about three years ago, IIRC.
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That's concurrent users still, not total system users.
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Amazing. They do not learn from success and call it remnant of the early days of PC gaming like it is a bad thing. Carmack and the other out of touch with reality greedy people that is.
I have been playing games since C64. I never once bought a game in my life. You just copied tapes, floppy disk etc from a friend of a friend.
Then Orange Box with TF2 came along. Bought and paid for it once. Still playing regularly several hours a week after 2 years. Dedicated Servers. Great community. Strong competitive scene
Re:A remnant? (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't want people like you as customers. They want people that toss a game after one month and go buy the next big shit. They want to limit a game's life span by being able to shut of things like multiplayer. They're not making money when you are playing something you already paid for.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, on one hand I still want to support titles which provide fun single player gameplay, even if they rape the online experience (see Modern Warfare 2; at least; I'm presuming that the single player experience will be solid and that it didn't go to consoleville as well). On the other, I would almost like to try driving games that do this shit off of our platform, except that considering what a bastard child that PC SKUs are already treated as, I'm concerned that the majority of the publishers will just sa
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>I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods
They can't be that stupid? Valve make a shit-load of money of Counter-strike(:source) and Day of Defeat:source, which all started out as mods (I was only an avid video gamer for a while so I'm sure there are lots more examples). Additionaly many people only buy thier latest game for the mods and to play with the community that has moved to them (i only got hl2, to play dod:s, to play dod with the clans i knew)
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The problem is they're ignorant and shortsighted enough to not realise that they'd make a damn sight more doing it valve's way than by screwing over the end user.
Simply about piracy (Score:4, Informative)
They want everyone to use matchmaking, which really means they want everyone to use an authentication system.
Re:Simply about piracy (Score:5, Informative)
Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?
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I'd argue this is less about piracy and more about upselling DLC to the PC crowd, which they can't currently do as easily as they'd like when gamers have dedicated servers and mod tools to extend the life of the game.
Having no dedicated servers is a bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of today's FPSes seem to prefer a ping of less than 100ms. Many of them become very frustrating to play at 150ms -- I can only assume this is due to whatever cheat protection they use forcing them to use less and less lag compensation, and forcing them to run less of the simulation locally.
I live on the west coast, and a lot of the people I play with live on the east coast. So when we have the option of buying a server, we get one somewhere in the middle so that we all have pings in the 50-100ms range instead of the 150-200ms range. Taking this option away will really, really suck.
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sadder than a crying puppy (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's not that sad. IMO id hasn't made a game worth playing *since* Quake 2.
Luckily Carmack still makes great engines for studios with actual design skill to use. His "games" have basically become demos for the engines, though...
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quake single player was good (Score:2)
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Lights... Camera... Action!!
Man, that brings back memories. AQ2 was awesome, and likely the inspiration for many of the things we take for granted in current FPS games.
I can't help but agree with this completely.
Decentralized gaming IS the ancient remnant (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
Technical vs. emotional (Score:3, Interesting)
That didn't sound very respectful. I think that JC was implying that there is no technical reason for dedicated servers anymore. With the CPU/GPU horsepower available, there is no reason why you can't host a game and stil
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Since when has hosting a game impacted frame rates? In fact, I distinctly remember dedicated servers having a very, very low footprint as far as CPU and RAM usage went. That may have changed in recent years, I don't know, but with older games that's what I remember.
One of the first games I played online a lot was Heretic II. I did not have a particularly good computer, and I hosted a dedicated server and played on the same computer just fine.
The issues with hosting your own server are all related to network
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The issues with hosting your own server are all related to networking, e.g. setting up all of your ports correctly, latency, etc.
But most games fail when it comes to that. Ex: Left4Dead
Local hosting has way more latency(and lower bandwidth usage) than a dedicated server on the same box. Even if you tweak cvars(which are capped), you can't push it beyond a certain point.
And to top it off, it impacts your framerate negatively.
Until companies do it right, please, just split them or allow both.
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Default L4D install, no config changes, local hosted game, worst ping I've had so far from a connecting player was maybe 70ms.
Well more than playable. what crap networking gear are you using or what crap ISP are you using?
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L4D isn't peer to peer. There are dedicated servers, it just automatically chooses them.
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If you want to play custom maps, you usually have to go with local hosting.
L4D is a combo system - I just wish local hosting worked a bit better.
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One friend is in Australia. Local hosting gives about 310 ping, but a dedicated server reduces that down to about 240.
Local hosting, I've never seen upstream pass 20KB/sec, despite having 60KB/sec available. Dedicated servers will gulp as much as necessary. Somehow that reduces the ping.
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There are still a few reasons for wanting a dedicated server. You can have a dedicated server that keeps running when the person who started the game gets bored. With a proper p2p architecture that can still happen, but it's difficult to get right. With a client-server architecture, the person who started the game quitting generally leads to everyone being kicked off. With a dedicated server you can have a game running 24 hours a day and just have people drop in and leave when they have some time.
As
Sure there's a technical reason (Score:2)
Well, a number of them actually. One would be bandwidth. Lots of people don't have good bandwidth on their connection, especially upstream. The majority of consumer connections in the US are highly asymmetric, way more download than upload. So it is easy to find someone without sufficient bandwidth to easily host a game since they are likely to be on a cheap consumer cable connection. Now compare that to a dedicated server. If it is good, and the ones people come back to are, it'll be hosted in a datacenter
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With the CPU/GPU horsepower available, there is no reason why you can't host a game and still get stellar framerates.
its not about frames, its about pings/lag
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Decentralisation = the people doing it by and for themselves, on their own terms, at low or no cost.
Centralisation = the suits doing it for you, charging you through the nose for it, dictating exactly when, where, and how it's going to happen, and the brainless masses referring to it as being a good thing.
Some of said sheep will probably respond to this very post, in order to tell me I'm wrong.
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That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
For what it's worth, most people are playing Borderlands online now using GameRanger for exactly this reason, because it eliminates all these problems. Gearbox has unofficially recommended it as a solution as well.
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a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, [...snip...]. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
As a forefather of modern gaming he doesn't know what gamers want? Interesting assertion. I suppose the word design can be used in many contexts but still I wouldn't be so sure he doesn't know what gamers want in any of those contexts.
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Mate if you can't port forward / open firewall ports to get borderlands to work, then how are you getting any other port forwarding requirements to work for anything else?
took me less than 5 minutes and most of that was spent in notepad cutting and pasting lines out of access lists (in addition to static NAT mappings, I am running a CBAC firewall so I need to open that up in my router as well), for a typical point and click home router gui I can't see how it could have been difficult. Esp if you have a DMZ
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Or the fact that there are so many hidden settings only configurable by editing files which are in a location you'd never think to look on your own (My Documents\My Games? Seriously? Who the fuck does that?). Disabling mouse smoothing is absolutely vital, IMHO, and the game feels like trash until you've done that. But you'd never even think to do it unless you happened to stumble onto the instructions about it in a forum somewhere.
Not everyone can host a game via p2p (Score:3, Informative)
to host a game (upload speed)
128kbps upload: 4 players
384kbps upload: 8 players
768kbps upload: 10 players
Id suggest that alot of people just dont have the upstream speed to cope with hosting a game... especially those of us in New Zealand, and Australia
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If you're getting lag on your AMD X2 4800 you're doing something wrong.
My old X2 4200 did the job just fine with an 8800Ultra and 2GB of RAM, hosting a game with a 5mbit upstream.
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Hosted a L4D server fine w/ a Pentium M 1.6Ghz laptop / 512Mb RAM, which was also running squid+privoxy caching, and a web-ui bittorrent/usenet downloading facility (torrentflux-b4rt to be precise - a php frontend calling transmissioncli and nzbperl and parsing the output back to web via the php scripts).
Having said that, with buddies in the same city and with a fast 2Mb upstream connection (ADSL2+ w/ AnnexM) and v low pings (lower than 20ms) between us via command line, they were getting ~70ms latency IN G
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Most third party players dropped between lobby and loading of the game.
I'm not sure whether you ran a dedicated or a listen server on that Pentium Mobile but I was talking about running a listen server. Being able to run a dedicated server shouldn't be a problem with older machines.
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Id suggest that alot of people just dont have the upstream speed to cope with hosting a game... especially those of us in New Zealand, and Australia
Huh? I thought dedicated servers were just that - dedicated servers. A program running among many others on rented servers that have the upload speeds and everything needed to host games without problems.
I feel like I'm either missing something or others don't quite grasp the difference between a game hosted on your PC from your game, a game hosted by the developers, and a game hosted by players on dedicated servers.
Doesn't really matter (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't a good thing (Score:2)
There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.
The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.
I can just hear the brainless, ovine responses now.
"But we'll still be able to do
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That's not how it works. The central server does matchmaking, but that's about all. The game itself is hosted by one of the clients, with some magic to hand over hosting as clients enter and leave the game. Your game packets do not go through a central server.
New trends, new counter-trends (Score:2)
So, if the new trend is to lock PC players into closed matchmaking services, wouldn't it start a trend of disgruntled players moding the game into having a satisfactory multiplayer service with dedicated services? Think about it, PC players have already modded single player games into adding entirely a multiplayer service (and quite successfully at that, I'm thinking about GTA San Andreas' two multiplayer mods, MTA SA and SA-MP).
An hypothetical example : Modern Warfare 2. It has both generated epic levels
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Or maybe all those modders will get fed up with the proprietary controls and just start learning to write their own games. Could it be a new era for open source games? I haven't really focused on gaming that much lately--especially since all the commercial offerings seem disappointing to me, but from what I've seen, open source games seem to be improving.
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Or maybe all those modders will get fed up with the proprietary controls and just start learning to write their own games.
Are you an idiot? I believe you are. How's anyone gonna write anything like MW2 short of having a few hundred of million dollars and hundreds of people working for you? Did you see the 'best' open source FPS out there? They pale in comparison with decade-old Quake III, and they have the advantage of using a pre-made game engine to begin with. Homebrew gamers have a choice : they can ei
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You fit your sig all to well.
Gaming companies don't use millions of dollars and hundreds of people working. They spend millions of dollars to get hundreds of people working for them. Open Source have people volunteer to do the work for free because they enjoy it. What, do you think game companies spend those millions on bricks and steel and machinery and sets for actors?
The main problem with OSS games has been there haven't been enough creative and graphic design people helping out. Have you seen what t
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I've been thinking about this since the MW2 server decision and it does seem to be a slight change in attitude recently.
Games like http://www.torchlightgame.com/ [torchlightgame.com], http://www.captainforever.com/ [captainforever.com] seem to be actively engaging its players in making the game but also expecting us to pay them.
We can't make good open-source games because someone has to stop playing them and DESIGN/CODE them! :)
So I think we are seeing something different and not so different,ie We should expect to pay for the games we play but we
So where are HIS details? (Score:2)
If the system he is proposing is so much better than dedicated servers, where are his details?
If he is suggesting the client/server model is dead... then he's having a stroke. How are you supposed to have lan parties without a dedicated server?
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My guess would be peer to peer. After all, it would be easier if you didn't have to set up a server to just play in a LAN party.
Then again, if it would be p2p, I don't understand why he wouldn't say that instead of being glad Rage did not lead the way away from dedicated servers...
Actually, I found this article [shacknews.com] referenced from linuxgames.com stating that it will just be geared toward single player and co-op, so maybe they think no one will care.
Dedicated servers are a must (Score:3, Insightful)
Cmdr Taco says ... (Score:2)
Cmdr Taco says no <em>tags</em> in story titles on the /. homepage !
Whats next? (Score:2)
Of Course! (Score:2)
community (Score:2)
Every MP game I've played for more than a week I've spent probably 90% of my game time in a single communities' servers. This goes right back to Quake and stands true today (TF2). Probably >99.999% of that time the server had some kind of mod too.
Re:This is a bonus (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather deal with the occasional cheater than suddenly lose multiplayer because the publisher decided the servers were no longer financially viable. This is really about making games disposable, which, for me at least, negates any inherent value received at purchase.
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What does that have to do with matchmaking vs dedicated servers? You need master server in both cases, otherwise you couldn't get a list of dedicated servers.
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Dedicated Servers = Freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Dedicated servers are the shit.
Remember when gamespy was quakespy? And there was Mplayer?
I used to play q2 tournaments on Mplayer. But all the mods rolled on Quakespy/Gamespy. It gave people from such communities as the Action Quake/Quake 2 group some exposure.
More recently a great example of such a contrast is the early release of Halo 2 and even the lack of multiplayer support in the Original Halo in the beginning.
Before xbox live we had Xbox Connect which allowed me to play online before xbox live was mainstream. Furthermore it allowed for the playing of Halo 2, online, months before it came out.
This includes modified versions of Halo and Halo 2 that would never be realized without dedicated servers.
This culture is not even recognized by the noob gamers that started playing games online through a console portal.
Definitely worth fighting for.
Re:Dedicated Servers = Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or you talk to a friend online and arrange an impromptu game of RS Vegas 2, and discover that the Ubisoft servers are down and that you have no way to simply create your own server and go. This isn't a fucking MMO, we just wanted to shoot AI bad guys between the two of us.
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Both of them?
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Also remember that Source was originally based on Quake II.
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The tech demo known as Doom 3 also used rendering techniques that only a couple of other tech demos used. These other tech demos used codebases derived from Doom 3. Actual games never even used the Doom 3 codebase, instead other codebases were developed and they used entirely different rendering techniques from Doom 3. The rendering techniques used by the other codebases were also done in a sane manner, unlike Doom 3.
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As the AC stated, that is what I am saying. It seemed they could do no wrong, and then Zenimax bought them out, and all this bad news about Rage starts coming around.
Bad news being (paraphrased) that Linux support was unlikely and would be determined on how strong/weak Linux users embraced Quake Live, and now this story.
I'm not sure why I got flamebait on this, it wasn't intended this way. A customer doesn't like what a company is doing and says so... and labeled a troll/flamer? It's not like I even said it
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Well, then my point would be rendered irrelevant wouldn't it?
Two words: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wooden barrels.