How Indie Devs Made an 1,800-Player Action Game Mod In Their Spare Time 87
An anonymous reader writes "Just Cause 2 Multiplayer has been getting a lot of press lately, but this making-of feature points out how the mod raises serious questions about the games industry: if 1,800-player massively multiplayer action games are possible on one server, why did it take a group of modders to prove it? From the article: 'There’s more chaos to come. That 1,800 player limit isn’t maxing out the server or the software by any means. Foote says that the team, who first met online seven years ago playing the similar Multi Theft Auto GTA mod, are "yet to reach any real barrier or limitation preventing us from reaching an even higher player count than the previous public tests." When it’s ready, the team will release the software for everyone to download and run their own servers, wherever they are in the world.'"
I did the math, with P2P you can get 50,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
MMO Joust (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MMO Joust (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I did the math, with P2P you can get 50,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
dealing with hackers though
Here is a probably patentable or patented method of dealing with that:
Each node shall crypt then sign its data. One key shall be unique keys per connection, it shall be use for encryption. The other key should be unique per application instances, it shall be use to sign the data. A node shall validate the authenticity of that data with a peer after every an empirically determined threshold of data on a singular connection. If there is a mismatch broadcast it to your peers, except the one use to detect the mismatch, inform central.
On reception of the broadcast the peers shall have the following behavior:
If the node having sent unauthentic data is know to the recipient node. It shall validate the authenticity of the data then it shall inform central. It shall also broadcast it to its peers. If the potentially malicious node is unknown, the recipient shall drop the message.
The central should perform a local rollback of the cheater when it reaches an empirically determined threshold with regard to an empirically determined metric.
Re:I did the math, with P2P you can get 50,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
If I'm understanding you correctly, I can see two possible problems (at first glance). The first is the overhead introduced by crypto: even at it's fastest, it will always add some latency to the data transmission (simply because the data has to be processed on both ends before it can be received or sent), and it requires additional processor time to manage the encryption. I'm not sure how much, but it could be a fair bit if you are transmitting several dozen times a second (which multiplayer games customarily do). This isn't a problem in BitTorrent where latency and computational overhead are not terribly important. It is a potentially very large problem in a multiplayer action game where the CPU may already be taxed and low latency is absolutely vital.
Secondly, a large number of malicious nodes could probably poison the system, or at least a part of it. This also could also be a problem: cheaters and trolls sometimes run in packs.
Uh ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Early 1990s MUD games had telnet connections in the three digits. As in, handling raw character input from the players, not nicely aggregated packets from a client GUI. That was on hardware like Sun boxes that pale in processing power and memory size compared to ... oh, your Jesus mobe, and such.
Re:I did the math, with P2P you can get 50,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
I was just thinking why don't we just say fuck it and make a wonderfully complicated game where the point was hacking and cheating.
A virtual world where the leader boards are filled with those who have the greatest skill and resources at hacking the code, abusing other players, spreading misinformation, hijacking networks, and generally being as shitty to everyone in the virtual world as possible.
Then I realized we don't have to create this game. That's how the real world works and is why we can't have nice things.