Brute 11 Posted May 19, 2011 BIS, can you please create a dedicated server client that can actually utilize the full potential of modern day servers? ArmA 2 has the potential to support multiplayer scenarios with hundreds of players and hundreds of AIs, but since the server is restricted to using two cores it can handle nothing near that. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
gossamersolid 155 Posted May 19, 2011 It's not going to happen in arma 2, I think. I've already made a post in the ArmA 3 section though to make sure BIS hears us while the game is still in development. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 19, 2011 It would revive ArmA 2 massively, giving ArmA 3 a nice platform to launch from. But I would imagine their development team is probably quite occupied now. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
gossamersolid 155 Posted May 19, 2011 It would revive ArmA 2 massively, giving ArmA 3 a nice platform to launch from. But I would imagine their development team is probably quite occupied now. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but more optimized dedicated servers would NOT revive ArmA 2. The only thing that would "revive" ArmA 2 would be another expansion (not happening) or Addon Syncing so we could effectively use mods easier (probably not happening) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 19, 2011 Being able to run 128+ player games, possibly even 256, would bring quite a lot of attention to the game. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
gossamersolid 155 Posted May 20, 2011 Being able to run 128+ player games, possibly even 256, would bring quite a lot of attention to the game. Well you can run an 128 player server, just can't have AI on it and it'd still have to be a strong server. Multi-threading at a stronger level won't solve the fact that AI do use a lot of resources and the fact that no matter how well the server will run, I guarantee at least 25% of those 128 players will have bandwidth issues of their own which will contribute to a bad experience. The hardware and internet of people isn't at a state where we can achieve this properly. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 20, 2011 (edited) Obviously I'm referring to servers with an equal or greater number of AI to players. The dedicated server client creates a bottleneck which cannot be overcome by the hardware of the server or the player. Currently I can run a 64 player warfare server on two cores at 3.46GHz, scale that to another ten physical cores and you're looking at 640+ players on a single server. The hardware and Internet connections of players will better over time, however if the dedicated server client is left in the condition it is now, there won't be anything to scale up to, because we would have already reached the limit of what the game can do, which is nothing near it's potential. Clock speeds are only increasing in tiny increments every year, the only choice they have is to redesign the dedicated server client to utilize the full power of multi-core processors, beyond two cores that is. Edited May 20, 2011 by Brute Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
daikan 1 Posted May 23, 2011 I think the difficulty of parallelizing AI logic is vastly underestimated. Otherwise it would be in the game already. A good general article on the matter of multi-core support in gaming architectures: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/practical-game-architecture-for-multi-core-systems/ To produce compelling onscreen characters that behave in interesting ways, the game loop does a large amount of conditional event evaluation that can look at any random game object. The intertwined subsystems in AI and simulation access disparate data in a cache-unfriendly manner. To properly parallelize these operations requires making each and every simulation variable thread-safe. The theoretical performance gained by parallelizing the AI tasks tends to be offset by the cache misses and latency induced by the thread mutexes. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 23, 2011 I'm not saying that it would be easy to implement, I simply think that there must be dedicated server optimizations that can be made a few years after the game's release. The dedicated server network settings are quite simply abysmal, having to set specific values is ridiculous, the dedicated server should detect the resources available to it and scale automatically as a map progresses. Manual settings should also be available but deffinitely not the default. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
SnR 1 Posted May 23, 2011 We have servers out there that cater and claim to have 70+ players with no lag, warping they are the minority imo. The popular public missions stick to 20-30 slots for a reason. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 23, 2011 PVP servers, with little to no AI, can host 64-128 however I'm talking more about PVP/PVE servers which run Warfare and have to handle large quantites of AI. I think it's ridiculous that I can only run a 64 slot Warfare BE server on a server with 2 X5690s, I could run 6 64 slot Warfare BE servers but not 1 128 slot Warfare BE server. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
vinque 10 Posted May 23, 2011 (edited) in the server of my community 30 players + IA (coop) sometimes is catastrophic too much lag, warp, and desync. Edited May 23, 2011 by Vinque Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 23, 2011 The dedicated server is probably being bottlenecked by either the CPU, RAM or bandwidth. Would you mind posting the specifications of the machine you are running the dedicated server client on? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Atkins 10 Posted May 24, 2011 Being able to run 128+ player games, possibly even 256, would bring quite a lot of attention to the game. Add a working MP concept to that (read: PR:Arma2) and we will have a huge success and influx of new players in no time. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 24, 2011 Add a working MP concept to that (read: PR:Arma2) and we will have a huge success and influx of new players in no time. I completely agree, hopefully PR:ArmA 2 won't have any, or at least very few, AI in which case reaching 128 players on a high-end server should be possible. Whether they allow the player limit to be increased for high-end servers however is a different matter altogether, they might simply leave it at 64. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Atkins 10 Posted May 25, 2011 Afaik PR:Arma2 will have 0 bots in the regular gameplay just like in BF2:PR. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Brute 11 Posted May 25, 2011 I have't seen that stated officially anywhere, as far as I am aware they were still considering civillian AI? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
zyklone 1 Posted May 25, 2011 Parallelizing the AI further should really be fairly easy in the engine. It already supports object locality and some AIs already run on the players computers. It could probably be done by setting up virtual remote network clients running nothing but AI in separate threads. Now adding threading to the scripting language would be a major challenge unless scripters actually start using SQF to its full potential. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
