A Game for a thousand players

[~Pantera~ 0]

Quote[/b] ]Despite problems with bandwidth, Microsoft seems to be creating a new technology code named “DonnyBrookâ€

This system allows people to play new fps games on a massive scale. We’re talking about hundreds to thousands of people all shooting at each other at the same time… Sound fun to you? Sounds fun to me!

The video below describes it as Helms Deep from Lord of the Rings but with every orc, every elf, every person on the battlefield being controlled by a real person online. Now this would be a huge problem because most people don’t have the upload bandwidth capacity to keep themselves up to date with everyone else on the map, but with this new system it is possible through “focus setsâ€

Focus sets refers to a new system by which the player gets more updates from players they have recently interacted with in the game. This way the players that you are fighting against will be lag free, while the players you aren’t fighting against will only be updating once every few frames.

This may lead to some questions, such as, Why aren’t the players who I am not focusing on lagging like crazy. This is fixed by another technique called “Guidable AIâ€

Guidable AI is a brilliant solution to this problem. At the most basic level, the Guidable AI emulates the people you are not focussed on in between the actual updates of the real player. Since this AI is locally being run, there will be no problems with bandwidth.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=492_1189364410

[shinRaiden 0]

So they expanded on client-side state prediction and swapped the network over to a p2p model? Spurious prior-art laden patents loom friends...

There's several problems listed in the discussion, and various non-solutions :

* Lack of upstream bandwidth - Existing workaround is to use hosted servers in a datacenter and not self-host. Solution is slap the politicians upside with the pork-riddled intertubes until they obligate the telco's to meet their decade old funded mandates to deploy usable bandwidth, and provide adequate safe harbor for municipal providers from the allegedly regulated telco monopolies.

p2p is not a valid solution, as p2p inherently requires that all nodes have substantially more upload capacity than their nodes nominally have in ratio. That much is painfully clear in Supreme Commander multiplayer games where a n-way p2p model is used.

* Interpolation of intermittent states - The work around has been to perform client-side interpolation where appropriate, and gracefully lag out where insufficient. Performing substantial behavioral interpolation well beyond the common bounds, and having those local interpolations be considered valid in a global p2p context, is highly inappropriate and inherently extremely vulnerable to cheating of direct and indirect state manipulatory manners.

Proper development logic many times dictates that it is far safer and more reliable to fail a given task, than to attempt to perform a likely invalid operation. This has wide-ranging stability and functionality benefits including anti-cheat controls on a fundamental level.

[jerryhopper 286]

here is the research pdf for thos who are interested.

http://research.microsoft.com/search....&id=all