Well EQ for that matter, when we had 1000's of players playing at once, upwards of what 200 players per zone?
- I remembered some massive lag, but not as bad as what we experience today.
How did EQ - Brad handle this, more zones, instanced zones-maps. but most of all how where we able to play so much better then we are today in sandboxes, etc..
I just dont get it, old school wins over new school programming?
Someone tell me, because today i cant see any BI games with more then 100 players without massive lag, and many more games out there.
What did wow and EQ do that made it so much better for us?
It's a complicated question to answer, short answer, assuming that the information has arrived alright, if there is a large overhead for the server to process it may suffer a drop in performance.
Inefficent coding, report frequency, damage bloat and field of view loading amount to name a few add to the amount of data to be processed.
With cleaner and leaner code reduces the transmission/processing overhead. If the game requires the client to resport more frequently, the amount of information the server has to process and transmit increases.
WoW was primarily instanced so servers only handle the players in a particular instance, never any outside. Consider a zoning equating to a handshake as your character is transfered to another server. If i recall correctly, WoW requires the client to report about 4 times a second. If it were to increase to 8, you would double the overhead for the server.
I am unsure how EQ works but it may work on the same principle.
WoW and everquest were developed in a time where dial up was the norm and broadband was just starting up. In order to get the player base on board, their code would of been stricter and more lean. If it wasn't for this it would be unplayable. Naturally overtime , the bandwidth grew, but as a base engine, they were catering to dial up speeds.
I hope that wasn't pure dribble and sheds some light on the lag.
well no that was not pure dribble, it basically explains a ton to me, as i know these things can effect the servers.
So it could also be the bloating of information being sent, since we know some games work off of CPU power more then GPU, it may equal why the load is overwelming to the client and server if it is being updated twice as fast, then what past MMOs required? XYZ fires shots, while ABC drives a vehicle firing a rocket. How much of that is being sent to the server, thus effecting the clients.
This is why i am asking the questions, because i dont get how sandboxes today can not hold enough players. Your lucky to see 30 players all play without a huge drop in FPS and CPU power. Any more then that and your bottlenecking somewhere else. Such is the case with Arma coding.
What brad did and the whole team back in the day i must give them huge credit for the work they did.
I am working on another arma 3 server, because i love to mod and script. Its fun as hell, period.
What i want to try to do this time, is find a way to reduce the load on the clients, and server this round. Maybe allow 50 players, getting the fps up to 40ish instead of 20's like high end systems can get.
It might be near impossible to do, even with another client handling the load of the AI.
Did EQ have multi servers handling the AI?, pathing? etc.. or was it all in the single server. Or was it even thought of then to have multi server engines handle the load??? would have been good to allow more players.
I hope these questions are not to out of the way, but it is important i try to understand why we had so many successful MMO's and today we can not build 1 damn Sandbox game without tons of lag, cpu, fps whatever. Netcoding sucks? or base engine codes?
You are forgetting the most important part:
The graphics in EQ were very coarse. An I actually think that is a good thing.
"Everyone" misunderstands the psychology of immersion and tries to make a game that visually looks more realistic, thinking that's more immersive. It's actually not. So a lot of these modern games have very complex surface textures and 3d objects/models. Just look at old Gfay - the trees were two perpendicular surfaces (like a tree on stage at a school play). The graphics overhead for that is modest. A real 3D tree has thousands of times more complexity and takes massively more computing power to process.
OK, since mentioning it I want to expand :
One of the things that allows us to be immersed is the WILLINGNESS to suspend disbelief - our brain has to WANT to believe we are there. Now, if our brain has the ability to fill in details the way our subconscious brain wants them, then we are invested in the reality.
If there are too many details, it leaves nothing to the player's imagination and they are basically not creating their own story freely and fluidly but running into someone else's details.
It's like reading a book - you can become completely engrossed in a book and totally lost in the scene, but your brain has a miraculous ability to imagine the way it wants things - it fills in the holes. For example, the author might not actually describe every leaf on a tree, but the reader's brain can imagine it - and every reader will fill in those missing details differently. But, (this is the important part) because the reader's brain is imagining what feels natural to them (they filled it in after all) it is immersive to them.
When you give too many details the reader is disengaged and instead of creating the reality (subconsciously) they are simply outside watching it.
Look at the runaway success of Minecraft - inarguably the "worst" graphics of any 3D game in the world. But it is a completely immersive world. Players forget the the ground is blocks and simply "go" there. Think of text-based MUDs - they are immersive without grpahics.
People incorrectly think that sexy graphics are better for immersion, but there is a point where they actually become a detraction and put a wall up between the player and the world.
So, why am I saying all this?: Because this is good news:
You want more modest graphics, which means easier server loads, less lag and faster development time.
Mod Edit: Removed a ton of white space to stop forum bloat.
There were almost never 200 people in the same zone. EQ's world was pretty big, and because the process of leveling and gearing was slower, it kept the population spread out. They also created expansions faster than any mmo in history so only the most hardcore players were in the top end zones and raiding. That group was probably less than 10% of any given server population.
The amount of data passed back and forth from clients to server was probably far less as well. You had character movements, autoattack and only an ability every few seconds for each character. Combat in general was slower. We also had instant cast clickable items which never seemed to cause problems.
Clients did lag graphically due mostly to the particle effects which still look amazing to this day as far as realistic looking magic (if such a thing can look "realistic"). This was back using first generation video cards so 2-8mb of ram only helped so much. Eventually they let people turn them down or off and that helped a lot. Even on dial up though, raids of 50+ people in plane of fear/hate/growth seemed to work really well.
Dullahan said:There were almost never 200 people in the same zone. EQ's world was pretty big, and because the process of leveling and gearing was slower, it kept the population spread out. They also created expansions faster than any mmo in history so only the most hardcore players were in the top end zones and raiding. That group was probably less than 10% of any given server population.
The amount of data passed back and forth from clients to server was probably far less as well. You had character movements, autoattack and only an ability every few seconds for each character. Combat in general was slower. We also had instant cast clickable items which never seemed to cause problems.
Clients did lag graphically due mostly to the particle effects which still look amazing to this day as far as realistic looking magic (if such a thing can look "realistic"). This was back using first generation video cards so 2-8mb of ram only helped so much. Eventually they let people turn them down or off and that helped a lot. Even on dial up though, raids of 50+ people in plane of fear/hate/growth seemed to work really well.
Two exceptions were East Commonlands and The Bazaar. Both of those zones experienced horrible lag for low performance PC's back in the day. Plane clipping and staring into the wall/floor was really the only way to navigate effectively.
If you look at Phinigel server now, theyve added multiple instances to dungeons, cities, etc. to help combat that. Since people had already played through the game several times, all of the popular zones could easily have 300+ targeting them.
I can see how that could have been a problem. My server didn't have east commonlands, we had greater faydark for trading. People were pretty spread out there though most seemed to stand around the wiz spire. I don't remember lagging much but I also don't remember there being 200+ people. This was on Rallos Zek.
You might be out of luck in your situation Crazzy, I'd expect you'd be more limited by graphical processing power in this case when it comes to Arma 3 depending on how demanding the textures are. A server can only do so much, compensating for an outdated or stressed GPU isn't one of them.
What would you be testing for realistically?
If you want a lag free experience, the easist option is to make less graphical details to be rendered, having a stick figure is the extreme, but it would require the least amount of processing power. Turning of shadows is one less thing to be rendered, turning off sky rendering and water reflection is another.