Here's to the FD Network folks!

[Hamerstein]

I was thinking yesterday, with all the current network issues with Alpha 3, how much pressure the FD networking folks must be under. Their role is one that goes pretty much unnoticed (by players) when everything is working fine, but when all hell breaks loose, everyone is hanging on their every action, devouring every network related post.

Come release, when (hopefully) everything is hunky dory and we're cruising through space, meeting different players seamlessly, seeing vistas and battling among the stars, we'll all be sighing at the beautiful graphics, being stirred by the emotive music and amazed and amused by the sound effects. But the network code that these folks worked so hard on, will be quietly ticking away in the background, doing what it does best, rewarding players with a great multi player experience and few will pay it a second thought...

...Unless it breaks of course

So I thought I'd post here, Here's to you the FD network coders, you are all legends, at least to this games player!

 

[airikr]

Yeah! Keep up the work and you will create something fantastic!!

 

[Nazarene]

Here here!

 

[Tinman]

+1 :smilie:

 

[antonymurray]

I have every faith in them to sort it out good one guys

 

[Bingo Brewster]

Yep, kudos to the net code gods

 

[ZenSpider]

Yup, keep it up folks, we'll get there.

 

[withnail]

Would be great to get a "Meet the Team" interview with one of them.

 

[JeffRyan]

It's a hard job, +1

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Well, MP is what will break or make this game, so they have serious burden on their shoulders. Said that, with all struggles, game is coming trough, so I have strong belief that we will get there! Thanks guys!

 

[Patrick_68000]

The network is certainly not the easiest part to make. Especially for a game like ED. Courage to developers for the network code. Thanks to them, we'll have a extraordinarily alive game

 

[Neo-ST]

To all guys @ FD

 

[Sir.Tj]

It might be just me but I noticed my FPS was a bit better yesterday.

So Cheers lads keep up the good work.

 

[Oss133]

Don't go praising them yet! They will get all lazy and self satisfied!

 

[Dejay]

It's certainly a challenge to develop a distributed p2p MMO, but it's probably also a very interesting and rewarding one

 

[Tinman]

To all guys @ FD

No no no...don't mix drinking with coding!! This might very well be the reason why it's unstable at the moment! They had their 20 year anniversary not to long ago after all!!

 

[Memnoch]

There is still a ways to go I think if they hope to realise their aim of having 32 player instances. The best of luck to them on that front as it will be amazing if they pull it off.

 

[Patrick_68000]

There is still a ways to go I think if they hope to realise their aim of having 32 player instances. The best of luck to them on that front as it will be amazing if they pull it off.

I'm not in the alpha, but from the comments that I see in the forums, there is really great difficulties for the network part

 

[Memnoch]

It does have it's moments. But when it works you can see we have great things in store for us.

 

[Toumal]

I'm not in the alpha, but from the comments that I see in the forums, there is really great difficulties for the network part

Well... this is kinda true, but only kinda. Most of the issues seem to be caused by ownership transfers when players drop out and someone else has to take over ownership of entities. I'd say the whole NAT thing seems to be dealt with mostly, since Elite now supports pretty much every important NAT punchthrough technology (We should all be using IPv6 LISP anyway, which does away with NAT completely ) and there have been big steps forward with the other problems in the regular updates.

This is a crucial time for Elite and it's important to get this right. That said, this is also the hardest topic to tackle. The whole syncing of trade markets etc. is much less of a complex issue. They really went in for the most difficult part first, which is multiplayer combat and dynamic instancing.

I personally still have reservation about how this will perform in the end, but in the domain I work in the requirements for distributed systems are quite different so this may well work great for Elite. And also, through any problems experienced in Alpha, keep in mind that even a little error in the code or a wrong sequence of events can cause weird issues - like Port Zelada simply disappearing during ownership transfer. So the fact that a huge space station just vanishes doesn't necessarily mean that the bug is a big one

So bottom line is, the core of the game works fantastically and the "feel" is amazing. When the whole networking part works, it's something that makes you giddy with glee, and not a lot of games do that for me in the past years.

If the FD guys ever need dedicated helpers for controlled tests of mundane repetitive things (vs. the freeform test that is the Alpha), I'll be happy to help and I'm sure a lot of other backers will too.