Are Fdev seriously out of touch calling P2P "SEAMLESS"

[Agony_Aunt]

I used to play DAoC between beginning of 2002 and 2009. Client server architecture, monthly subs model
Using the tech of those days, DAoC could provide 3 realm fights gathering hundreds (as in more than 500) of players in the same zone (same instance) .

Spoiler

Below a movie from a memorial where 500 players from all 3 realms gathered to pay their respects to an early departed fellow player.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43wQdFGmf30

There's the rub. With client server there are higher costs and that usually means either subscriptions and/or pay to win.

If ED had been subscription based, i'd probably have never got it.

Point and click MMOs also have a lot less networking overhead than shooters. There is a good reason most online shooters limit the number of players or use fancy tricks to work with higher numbers of players. Like Fortnite has a large map and a shrinking play area over time which causes more deaths. Sometimes you get lots of people landing in the same area and then the jank and glitches really start.

 

[Naddesh]

You guys havent mentioned the most important thing. Especially in FPS P2P connection is the absolutely worst thing. It takes one person with ty internet to make the FPS component unplayable with this choice. There is a reason why all good FPS games run on servers.

 

[Northpin]

There's the rub. With client server there are higher costs and that usually means either subscriptions and/or pay to win.

If ED had been subscription based, i'd probably have never got it.

I'm well aware of that.
Also, i take the game as it is - as in: i'm not the one to complain about clogging or instancing or any other issues that derive from the ED networking model

Point and click MMOs also have a lot less networking overhead than shooters. There is a good reason most online shooters limit the number of players or use fancy tricks to work with higher numbers of players. Like Fortnite has a large map and a shrinking play area over time which causes more deaths. Sometimes you get lots of people landing in the same area and then the jank and glitches really start.

Not sure what you mean by point and click mmo, but DAoC was more complex than a shooter since it allowed toons to move on ground, had keeps and towers that could be climbed upon and rivers and seas that could be dived in and allowed fights in water or between toons located in water and/or on ground.
Also it had the entire arsenal of contact fights (melee weapons, including shield block or shield attacks) and ranged fights (archers and casters) and crowd control mechanics (mesmerize, root or stun spells) and a lot of weapon specific attacks, follow-ups, abilities and/or spells all mapped to 1-0 keys that could be organized in multiple quickbars - most often that meant a toon would be using 20-40 abilities mapped to those quick-bars (as a comparison, ED has 2 triggers and usually1-3 weapon banks, rarely 5)
All of that in real time with really tight timers - a well equipped caster could get 0.8s cast time and could kill another toon in 4-5 seconds.
Hibernian casters were mostly hated since they had a base stun that could last 5 seconds on target (after resists) and they needed 4-5s to kill a toon (but they could also be one-shot by assassins or 2-shot by archers with critical strike)

Sure having 500-700 people in the same area and having nukes flying all over was killer - but not necessarily for the servers as it were for the clients - usually in zerg fights one had to use /effects off to remove most of the graphical effects from spell otherwise his game was running at 4 fps - unless he had a monster computer

But yea, 2001 game tech, but from a company that really knew how to design and balance a competitive MMO and with players willing to pay 15€ per month to enjoy that experience (with a lot of them paying for 2 accounts, yours truly being one of them)

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

If we were talking about a P2P connection between just two players then maybe, with multiple players in the same instance there's going to be a lot of network overhead as all Peers need to agree on what the hell is going on resulting in much more packets exchanged.

There's a reason MMO's don't use this model and please don't make me post a screen shot of Limsa Lominsa or Stormwind to show you the difference between a real MMO and this poor man's multi-player because I can probably fit more players in a single screenshot in any of the MMO's that I've played than E: D can fit in an entire instance.


edit: somebody used a lot more words and a pretty graphic to say (much more clearly) what I was trying to say.

There's a reason why MMORPG are not twitch based due to the lag.

People need to understand the difference between a classic MMORPG combat system and the system that ED uses. It's not comparable.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

I'm well aware of that.
Also, i take the game as it is - as in: i'm not the one to complain about clogging or instancing or any other issues that derive from the ED networking model



Not sure what you mean by point and click mmo, but DAoC was more complex than a shooter since it allowed toons to move on ground, had keeps and towers that could be climbed upon and rivers and seas that could be dived in and allowed fights in water or between toons located in water and/or on ground.
Also it had the entire arsenal of contact fights (melee weapons, including shield block or shield attacks) and ranged fights (archers and casters) and crowd control mechanics (mesmerize, root or stun spells) and a lot of weapon specific attacks, follow-ups, abilities and/or spells all mapped to 1-0 keys that could be organized in multiple quickbars - most often that meant a toon would be using 20-40 abilities mapped to those quick-bars (as a comparison, ED has 2 triggers and usually1-3 weapon banks, rarely 5)
All of that in real time with really tight timers - a well equipped caster could get 0.8s cast time and could kill another toon in 4-5 seconds.
Hibernian casters were mostly hated since they had a base stun that could last 5 seconds on target (after resists) and they needed 4-5s to kill a toon (but they could also be one-shot by assassins or 2-shot by archers with critical strike)

Sure having 500-700 people in the same area and having nukes flying all over was killer - but not necessarily for the servers as it were for the clients - usually in zerg fights one had to use /effects off to remove most of the graphical effects from spell otherwise his game was running at 4 fps - unless he had a monster computer

But yea, 2001 game tech, but from a company that really knew how to design and balance a competitive MMO and with players willing to pay 15€ per month to enjoy that experience (with a lot of them paying for 2 accounts, yours truly being one of them)

Quite simply there are a lot more inputs per second and actions that need to be tracked in your typical shooter than most MMOs. On top, some lag can be more acceptable or compensated for in your typical MMO with some tricks in the code.

Not an MMO, but there is a good article on the internet floating around about how they made Age of Empires work well over the internet in the age of modems. Tricks they used to make it a good experience despite slow internet connections.

Take your typical MMO, in a second a person might click to cast a fireball, click on the target, then click to move afterwards, those actions queued up, and just 3 inputs.

In a second in a game like Elite you might have a person moving in multiple axis, making multiple inputs, firing weapons, those weapons' ammo tracking, and more.

The networking overhead is a massively greater than in your typical MMO.

I have no experience of DAoC, but from what you say, it sounds like there will be not much more networking overhead than in your typical MMO.

 

[starman]

If it was played on a lan it would be pretty good. All twitch shooters have these issues.

 

[Susanna]

You should know me by now...
When my mum warned me about strangers I just told her I had nothing to worry about as there was no-one stranger than me

<Evil Grin> You have met your match Dear Sir!

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

In all the iterations of this thread, I've not seen any client-server topology advocate explain what criteria they would use to allocate which players to which servers, what those servers would host and how many would therefore be required based on those criteria to serve the current and future player base...

Anyone up for the challenge?

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I'm not a network expert, but could someone explain how a connection involving three computers and two network paths (player <--> server <--> player) is going to be an improvement over a connection involving two computers and one network path (player <--> player) ?

P2p is great when there are only two people connected together, however it gets progressively worse the more players there are in the instance, as every computer has to communicate simultaneously with every other computer, rather than all to the same server. So if just one player has a dodgy connection it tends to create lags for everyone in the instance. Fdev tries to mitigate this by grouping players together from the same geographical area, which isn’t ideal.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You guys havent mentioned the most important thing. Especially in FPS P2P connection is the absolutely worst thing. It takes one person with poopooty internet to make the FPS component unplayable with this choice. There is a reason why all good FPS games run on servers.

Client-Server isn't the saviour of FPS. The experience is just as crap with a player who fields crappy connection in client server environment. Rubberbanding, lag, delayed hit detection. All done before P2P scapegoat was being blamed for all the ills of online gaming.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Fdev tries to mitigate this by grouping players together from the same geographical area, which isn’t ideal.

Sure, but that's not so much a P2P or client-server thing, so much as a "this planet is big enough that speed of light transmission delays become significant for action-based games"

If (big if!) everyone has a good network connection, P2P can be better where people are in very different geographic areas because the point-to-point links are significantly shorter than going via a server in a third area would be.

 

[biot]

Sorry if I missed it in this thread but does ED use P2P server (with one host acting as server and the other as clients) or fully distributed P2P where everyone is a server?

 

[Ian Skippy]

As always with P2P, the quality will largely depends on the connection between peers. If it sucks for you now, it'll probably suck in Odyssey too.

 

[andrewg_oz]

OK, I think folks have explained that client-server has an advantage in that there are fewer incoming/outgoing connections to/from each client. It makes the client much easier to manage. However, it doesn't change the amount of information that needs to be transferred from client to client. No matter if it's p2p or client-server the state of every client needs to be transmitted to every other client. All adding a server into the mix does is allow for potentially lots of smaller packets to be merged into a single large packet, at the cost of latency.

On the topic of latency, someone mentioned speed of light limitations. I live far away from anywhere (Australia). In a client server setup the servers are odds-on going to be located in the US, or maybe Europe. If I'm playing with local players, we would suffer from round-trip latency, while with p2p the latency would be much lower. Client-server does nothing to change the latency for globally separated players (and probably makes things worse), but p2p greatly helps playing with nearby people.

I don't understand how a single 'bad' client connection can affect all the people in an instance. If clients are communicating directly with each other those messages would be independent from each other. It sounds like a problem that would be common to all communication methods, and not a fundamental issue with p2p.

For example, some people seem to think that problems arise when a 'bad' client is hosting the instance. I don't believe any single client hosts an instance - each client is just managing 'its' player and ship and tracking events reported by the other clients and modelling their effect on 'its' ship. That's why, when people disconnect (for whatever reason), their ship stops taking damage. The local client doesn't model damage to other ships in the instance, but relies on the other clients to report the damage. It's also the only way cheat apps can work - if the instance was managed by one PC in the instance, then the cheat would only work when it was the manager - would be be effectively random.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I don't believe any single client hosts an instance

It is, as far as I can tell, the responsibility of whoever gets there first to manage things like the NPCs. It's not quite the same as hosting the entire instance, and the responsibility gets transferred (usually fairly seamlessly) to someone else when they leave, but it does mean whoever it is has to throw a bit more data around since they're sending out updates for more than just their own ship.

We certainly found things worked a bit better if the first person down to a meetup on an expedition had a really good network, even if it was otherwise the same people meeting up.

I did also once get a case where there were three of us in a wing, and if two of us "made" an instance the others could all drop in fine, whereas if the third of us made an instance it was impossible for the other two to drop in to it. It's perhaps more a "first among equals" sort of role, but it does matter.

 

[BL1P]

You guys havent mentioned the most important thing. Especially in FPS P2P connection is the absolutely worst thing. It takes one person with poopooty internet to make the FPS component unplayable with this choice. There is a reason why all good FPS games run on servers.

That is basically why im not interested in pvp in Elite, be it in a ship or on foot, you are too reliant on the other persons connection.
Ill be fine with group or solo Unless there is a high wake option for feet, High Leggit option maybe

You see the problem all the time when you fight in wings, someone will say "Hey you bumped me and damaged my shields", yet there was no bumping on the other persons screen and no shield damage. Happens all the time and just shows that what ones see or does isnt correct compared to what the other person sees.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

It is, as far as I can tell, the responsibility of whoever gets there first to manage things like the NPCs. It's not quite the same as hosting the entire instance, and the responsibility gets transferred (usually fairly seamlessly) to someone else when they leave, but it does mean whoever it is has to throw a bit more data around since they're sending out updates for more than just their own ship.

We certainly found things worked a bit better if the first person down to a meetup on an expedition had a really good network, even if it was otherwise the same people meeting up.

I did also once get a case where there were three of us in a wing, and if two of us "made" an instance the others could all drop in fine, whereas if the third of us made an instance it was impossible for the other two to drop in to it. It's perhaps more a "first among equals" sort of role, but it does matter.

In fact the NPCs are spawned according to the combat level of the first player in the instance, always useful to know if you do a haz res in a wing and want the best payout possible.
To be honest I don’t think elite has a big problem with p2p, more with how instancing is managed. If you duel someone with a bad connection it’s never going to work well, but we do need a better ‘handover’ between instances for example when going from SC to normal space and vice versa, and also from system to system. But fdev must have revamped this for odyssey if we can now instance together in the combat triangle and do ‘physical’ multicrew.

 

[jimaras]

Seriously, p2p and multi player are mutually-exclusive things. Cant have both. The difference is that the server version needs ...a server. That's more costs. Well....when the multi goes boom...and the cost of losing clients will exceed the cost of server, we will get the server-client. Any tech manager that respects his product and sees the future as multiplayer, respect and understands the power of server-client

 

[jimaras]

PS: p2p is only for 1v1 situations. Max 3 people. After that the connections needed to keep the smooth connectivity is exponentially increased in favour of server based tech

 

[Bottom Hat]

Okay.