ED Server / Servers Down problems discussion thread

[Aewarin Jameson]

They're not reinventing terminology, they're just using English... but this appears to have confused some people.

Hopefully that wasn't aimed at myself as I understand perfectly what FD are doing. With English being my native tongue I still think they could have used better terms as whilst what they selected was technically correct (from an English point of view) it goes against gaming terminology used in the past that only serves to confuse those that don't read the DDF archives.

To prove the point:

All Players Group (I called it group) = The multi-player server.

Private Group ( or Alliance) = A "private group" on the server (see above)

Solo Group ( or Solo) = Single-player with the ability to still communicate with "friends" if the "soloist" has that enabled.

This is not correct.

An alliance is not a private group, it's a subset of players within the group united temporarily together.

• Who you play with online forms part of your "group" - that can be everyone (all pilots); a subset (friends) or solo.
• Within that group you can form an alliance to team up with people to complete a common goal.

For example: Kroy is currently setting up a "guild" that consists of Alpha backers. Once the game goes live he could if he wanted to set up a Group that consisted of only these people. When the pilots start the game and join that group they will enter the game and only see these pilots. Whilst playing a group of say 4 of them could set up a temporary alliance and go kick in some pirate base together. Alliance is a subset of the group.

 

[Alpha Protocol]

... snipped needless wall of text since my question has been answered ...

TL;DR: Everyone is in the All Players Group unless they join a Private Group or Solo Group. Alliances are sub-groups that can be formed within the All Players Group or Private Group.

Thanks for your help Liqua and Seonid and btw I think Tooterfish was aiming at me

 

[Seonid]

Sandro's post doesn't mention "Alliance", so I'm not sure. Is there another post you can direct me to?

It does: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6300

In addition to the groups presented above a player can be a part of an Alliance with other players. This is a separate entity that operates within the boundaries of whatever group the players are in:
A player can only ever be in a single alliance at a time
Alliances allow players to indicate trust between themselves so they:
Can freely jettison and pick up cargo between themselves
Can fire upon each other without criminal implications
Gain the same criminal fine/bounty if one or more other members commits a crime
This only occurs if the player is in the same vicinity as the player committing the crime
Have the ability to slave hyperdrive systems together to make travel easier
Get matched as a whole during slaved hyperspace travel and if not possible spawn in their own instance at a location rather than splitting the alliance up
Alliances in the all players group allow those in the alliance to come across other human players as normal except the game is explicitly trying to keep the alliance together when they arrive at the same location through match-making
This is in addition to the normal preference system and operates by giving a much higher weighting to alliance members when determining preferences over friends for example
Alliances in a private group would only meet other players in that private group
Depending on the size of the group, players may typically be in an alliance with everyone else in the private group but multiple alliances can exist in a larger private group if desired
Creating an alliance is handled exactly the same way as creating a private group with the caveat that anyone in the group can invite other players (including non-friend players) into the alliance and no one is the leader
In the all players group any player can be invited into the alliance by any alliance member
In a private group only the players in the private group can be invited into an alliance by alliance members
Players can vote to kick an alliance member out of the alliance
After a set time limit the vote is closed and the majority is taken to decide the outcome unless all members have already voted or the required number of votes is reached
Players can leave freely of their own accord
Any criminal status or reputation earned as a consequence of other alliance members behaviour is kept after leaving an alliance

 

[Alpha Protocol]

It does: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6300

Ah thank you!

The slaved hyper drive ability sound rather... Elite!

 

[Seonid]

The real question I have is, since I want to play with as many people as possible, would I just stay in "All Players Group"? Can my wife and I be in a group together while still encountering other players in game

From the developer posts it would appear that in the "All" group, those on your friends list would be attempted to be matched first, so assuming she is on your friends list then what you want should happen, you two would be in the same instance and the rest of the spots filled by either more friends or random people, in that order.

 

[glennbuck]

Who pays for the servers and how much will it cost each year?

Who will pay for the online single and multiplayer servers?How much will it cost each year for 50,000 to 300,000 players on a server?As elite dangerous and star citizen could have a lot more players than eve onlines 50,000 at one time on there servers,has this been done on such a large scale on a online space game before?Thanks for an info on these subjects.

 

[Hellhawk666]

The multiplayer aspect is peer-to-peer, so there will not be "servers" in the way that they exist for other online games. There will be a central server that handles all the persistent universe data and co-ordinates the game. I'd imagine that the costs would not be enormous - in fact the cost of salaries to maintain the game will probably be much more than the ongoing hardware and data cost. At the moment it looks like FD are planning for new accounts and game microtransactions to cover expenses. As for the exact yearly costs I have no idea.

 

[glennbuck]

cool thanks for info was looking at the disadvantages of peer to peer on wiki dont know if any will apply here,quote below

However, peer-to-peer has many disadvantages:[4]
It is very difficult to keep all peers synchronised. Minute differences between peers can escalate over time to game-breaking paradoxes.
It is very difficult to support new peers joining part-way through a game.
Each peer must communicate with all other peers, limiting the number of connected players.[3]
Each peer must wait for every other peer's message before simulating the next "network frame", resulting in all players experiencing the same latency as the player with the worst connection.

 

[Zplintz]

At the moment the expected maximum number of players connected to each other (in a single instance) is 32 (although this might increase over time with improvements to current networking technologies).

32 sounds low (to me) but I try to remember the actual number of people you encounter (see) at any moment in time in MMOs is often no more (if not much less) than this. There is a perception of their being 1000's of people in the same game. This applies to the ED p2p/central server networking as much as many other games I have played.

The persistent (evolving) wonder-verse will be shared with everyone who isn't playing sp offline but the issue of synchronisation isn't so much of an issue at this level.

 

[ste]

From my experiences online dedicated servers arent much better.

I dont know much about how it works but it would seem to me there wouldnt be as much communication required as an FPS like COD which uses peer to peer and BF4 which uses dedicated.. as FPS are much faster paced and less predictable with more going on.

BF4 has much more problems with stability and lag online than COD does, so it doesnt necessarily mean worse from my experience..

 

[glennbuck]

Cheers thanks for the reply,is this why star citizen had a problem with there alpha release,putting 150,000 people on the server caused them to delay it,or is star citizen using peer to peer as well?

 

[Pyros]

Cheers thanks for the reply,is this why star citizen had a problem with there alpha release,putting 150,000 people on the server caused them to delay it,or is star citizen using peer to peer as well?

There wasn't any alpha release of SC scheduled for now. What was planned was the DFM (dog fighting module), but it wasn't released because it wasn't ready. One of the reasons was the replacement of the original cryengine 3 original netcode for a custom one.

AFAIK SC is client/server communication. ED is client server and P2P at the same time.

 

[Hellhawk666]

Cheers thanks for the reply,is this why star citizen had a problem with there alpha release,putting 150,000 people on the server caused them to delay it,or is star citizen using peer to peer as well?

SC will be using servers, both official and also stand-alone for private group games and modded versions. Much more like the WoW/Aoc/SWTOR sort of thing. I believe they are planning for about 100 "entities" in an instance, counting both players and NPCs, but that figure might be reduced.

Their alpha release delay was caused by Chris Robert's decision to customize the code for the engine instead of using the raw Cryengine code.

 

[howard]

Wouldn't know about star citizen. Might be netcode, might be gameplay, might be anything really. Large projects is unpredictable. I think the reason it seems like ED development looks like it's running so smooth is some kind of headstart on the development even before they asked for kickstarter funding. Backburner project for many years. And probably a lot of inhouse code thats modular and easy to implement in a new project.

As to netcode, my guess for a good comparison would be a coop "ninja" fps: Warframe. Which uses p2p and has 3 modes, a online matching queue. Private, and solo play. 4players max.

No servers beside update, account and matchmaking. Clientside handle sessions peer 2 peer. Works incredibly well, but there has been a fair amount of trouble. (the client with the best bandwith handle the brunt of the traffic. Trouble has been a good netconnection doesn't equal a CPU up to the task.

But all this is pure speculation. Truth is, good netcode is better than bad code, no matter what "technology" you use. p2p need to handle packet loss much better than dedicated servers. As small glitch potentially affect all clients. And the true test will come beta. If that runs smoothly day one, consider me well and truly impressed.

 

[glennbuck]

Gosh you guys know are more about servers than me,sd client/server communication. ED is client server and P2P at the same time.What is the difference to these two?

 

[Alpha Protocol]

cool thanks for info was looking at the disadvantages of peer to peer on wiki dont know if any will apply here,quote below

However, peer-to-peer has many disadvantages:[4]
It is very difficult to keep all peers synchronised. Minute differences between peers can escalate over time to game-breaking paradoxes.
It is very difficult to support new peers joining part-way through a game.
Each peer must communicate with all other peers, limiting the number of connected players.[3]
Each peer must wait for every other peer's message before simulating the next "network frame", resulting in all players experiencing the same latency as the player with the worst connection.

The peer to peer data transfer only occurs between players that are in the same instance. For example we update each other on things happening around us or to each other. Our clients update the server. The server updates us. The clients are not responsible for maintaining a catalog of changes in order to update other clients. The server does that.

 

[Patrick_68000]

It would be so interresting that Frontier makes us a detailed exposed of how this will be implemented. Many people would be interested. But I suppose it is also any secret manufacturing process

 

[KING5TON]

Considering it's peer to peer 32 players is quite a high number.
A lot of console multiplayer games are P2P and they rarely go above 16 players due to the limitations on people's internet connections.
Games like battlefield that have more than 16 players have dedicated servers.

Peer to Peer is not without it's problems.
In other games (E: D may do things differently) basically one person (hopefully with the best connection) is picked as the host and they act as the server that the rest of the players connect to. If they quit the game then a new host needs to be picked and everyone migrated across.

The quality of the game for the rest of the players is dependent on the upload speed of the host player and typically around 1/2Mbps per player is required for a decent game (well it was when I used to play the original xbox, may have changed since then).

I've got FTTC with 10Mbps upload so I could comfortably host a 20 player game.

If someone on ADSL is the host though they might only have a 1/2Mbps upload speed which will mean the game is terrible for all players connecting to them.

There will be people with Fibre to their doorstep that will have excellent upload speeds and will comfortably host 32 players but I think they'll be in the minority.

 

[huwthomas]

If someone on ADSL is the host though they might only have a 1/2Mbps upload speed which will mean the game is terrible for all players connecting to them.

... which makes me think (hope!) that the upstream bandwidth demands will not be nearly as great as in the games you were playing.

 

[KING5TON]

... which makes me think (hope!) that the upstream bandwidth demands will not be nearly as great as in the games you were playing.

They may not be, they may be higher than back in the day.
What's more encouraging is, especially in the UK, the prevalence of Fibre Optic nowadays.

I live in Lancaster, up T'north and it isn't a very big place but I have a 80Mbps Down, 10Mbps Up FTTC connection.
If you live in a big city you're more likely to have FTTC available and maybe even FTTD (100Mbps+)