ED Server / Servers Down problems discussion thread

[Squicker]

But... It's Elite - and I'm not going to look too closely at its mouth as long as the single player works. (You'll be glad to know I'm now out of equine metaphors)

If I can just introduce some more equine metaphors, mainly because I was really enjoying them. If I ride single horse ED does it mean I am on a horse truly alone, or will I still be in an arena populated with other horses but with only my own horse visible through my blinkers? Therefore will the quality of hay the other horses are eating (bandwidth their computers are using) be able to affect me at all?

Ok, if I play single player but with live consistent universe, could I ever get lagged out etc?

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Perhaps someone can clarify before I resort to breaking out ethereal?

I thought the network architecture for ED is a hybrid, with client/server for the persistent world elements and P2P for the 3D "island" handling between players in a local vicinity (i.e. outside a station, asteroid field etc.)?

 

[Xzanron]

As a software engineer in real life, I can tell you that the "B" in Beta stands for "Buggy as hell"...

The "A" in Alpha stands for "At least it compiled..."

That's good I like that. I'll have to remember that when talking to my project managers

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Perhaps someone can clarify before I resort to breaking out ethereal?

I thought the network architecture for ED is a hybrid, with client/server for the persistent world elements and P2P for the 3D "island" handling between players in a local vicinity (i.e. outside a station, asteroid field etc.)?

Server also tracks player position (roughly) and manages peer to peer session matchmaking. Other than that, you are correct - when you are out of hyperspace and supercruise, you are in peer to peer session.

 

[Zplintz]

I am understand that people have their loyalties to their favourite providers but I don't agree that Virgin are the best performance versus cost in all cases. It really does depend on your package and location (as anyone who was with some of the other cable providers that Virgin took over will know).

Virgin quite definitely do shape traffic btw. You may not notice it if your local hub is less used/crowded but its there nevertheless.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

ISPs oversell bandwith and are very unhappy when customers use their bandwith fully. Only thing to fight it is change vendor.

However recent improvements in ED protocol seems have brought down traffic quite a bit. Still, one host with low upload speeds and high pings can bring instance down for everyone. FD has to fix that.

 

[Squicker]

Server also tracks player position (roughly) and manages peer to peer session matchmaking. Other than that, you are correct - when you are out of hyperspace and supercruise, you are in peer to peer session.

Assumption is server also is authoritative for integrity checking the above mentioned position data, client item data (dupe style exploits, falsely unlocked ships, cash & weapons etc), against its own centralised records re state etc, etc? I realise those mechanisms are not deployed now according to Juniper, but it has to be the server doing all that, does it not (only authoritative trusted resource on network)?

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Assumption is server also is authoritative for integrity checking the above mentioned position data, client item data (dupe style exploits, falsely unlocked ships, cash & weapons etc), against its own centralised records re state etc, etc? I realise those mechanisms are not deployed now according to Juniper, but it has to be the server doing all that, does it not (only authoritative trusted resource on network)?

More or less. It gets improved with each release. Server will have to check a lot of stuff against cheating sure.

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Server also tracks player position (roughly) and manages peer to peer session matchmaking. Other than that, you are correct - when you are out of hyperspace and supercruise, you are in peer to peer session.

Thanks,

That's what I was thinking - I suspect some of the issues will therefore be the syncing between the two err "universes" (can't think of the right word) e.g. there are too many players causing too many events that need to sync into the persistent server database (e.g. the market) and therefore instances/islands are getting out of sync with the state of the persistent server based master.

I did actually manage to drop out of supercruise at freeport station in the anarchic system (population of players should be lower) and had a wonderful time learning to dock, but the other safer and I assume more "populated" systems I have yet to get into an "island" around a station, which makes trading a little difficult to say the least.

I also wonder what matchmaking is being used? I know for a fact that in CoD:MW3 a lot of the problems that had were due to some ISPs using address ranges which either couldn't be geographically located at all, or were being located wrongly e.g. BT Internet in the UK having address ranges which should be in Spain according to some lookup methods.

Still early days and FD will resolve this hopefully as we get more updates.

 

[Juniper]

Ok, if I play single player but with live consistent universe, could I ever get lagged out etc?

Unlikely, because the only connection you would have would be to the galaxy server, which does as little as possible. Add some players and P2P comes into the mix... which introduces latency, bandwidth & multiple ping issues.

Everything about the game exists entirely on your PC. There's no centralised galaxy play area, it's all on everyone's PC, but just a server which (will) push updates down to you as and when needed.

 

[Squicker]

Unlikely, because the only connection you would have would be to the galaxy server, which does as little as possible. Add some players and P2P comes into the mix... which introduces latency, bandwidth & multiple ping issues.

Everything about the game exists entirely on your PC. There's no centralised galaxy play area, it's all on everyone's PC, but just a server which (will) push updates down to you as and when needed.

Ok thanks. I kind of like the idea of being the lone pilot again. The bits I've been enjoying most in the beta are where I am alone in deep space, I think they've created that feeling superbly and I'm avoiding other humans at the moment. But I like the idea I still have a connection to that persistent universe that everyone lives in.

 

[hchalkley]

To answer the question at the top of the thread, there were ten servers online Friday night for the expected surge in traffic, compared to two servers throughout the Alpha.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I also wonder what matchmaking is being used? I know for a fact that in CoD:MW3 a lot of the problems that had were due to some ISPs using address ranges which either couldn't be geographically located at all, or were being located wrongly e.g. BT Internet in the UK having address ranges which should be in Spain according to some lookup methods.

Still early days and FD will resolve this hopefully as we get more updates.

Currently there's no geo ip matchmaking yet as far as I know, but it's on their "Soon" todo list. It's a server side thing and they don't need updated clients to do that, so we will just have wait for news from FD regarding this and see if it does bring any improvements. They also plan to add "health" variable of session, so people won't be joined by problematic instances. This is no way easy to fix, but what I seen in recent dev responses FD have good plan regarding this.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

To answer the question at the top of the thread, there were ten servers online Friday night for the expected surge in traffic, compared to two servers throughout the Alpha.

Nice. Any aprox. data what was peak rate of players?

 

[pompomJuice]

If I were Brabels I would do the following:

1. Catch a wake up call.
2. Read something that Richard Branson wrote about what going big is all about. I feel confident now.
3. Fire the CTO, hire an security expert. If I can't find one I will become one.
4. Branch the game client into a dedicated server version that branches into a proxy and a node variant. Amazon PAS enables me to still use the existing UDP p2p model to handle comms between nodes that scale while proxies provide access to the players at strategic points around the world that minimizes their entry into the cluster. For example not my back yard because obviously its going to work for me then.
5. Remove collisions between player ships because a free sidewinder is a missile.
6. Register and group players and servers by region & use Amazon cloud service target those: us-east-1, us-west-1, eu-west-1, ap-southeast-1, (ap-southeast-2)
7. Install air conditioning for those uber gaming rigs required instead of dusty desk fans that just blows hot air around.
8. Stop pretending I am a gamer

 

[Lobstris]

If I can just introduce some more equine metaphors, mainly because I was really enjoying them. If I ride single horse ED does it mean I am on a horse truly alone, or will I still be in an arena populated with other horses but with only my own horse visible through my blinkers? Therefore will the quality of hay the other horses are eating (bandwidth their computers are using) be able to affect me at all?

Ok, if I play single player but with live consistent universe, could I ever get lagged out etc?

In single-player online mode, you're on a horse, but you won't see another horse, but they could eat and defecate in the fields around you. In single-player offline mode, "all these fields are yours - except Europa. Attempt no cantering there".

 

[cherbert]

Dedicated servers is the only way to go with this in reality ... I'm kinda hoping FD picks up on that before its too late...

I'm calling it now that FD drops P2P.

 

[devastat]

Save this post. I'm calling it now that FD drops P2P.

The game is totally unplayable here too :/

Don't know if it has something to do with the fact that here in Finland the client might have to connect with players overseas.

I'm just afraid that they might not be able to get P2P working for everyone, and some of us will have to play single player because of that.

 

[Squicker]

I'm calling it now that FD drops P2P.

The more I think about it, the more I tend to agree with you.

Yes, they could make P2P work well enough, but the solutioning costs & timescales, ongoing dev costs of defeating exploits on local clients and the fact that there will have to be a such a large amount of centralised security & integrity checking anyway, coupled with the massive reduction (up to 90% in some cases) in cost of deploying dedicated game servers on elastic compute instances (Azure or Amazon EC2), will eliminate any possible financial gains that may have been made in the long term by going P2P.


The opportunities for this sort of hosting provided by cloud computing will only improve, accelerate and cheapen over time, the cost & effort-time of labour to code and maintain a complex P2P solution will remain roughly the same. Possibly FD thought of this idea when game companies were still deploying their infrastructure on physical kit, but those days are gone. No one deploying a new game deploys physical infra, in the same way no one deploying any new business solution would deploy on physical unless there were extenuating circumstances, usually related to data protection legislation across borders, or extreme security requirements.

This is why MS are offering free dedicated servers for all their game devs on XBOne, it just makes sense in 2014.

P2P is not a good strategic decision IMO and I think that beta may well prove this point.

But that is what tests are for, proving or disproving theories and giving people an opportunity to remake decisions.

 

[Evenios]

i agree obviously there is some sort of strein this may be the cause of a lot o the weird docking issues and the fact that many times it often takes a few minutes or seconds to exit supercruise near a station....

personally i think if they had just added more systems that could have been a big help but apparently this early stage of beta was ment as a stress test .

but hopefully some of that will be fixed later on.