How to afford the bandwidth?

[leeta]

I notice that most objects are actual entities that appear over the wire (in this release, crystals :-))

I also notice that all traffic goes to the main server.

How on earth are you going to afford running a world of any size for free? Why not use some peer-to-peer scheme? (there are solutions to cheating in p2p, too)

[leeta]

Great! Nobody knows!

Yet another free project that\'ll die painfully, I suppose? Get out now or be burned later...

[acraig]

We\'ve received great support from many different providers that are willing to host our game free of charge because of the quality and dedication of the team.  We are really making a good game here and people are willing to help us out.   We are not some glassy eyed bunch of teens with dreams of grandeur of becoming 3l33t.  

Yet another free project that\'ll die painfully, I suppose? Get out now or be burned later..

This is exactly the type of attitude that causes projects to fail.  We realize that the is no such thing as a free lunch yet we are going on.  To worry about things like this is a moot point.  We are not doing this for the money.  We are doing it because we want to.  If nobody wants to host it or we only get 5 people online then so be it.  The fact of the matter is that even if nobody plays it, it is still something that we want to work on.  However, I think that it will be very popular in the future and we can make a difference in the online gaming community.

There are people willing to donate the requirements in order for this to succeed.  To say that the project will die because of hosting is totaly false.  You might as well ask \"Why bother to live?\" You will only die in the end.

[Vengeance]

1337a,

Our current PS tech demo has 21,000+ player accounts on it.  We received 15 different offers to host game servers within 48 hours of posting the request on our website.

But you might get burned later, so you better bail now.

Sounds like sour grapes to me.  I suggest you go make your peer to peer game since you are obviously an expert.

- Vengeance

[leeta]

Wow! I got flamed not once, but twice! For asking an honest question.

An alternative answer could have been:

\"I missed your question the first time, so please be patient. We actually have several offers to host the game for free already, so for now it seems to work out OK.\"

I wonder why it wasn\'t like this?

[Kiern]

Maybe because you acted like a little kid when no one answered your question?  So, basically you flamed the whole game (and therefore the devs) and you expect them to be NICE to you?  Hate break it to you, but that\'s not how things work...sorry if that makes you cry

[Peeeevs]

haha...calm down people its only a game

oh wate... did i say game..i ment its a jewl !! lol

do you think it will ever go Pay 2 play??? cause when
it starts to get real popular i dont think your going to get free hosting for 20k+ people playing at a time...

[leeta]

Keep it coming! I can heat my house this way!

I\'m not sure I\'ll feel at home on this board, though, because vague cynicism is about as far as I can create on my own.

Is anyone interested in debating the merits of a peer-to-peer MMOG with appropriate mechanisms for anti-cheating?

[Kiern]

Oh come on leeta, I was looking for a good argument (having not been here in a while) and I guess it\'s not gonna happen ;(  ;(

Well, I\'m off then, laters.

[acraig]

Well, I\'m sorry that you took my post to be a flame.  I was just responding to what I thought was a mis-informed opinon that you seemed to have.

For the peer-peer system I cannot see anyway it could work without the server validating the data comming in.  What data do you see as being available for peer-peer and how would you work out any cheating issues?

[Ravenmaster]

Wow! Acraig, your posts are always so... uh, nice. No matter how stupid, vague, poorly worded, or ps-attacking it is, you always come up with a good answer. I congratulate you on this.

[kinshadow]

Originally posted by acraig
For the peer-peer system I cannot see anyway it could work without the server validating the data comming in.  What data do you see as being available for peer-peer and how would you work out any cheating issues?

I have actually thought of several ways to implement a peer-to-peer persistent world, but the likelihood of it being technically possible is at least a decade away.  Data validation (player movement, geography, etc.) would have to rely on a multi-system voting scheme, so that a rogue player would not be able to subvert only the local system to gain the behavior wanted.  You would still need an entity with authority (either a person or machine who logs into the p-p network) to add features, distribute updates, and change the world.  The security of said authority can be kept using a public/private key system (like a secure socket) to force clients to update from a central location.  Unfortunately, you would still need a primary server to reload the world into the network if all clients exit, but it would not need the space or bandwidth of a server cluster in a conventional system.  The big draw back is that the clients would all have to have fast connection, plenty of spare cycles, and a lot of space.... which you probably can\'t guarantee for another 10 years (IMO).

[leeta]

Every client needs to have the information about what every other player is doing, to show that to the player, right? Thus, there is not necessarily any extra bandwidth requirement.

Servers can be authoritative about \"important\" stuff like rate of character level advancement, trade, etc. Also, a single attempt at cheating would probably just be logged as a statistic on the server when some number of cooperating machines agree. A pattern of detected cheats could lead to spurious devolvement of the character; there could also be public records of cheating statistics.

The game design could limit the rate of character advancement, accumulation of wealth, etc. It could be balanced such that even if you found a \"legal\" way to get lots of experience or lots of currency in a short period of time, the character server would limit the rate of gain.

Note that I\'m assuming someone with a little more authority stores the characters, to avoid local-side editing (a la phantasy star online), so I haven\'t yet figured out a good way of being TRULY peer-to-peer; only some ideas about how to greatly reduce the cost of running one of these games.

Too bad that Kiern left; he sounded so manly.

[killercow]

What would be useful would be to have a whole range of hosts hosting different pieces of the entire Planeshift world.
So you would have different hosts for different areas of Planeshift. You would then also have a \'home\' server that would hold all your stats and info about your character. It would be good if this \'home\' server was located in your country, or close to your country for latency reasons as the \'home\' server would be most frequently accessed.

Of course this sounds like it would take a lot of re-programming to accomplish, it could work and would spread bandwidth between several hosts for better bandwidth per player.

Just an idea.

Hope it helps,
K-C

[Vengeance]

Doing this is in the plan but a LONG ways off.

Regarding the peer-to-peer way of doing this, when you figure out how to get two NATted machines to talk to each other without a server in the middle, you let me know.

THEN we\'ll worry about the anti-cheating stuff, which as Kinshadow has started to explain, is so ungainly, complex and computation-intensive as to render it completely impractical--and certainly less practical than finding people to donate servers to do it the way every fricken game does it.

If you can\'t see that, I can\'t help you.

-V