4 ms·

That sounds a very unimpressive amount to be called massive.

by shultays 6y ago

0xFF0123 6y ago
If you share data about every player to every player, every frame (or tick) then it adds up pretty quickly.
- Jare 6y ago
  You want to limit as much as possible what you share about all players, not just for performance but also for cheating reasons. Rule-of-thumb, any information that does not translate into something the player can perceive in his screen/audio for that frame, should not be sent in that frame.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    The disadvantage of that is that you cannot do reliable client side prediction anymore, meaning you now need to send the full physics state instead of sending just an error correction signal.
hnick 6y ago
Many modern MMOs are instanced. Thousands in the world, but only a handful in each zone. So that does stretch the definition of massive a bit but it's how they cope. I think FFXIV has a hard cap of around ~350 per zone, but you get some silly processing outcomes when everyone is in the same area (entities or attacks not being rendered, area of effect attacks randomly only hitting a portion of people within the target zone, etc).
- Mirioron 6y ago
  Just to add on to this: it doesn't often even make sense to have more people in one area even if your servers and net code could handle it fine. The players themselves will likely run into severe performance issues with too many people on screen. In an MMO you want player character models to be heavily customizable (costs lots of draw calls, but also effects budget), which means that the usual tricks for rendering lots of animated things on the screen don't work as well. As a result, basically every 3D MMO runs poorly if there are too many people in the area, even when the server runs fine. Some games will start just not drawing the models for other players. At that point it doesn't really matter if your game is instanced or not. You're still not going to be playing with thousands of players on the screen. The funny thing is that the maximum number of people on the screen before performance issues really hasn't improved much in MMOs in 16+ years.
  - hnick 6y ago
    > The funny thing is that the maximum number of people on the screen before performance issues really hasn't improved much in MMOs in 16+ years. They're probably pumping up the graphical effects and maintaining a stasis there. But there are also hard caps to how much data or how many position updates you want to be sending in packets before perceived latency degrades too. FFXI in particular had a famous meme "PS2 limitations" where the game was being held back technically due to supporting the older platform, not to mention it was built with dial up internet in mind and a very low update rate. Many MMOs in general want to cast a wide net and will rarely improve to the point where players with older systems can't join in. That's for the sequel!
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      I don't think the network side is the issue in almost any MMO when it comes to the client. The amount of data that is sent and received is tiny. It's most likely the number of draw calls that is the performance bottleneck. A high end machine in 2018 can handle around 2000 draw calls per frame (remember, this has been single threaded until recently!). You could easily have a single draw call per player, sometimes even more. That alone could take a system to its knees in an MMO with lots of players.
- shultays 6y ago
  I mean, most MMOs are only an illusion of MMO. You don't really play together with thousands of other players. Stuff like an auction house perhaps the only "massively multiplayer" part of the game, otherwise it is probably not much different a regular mp. Although numbers like 64 players is still above most multiplayer games support. MMOs get away with it by designing game in a way that minimizes the load on server and moving most stuff that should have been done on server to client side You are right, definition of MMO is stretched quite a bit when you have such limitations. One could argue that counter strike is an MMO because you thousands of players are playing on same universe (I guess gun skins are the only real progress of the game :) ) and each server is an instance. I think calling something an MMO mostly depends on how well it is hiding that it is not really a MMO 350 sounds quite impressive. Looks like eve online handled 2,670 at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB . eve online slowdowns the server to a crawl when there are such large scale battles though

That sounds a very unimpressive amount to be called massive.

0xFF0123 6y ago

If you share data about every player to every player, every frame (or tick) then it adds up pretty quickly.

Jare 6y ago
You want to limit as much as possible what you share about all players, not just for performance but also for cheating reasons. Rule-of-thumb, any information that does not translate into something the player can perceive in his screen/audio for that frame, should not be sent in that frame.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  The disadvantage of that is that you cannot do reliable client side prediction anymore, meaning you now need to send the full physics state instead of sending just an error correction signal.

hnick 6y ago

Many modern MMOs are instanced. Thousands in the world, but only a handful in each zone. So that does stretch the definition of massive a bit but it's how they cope. I think FFXIV has a hard cap of around ~350 per zone, but you get some silly processing outcomes when everyone is in the same area (entities or attacks not being rendered, area of effect attacks randomly only hitting a portion of people within the target zone, etc).

Mirioron 6y ago
Just to add on to this: it doesn't often even make sense to have more people in one area even if your servers and net code could handle it fine. The players themselves will likely run into severe performance issues with too many people on screen. In an MMO you want player character models to be heavily customizable (costs lots of draw calls, but also effects budget), which means that the usual tricks for rendering lots of animated things on the screen don't work as well. As a result, basically every 3D MMO runs poorly if there are too many people in the area, even when the server runs fine. Some games will start just not drawing the models for other players. At that point it doesn't really matter if your game is instanced or not. You're still not going to be playing with thousands of players on the screen. The funny thing is that the maximum number of people on the screen before performance issues really hasn't improved much in MMOs in 16+ years.
- hnick 6y ago
  > The funny thing is that the maximum number of people on the screen before performance issues really hasn't improved much in MMOs in 16+ years. They're probably pumping up the graphical effects and maintaining a stasis there. But there are also hard caps to how much data or how many position updates you want to be sending in packets before perceived latency degrades too. FFXI in particular had a famous meme "PS2 limitations" where the game was being held back technically due to supporting the older platform, not to mention it was built with dial up internet in mind and a very low update rate. Many MMOs in general want to cast a wide net and will rarely improve to the point where players with older systems can't join in. That's for the sequel!
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    I don't think the network side is the issue in almost any MMO when it comes to the client. The amount of data that is sent and received is tiny. It's most likely the number of draw calls that is the performance bottleneck. A high end machine in 2018 can handle around 2000 draw calls per frame (remember, this has been single threaded until recently!). You could easily have a single draw call per player, sometimes even more. That alone could take a system to its knees in an MMO with lots of players.
shultays 6y ago
I mean, most MMOs are only an illusion of MMO. You don't really play together with thousands of other players. Stuff like an auction house perhaps the only "massively multiplayer" part of the game, otherwise it is probably not much different a regular mp. Although numbers like 64 players is still above most multiplayer games support. MMOs get away with it by designing game in a way that minimizes the load on server and moving most stuff that should have been done on server to client side You are right, definition of MMO is stretched quite a bit when you have such limitations. One could argue that counter strike is an MMO because you thousands of players are playing on same universe (I guess gun skins are the only real progress of the game :) ) and each server is an instance. I think calling something an MMO mostly depends on how well it is hiding that it is not really a MMO 350 sounds quite impressive. Looks like eve online handled 2,670 at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodbath_of_B-R5RB . eve online slowdowns the server to a crawl when there are such large scale battles though