This hasn't been mentioned anywhere yet that I've seen, and it wasn't part of the official presentation. However, there was a bit of a ruckus on the forums recently after Brad mentioned that they might filter out people with very low upload bandwidth on the Stardock servers.
At PAX, a question was asked if people would be able to host their own servers and the answer was: YES.
Stardock will provide their own servers where they will be able to guarantee quality of play (pings, mod content, etc), but Frogboy did also say that people will be able to just host their own servers and do whatever they want with them.
Thanks keith for reminding me I double-checked it again with Frogboy on IRC before posting.
Still doesn't answer the question as to why they think it's necessary to filter out people in a turn-based enviroment. There are still a lot of questions about how battles will be handled, what kind of turn systems are being used, but I would just like to know what they are doing with Elemental that would cause such a concern to even come to light. If they are using Elemental as a test bunny for existing or future RTS issues, the least they can do is say so. The best they can do is grab those whining players and let them test a system that benefits them.
Nesrie: Have you ever played Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri? The amount of information to exchange is atrocious, terraforming data such as terrain levels, the effect the new hill has on rainfall, unit movements, combat resolutions, forest/fungus spread etc etc etc. This all has to be calculated on the host and then transmitted out and back to make sure everyone is synchronized properly. Turns take AGES when just one person is slow. Elemental is going to have miles more stuff to calculate, exchange and synchronize and unless that turn package is delivered pronto and then uploaded back to the host its going to take forever to get to the next turn.
SMAC was before the age of broadband pretty much.
I don't think speed will be a big problem.
At least there is an option to get around Stardock servers- which is a good thing, because what if Stardock went under? (Yeah, I know there's no reason for it to happen for a LONG time, but you never, EVER know)
This is why I'm not a fan of forced central servers.
I think the bandwidth thing has been blown a little out of proportion. Anyone with decent broadband should be fine, but if someone is continually starting games with a crappy connection in some far corner of the world, it would get a bit annoying.
Are these going to be Listen servers or will we be able to host dedicated servers?
Which is the point: not everyone has broadband. Some people are still using crappy little modems. Not even the 'good' 52 something modems, but old, OLD, 8 unit (baud?) ones.
Will those people be playing Elemental though? While not all of Elemental's customers will have high-end computers, it is reasonable to assume they have some form of broadband access, even if it's wireless.
The reason this issue concerns me: At work, I have a wireless broadband connection, and I wondered if I'd be able to have MP on that? It's laggy but otherwise is decent- TF2 is playable on it.
I don't expect it'll be a major factor in Elemental, but nonetheless when underspec users harm the experience for others, it's as often as not the game's maker that gets blamed, not those users.
I've played a lot of games actually, including that one, and Civ II, Age of Wonders, Everquest, HHOM3, several of the Settlers series all on a modem. I played Age of Empires II on the a modem too. Please don't address me as if I do not understand that data is being exchanged in turn-based enviroments or as if if I am unfamiliar with how modem play worked or even the basics playing games online.
Provide the information then and let who ever started the game decide whether or not to boot players from the game based on their connection issues.
I still think this is a knee-jerk response to connection issues associated Demigod which has very little, if anything, to do with Elemental.
I should have added that I do have broadband now.
Then you also know how atrociously slow the turns go in SMAC, I recently (just the other week actually) played a game with some friends over IRC and one of them was in south america somewhere and turns would take ages. I'm going to assume that Elemental will have simultaneous moves for the benefit of moving the game along at a reasonable pace, but having 2-3 second lag between moving your rover one tile and being able to move it another because your move is not resolved on all machines frankly kills it for me.
Awesome news! Thanks Annatar!
Maybe that has something to do with the game and not the connection. Majesty 1, Age of Empires II, a lot of old games I have lag more than then the newer games do, and the people I play with have broadband speeds in the States. Hell, my router was overheating for a bit and I would get disconnected for about 2-3 seconds randomly. EU3, Colonization, CIV 4 never even blinked when I "blipped" in and out of the game. These games hardly missed a beat and I was I dropped entirely, and the only way they (my friends) even knew I was out of the game for a moment was because MSN Messenger kicked me hard and dropped our voice chat. Battle for Middle Earth II would pause for a moment, but always recovered and EU3 certainly isn't turn based either.
I've played SWAT 4 with a friend in the UK. Her issue was with low-end hardware, not so much connection speeds, and sure, we troubleshooted with her for awhile to get the settings right for smooth play but we chose to do it. So yes, I am happy that we can host our own games and put up with whatever we want, but that doesn't convince me that what Stardock is proposing is necessary on any level with a game like Elemental. This is an after the fact fix for one of many, of many connection issues they had with Demigod, and it doesnt' belong in the arena with Elemental.
Those games also functioned very differently, Civ4, Colonization etc operate in very simple terms. You have a flat world with each square pre-defined as grass/hill/water/etc and the only updates needed between clients is basic information about unit types, square improvements and the like. SMAC is a bit more advanced in that regard what with there not being hill squares but instead the landscape being completely mallable with terraforming and these changes have to be synchronized on all clients as well as what units have what armor/weapons/specials and where they are etc and the occasional spread of forest/fungus. EU3 does not have terrain, it has provinces, a few towns and a bunch of armies moving around and RTS games like Age of Empires is the same. I'm not saying that SMAC didn't suffer from bad design and coding but the sheer amount of information having to be moved when you click the end turn button is quite significant.
Hopefully Elemental will be coded better but in a lot of places, while you have good download speeds your upload is very much capped very low and it "can" cause problems when your playing multiplayer games. With increased amount of unit costumization comes increased sizes in data blocks that need to be moved, simply because you have to define a unit as having bronze swords, chain mail armor and wooden shields instead of just being vanilla swordsman or pikeman.
Are you suggesting that if a game is not designed exactly like SMAC, you think that the amount of information being exchanged between clients and the host is going to be less than SMAC?
No... he's pointing out that SMAC had a high amount of data compared to other games to transfer (though, in truth, it should have been possible to only transmit the data... the joys of a P2P computational model!)
As long as Stardock servers aren't biased towards the American region, I'm down with it.
Hey everyone. At PAX durring the Q&A session after the Saturday E:WoM demo I am the person who actually asked the question about hosting servers. The answer as I understood it had two important pieces of information to it.
First: Yes, they will allow people to host their own servers without going through any Stardock servers or networks. You will have your freedom to controll your own games.
Second: The point of Stardock hosting the main game servers is to provide a service to the players, not to controll or restrict how their customers play the game. They are hosting the backend servers to take the burden off of the players and improve everyone's game experience.
The bandwidth filtering issue is an entierly separate discussion. From my own experience as an 8 year industry veteran as a game software test engineer with LOTS of work testing multiplayer games of different types over different network environments, the claim of "broad band will fix everything" is just not that simple. Without getting all technical about it, there are a lot of different things that can result in a bad network connection between two people chosen at random from accross the internet. Some of these can result in an effective loss of bandidth even when the people on both ends have rediculously high upload and download speeds. Now multiply the potential problems every time you add an extra player to the game, and they are currently targeting 32 players as a cap, and they pretty much HAVE to have SOME filtering to make sure that one bad connection doesn't drag down an entier game.
Almost every network game released in the last 5 years (or more) has some kind of filtering on it. Some methods have worked better than others, but in every case the intention was to improve the game experience, not to exclude players who couldn't keep up. So again, when Brad mentioned that they "MIGHT" filter players, that doesn't mean that they are trying to exclude players, it means that they are looking into ways to make the game experience better. And since this is one of the companies that actually listens to their customers, and since they are planning on runing a very long and thurough beta, it stands to reason that they will make sure that anthing they put in the game as a filter will be done in a way that will not screw people over.
Support for independent MP servers sounds like good news for many folks, but the news here mainly makes me wonder if anyone at PAX mentioned the possibility of a referee role in MP and whether there was anything interesting said about very long-running MP games (on 64-bit Ludicrous maps).
Nobody asked about referees during the demo I attended, but someone did ask about hot seat play for MP games. The answer roughly translated as "We are not looking at that feature right now, but we might consider adding it in later."
Also one of the expanded answers resulted in a comment about using a "play by email" model for certain things. The expanded follow up explanation was that if everyone had to shut off for the night, the game would still be saved on the server and when everyone logged back on later you could resume an MP game where you left off. This would allow you to play very long games that potentially lasted for years.
Personally, I would like to see an option to allow at least limited AI agents or managers that could run your part of an MP game for you when you logged off. If they made the agents also a part of the SP game to help you manage cities or armies that you didn't want to pay attention to then they could even make it part of the tech tree. However this wasn't discussed while I was at the demo so I don't know if it would be even possible in their current game design.
Being able to host games yourself is doubly-sweet- great bandwidth if you're just playing local friends and great for SD, too, as it won't consume their bandwidth.
I seem to recall something about how all save games will be hosted by SD rather than stored locally. Would that be the case for self-hosted games? So, if I host a server, would each person need to login into Impulse/Elemental in order to access the game, or could they get it from my host? Or do they each maintain their own copy? I'm fine with it either way, but just curious.
Another bit of news on PBEM - I was at the friday(I had the Sword, take that footman2!) showing and someone had asked about PBEM, Brad's reply was that there was no techincal reason they could not implement it - only laziness. The general gist was that they were looking into it.
I think it's safe to say that AC was simply very inefficient. As noted, many older games had very, very bad netcode, with poor error tolerance, high lag sensitivity, unnecessary data movement, etc. Modern games are often far superior even as they are more sophisticated.
With regards the Stardock servers, I doubt I'd ever want to use them anyway.
Yeah, and he also mentioned that PBEM was more likely to happen than Hotseat.
I couldn't help but notice that in all 3 presentations I listened to on the subject, (2 elemental demos, one stardock general status) somebody asked about hotseat. So if thats any indication of the demand for hotseat, we'll see what ends up happening.
Something mentioned in terms of saving the multiplayer games is that if a game hosted on a server is saved, it will remain there and players will be able to come back to it already up and ready to go. If this is the way its handled, PBEM may be void because you could just log online to do your turn then log off. Same idea as play by e-mail, except the turns arn't physically passed in an e-mail. People will be able to sign on at different times throughout the day to do their turn. Again, we'll see, but thats what I took from it.
My thoughts exactly. But a notification when you're next turn is up, either trough email or impulse, would be nice.
Does anybody know if multiplayer games will feature simultaneous turns (ala, Civ4 and AoW)? This would drastically cut down on waiting times between turns.
Edit: nevermind, found reason to belief simultaneous turns will be in, in another thread. (the one about saving multiplayer games)
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