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Technology and Huge Seamless Open Worlds
paulytheb
Member UncommonPosts: 363
Note* This is not a Themepark Vrs Sandbox topic. I am not an expert on technology at all. I only have a laymans understanding of how all this tech brings us these game worlds.
Hello,
I am interested in what the technology 10 or even 15 years ago was capable of. Back then most people connected to AOL on a regular 56K modem over a regular phone line.I am really more interested in how much has changed since then.
Then I am interested in what the technology can do now. Most people have a DSL or cable connection now.
It seems to me that there is this huge pent up demand for a Huge Giant Seamless Open World in games these days. (don't care if its themepark or sandbox, that is irrelevant to the topic)
However most games over the last 10 years are zoned and the large maps are made up of smaller connected zones.
Does the technology exist today to make the Huge Giant Seamless Open World that some Gamers are craving? Can it be done at current connection and computer speeds? There are many more online gamers these days, so the worlds would have to be much larger than the games of yore. What are some of your opinions on this ? Is a modern 3D MASSIVE world possible with all the glitz and shine that gamers demand today?
Maybe most importantly, How much would it cost?
Thank you in advance for any knowledge shared, but please keep it in a laymans perspective so it is easily digestable.
Pauly the B
(P.S. I kinda think that it can't be done yet, I kinda think some gamers are asking for more than what is possible, but that is just a gut feeling. Thus the reason for this thread. I am looking for a better understanding.)
( Note to self-Don't say anything bad about Drizzt.)
An acerbic sense of humor is NOT allowed here.
Comments
Oderint, dum metuant.
Rift managed to have invasions and an open world too,the DE in gw2 are not so dynamic anyway,more like a choice of developers to avoid writing any decent quests beside the personal story.Why no more huge and seamless open worlds ?Maybe because a lot of players are not interested in worlds,they just want instant travel to a dungeon to farm the last tier of gear and even flying on a gryphon for 5m is too much for them.
Different games handle things differently.
In Darkfall for instance, mobs only spawned when players got into a set distance from them, thus reducing server lag from having every mob spawn active at the same time.
Old UOs only answer to the same was to institute a policy of rewarding people for throwing their trash away, thus getting rid of unwanted pixels and lessening server load.
In Planetside 2 there is a mechanic for limiting the visibility of PCs when a certain amount of players crowd a tight area, thus ensuring that people with super computers aren't the only ones that can move around in large battles. (I bring up PS2 because EQ next will use the same engine and I am curious to know how they will handle the same issues)
Also, most "open, seamless worlds" still have server lines, they just make it so you can go across them without staring at a load screen.
The above is my personal opinion. Anyone displaying a view contrary to my opinion is obviously WRONG and should STHU. (neener neener)
-The MMO Forum Community
Ultima Online exists to prove you wrong
which is still to this day one of the largest game worlds on top of being open and seamless.
UO also had huge live events where hundreds of players would be in the same area defending towns against wave after wave of attacking mobs.
It always makes me sad when posts like this are made because they were proven wrong back in 1997, with a dialup connection, on a 486 ...
It has to be possible. Some of the old games had this ability. Take SWG for example, you had planets which were essentially very, very large maps and people were building houses on them without instancing and decorating them and such. If you could take that level of art, but use a better engine, it seems like it would have to be possible.
I think where we run into problems is some people expect Skyrim graphics. But SWG graphics were good enough. Maybe you could take it up one notch.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Vanilla EQ, uo, daoc, ac, eve etc..
Wow changed all that (although Ao, coh and eq2 had instancing before it)
It's mostly due to laziness imo.
It can be done, but the process is rather complicated compared to zone based systems.
On the client side, the terrain is setup in as a system of tiles. All in-game assets are loaded and unloaded on the fly (using multiple threads usually spread out over multiple cores) based on a technique called scoping where anything that can't be seen is either unloaded or shoved in a cache but not rendered.
Server side gets a bit tricky. Although it's all one world, it's not all one physical computer. There might be 2 dozen or more computers handling client connections, each of these connected to shared background servers that are handling mob / NPC activity as well as ghosting other players.
The whole process on the server-side looks and works like a single computer, but the load is distributed based on tasks.
How much would it cost? I have no clue. Server software license alone would very likely be in the hudreds of thousands. I don't know of any of the budget engine / middleware / server combinations that can handle large scale seamless.
I've seen numbers as high as the range of 7,500 simultaneous connections per single seamless world (or region) on a given server (multiple machine cluster).
Eve can handle much much more.
Without a doubt. It's been done on the Playstation 2 with EQOA and worked flawlessly, I see no real reason it can't be done on the PC.
That was daoc in its day, it uses the same engine as Morrowind.
Still managed to have a fully persistent world with zero instancing.
I'd love to know how they pulled that off. Those planet maps were 16 km x 16 km. The biggest test I ever had running was 8 x 8 and it plain old exploded if I pushed population density up. Machine was like... hell no, I'm not gonna do it. Insane CPU load.
It's pretty easy to make a huge, seamless, open world. It's not a problem of hardware or technology. Rather, it's a problem of trade-offs. Most people wouldn't want to play a huge, seamless, open world that consists of an infinite featureless plane where you start so far away from everyone and everything else that you'll never see anyone or anything else except for the ground that repeats forever. While it would be easy to implement a "game" like that, it would also be stupid to do so.
Any game with a large world pretty much has to have lots of zones. Furthermore, it probably breaks the game into zones in several different ways. The question is not whether a game world has zones. Rather, the question is whether it has zones that are distracting or obnoxious to players. Zones used for internal code purposes in ways where players would never guess that they just crossed a zone boundary are not a problem. Having to stop every few minutes to stare at a loading screen for 20 seconds, on the other hand, is obnoxious.
The culprit that causes loading screens is that hard drives are slow. While most computer hardware has gotten dramatically faster over the course of the years, a 7200 RPM hard drive today spins at the same speed as a 7200 RPM hard drive in 1998. That means you can only load stuff off of it so fast, and textures are the main issue.
If you need to display something in the game world and haven't loaded it off of the hard drive yet, a game programmer has a few options:
1) Let the game crash.
2) Don't draw it until it loads.
3) Draw some placeholder graphic instead, such a a white box.
Option 1 is obviously bad.
Option 2 isn't a problem if it only means a delay of 30 ms here and 50 ms there, but becomes a huge problem if players are being attacked by invisible mobs as the hard drive struggles to load the data for them. Running around on invisible ground is also distracting.
Option 3 is fine if the white box only appears once in a great while, but having a game world with white boxes all over the place is obnoxious and distracting.
Loading screens let you make a player stop and not move on until you've loaded everything and can draw it properly. If you want to skip loading screens, then you have to reduce hard drive accesses to the point that things will load fast enough for nearly everyone as they move around, no matter where they go.
There are some tricks to doing that. Some "seamless" games will have a large empty area between zones. As you travel through that empty area, it's loading the next zone over for you. Many games, whether seamless or not, will apply exactly the same models to many characters. That way, you get to fight against identical centuplets, one at a time. Loading a model once and displaying it a hundred times is a lot faster than loading a hundred separate models.
You know how some players complain that they look like everyone else their level in some games? That's not an accident, and it's not necessarily an issue of the art budget, even. Applying the same textures to a bunch of players is easier to do than having to load completely separate textures for each player.
Another way to make worlds seamless is to not have to load entire classes of data at all from the hard drive. Tessellation done properly makes it possible to get a huge variety of models from very little vertex data, which means you can upload all of your vertex data when you launch the game and never have to check the hard drive for more while the game is running later. Procedurally generated textures (e.g., my avatar) don't have to be loaded off of the hard drive, either, but all you need is a little bit of source code in the executable file. That's actually what I'm working on.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Technology like phasing is really starting to give developers the ability to allow players to change the game world around them without the need for instances. You see this quite a bit in WoW, particularly in the new zones.
My guess is that this type of technology will be heavily used in future AAA MMO's including Titan, allowing developers to create larger, seemless worlds that still cater to the single player (I am the hero) experience.
Yes it's possible. The problems have been mentioned except for one, server capacity. You'd simply need more of that, which means a larger cost on an onrunning basis.
As far as player load, it seems to me that in an overall, normal fashion, you'd have less. Because the game world can be spread out more. Meaning that you don't need as much loaded up.
Two exceptions to that last.
Once upon a time....
It's a dividing up your dev team issue.
E.g. "you guys go an work on a dungeon"
Also there is ego involved "I just designed this great new instanced raid" is better for showing off than "I just designed this great resource gathering mechanic that links into world pvp and the careful management of mob ecology"
But you can have instance free all open world themeparks
EQ at launch, daoc, both planetsides.
^^This^^
Devs are lazy these days, with doing WoW clones, they don't have to make seamless worlds. They're stuck in a rut and don't even have to compete with older games in content/seamless worlds because too many people are accepting mediocrity in their mmorpgs and not demanding better.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
That doesn't make much of a difference. The textures for a character are the same whether he moves or not. The vertex data might be different if he moves, but you could just pack it all together in a single file and load it about as fast either way. If it's a question of whether characters will have to be loaded, you check to see if you have to load data before you load it.
Terrain and so forth is stored in the hard drive. The general rule is that anything that doesn't change and can't be used to cheat will be stored on the hard drive and never checked by the server apart from checking for the latest version when you launch the game. That uses no bandwidth at all apart from the initial download. You only need to download stuff from the server in the middle of the game if it's data that can change (e.g., which mobs are alive at the moment and where are they?) or stuff that could be used to cheat (e.g., how much HP do you have?).