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Update #14 A More Epic Battle, and a Technology Mini-Roadmap
ArcherBullseye
Member Posts: 77
Good afternoon from Andrew! Thanks to all of you for checking out the video last night. Here’s a small update, just showing the same engine demo at 1000 characters instead of 500. Epic indeed! A few things I wanted to emphasize:
- Under the hood, we’re not drawing the same character hundreds of times. We’re actually loading up hundreds of copies of the each model, because we want tech that can actually draw hundreds of unique models! No two characters in the world should be exactly the same. We’re going to have a huge amount of character customization on tap, as I’ll detail in an upcoming post.
- We’re still missing level-of-detail. Normally, game engines will have multiple versions of each model, some for up close and some for far away. When a character is 100 pixels high, there’s no reason to render him with 10,000 triangles. Triangles that are smaller than a pixel just don’t contribute anything to the scene, but they do slow things down. But right now we’re doing that, and fixing it is my project for, literally, today. That should get our frame rate up even higher, which then gives us room to max out effects and environments -- but those are things that we’ll fit in around the characters. The characters are the thing. They’re the reason for going custom with this.
- The animation is really rough. That’s not the fault of the renderer. It’s also not the fault of our animators -- they just had a couple of hours to do a very quick take on this. For an example of what they can do, check out this trailer, which they did all in-house. Funding them to do that level of work on Camelot Unchained is a big part of why we need to do this Kickstarter.
Now, where we’re going with things: Over the next week, I’ll be tweaking this some more and dropping in an effects system. A lot of people have been saying “but how will it go with effects???”, so we’ll answer that for you. We’ve got a really powerful design for the tech, heavily inspired by something the tech director on Wildstar showed me back in the days when we worked together at Troika. (The game industry is a very small place.) A little story on that -- on one of the projects we had at the time, an artist came to me and said his level was running a little slow, and I found out that he’d accidentally spawned out five million invisible particles that were bouncing around forever. The fact that we could sustain that on 2002 hardware gives me great optimism for what we can do on modern hardware and taking advantage of GPU computing.
That brings me to the next goal over the remaining three weeks, which is to connect this front-end demo to the back-end server tech we showed you for “CSE SmackHammer”. When you can use DirectX 11 as a baseline (entirely reasonable for a 2015 launch), there’s a huge amount of work you can offload to the graphics card, and that’s a good thing for us. Right now, with 1000 characters, we’re hitting around 6% CPU load. That gives us all the room we need to do the kind of prediction, decoding, and lag compensation we’ll need to handle the networking for a ton of players and “real” projectiles in a very dynamic world. I’m looking forward to sharing -- and maybe even playing -- that with you!
-Andrew
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/posts
Comments
Think there's any chance smackhammer will handle that many players when they open it up.
Lawt
MJ has been purposely vague on if/when they would let us play smackhammer. You have to remember they more then likely are not renting and have not yet built any server stacks for the game. It would be wasteful for them to do so this far in advance. IF they release smackhammer to us, I assume it would be limited in the amount of players that could be on a 'world' at any one time.
Man I'm drooling thinking about what this tech would have been like when DAOC was at it's peak with relic raids and whatnot.
Homer does it best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUe35UReX4E
MMO history - EVE GW2 SWTOR RIFT WAR COH/V EQ2 WOW DAOC
Tuktz - http://www.heretic.shivtr.com/
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agreed +1 ^^
This is because the big companies want as many people playing as they can get. I am sure anyone can do it if they are willing to limit them selves to fewer people with higher end machines that can handle the strain better.
Emissary of Istaria
Andew's System Specs
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B27
SMC Version (system): 1.69f4
Serial Number (system): C02F82WNDMGG
Hardware UUID: FFC44198-02A4-5728-A12E-B479B53C2CAD
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled
I think the graphics card that goes with this model of MacBook Pro is a Radeon HD 6750M* or the Intel HD Graphics 3000 that comes integrated with the processor.
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This is because the big companies want as many people playing as they can get. I am sure anyone can do it if they are willing to limit them selves to fewer people with higher end machines that can handle the strain better.
I'm not sure how accurate that is. Even though they are limiting themselves to a smaller, niche market.. it doesn't mean there are going to be fewer people on screen at once. In fact, they are shooting for higher numbers of players on screen all at the same time. Also, I don't think every player is going to be required to have a top of the line PC to run this game. You might need more than a 10 year old laptop, but it's not going to be like Crysis or anything.
The big companies waste most of their budget on marketing and TV spots. Take blizzard for instance, the amount of money they are making you'd think they would be developing future tech for the mmo genre, instead they are wasting it on a hollywood movie.
Until a game is released that can have 1000 real time players running on the same screen, I won't believe this nonsense.
It's nice that the engine can handle 1000 copies, but once you start adding in the guts of the game then it drops quite a bit. And no, not just particle effects, but also the crazy number of calculations being performed per second with 1000 players on screen.
Roll to hit, roll for damage, roll for avoidance. . . . etc, each one with it's own algorithm.
And of course the cherry on the reality cake - bandwidth. The engine can render a kazillion models at a time if it wants, but if you're playing with 50mbps down from comcast you're going to have some bottlenecking going on. That's a lot of data being sent back and forth, not just displaying it.
Again, we hear this all the time from feature-sets, that they can host X number of players on screen at any time. And inevitebly the game is released and *sad song* it doesn't happen.
The network bandwidth should not be an issue on the client side. I forget what the real bandwidth for MMORPG gameplay tends to be, but it's rather low. 10 - 20k? The constraints center on:
1. Client graphics/processing balance to handle 1,000 players on screen.
2. Server computation to deal with 1,000 players doing things.
3. Network latency so that the clients are displaying the right 1,000 players doing the right things.
4. Additional client side (and some server side) computations to compensate for the latency so that the clients are displaying the 1,000 players more accurately.
5. Other stuff.
Naturally Andrew's demo doesn't really indicate a resolution for "all of the above", but it does take a bite out of #1. The irony is that MMOs have failed so spectacularly at item #1 despite technology improving (with SWTOR being the best recent example thanks to Ilum and the Alderaan WF).
The point is that CU is aiming to tackle the basic technical challenges that massive PvP battles impose (re: why they're using custom coded parts of the engine), rather than ignore the potential problems and watch Ilum crash and burn with 15 players on screen.
I think it's obvious that CU will not end up on release (if it funds and releases) with 1,000 players on-screen. That number will go down with the addition of all the other components. However, benchmarking the maximum "graphics-only" load is a good start. I'd be pleased to have 300 players on the screen at once. At that number it pushes my ability to actually see what's going on in any normal or "large" fight, so I don't really feel like I need to see the 400th, 700th, or 1000th player in a gigantic fight.