(04-10-2014, 12:21 AM)Zyrusticae Wrote: Wow, okay, Ignacius, you're making several assumptions and mistakes here.
First of all, the reason EVE doesn't have Walking In Stations yet is PURELY a content issue. They were going to focus on creating working multiplayer stations but the playerbase vehemently disagreed with their direction and forced them to change course to working on spaceships again.
Secondly, the lack of ship customization is almost entirely because the ship models are OLD. Many ship models haven't been touched since Trinity released in 2007. They've done a shader pass over them all specifically so they can start adding more variety to the ships through shaders (allowing for more variety in coloration and the like). It's also worth noting that the v3 shader project introduced entirely new ship models to ship variants, where before they were simply modified textures. Again, this is a content issue, not a client-server issue.
Thirdly, the only time you actually stress the servers is when you initially load a new (unloaded) player model. After that your requests are no different from any other multiplayer game. Blade & Soul, as an example, has no issues rendering so many different player models on the connection side - it is ENTIRELY up to your PC to be able to render a large number of player models at a decent FPS.
Finally, you are gravely overestimating the amount of data each PC model requires to be sent over the internet. Each individual character's data can be measured in bytes, NOT kilobytes and certainly not megabytes. How do I know this? My saved character data for PSO2 - yes, with ALL of its options and everything - measures 364 bytes for each individual. 364! It's just a list of numbers! They don't even need to list which option is which, they parse that out when they read the file and it's literally done in an instant. Do you really think the morphing is killing servers or PCs? All they're doing for those is applying offsets and modifiers to bones, nothing more. Simple numbers. Easy math. No, the most taxing part is simply loading the assets in memory... and on the PC, we have nothing if not LOADS of extra memory. Especially if you have a proper 64-bit client!
In fact, the assets are the only thing worth noting here - individual armor models and weapon models all add up, far, FAR more than the simple list of numbers and values that make up any decent game's character customization. (And if you're going to try and argue that we should have less variety in armor and weapons in our games, you're going to have a bad time, I have to say.) Under no circumstances could you reasonably argue that we should prioritize things other than character creation under the pretense that it is performance-intensive.
And you definitely can't blame it for unimaginative AI or anything along those lines... because that's completely unrelated. Character creation is really, really easy to do compared to advanced AI... and there is zero - let me repeat that, ZERO - overlap between these fields. Character creation is just simple math, modifiers and offsets and lots and lots of artwork. AI is an entire field of constant high-end research, and it won't be a solved problem for a VERY long time - not the least of which is because modeling an actual intelligence requires more computing power than we can reasonably spare in our PCs. Even single-player games have a difficult time with this, and you're criticizing MMOs, somehow, for "prioritizing" character creation over one of the most difficult problems in all of science and engineering?
Yeah, no. The more I look at this argument the more insane it seems. It just doesn't follow.
I think people just aren't aware of how much data is being sent between the local server and your computer at any one time in an MMO. Â The idea that all your character data, even in something relatively simple like FFXIV is measured in a few bytes, means you think that what your computer is transmitting is your stated 364 bytes of data because that's all your computer needs to construct your character in the character generator locally. Â That'd be nice, but it's absolutely not true. Â If every single thing was a listed item, like it is in WoW, you're still looking at a pretty shocking amount of data. Â I run on a rather pedestrian (these days) 20 mb/s connection and even walking into a crowded Stormwind, it can take a while for everyone to pop up. Â Stormwind renders beautifully, people are still spontaneously showing up in existence after two minutes.
That's no sliders. Â Remember that the central server can't send you a simple command like hair6 on its own, or the game wouldn't recognize it. Â Also, imagine the kind of data you're shipping on parametrics, which FFXIV has relatively few of (not that you'd really notice, they do a fantastic job of giving you a lot of options with sheer list items). Â In a game with a more intensive and variable character generator, those aren't just line items, they're complete parabolic formulas (if they're being economical) getting loaded with every new character that shows up. Â That's in addition to constantly updating character and enemy locations, character and enemy actions, any computer-controlled pets or minions in an area, any transportation being handled by the central server that's in your field of vision. Â It's a lot of data to be adding to already.
Which wouldn't be a problem if MMORPGs weren't places characters very often do show up out of the blue (that's one of the defining features of an MMO, after all) and are often the most important sprites in the area with you (they're very often killing or helping you, or there's not much point to making it an MMORPG). Â The internet connection is a very tight pipe that backs up the data you can send. Â The more you can keep local and not have to send, the better. Â Which is why FFXIV will give you an option like "highlights" and give you the option of two colors. Â Near-infinite hair variety, all on a list they can save to your local. Â They let your graphics engine sort out the texture fade.
You don't have to take my word for it, though. Â Open your network connection window, make sure FFXIV is in windowed mode, teleport to Ul'dah and take a look at how much raw data you have to pull when zoning into a new area with an actual population. Â Ul'dah is saved to your local, so everything you'll be pulling up will be character and NPC data. Â It's probably more than you'd think. Â It also doesn't help that you can't design MMORPGs for a 50 mb/s connection; not everyone has access to that kind of muscle. Â So even if you HAVE a high-end internet connection, you may not be able to use all the available bandwidth.
Hard code designers are an underappreciated species in the design world. Â Nobody notices when they do something right, everyone notices when they screw up. Â Definitely nobody appreciates the decisions they have to make for your game engine.
EVE is definitely having station walking issues from a technical standpoint, though. Â Remember, they also told us that they were surprised that they led a few thousand highsec newbies into the teeth of a nullsec warzone and had to change their direction. Â They're not that incompetent, they just bite off way more than they can chew and backtrack. Â Did you see the engine their current captain's quarters is rendered in? Â Imagine their incredibly deep customization having to be loaded and unloaded every time someone walks into or out of a station with everyone else. Â Everything in their game is about unlimited everything and everyone is on "one" server. Â Most people's bandwidth simply doesn't have the muscle (and their server team simply doesn't have the personnel) to make that work with any efficiency. Â I know the RP community I talked to was annoyed that they didn't have it until we worked out the logistics of it in a channel one day.
Their ship work, on the other hand, is very deliberate. Â The reason you never got that custom paint job idea that's been knocking around a few years (until now if you want to count a few more listed paint colors) is because of the server load when you're talking about thousands of ships now having an RGB slider. Â And an RGB slider is one of the easiest and most basic customization options that has been developed in gaming; it's older than the polygon. Â It's more taxing than you'd think, though, when you go from shipA, colorschemeC, weapon6(1-8) to a list of parametric variables, polygons, custom colors. Â You're not talking about a few bytes, that code can run up into kilos and then exists as a custom, separate entity within the rendering engine (as opposed to when you have, say, a bunch of script-rendered bushes that are all the same for a few hundred feet in a game like FFXIV).
I think you're somewhat simplifying the process, which makes all this seem relatively trivial. Â Game design's not really about pretty cities and particle effects; even I could put those together relatively easily. Â Successful games trick you into thinking there is no economy of data they're wrangling, but I guarantee you that it is the number one issue in designing an MMORPG. Â If you look into FFXIV, even, almost everything about it is designed to hide the internet connection, from character creation down to the combat. Â So it is a little sad to hear that EVE uses that spaceship design, even with the new SoE ships, because they're too lazy to update rather than having a viable reason. Â They just aren't going to tell the player base that. Â Player communities are notoriously unsympathetic to the realities of server loads.
That's why your armor can have a ton of polygons and be very well textured, it's all a list; armor107236 is a very simple line item to transmit, then your computer can handle the rendering or not).  While it may seem like that's a horrendous drain  on resources, it's not a drain on anything Square has responsibility for.  However, armor107236, colors R:26, B:225, G:167, shoulder size: 105.67 would be a pretty simple customization for that armor piece, but would drastically increase the amount of data needed just for your computer to draw it, much less be told how to draw it in an open-world battleground for fifty people constantly popping in and out of the rendering space.
I hope this is starting to make sense. Â It's not crazy. Â This stuff is a big deal in the less-sexy corridors of design.
On the subject of AI, that's actually not true. Â It's not a problem of being able to make a reactive, intelligent AI enemy. Â In fact, they'd had that in three dimensions as early as the mid 90s. Â It is a lot more complicated than a character generator, but the reason I bring it up is because it's a lot more complicated to run in an MMO. Â Did you ever wonder why enemies almost always hold their ground in an MMORPG and only move when scripted? Â It definitely isn't because we haven't been able to program AI to fight for better tactical position or change tactics based on the situation, it's because that is an interplay between character and enemy that's simply staggering in an MMORPG.
Imagine that an enemy would have to be able to react to a relatively large set of stimuli, all of which was coming from a distant source over an internet connection of indeterminate speed, which would then have to be translated into an action sequence and sent to those same players who would, we'd assume, have to react to it. Â It's possible, but some of the niceties of character design would be a significant drain to that. Â It's one of the reasons Monster Hunter never went truly unlimited in an open world; adaptive AI is extremely hard to operate in an MMO environment.
It's also one of the reasons combat slows WAY down as graphical quality and customization increase as a rule of thumb. Â It's one of the reasons FFXIV's global cooldown is so slow, why enemies that appear tend to wait a few seconds to be attacked before they start their own attack sequences, why we have so much time and a big orange box to get out of the way. Â It's all because they're trying to mask the internet connection. Â Imagine walking into a FATE with the huge datapackets you'd have in EVE for each individual character. Â And would it be worth it in that scenario? Â Does it really matter in that instance whether the nose is crooked slightly to the left when it's just some other player in a FATE?
It's all well and good to poo-poo the idea, but that's the kind of decisions you'd have to make designing a game. Â It doesn't get the same press, but it's a far more immediate concern in an MMORPG than water effects. Â Try to step outside the boundaries of your own computer and into theirs, maybe this stuff will make more sense.