Future MMO Prospects

[Clover]

Wow @_@

The lack of character customization was what kept me away from Black Desert, but now I'm interested again.

 

My only complains right now are:

1-Lack of hairstyles. True, you can modify the existing ones in a very deep way, but I don't personally like any of the base ones to start with.

2-Females look very Asian and cute (which I love), while males look very Western and rugged... can we have young, cute looking males as well? ._.

 

In any case, that looks really promising, much better than Bless Online... and than anything I've ever seen, really. It's also just a beta, so I guess they'll improve it further with more hairstyles, hopefully. Thank you for sharing!

[Ignacius]

Wow @_@

The lack of character customization was what kept me away from Black Desert, but now I'm interested again.

 

My only complains right now are:

1-Lack of hairstyles. True, you can modify the existing ones in a very deep way, but I don't personally like any of the base ones to start with.

2-Females look very Asian and cute (which I love), while males look very Western and rugged... can we have young, cute looking males as well? ._.

 

In any case, that looks really promising, much better than Bless Online... and than anything I've ever seen, really. It's also just a beta, so I guess they'll improve it further with more hairstyles, hopefully. Thank you for sharing!

 

Honestly, I kind of wonder about that.  I mean, detailed character creation is great and all, but it seems like a relatively vast waste of system resources.  How closely do we honestly look at other people's characters, but having sliders for proportions means every single character in the game has to be custom made and calculated by the system.

 

I mean, it's nice to have, but I wonder if it's something that isn't as necessary as maybe being able to play with more clothing or weapon options if we're just talking about cosmetics.

[Ildur]

I doubt in depth character sliders take any more computing time than shadows or reflections. While I don't know how a MMO does it and my knowledge of the required programming skills are pretty bad, I'd wager that they just slap a very lenghty code somewhere to the character. When they appear in the vecinity, the system reads that code and models their face until they leave. This would be no different nor more lenghty than drawing armor, boots, gauntlets, helmets or a weapon. It would also not take considerable space in the server. It's just one more variable for the character. Like quests.

 

Don't worry about it because it's a non-issue. Shaders, reflections and textures is were all the resources will go.

[Ignacius]

I doubt in depth character sliders take any more computing time than shadows or reflections. While I don't know how a MMO does it and my knowledge of the required programming skills are pretty bad, I'd wager that they just slap a very lenghty code somewhere to the character. When they appear in the vecinity, the system reads that code and models their face until they leave. This would be no different nor more lenghty than drawing armor, boots, gauntlets, helmets or a weapon. It would also not take considerable space in the server. It's just one more variable for the character. Like quests.

 

Don't worry about it because it's a non-issue. Shaders, reflections and textures is were all the resources will go.

 

Well that's just it.  FFXIV is showing, for example, 4 or so nose types.  Essentially, when drawing a character, it calls up nose3 or whatever, which is loaded on everyone's version of FFXIV.  It's fairly quick.  Conan had a slider for the nose that allowed you to lengthen, hook, crook, flare, and more to your nose until it was just the way you thought you wanted it.

 

While highly customizeable, I can't remember ever noticing a character's nose in that game.  Or any game.  But that means in a major city, everybody's nose has to be rendered individually as a scalar unit.  So instead of nose3 for several characters, everyone has a 6-part variable function for just their nose.

 

Not sure that's essential to modern gaming.

[Naunet]

Not sure that's essential to modern gaming.

 

What's nonessential to you is clearly of high importance to many. While I maintain my earlier stance that a game which over-markets its graphics might be hiding an extremely thin gameplay experience, I do think that character customization is important. These are our personas, not just some pixels but characters we play often for years. For a roleplayer, the connection is arguably even deeper, and many of us appreciate the opportunity to modify our character to get them as close as possible to what we imagine in our heads.

 

I for one spend absurd amounts of time looking at my character and others'.

[Ignacius]

Not sure that's essential to modern gaming.

 

What's nonessential to you is clearly of high importance to many. While I maintain my earlier stance that a game which over-markets its graphics might be hiding an extremely thin gameplay experience, I do think that character customization is important. These are our personas, not just some pixels but characters we play often for years. For a roleplayer, the connection is arguably even deeper, and many of us appreciate the opportunity to modify our character to get them as close as possible to what we imagine in our heads.

 

I for one spend absurd amounts of time looking at my character and others'.

 

As a roleplayer who had to imagine what characters look like in book games for years before we got MMORPGs, I'd much rather the game spend its resources making the world interesting, variable, and the AI more realistic than making sure we can crook our noses ever-so-slightly to the left.

 

I can imagine someone broke your character's nose five years back and it healed crooked, but I can't imagine that the endgame combat is more interesting than it actually is.  In the grand scheme of limited resources, character customization is probably not where the games industry is missing most of its opportunities.  When we have a game where the world is truly engrossing, the combat is truly exciting, the story is truly captivating, and the enemies are blisteringly difficult, and they have a little bit of space left over before the median system starts to graphically chug and some time to implement it, then we can have the nose slider.

 

It seems like focusing on graphics and highly specific character customization in your MMORPG is a little bit like paying very close and detailed attention to the interior stitching on the upholstery in a car whose engine runs like crap and dies after two years.  It doesn't matter how nice the interior is if nobody's driving the car anymore.

 

Personal opinion.

[Naunet]

We're saying the same things, Ignacious... or you're ignoring the first half of my second sentence. >_>

[Ildur]

So the problem isn't character customization per se but the focus on photorealistic graphics and engines. We can agree on that. We don't need any more shinny graphics.

 

I still want to repat myself: No matter how many variables you put on a nose (or character's face), it's still not the same complexity as casting shadows and rendering reflections in real time (which often means rendering the whole objects two times), textures of any size, any model or any animation. The sliders only modify the polygons already in the face, so the game had to load them anyway to draw them. Placing a face-showing helmet is probably more resource intensive because then you are giving the computer a new set of polygons to draw and textures to place on top of the model.

[ArmachiA]

Character Creation is basically the only reason I'll start looking at a game. It's just that important to me. I dun care if other players are looking at Armi's nose, I AM. And I matter.

[Clover]

I for one spend absurd amounts of time looking at my character and others'.

Hahaha, same. Also, I must say I LOVE photorealistic graphics. Good graphics and good characters are a must for me to have fun, otherwise, I don't even touch the game.

 

Likewise, games that don't offer more than that become boring pretty fast, but at least they have still served for great RP since I was able to like the characters (Tera, I'm looking at you).

 

I've been following Black Desert from the very first trailer that was released, since the setting and atmosphere was pretty much of my liking; I wasn't inspired by the lack of character customization, but that's changing now. However, I doubt I'm going to like it more than FFXIV because FFXIV has spoiled me good, and because Black Desert's classes are character/gender-locked, which lacks freedom. My guess is that Black Desert will be like Tera and Blade and Soul to me: I love the RP, I love the characters, yet the game is forgettable.

 

I'm fine so long as I can play with that character creation, really *laughs*.

[Ignacius]

So the problem isn't character customization per se but the focus on photorealistic graphics and engines. We can agree on that. We don't need any more shinny graphics.

 

I still want to repat myself: No matter how many variables you put on a nose (or character's face), it's still not the same complexity as casting shadows and rendering reflections in real time (which often means rendering the whole objects two times), textures of any size, any model or any animation. The sliders only modify the polygons already in the face, so the game had to load them anyway to draw them. Placing a face-showing helmet is probably more resource intensive because then you are giving the computer a new set of polygons to draw and textures to place on top of the model.

 

It's a bit more complicated than that.  If it was all contained within our local software, that'd be the case.  It isn't, though.  Every time a player character walks into your render zone, you have to receive information on their character to tell your GPU what it is rendering and then raytracing.  In World of Warcraft (as an example of a very simple character designer) hair, color, face, skin color, everything is determined by a list.  You might have hair 1, hair color 6, face 2, and that is saved locally to your hard drive.

 

Let's go the extreme route.  You've got sliders to everything.  Every single character doesn't use a set of presets, it's all parametric in this example.  That means that receiving character data from another player means that the central server has to send that information to the computer and then those dimensions need to be saved to your local memory.  For five characters at a time, it's not terribly taxing.  For a hundred?  That's a ferocious tax on resources.

 

FFXIV kind of runs in the middle, where sliders tend to be somewhat general information that isn't as difficult to store (e.g. height).  But it is why EVE Online hasn't had station walking put in yet.  They put in so much as far as character customization goes that it would max the RAM in anyone's computer to have more than 30 players in the same place.

 

The worst of it, though, is how taxing it is to the server communication with the players.  Not everyone has a 100 mbs connection, and rendering that way takes time.  A full on raytrace in a program like Revit, which doesn't use any lists, can take a half hour to run a frame at 1680.

 

It's more hardcore than you'd think.  The more you can drop into a list on the local drive, the faster your computer can process it all simply because it's all on your local storage, rather than having to load it from the central server for each individual instance.

[Naunet]

I don't recall even Aion, in all of its slider-ific glory, taxing my computer to its limit back when I played - at least not in any way that could remotely be contributed to the number of sliders. I think you're overstating the issue, to be honest.

[synaesthetic]

Sliders are just modified weights and vertices applied to different polygons. We can do this quite easily and quite resource-efficiently in loads of games--see any game with a realistic physics engine, which is even more problematic than sliders since the physics stuff is calculated in real-time instead of beforehand. 

 

Non-MMO example: Mass Effect 2 and 3 use a code system to tweak the face polys and textures for your custom Shepard. Is it slower than using a predefined Shepard model? Sure it is. Is that slowdown noticeable? Not on modern hardware. I bet if I did some tests against default Shepard and a customized Shepard, the FPS would be virtually identical, all other things being equal.

 

3D rendering doesn't actually store anything "physical." It's continually drawing all the polygons and applying textures to them, so a face or body with sliders is mathematically and functionally no different to the game engine as one without them. 

 

Either way, sliders or no sliders, the engine uses maths to draw the picture. The engine doesn't care if the maths are slightly different because modern PCs with gaming-level GPUs can do both integer and floating point calculations at absurdly ridiculous speeds.

[Ildur]

It is all contained locally: all the characters, no matter how many sliders you slap into them, will be made from a preset. They are all basically modification of it. Think of TERA: Bob's character makes a human and chooses preset 6 and hair 31, and then moved the sliders. Your computer receives the data from the server: Bob is entering at coordinates X,Y,Z, moving in W direction. He used Preset Face #3 and Hair #31. At the same time, your computer receives the data of the sliders. Then it renders Bob in all his slidy glory. There's no meaningful difference between someone's computer sending you the data of their face than them sending you their position which is constantly changing, unlike their face/body. And all faces, textures and models are already in your computer. All the game has to do is receive the slider data which, I repeat, is no more taxing that someone's position when bunnyhopping and randomly turning. It is still not an issue.

 

And what Synaesthetic said.

[Ignacius]

It is all contained locally: all the characters, no matter how many sliders you slap into them, will be made from a preset. They are all basically modification of it. Think of TERA: Bob's character makes a human and chooses preset 6 and hair 31, and then moved the sliders. Your computer receives the data from the server: Bob is entering at coordinates X,Y,Z, moving in W direction. He used Preset Face #3 and Hair #31. At the same time, your computer receives the data of the sliders. Then it renders Bob in all his slidy glory. There's no meaningful difference between someone's computer sending you the data of their face than them sending you their position which is constantly changing, unlike their face/body. And all faces, textures and models are already in your computer. All the game has to do is receive the slider data which, I repeat, is no more taxing that someone's position when bunnyhopping and randomly turning. It is still not an issue.

 

And what Synaesthetic said.

 

I think the problem is that you guys are examining this as a polygon solution, all self contained within a local system.  MMORPGs aren't like that, as so much data has to be sent to you from the central server.  I think it's not always apparent how the data gets to you or sometimes how long it takes to get there.

 

The GPU, playing with your personal polygons on screen, might be relatively fast.  We're talking about a Stormwind City scenario, walking into a place where you're going to get rendering instructions on a few hundred players at a time.

 

Aion's actually one of those games that had the problem, but hid it well (we looked it over to see how it was going to handle the game for just that reason).  We got a relatively decent (at the time) PC to chug by walking into Sanctum during a REALLY crushing population boom.  The amount of character data you had to load at the time simply choked it out, not only did the framerate stutter, but people were popping into existence from nowhere.

 

Luckily, Aion's graphics, while appearing pretty, used World of Warcraft-style methods of saving bandwidth.  Like I said, the more crap you throw onto a local list, the more you tax the system rather than the connection.  So you'll see arcades of what look like the same stamp of modular wall over and over again, and in fact that's exactly what it is.  I wasn't much of a fan of Aion's gameplay, but I can appreciate the smart design choices and the economy of the computer.  They made as much as they could local and did their best to keep things to list.  It freed up space for the character variety.

 

I think a lot of people kind of think of that as cheating, in a way, but NCSoft, for all their flaws, were very aware of how hard they'd be taxing the servers with the character generator.  But this is why we don't really have enemies that have deep AI.  The enemies are controlled by the network server, not the local drive, and so if you start eating the bandwidth for use in character modeling, there's less you can allocate to the position and reaction of enemies.

 

It's one of the reasons that games have generally opted to limiting the size of parties and raids.  While it's generally assumed that it's meant to make it easier to put a raiding party together, what it's actually doing is limiting the information zipping back and forth between players and server.  Imagine you're in a raid, and an AOE goes off that hits every single member of a 40 man raid.  Every character has a longwinded formula determine their damage, which is then sent to them and everyone else in the raid, so they all know what their health is at.  If there's a status effect, that means not only does the server tell you that you have it, but the other 39 people as well.

 

What this essentially means is that, as characters are added and variables added that need to be sent back and forth, the growth of data is exponential, not proportional.  It doesn't seem like much, sending the variables of things like noses to every other character in an area with a hundred players, but every single character needs that information sent to the other 99 people and needs to receive the information of those 99 people.  Instancing has helped a lot, since this means that big boss fights tend to be fought with people who know each other and have limited information it needs to send (at that point, mostly skeletal movement and raw gameplay data).  That's much more of a problem in the kinds of open worlds people say they really want.

 

There's a reason EVE Online has limited ship models and colors with little customization of the actual ship avatar.  You can play with the character creator all you'd like, all it needs is a snapshot.  Its character creator, coupled with its high graphical polish, means that EVE players won't be able to congregate at a station for a long time.  It's incredibly difficult to pull off that kind of data transfer.

 

Just some of the things that get handled behind the scenes that isn't always appreciated.  In the grand scheme of things, as I said, I'd much rather my bandwidth was spent giving an enemy the ability to track me stealthily and ambush me across a mile of terrain rather than giving me the ability to position a custom scar wherever I want on my jaw.  Nice as it might be, I RPed for a very long time without video games and my powers of literary description have always outpaced even the most powerful character generators.

 

Then again, it doesn't look like anyone's using that economy of server load to allocate to AI or other gameplay attributes.  Parametric customization is better than nothing, and everyone seems to be at least capable of making that.  Shoddy AI seems to also permeate games that can't use server load as an excuse.

[Zyrusticae]

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.

[synaesthetic]

Very little data is actually sent between server and client in an MMO. Otherwise playing on dial-up or slow connections would be impossible and it's not. I raided all of BWL and the first half of AQ40 on 56k. I've played TERA over HSPA not-plus, crappy signal, around 1.2Mbps downstream. It's mostly just raw numbers--positional data, hits, misses, and renderer calls.

 

The actual graphical data is already stored locally, which is why most MMO clients tend to be huge compared to other games. Modern MMOs tend to eat up between 18 and 30 gigabytes of hard drive space. Compare with single-player RPGs which are closer to 10.

[FreelanceWizard]

I've been playing on my phone's Internet sharing these last few days, and XIV uses about 15-30mb per hour of play. It's much more sensitive to latency and jitter than it is to bandwidth. Really, when you think about it, the game can send extremely small bits of data to tell the client what's going on; you need 32 or 64 bits for an event ID, plus 3-4 more of these for event parameters (target, coordinate location of effect center, actual effect to display). MMOs typically don't transmit a lot of position or asset information for objects not in the immediate vicinity of the player, and even then, we're still talking a few bytes per character per update (current position, motion vector, asset ID, some packed array to specify the rendering if it's a player character).

 

In terms of the AI, the real limiting factor is the speed of the simulation. A game server typically needs to run at twice the frame rate of its clients at least to get an acceptable simulation speed; otherwise, you get people getting killed by attacks they escaped, "You can't do that right now" messages, etc. The time in the game loop between frames is, thus, rather short. Single player games have less to deal with (they don't have to update 1000+ mobile object positions, process several hundred combat and other events, manage crafting results, transfer characters across instances, etc.) so they have more time for their AI routines. That said, complex goal-driven AI is tough to do and requires substantial computational resources, which is why you only see something similar to the state of the art in games that tend to make it their selling point (such as Bethesda games). Natural language processing is functionally impossible to do in a game because of its obscene processing requirements.

 

One way out of this is event-driven programming, but event-driven games aren't as well understood from a performance standpoint and are harder to code due to their much more complex multithreading. The other approach is to offload as much as you can to the client; for instance, world collision detection and self animation is done client-side. The problem here is that the client lives in a hostile environment, so you can't really trust anything it says. Trusting the client is how you get speedhacks, teleport-hacks, and the like. In EQ, for instance, the server always trusted the client's statement of the character movement vector, so the speedhack involved altering that value on the client to have an excessive speed component. Later countermeasures (having the server periodically send out an update to that) were defeated by patching the client or having a debugger rewrite that part of RAM.

 

At any rate, I hope the above sheds a bit more light on the way these servers typically operate.

[Ignacius]

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.  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.  That'd be nice, but it's absolutely not true.  If every single thing was a listed item, like it is in WoW, you're still looking at a pretty shocking amount of data.  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.  Stormwind renders beautifully, people are still spontaneously showing up in existence after two minutes.

 

That's no sliders.  Remember that the central server can't send you a simple command like hair6 on its own, or the game wouldn't recognize it.  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).  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.  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.  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).  The internet connection is a very tight pipe that backs up the data you can send.  The more you can keep local and not have to send, the better.  Which is why FFXIV will give you an option like "highlights" and give you the option of two colors.  Near-infinite hair variety, all on a list they can save to your local.  They let your graphics engine sort out the texture fade.

 

You don't have to take my word for it, though.  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.  Ul'dah is saved to your local, so everything you'll be pulling up will be character and NPC data.  It's probably more than you'd think.  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.  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.  Nobody notices when they do something right, everyone notices when they screw up.  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.  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.  They're not that incompetent, they just bite off way more than they can chew and backtrack.  Did you see the engine their current captain's quarters is rendered in?  Imagine their incredibly deep customization having to be loaded and unloaded every time someone walks into or out of a station with everyone else.  Everything in their game is about unlimited everything and everyone is on "one" server.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  Game design's not really about pretty cities and particle effects; even I could put those together relatively easily.  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.  If you look into FFXIV, even, almost everything about it is designed to hide the internet connection, from character creation down to the combat.  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.  They just aren't going to tell the player base that.  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.  It's not crazy.  This stuff is a big deal in the less-sexy corridors of design.

 

On the subject of AI, that's actually not true.  It's not a problem of being able to make a reactive, intelligent AI enemy.  In fact, they'd had that in three dimensions as early as the mid 90s.  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.  Did you ever wonder why enemies almost always hold their ground in an MMORPG and only move when scripted?  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.  It's possible, but some of the niceties of character design would be a significant drain to that.  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.  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.  It's all because they're trying to mask the internet connection.  Imagine walking into a FATE with the huge datapackets you'd have in EVE for each individual character.  And would it be worth it in that scenario?  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.  It doesn't get the same press, but it's a far more immediate concern in an MMORPG than water effects.  Try to step outside the boundaries of your own computer and into theirs, maybe this stuff will make more sense.

[Zyrusticae]

I'm sorry, Ignacious, but I simply do not believe you. It contradicts everything I've experienced in my games thus far and, more to the point, there is simply no evidence for half the stuff you're asserting (especially the idea that the character creation/customization is heavy on the server-client side, which I have yet to see ANYONE making a big deal out of). I think you're confusing your client-side rendering with server-side data transmission. It only takes a few milliseconds to get all the data to reconstruct a character... it takes a lot longer to take those assets from your hard drive and get it duplicated in your RAM.

 

At any rate... until someone with insider knowledge or firsthand experience can come in to dispel these mysteries, let's talk about the games instead. Some new trailers:

 

[video=youtube]

[video=youtube]

 

I think the game shows quite a lot of promise. The roleplaying and crafting features are especially impressive, particularly in light of all these other games that put those on the back burner.

[Ignacius]

I'm sorry, Ignacious, but I simply do not believe you. It contradicts everything I've experienced in my games thus far and, more to the point, there is simply no evidence for half the stuff you're asserting (especially the idea that the character creation/customization is heavy on the server-client side, which I have yet to see ANYONE making a big deal out of). I think you're confusing your client-side rendering with server-side data transmission. It only takes a few milliseconds to get all the data to reconstruct a character... it takes a lot longer to take those assets from your hard drive and get it duplicated in your RAM.

 

At any rate... until someone with insider knowledge or firsthand experience can come in to dispel these mysteries, let's talk about the games instead. Some new trailers:

 

[video=youtube]

[video=youtube]

 

I think the game shows quite a lot of promise. The roleplaying and crafting features are especially impressive, particularly in light of all these other games that put those on the back burner.

 

I actually have worked in 3ds Max, Radiant, Maya, and FormZ, and today I work in Revit.  I'm not an expert in everything code, but I do know quite a bit about data transmittal.  I did a study in school about the connections between digital design and architecture, and how architectural design can influence video game environments and perspectives.  I just don't think people really give designers credit (or scorn) or examine the decisions they have to make.  Especially the poor hard code guys (my brother does that for a living); they work really hard to make sure we don't notice how hard it can be to move data by hiding it.  I mean, you can not believe me, but try logging into a major city and see what your transmission and received data spikes to.  Since the city is all loaded, it's all character data.  You don't have to take my word for it.

 

As a point of interest, I asked how this sort of thing might work if some of my friends were doing it (some of whom are definitely in the "sliders" camp).  The best summary says that it's actually somewhat common practice to send the data in bits that get rendered in order of necessity.  So the computer gets the necessary list data for the basics first, then the variables later.  While this makes the amount of raw data larger (because then you need to transmit it in pieces in a code your computer will understand to put it together in), it does mean most people could use that sort of data to get a higher level of customization without bogging down the game.

 

Another point was the cumulative effect of data transmittal in a game like an MMORPG, that if you suddenly appear in a room with 39 other players, not only do you need data on all 39 people, but those 39 people need data on you.  A friend of mine that used to work at 3d Realms (Lord knows where he works now) talked about that in WoW once, so I asked him.  Apparently, it depends a lot on how it is integrated.  He said that, if you have a nose on a list, and you just have to apply a quantity to it, it might not be so bad, it's just a few extra numbers that gets plugged into a formula.  It's once you're dealing with multivariable movement that things start to get really heavy.

 

On your client-side rendering point, he did bring something up.  I usually don't think about it; my computer was recently built and is pretty muscular, and I've always had a fairly well-equipped machine.  He said that such information, regardless of the transmission, has to be kept in active memory if it's being used to do GPU calculations.  It's getting to be less of a problem now because the cache sizes are rising and the RAM is getting easier to buy at higher prices, but he said he'd probably worry more about that if it was his game he was designing.  The more customized numbers each individual character has, the more active memory gets eaten and can't be released until the character exits the rendering area.

 

System resources in PCs can be so variable, and players so harsh, that if someone has an otherwise phenomenal computer but is chugging due to one component (say, the rest of the PC is great but the RAM has been outpaced), someone could complain about the design when it really wasn't their fault.  Therefore, MMORPGs have a tendency to be designed for a lower common denominator of computer, and they use some older techniques to shore up the graphical backlog.  So he said computers that have highly adjustable characters will probably lose something in the transition simply because you have to keep in mind that people don't all run the SOA hardware.  He said if you look closely enough, you see where they saved the resources.

 

So while the server load seems to be a problem (especially, my brother tells me, on the server's side, since the amount of data they actually push per second is mind-boggling), it's not the largest.  That's where you're probably right, what's not a problem for my hardware personally might be a problem for someone else.  There also seems to be a workaround for it by just loading things in order of priority rather than all at once.  However, this isn't always used, so if a game has a universally hard time loading intense character data at once, it could be that this wasn't kept in mind.  It also makes it a bit more intense on the server, as then every quest is parsed into bits of data over time that need to be stopped and okayed (though those bits are smaller than getting it all in one big chunk).

 

That's what I've got on it so far.  I'm far more critical of the pedestrian stuff than most people considering my background, I suppose.  I'm in a budget-heavy design field and I'm kind of half-in, half-out of the world of hard computer programming.  My biggest problem with MMORPGs, especially the crop coming out now, is that they have a bad habit of wasting their strengths and trying to gloss over their weaknesses.  They have a tendency to be developed just like every other single-player game, just with more people involved (sort of that quest-grind/world-PVP dichotomy).  That seems like quite the waste, especially since the answers are out there.  I imagine most people could come up with a decent way to escape that "traditional" MMORPG patois, just that we don't seem to get games developed that way.

[Zyrusticae]

Well, to your point, I've been logged into Mor Dhana for the past half hour (after running around in Thanalan doing Beast Tribe quests and doing a quick Castrum run) and my total bytes received is 12,181 kB... hardly something to get worked up over and a scant proportion of my total bandwidth, especially if you divide that by the total amount of time since I logged in. (If we assume two hours, a quick calculation runs that at around 1.69 kB/s... yeah, even a 56k connection could handle that.)

 

Mind you, FFXIV is indeed not the most taxing game, particularly since they designed it to be able to run on the PS3 of all things, so games with more robust character customization may run more data transmission. As a proportion of server load however, I can only guess at that. All I know is that connectivity is not a big issue here.

 

To your point, yes, computing resources are limited, of that I have no doubt, but our machines just keep getting more and more powerful over time. It's no coincidence that EVE Online keeps seeing bigger and bigger battles as CCP gets smarter about how they use their hardware and continue to upgrade the servers. The possibility space of what we can do will only improve as our hardware improves. But as for the question of designing a more dynamic MMO world...

 

That's a question that is beyond our ken, I think.

[Ignacius]

Well, to your point, I've been logged into Mor Dhana for the past half hour (after running around in Thanalan doing Beast Tribe quests and doing a quick Castrum run) and my total bytes received is 12,181 kB... hardly something to get worked up over and a scant proportion of my total bandwidth, especially if you divide that by the total amount of time since I logged in. (If we assume two hours, a quick calculation runs that at around 1.69 kB/s... yeah, even a 56k connection could handle that.)

 

Mind you, FFXIV is indeed not the most taxing game, particularly since they designed it to be able to run on the PS3 of all things, so games with more robust character customization may run more data transmission. As a proportion of server load however, I can only guess at that. All I know is that connectivity is not a big issue here.

 

To your point, yes, computing resources are limited, of that I have no doubt, but our machines just keep getting more and more powerful over time. It's no coincidence that EVE Online keeps seeing bigger and bigger battles as CCP gets smarter about how they use their hardware and continue to upgrade the servers. The possibility space of what we can do will only improve as our hardware improves. But as for the question of designing a more dynamic MMO world...

 

That's a question that is beyond our ken, I think.

 

Apologies for being out of the loop so long.  I just moved into a new place and they haven't hooked up the net yet.

 

FFXIV isn't very taxing, but I'm actually surprised at the low number.  WoW has blistered a 3 mb/s connection for me before (Ah, the days when my 3 mb/s connection was considered muscular) by dumping about 20 megs of data to instantly choke the bandwidth in Ironforge.  Pure lists, that.  However, that makes me think not just that FFXIV isn't the craziest game for data transfers, but that maybe people have gotten a lot smarter about how to move that data.  It may have something to do with how it's all separated into zones rather than being purely open world.

 

Still, to that point, you probably wouldn't need much in the way of customization to keep people satisfied.  At that data load, you can probably get away with quite a bit, especially if it's loaded after the major character data.  I had to "settle" for a 20 mb/s connection in my area (unfortunately, they haven't upgraded the Pickerington cable network since the Bronze Age) but otherwise I would have been able to push 50 or 100 in other, more developed parts of the city.  Even if you did pipe a hundred times that data per character, it wouldn't affect the overworld game area.  And I suppose that's the important part, rather than how fast I see other characters appear in a city.

 

EVE's battles aren't getting bigger due to technical resources, though, they're starting to get bigger (at least when the Halloween War was kicking off) because all this time that nullsec corps have been reasonably stable, they've been building these massive backlogs of titans and dreads.  So it just so happens that when the major alliances DO get off their nullbear asses and do something, it tends to blow more resources than before.  There was a time when having a titan was a big deal, but before I stopped playing even some of the smaller RP corps were getting them off the assembly line.

 

Luckily, EVE's data steam is almost insignificantly small.  An Avatar is an Avatar, and pulse lasers are pulse lasers.  List data for each individual ship is probably a line of code we can type ourselves.  If positional data wasn't so complicated, I'd imagine they wouldn't even need TiDi.  It helps that EVE space is often a vast desert, as well.  They don't have to handle the entirety of their game field because if there's nothing to warp to, there's nothing to worry about.

 

Really, though, I think that's sort of the problem with us as a gamer culture (if such a thing exists).  We have a tendency to criticize stuff that doesn't matter and ignore stuff we shouldn't.  People who play games aren't all stupid or ignorant; I think we have a right to expect that developers can come up with better ideas than we do.  Yet most of the best ideas in MMORPGs especially came from players who didn't shut up on forums.  At the very least, I think we should be able to intellectually debate the philosophy behind where we want our games going.

 

I'm personally just disappointed in the whole endeavor at this point; games are developed using film as a model instead of sculpture or architecture, so they're much more often built as a series of vignettes along a rail than as a space to be inhabited.  That's the problem with taking a media that can handle persistent action of infinite variety and modeling everything after a two-dimensional media that is temporal in nature.

 

And yet, inexplicably, everyone that bucks this particular trend in gaming makes the ridiculous choice to not design a game around it.  It's almost like game companies haven't really looked at the core advantages, disadvantages, and promises of an MMORPG yet.  Say what you will about FFXIV being mostly a series of short stories told in a row interspersed with random quests you can take elsewhere, Square at least understands the fundamental strength of an MMORPG.  Most companies haven't even thought about it.  I have a lot of respect for that, I just wish they'd have done something a bit more original than make a more respectable copy of WoW built out of an older developmental failure.

 

Sad that I still think it's the second best MMORPG in the field considering that pedigree, but Square understands how to get us our money's worth for the subscription we pay.  Maybe that's just testament to the weakness of modern design as it is; you can just be good at the pedestrian stuff and still be at the top of your division.  Most companies can't even handle the basics with grace, so it's not worth bragging about the things they did spend their time on.  If you can't skate or handle the puck, you can't brag about how well you shoot; you'll only get the benefit if you stand still on the ice in the right place with nothing else trying to stop you.

[Yssen]

Speaking of CCP, so much for the World of Darkness MMO. Number of prospects, one fewer. 

[synaesthetic]

Uhm, what?

 

What does Square understand that Trion Worlds, Blizzard, Arenanet and countless other developers do not?

 

XIV is only "innovative" in Yoshida's mind. It's not a bad game--if it was, I wouldn't be playing it at all--but it's so far behind the times it's not even funny. 

 

Square's reading out of a playbook that's eight years old, which, ironically, is the same mistake Bioware and EA made with SWTOR.

 

Why did it take six months for us to get a crippled costuming system? Why did it take six months for us to get a chatbox transparency slider? Why can we still not send tells in dungeons? Why can we not leave a dungeon and then return to it without resetting it? Why do the dungeons have pointless timers? Why can't we invite a FC member to join our in-progress dungeon run when a random drops? Why do I have to close any active windows to accept a party, linkshell or free company invite? Why can't I access the Free Company or Linkshell interfaces while I'm in a dungeon? Why is the world so small and shut in? Why doesn't Square try to make FATEs fun instead of just required? Why is the macro scripting so limited? Where is that add-on API and support we were promised before release? Why is Crystal Tower so hilariously faceroll easy? Why can't we queue into it with a full raid yet? Where's horizontal gear progression? Why is the endgame gearing metagame so boring? Why are they gating new content behind deprecated content? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to design a fight that requires precision split-second timing in a game that's already astonishingly laggy? Why haven't you stopped running the game on toasters? Why can't we have scalar raiding at endgame instead of being arbitrarily limited to how many people we can take? Why is there virtually nothing entertaining or rewarding to do in the open world at level 50 except busy work? Why are the enemy animations desynced from the actual attacks? Why is the character creation so limited? Why is the main storyline so lazy, and why does it contain so many fetch quests? Why are we given the hopelessly-transparent illusion of choice with assigning attribute points instead of having a standard skill modifier system or talent system? Why is the attribute bonus determined by class instead of job? Why do classes even exist at all beyond level 30? Why are cross-class actions so limited? Why is every endgame boss room a big circle? 

 

WHY AM I ASKING WHY SO MANY TIMES?!?!

 

This is because Square-Enix clearly does not understand the fundamental aspect of what makes a world-class themepark MMORPG in 2014.

 

That's not to say it isn't fun. It is, but it could be so much more.