Fractured Universe resumes

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Nicholas Bogart   (Nov 29, 2008 at 14:57 GMT)

Very cool I am glad you got the installer out and got FracU ported over. Torque is a good engine that has its flaws in certain aspects. Best of Luck.

Stephen Zepp   (Nov 30, 2008 at 03:35 GMT)

Congrats on your progress--it's always cool to see people doing new things!

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The default networking in Torque basically made it impossible to host an MMO game without significant rewrites... so, a couple of years later,

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Pretty sure vSide and several other MMO's will disagree with the strength of your statement.

I definitely appreciate your energy and drive, but it would be refreshing to see a post from you that doesn't include disparaging Torque--you may have chosen to go another route with your development, but others come here for well informed advice--and statements like the ones in your posts and the one above are very misleading unfortunately.

For further discussion on general networking with Torque for various game types, please discuss here so we don't derail Tony's .plan.
Edited on Nov 30, 2008 17:10 GMT

Stephan (viKKing) Bondier   (Nov 30, 2008 at 08:28 GMT)

Quote:

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With about 7 changes to the underlying code and a few adjustments to previously programmed parameters, you can easily serve 200 players with a decent network (not even a good one)--and that's more than Everquest serves even today per zone.

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Sorry to hijack the discussion, but in this case, why isn't it set as a default in the distribution?
Edited on Nov 30, 2008 08:28 GMT

Marcus   (Nov 30, 2008 at 10:17 GMT)

I think it is important to remember that your 1kb may not be very adequate for twitch based gameplay...say a MMOFPS.

Stephen Zepp   (Nov 30, 2008 at 16:22 GMT)

Questions answered in the discussion thread
Edited on Nov 30, 2008 17:15 GMT

David Montgomery-Blake   (Nov 30, 2008 at 17:22 GMT)

Thank you for moving the derail to another area where it can be discussed. It's a great topic, but you're right. It shouldn't derail Tony's blog about FracU. Those who want to discuss it should head to the topic that Stephen posted.

Tony Richards   (Nov 30, 2008 at 18:29 GMT)

Quote:

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With a couple more months of well informed architectural decisions and implementation, you can serve Torque across distributed servers and have as many players as you wish up to your main server farm input pipe.

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I didn't say you can't make an MMO game using Torque. I said that it was nearly impossible to host. Taking into consideration the audience reading this .plan, I don't believe that's a misleading statement. Do you?

Most of the people reading this blog probably do not have the kind of money to outlay for the hundreds of computers and the networking infrastructure required to publish a large MMO game.

Not all MMO games are as innovative as Fractured Universe... if you're satisfied with 200 players per zone and you can afford the bandwidth for a traditional client / server game then Torque works fine.

I wanted something more innovative... something that could be used as a sandbox for games, toys and even serve as the next generation 2d and 3d virtual worlds web browser. The requirements for Fractured Universe include seamless zoning and support for 10,000 players per cluster with only a 10mbps pipe.

So, in the end, I chose not to use Torque.

[edit - made nicer]
Edited on Nov 30, 2008 19:32 GMT

Tony Richards   (Nov 30, 2008 at 18:41 GMT)

@Marcus - Azaezel, one of the guys working with the open source libraries of Zen Engine, is in the process of helping me make an open source version of this peer to peer networking and he's specifically targeting ZeeBall which is an MMOFPS game.

If your MMOFPS has RPG elements then you'd still need a server to keep track of statistics and for transaction support such as trading, leveling, etc, but otherwise my gut feeling tells me we'll be able to accommodate nearly pure peer to peer and just use the server to help with NAT punch through and a few other non-innner-loop tasks.

I'll post another .plan with actual numbers ZeeBall uses as soon as they become available.

J Sears   (Dec 01, 2008 at 03:53 GMT)

@Stephen, since when can people not be honest? If he had problems getting torque to do what he wanted he is only being honest. There is no rule that in order to post plans you have to be 100% in favor of torque. And with the many people who share in the same problems that he had with torque I don't think the statements are the least bit misleading.

Congrats on the progress

Stephen Zepp   (Dec 01, 2008 at 19:19 GMT)

Quote:

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The default networking in Torque basically made it impossible to host an MMO game without significant rewrites...

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My concern was that the above is not a factual statement. Yes, re-tuning for an MMO does require good knowledge of the underlying networking, as well as fundamental understanding of the engine architecture, but it does not in any way require a "significant re-write".

As I stated in my initial post--it's awesome to see community members looking at, and if appropriate, taking alternate approaches and even different engines for their specific needs. We don't claim that Torque handles everything you could ever possibly want out of the box, and there are certainly scenarios and project needs that Torque doesn't fit trivially--but the tone of his message was very strong.

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