

Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack - bensillis
http://www.redbull.co.uk/cs/Satellite/en_UK/Article/Just-Cause-2-Multiplayer-Behind-the-scenes-with-021243257915642

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incant
About that 1800 players number. Based on posts by one of the developers, their
server doesn't do any sort of calculation:

> Our server is basically 'dumb', it doesn't do anything in the sorts of
> processing bullet trajectory, player line of sight or any hit detection at
> all.

[http://www.jc-
mp.com/forums/index.php/topic,638.msg4783.html...](http://www.jc-
mp.com/forums/index.php/topic,638.msg4783.html#msg4783)

Unlike other games which run a full simulation on the server-side, their
server (I presume) mostly routes messages between players. This means that the
server trusts the client, which is rather poor design for a competitive
multiplayer game. Once this is released, players will probably prefer a cheat-
free game to a large-scale one.

This is, nevertheless, a fantastic mod. But these people have not yet solved
the c10k-equivalent problem for massively multiplayer games.

~~~
mediocregopher
>which is rather poor design for a competitive multiplayer game

Watching that video, I would guess the environment isn't so much competitive
(even single player JC2 is very no-particular-goals-in-mind-just-blow-shit-up
oriented) as it is mass chaos. It looked like what would happen if /b/ bought
an island. So cheating is probably only a minor concern at this point.

~~~
parktheredcar
While cheating may not be a problem in a noncompetitive sandbox environment,
griefing is. Consider a dumb client that fakes logging in to the game server
and sends thousands of explosions to a player's screen at once, or drops
hundreds of jets or explosive barrels everywhere instantaneously. There is
practically no limit to sending these hand crafted packets in comparison to
how fast the GPU will be able to render the resulting actions. So now, you
have a massive DoS problem on your hands. Ideally nobody will do this, but my
point is lots of problems can come up when you trust the client.

~~~
willtheperson
"drops hundreds of jets or explosive barrels everywhere instantaneously"

I don't know about you but this sounds like an awesome feature to me

~~~
lmm
The first time, sure. When it's happening every other minute it will just be
dull.

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RyanMcGreal
Impressive accomplishment, but perhaps the title should read: "How two men
made an FPS mod to support 1,800+ multiplayers in their spare time".

~~~
freehunter
It really irritates me when the titles get changed after a submission gets
popular. Now comments like this one lose their meaning since the original
title has changed to something completely different.

If it's a bad title, it's a bad title. Just leave it alone. Bad titles will be
corrected in the comments (like here) or won't be upvoted in the first place.
Just stop messing with them.

~~~
arthulia
For anyone who is curious, the original title was:

"How two men made an 1,800 player shooter in their spare time"

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joezydeco
I can't stop cracking up watching these videos. It's like a 3D visualization
of Reddit or 4chan.

 _"...in the last test players were killed 223,704 times, averaging out at
1.29 untimely ends per second."_

~~~
nihilocrat
This one's particularly great:

<http://youtu.be/1-zhdU4GSBA>

You can tell there are pretty often some weird syncing errors, but hey, it's
worth it for stuff like this.

~~~
JonLim
As per the recent test, I think a lot of latency issues have become less
pronounced. Only in 'Dome Deathmatch' did I really see any glaring movement
issues.

There are still plenty of funny movement related issues because of latency,
but they don't really affect the game too much.

And it's totally worth it. I sat there laughing for a good long while after
someone dumped a jet right into the ground, taking at least 5 people with him.

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lmm
>Sure, you can have 8,000 players questing in World of Warcraft at once, but
there’s no massively multiplayer shoot’em up or action game to be found. The
latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops 2, has a 18 player level cap; Grand Theft
Auto 4 multiplayer is capped at 32 on the PC and just 16 on consoles.

>Foote says it’s the politics and the economics of making a game that often
has to run on as many as three or four different systems that’s stopping it.

>“We don’t have any schedules or design plans that we have to stick to. We
have freedom of imagination,” he says. “I think if game studios had that same
freedom, we would see much more unique content coming out.”

This seems very much at odds with APB, which is the only serious effort at a
GTA-style MMO I'm aware of. Their interviews were all about how the money and
freedom was a curse, that being able to do anything meant they had no idea
what to do and ended up with, well, a massive failure.

I have to question whether this is going to last. Goal-less, open gameplay
means little in the way of storytelling, and without a way to compete
"seriously" between teams it won't have the WoW guild dynamics, so I'm not
sure what'll keep people coming back. Anyone know how second life is doing
these days?

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revjx
I used to play Multi Theft Auto a lot years ago on GTA: Vice City, which was
similarly buggy but excellent fun. This just looks completely insane.

Impressive work by the developers - even though they've effectively piggy-
backed onto an existing game, presumably the engine etc is closed-source and
therefore their efforts are worthy of admiration.

I wonder if Multi Theft Auto is still going, I still have my Vice City disc
somewhere...

~~~
veb
The funniest thing is this guy _started_ reverse engineering by reverse
engineering MTA to create bots that followed people to kill them and all sorts
of other hacks.

Now look where he is. I find that an awesome progression!

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robert00700
Would be great to see some articles on their technical approach, I assume they
have used techniques to reach those scales based upon the fact the average
pair of players are too far away from each other to be visible

~~~
rjzzleep
i second that, immediately went to check if the source code is available, but
sadly nothing.

~~~
ch0wn
It seems hard to general to get your hands on any modding code. Apparently the
modding culture doesn't encourage opensource as much as other hacking circles.

~~~
prezjordan
Modding seems very 'credit-heavy' and it can be difficult to get credit for
your work when a bigger, better team can simply fork your code and call it
their own. Then again I don't have any experience in this field so I could be
completely off-target.

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DigitalSea
Reminds me of the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas multiplayer mod from a few
years back. A few fans in their spare time creating a multiplayer mod for a
popular game that lacked it. It really makes you wonder, I understand some
games don't have multiplayer due to the fact you not only need to find room in
the budget to accommodate more development & testing time, you then also have
to invest into the server infrastructure to support the game as well as
implement some kind of anti-cheating functionality.

I think this modification is proof that even pointless multiplayer games that
are essentially just deathmatch on a massive scale are popular and fun,
longevity wise if this were a paid mod I'd expect many would get sick of the
boring gameplay after a while.

Different game modes like; Racing mode, Team Deathmatch, Police and Bad Guys,
Capture The Flag and good old fashioned single deathmatch. Will be interesting
to see how they further improve this, I just went and bought the game because
of this mod.

~~~
TylerE
The big difference is that this is basically just ad-hoc networking. All of
the game logic is still done on the client side, with no synchronization.
There is absolutely nothing to prevent speedhacks, wallhacks, aimbots, etc,
all of the reasons that the big boys stopped doing it that way a decade ago.

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staunch
Planetside2 is a new MMOFPS that actually plays like a real game and supports
up to 2,000 players in a huge persistent world. Beta is out now and it's quite
fun. It will be free-to-play when it's released.

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martindale
DUST514 is another MMOFPS that is in beta: <http://www.dust514.com/>

It takes place _inside_ the world of EVE Online (~30-50k online at a time),
which is a fully persistent single-server universe.

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sray
The best part of the article is the response from Avalanche, the studio that
developed the original game. Rather than try to shut the project down, they
praised the authors and invited them over for a visit. Awesome! When companies
act like that, it makes me want to support them.

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jebblue
Looks ok, still when explosions don't do damage to the surrounding area it
doesn't seem as real. In Minecraft when a creeper blows up, it leaves a pit in
the ground and in your beautiful new home.

