Nope. The test probably involved 400 trivial clients that did nothing more than provide random inputs to 400 ships. Those clients exist entirely to connect to the server, provide those inputs and read the responses. There is no “AI” involved here, and that control code certainly wasn’t running on the server. The very purpose of the test was to emulate players connecting to the server.
Flavien commented that he wondered if 400 ships could be managed even after adding weapon fire and such. So he already knows that the server may be challenged to stay at the 400 level. We have no real way of knowing how great a concern that is because we don’t know how beefy the server hardware was, nor how much of its capabilities were being used during the test. Was the network card throughput at 1% or 100% of utilization? How about the CPU? Memory? Without knowing those things, we can’t begin to speculate.
As long as nobody holds the developers to anything, you’re fine. The problem is that people will read the speculation, not know how foolish the claims are (that would be you) and assume that it’s realistic. Off you go to repeat it to others with the assumption that it’s all true. The more the speculation appeals as clickbait, the more it will be repeated.
And who will have to deal with all this misinformation? The developers. In this case, @Hutchings wisely posted in an effort to nip this nonsense in the bud.
If you value the work that the development team has to do, you will not speculate. You will do no more than faithfully repeat what the developers say - by quoting them - and otherwise refrain from making statements on their behalf. Johnny Redhead gets that much right when he reposts INS updates all over the place.
I could go on and on about this. Use of techniques of rhetoric and how they can be used to sway the masses. How this sort of “speculation” has caused problems through all of history. How speculation has produced fake news and otherwise confused half the people on the internet. But people who speculate irresponsibly don’t care about the long legacy of speculation disasters. So if you don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, don’t open your mouth in public.
Imagine what the internet would be like if that was the standard practice.
Easy there cowboy. No one here is putting words in the developers mouths - some of us are just entertaining the possibilities. What’s more if everyone did as you suggested and let only the people who knew what they were talking about (who is going to qualify that?) then the Internet you imagine would be a stale, virtually empty, elitist cyber shit show. And this isn’t SC: the real problem of overblown expectations is over blown promises from Devs and this isn’t happening at all here. Chill and let fans have some fun - because if you don’t you end up killing enthusiasm which is far more destructive than fans speculating.
I’ve tweaked the HUD and added weapons and various special effects to the battle test since last week. As expected, framerate goes down quite a bit. An optimization pass will be necessary, as well as careful tuning of many parameters, but I believe “hundreds of players/ships” in a big battle is still on its way.
With weapon effects in, I think a design challenge awaits us, because right now the battlefield is actually too chaotic, with stuff going on everywhere, so it’s hard to concentrate on specific targets ( and, when actual players will play, focus on objectives as a team ). But it’s hard to say cause there’s a single weapon type (the old one), and ships are firing in random directions, so basically there’s a sea of projectiles and explosions everywhere you look at. Once targets get focused it might look very different and far more structured as a battle.
The HUD is pretty much useless atm in the middle of a big battle.
I’m looking forward to what you guys come up with.
IMO, just focus on building strong team interaction. Big battles are hectic, and it ultimately comes down to the ability of a team to coordinate. If it’s nothing but a big FFA in game, even with Discord, it’s just going to be a giant mess to get involved in bigger battles. In-game squads, formations, target designations, even having some guy in a cap ship playing as admiral giving orders and creating waypoints are a few examples I could think of. Allow squad leaders to build on that.
One HUD idea I think may help in this regard is to have a form of complete transparency from inside the player’s cockpit. So once activated, a new HUD allows the player to have a completely unobstructed 360 degree view, and can easily see where the rest of the squad is.
As to a sea of projectiles, such is war.
Otherwise you’d have to find some way to encourage players to split up and nearly exclusively fight in smaller groups. You could do this with having a very quick turnaround on asset ownership, forcing a very quick reactionary force to intervene. But then you’d have no really big battles, which would stink.
As I said, I’m looking forward to what you guys come up with.
What’s that you say. (Star Wars) Bespin like gas mining facilities hanging in-between (thick and varied) layers of volumetric clouds around a gas giant. Sure why not, go for it. Sounds like a great addition near release or very soon after DLC.
Chaos in battles can be mitigated via parameters balance. That’s also correlated to performance. Changing the size of projectiles, their speed, the fire rate, etc… will make the amount of projectiles visible at once go up or down, making performance go up as well as readability. So there are solutions, it’s just a matter of figuring out what we want to achieve
Even in EVE large overwhelming blobs are beaten down by strategy and well coordinated countermeasures. Battles within battles hopefully will become the norm because one blob out blobbing another just isn’t fun. Sure I would love to have a 400 even a 1000 ship battle but if the mechanics are bad then its pointless for the most part. A 100 ship battle can be more fun than a 1000. IMO.
A certain amount of chaos is important for fun, otherwise where’s the risk? But yes, it can’t be completely chaotic or individual players lose any sense of power to influence the battle.
We can test and refine! And, as talked about a few times before, we could look closer at how Planetside 2 handles large battles. They feel epic but controllable.
I think in these large battles to come the side that best coordinates their targets will win.
Imagine 30 ships simultaneously shooting one ship, it will be a chain of ships popping one after another, its gonna be lit.
I’d worry first about how to get hundreds of concurrent players in the game. There’s too many options for space battle games to have any real expectation of a high level of organic growth. There needs to be a hook, and I’m not sure what it is yet. Massive space battles isn’t a hook, it’s a kicker. Superb article on the subject here:
A good trailer will help a lot as that piece notes. But creating the Kickstarter trailer took all your resources for about six months. Are you planning to dedicate a month or more just on making a good promo video? It could be something worth considering.
I would think there are a lot of skilled promotional teams out there … although … I don’t really know. Guess most publishers do their marketing in house.
Anyway it doesn’t feel like you have spare time on your hands. The art team maybe in a year or two …
I mean, Planetside 2 basically has massive battles as its hook, and it’s doing okay, even with all the dev snafus. People still play for massive battles.
Massive space battles is the biggest hook a space shooter can offer. No other game currently offers massive space battles with shooter like realtime controls, add the fact that battlescape features real scale solar system and planetary bodies, this game will be exceptional.
Just look at star citizen, they can’t even get a stable server with 12 people, and judging by how things have went in the past regarding their networking code it seems very unlikely that they will be able to offer big battles any time soon.
Once the game is published on steam it will sell bigly.
Sony threw a large budget behind PS2 though, which helped get them enough players to ensure the massive battles could be a hook. If you can’t get enough people through the door to actually have massive battles, you’ll struggle to use it as a hook.
You can’t really use massive space battles as the main hook until you know you are going to get enough players to have massive space battles. It’s chicken and egg stuff.
If you hook a player with the promise of massive space battles they aren’t going to stay around long if you can’t deliver them. If players keep leaving then you’ll never get hundreds of concurrent players.
I’d also argue that massive battles isn’t really a hook in the first place (as the article I linked describes). It’s more of a kicker, the same way that procedural worlds are a kicker.
The closest I can see to a hook is the concept of having battles that seamlessly translate from orbital to airspace engagements. That could hook people if the launch video sells it well enough.
But yes, it can’t be completely chaotic or individual players lose any sense of power to influence the battle.