The PlanetSide Hacking Epidemic

[Ratman_tf]

Aha. My Planetside screenshots are still up on the interbutz.

http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/Planetside.html



I ran it on my old compy, so the graphics are turned way down.

[Synnoc]

Aha. My Planetside screenshots are still up on the interbutz.

Ah, Nzame on Cyssor.   A great fight.

I really don't understand why MMOFPS's aren't given serious consideration.  It's like TV, where if one "Sci Fi" show fails the executives dismiss science fiction as nonviable, yet they'll green-light three failed cop shows and four failed doctor shows a year.  FPS games dominate PC multiplayer (cf CounterStrike, HL, BF, Quake, Unreal, ad nauseum), yet there's no successor to PlanetSide even announced.  (I might be mistaken, but all "MMOFPS"s I know about are really MMORPG's a la Tabula Rasa, where hitting is a die roll.)  A game with PlanetSide's gameplay and HL2's performance would be huge.

[Merusk]

The issues have been discussed in this thread already.  Too much has to be put client-side to make it not a laggy pile of shit over a certain number of people.  On TR and other games the most advanced math there is is "is x in range?  What's their die roll?"

  To do an FPS right you've got "Where is x when y fires.  What's in between them? What's being fired where &  how fast?  Now project the distance x traveled.. and check.. oh wait he stopped 2 ft short of being hit..."

[LK]

Fuck that KAAOS video was great.  I'd love to be a part of a squad like that.

[MahrinSkel]

There's a technological window opening for an MMOFPS based on Cell Processor blades.  One thing that the Cell does *really well* is massive amounts of parallel physics simulation (one physicist is using 16 PS3's to simulate black hole collisions), which has been the usual barrier to taking the FPS past 64 players.  In PS, they had to expose lot of stuff you should never trust the client with, otherwise there simply wasn't any way to cost-effectively do it.  There are now blade format Cell-based systems available, the problem is that there's not a lot of programmers that can deal with the...quirks, of the Cell architecture.  But thanks to the PS3, a lot more than there used to be.

--Dave

[Righ]

There are now blade format Cell-based systems available, the problem is that there's not a lot of programmers that can deal with the...quirks, of the Cell architecture.  But thanks to the PS3, a lot more than there used to be.

The programmer mind-share part is the only real step forward with the Cell BE. Well, that and WoW's growth of MMOG revenue expectations. There have been suitable parallel environments for many (processor) generations, but they tend not to catch the interest of games developers because they are expensive to deploy and there aren't heaps of people familiar with the architectures who are working in the games industry. I would imagine that scalable games server design will continue to advance more quickly through industry supported communities:

http://www.projectdarkstar.com/

[Venkman]

Wouldn't one of the other limitations be the amount of info that can be passed to the servers though? Seems to me that a true FPS game is passing a lot more data than your usual RPG on a global clock. I'm probably wrong though

[Zetleft]

Fuck that KAAOS video was great.  I'd love to be a part of a squad like that.

I ran with KAAOS when I played PS.  It was some of the most fun I've had on an FPS game.  Hot dropping as an organized squad behind enemy lines to change a course of a huge battle 

Too bad PS made so many dumbass changes and killed my enthusiasm for it.  But still, fun times.

It's a shame its just in a neither dead nor alive zombie state though, it seems no one wants to give that type of game another chance. 

[MahrinSkel]

Wouldn't one of the other limitations be the amount of info that can be passed to the servers though? Seems to me that a true FPS game is passing a lot more data than your usual RPG on a global clock. I'm probably wrong though

It's a non-trivial problem, but not ultimately the current chokepoint.  Bandwidth keeps getting cheaper (and will continue to for a while), and if you toss the dialup compatibility out, your pipe down to the player can be 10 times wider than what we've been using.  At base, bandwidth is an n^2 problem, but there are various optimization tricks (which are already well explored), and it's the n^x physics problems that have really been choking us off there right now.

Client-side visuals is another issue, of course, we still have graphics pipelines that degrade exponentially in performance with the number of separate geometries involved.  But as we approach photo-realism (and we're very nearly there), that will start becoming less of an issue.

--Dave

[UnSub]

I really don't understand why MMOFPS's aren't given serious consideration.  It's like TV, where if one "Sci Fi" show fails the executives dismiss science fiction as nonviable, yet they'll green-light three failed cop shows and four failed doctor shows a year.  FPS games dominate PC multiplayer (cf CounterStrike, HL, BF, Quake, Unreal, ad nauseum), yet there's no successor to PlanetSide even announced.  (I might be mistaken, but all "MMOFPS"s I know about are really MMORPG's a la Tabula Rasa, where hitting is a die roll.)  A game with PlanetSide's gameplay and HL2's performance would be huge.

You just named a stack of FPS games I can play for free past initial purchase and all allow some kind of team deathmatch. Why should I pay a MMO $15 a month to do the same thing?

... although the Guild Wars payment model could work for such a game.

[Jayce]

You just named a stack of FPS games I can play for free past initial purchase and all allow some kind of team deathmatch. Why should I pay a MMO $15 a month to do the same thing?

That's been a common complaint about the PS model, yet people still play it.  Makes me think they're on to something.

There's something to be said for just the ability to gather hundreds of people on one world, and knowing that there are battles going on on different continents at the same time. 

I think it would be even better if they were to add some real persistence to the world, rewards that couldn't be picked up in a day or a month, to encourage play past the month or so timeframe (about the time my interest always flagged, at least).  Obviously it would be really bad to introduce things that made you better in battle, since one of PS's big strengths has always been that a rank newbie could take out a veteran if he had the skill.  I'm thinking more along the lines of medals, or campaign ribbons, maybe tied in with some greater storyline. If the players could influence that storyline, it'd be even better.  Cooler-looking armor for 100, 500 and 1000 battles maybe?

Short version: I think that the answer is persistence and ability to gather large numbers of people across the world for large wars.

[Venkman]

People still play it, sure. But you can find 1,500 people to play just about anything. Heck, I think AC2 had more players when they announced it was shutting down.

Compared to the number of FPS games out there and their sales over the years, PS is not a successful FPS game. It's a niche for an audience that wants that niche. Great and all as long as SOE makes enough money to keep it up. But it's not something other companies look at as an enviable business model worth emulating.

It's not the only MMOFPS out right now. But the others aren't all that successful either. Ultimately, the entire sub-genre still needs its EQ1 before more people stand up and take notice. And that means someone needs to give it a pretty big shot time and money wise.

Client-side visuals is another issue, of course, we still have graphics pipelines that degrade exponentially in performance with the number of separate geometries involved.

I would have thought managing separate geometries as independent of graphics quality?

Personally, I'd rather have deformable worlds for MMOFPS than Crysis-level graphics. As long as shadows and lighting are useful to gameplay, COD4 is fine for me. Physics is problem to solve but the far more interesting one in my opinion.

[Dtrain]

You just named a stack of FPS games I can play for free past initial purchase and all allow some kind of team deathmatch. Why should I pay a MMO $15 a month to do the same thing?

You're absolutely right. This is one of the main reasons PS was never a breakout hit. The biggest barrier to an MMOFPS is the subscription fee, and all those cool games that are free prove it. What PlanetSide offers is the massive scale, which at first doesn't sound like much when you're having a blast on any given team deathmatch game, but when you actually experience a raging back and forth bridge battle on cyssor with behind the lines incursions and galaxy drops you understand what makes it great immediately.

SOE should have known this and should have been doing everything it could to get people past the hurdle of a subscription fee. The game should have shipped with some sort of unlimited free trial, just with caps on the CRs you could earn. On top of that, they should have had a demo trial that only worked for a few days.

[MahrinSkel]

Client-side visuals is another issue, of course, we still have graphics pipelines that degrade exponentially in performance with the number of separate geometries involved.

I would have thought managing separate geometries as independent of graphics quality?

Keep in mind that graphics programming is a black art far beyond my own programming skills, but here's my understanding of it:  The poly per second counts you see thrown around on benchmarking reviews all assume a strip of triangles where only one additional vertex is needed per poly.  Break up the strip, start wrapping it around itself, the rate goes down.  Beyond that, every time you change geometries, you have to reset the pipeline, flush the cache, reload your shaders, etc., and you have to do this every frame for every geometry.  What winds up happening is that up to a few hundred different geometries, performance degrades linearly, after that it begins degrading exponentially.  And "geometry" doesn't mean "model", it means each piece of geometry that must be seperately rendered, for your typical MMO each player avatar is 5-15 geometries (boots, gloves, shoulders, weapon, etc.).  So you wind up *way* down the exponential degradation really quickly when you put a lot of people in the same place.  Now, if you reduce the cusomizability of the avatar and therefore the geometries, it helps a lot, if you reduce the raw number of polys it helps some, if you reduce the number of passes per frame it helps quite a lot (so bump maps, specularity, alpha maps, etc.).

You can do a lot of optimizations, and of course you can have graphics options that run all the way from photo-realistic to "looks like cel-shaded ass", but ultimately you have to optimize for some particular target, and that sets your maximum number of players who can interact in the same area without it turning into a slideshow.

--Dave

EDIT: For another example, the big innovation that made better grass and trees feasible was turning them all into a single geometry that was built at runtime.

[Stephen Zepp]

The only thing I'd add to what Dave said is that with proper pre-batching, you can make great savings in performance by sending up a geometry/texture set to the GPU, and then tell it to render it multiple times in multiple "locations" (things get hairy when you are talking about this type of thing, and I for sure don't know the proper terminology).

For example, if you have 30 tanks with the same geometry and textures, you can batch them up, set a complete render state block (DX10 there, although state blocks work for OpenGL as well as DX9 iirc), and then simply render lots of times in different places. GPU pipes are optimized for fill and are very bad at state changes, so you gain a lot by smart prepping of how you present data to the card.

[nurtsi]

The only thing I'd add to what Dave said is that with proper pre-batching, you can make great savings in performance by sending up a geometry/texture set to the GPU, and then tell it to render it multiple times in multiple "locations" (things get hairy when you are talking about this type of thing, and I for sure don't know the proper terminology).

It's called instancing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry_instancing).

[Mrbloodworth]

I really don't understand why MMOFPS's aren't given serious consideration.  It's like TV, where if one "Sci Fi" show fails the executives dismiss science fiction as nonviable, yet they'll green-light three failed cop shows and four failed doctor shows a year.  FPS games dominate PC multiplayer (cf CounterStrike, HL, BF, Quake, Unreal, ad nauseum), yet there's no successor to PlanetSide even announced.  (I might be mistaken, but all "MMOFPS"s I know about are really MMORPG's a la Tabula Rasa, where hitting is a die roll.)  A game with PlanetSide's gameplay and HL2's performance would be huge.

You just named a stack of FPS games I can play for free past initial purchase and all allow some kind of team deathmatch. Why should I pay a MMO $15 a month to do the same thing?

... although the Guild Wars payment model could work for such a game.

Because your logging into a world, not a server. Also, the scale, 133 x 3 on one continent, not to mention i think PS has one of the largest arsenals for a FPS (Including Vehicles ETC), and The cert system is a form of "Skill" RPG system, allowing you to play what you want and how you want. The world portion is very important, as outfits are a very strong part of the experience.

As far as the biggest barrier, i would argue that it was the learning curve. Planetside is a very complex game. Also, MMORPG players finding out that "real" skill is required, not just TAB + Number key 1, repeat.

@MahrinSkel, Planetside does not have that level of customization in the avatars, only not to recently did they add merits that may approach that kind of complexity, but those were only 4, 5px strips..But i do understand your talking "in general".  minimal customization played well into the Conscription aspect of the empires.

[Ratman_tf]

I think another thing was Core Combat. They took time and resources to make a paid expansion that no one wanted. That's time and resources that may have been better spent improving the base game experience.

[bhodi]

All this talk of multiplayer technology is silly; the fact is, they already did it and did it well enough to make a really fun game out of it. Even if latency hasn't gotten a whole lot better (it has), we could simply scale up the same techniques they used and make a fun game. Technologically, we can do it. We'd have to take shortcuts (give the client a lot of power) but it's fully possible.

The trick is, as always, not in the technological side of things -- it's making the game fun to play.

[Trippy]

I think another thing was Core Combat. They took time and resources to make a paid expansion that no one wanted. That's time and resources that may have been better spent improving the base game experience.

Well people wanted mechs. They just didn't want to grind out the captures in the stupid caves.

[Mrbloodworth]

I think another thing was Core Combat. They took time and resources to make a paid expansion that no one wanted. That's time and resources that may have been better spent improving the base game experience.

Well people wanted mechs. They just didn't want to grind out the captures in the stupid caves.

Core combat was supposed to be "urban combat", it was just to far from "urban earth city's" and to much "Giant crystalline buildings and very alien city's" that people never took to it. Oddly enough, The caves were where you could find some of the best grunt combat.

Also, the average Joe had a REALLY hard time figuring out navigating of the zip lines.

The kills requirements came WAY after core combat (and BFR patch), and it was part of an anti-proliferation change.

[Ratman_tf]

It was retarted. If they wanted urban combat, they should have made a mini-continent with more buildings and no vehicle pads.

Ziplines. Double-You Tee Eff?

[Trippy]

The kills requirements came WAY after core combat (and BFR patch), and it was part of an anti-proliferation change.

I was referring to the caverns capture requirement to get your first BFR.

[Mrbloodworth]

The kills requirements came WAY after core combat (and BFR patch), and it was part of an anti-proliferation change.

I was referring to the caverns capture requirement to get your first BFR.

We are talking about the Same thing. You need kills (of a certain XP yield) and Captures, its all part of the (BFR) anti-proliferation change.

[Krakrok]

Core Combat was crap.

[Venkman]

Gutboy?

(just kidding)

Thanks for the explanations on the graphics tech. It actually made sense. I assume this is why we're still seeing state-change terrain from the new Unreal and Lucascarts projects rather than purely deformable terrain. That would be good enough for me. As long as I can blow a hole in a wall without having to go through the entrance, I'm fine. If I'm flying something that can blow up continents, I don't expect a puny piece of steel to stop it.

[Mrbloodworth]

Fuck that KAAOS video was great.  I'd love to be a part of a squad like that.

Planetside Player made AD

[Surlyboi]

Though he's dirty TR scum, I gotta agree with bloodworth. PS took a shitload more skill than any other MMO before or since. That turned off all the spreadsheet whizzes that thhought they were hot shit in PVP in any other MMO.

[Nebu]

Though he's dirty TR scum, I gotta agree with bloodworth. PS took a shitload more skill than any other MMO before or since. That turned off all the spreadsheet whizzes that thhought they were hot shit in PVP in any other MMO.

I'll remind you that twitch is only one kind of skill.  The thing that turned me off to PS was that I had to have a bajillion builds premade and they had to contain the right contents.  There was still plenty of min-maxing going on in PS, it just took less time to do it.   There have been other good skill-based MMO's in the past (DAoC 8v8 was, for me, the best strategy-based combat I've ever enjoyed in a multiplayer PvP game).  The hard part was being able to pay the admission price to enjoy the content where these sub-games existed. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Though he's dirty TR scum, I gotta agree with bloodworth. PS took a shitload more skill than any other MMO before or since. That turned off all the spreadsheet whizzes that thhought they were hot shit in PVP in any other MMO.

I'll remind you that twitch is only one kind of skill.  The thing that turned me off to PS was that I had to have a bajillion builds premade and they had to contain the right contents.  There was still plenty of min-maxing going on in PS, it just took less time to do it.   There have been other good skill-based MMO's in the past (DAoC 8v8 was, for me, the best strategy-based combat I've ever enjoyed in a multiplayer PvP game).  The hard part was being able to pay the admission price to enjoy the content where these sub-games existed. 

I only ever had one build. For me, it was filling a role , a role that was my playstyle (Secondary fire support, medical, marauder driver, Combat support (Repairing stuff) and Squad leader). I never approached it as "I must have this combo/set up". That was something left behind in MMORPG games, and i feel it wasn't required in Planetside.

Planetside was more of a Traditional Role playing game that anything ending in RPG, you filled a real role... The role of a solider in a large empire. The players made the entire "Empire" something real, broken down to outfits, then individual squads.

Me personally, if a game has dice role, i have a hard time calling it skill. I understand that tactics, strategies ETC.. are one type of skill, but i lump what others call "Skill" in RPG games, as "Knowing the system". Two different types of skill. Thankfully, Planetside required both.

But in most RPG's, its not really skill that wins the day.. Its whats known as "blobbing " in RTS's, it just not blobbing units, but blobbing Stats and numbers. Don't get me wrong, i enjoy RPG's, but its a different kind of "competition".

anyway /flame suit on 


PS: If you cant tell, Planetside held some of the most immersive experiences in any MMO for me. Due to what i said, more of a traditional RPG, and a very strong community of outfit mates and squads. I don't think ill ever get that from a game again that is in any way restrictive. I'm not the best writer, so its hard to explain in words. If you jumped in and played it like a Normal FPS, you would have missed this, if you jumped in and tried to treat it as a Normal RPG, you missed this as well.

[Nebu]

No need for the flame suit.  We each like different things.  I can appreciate what Planetside was trying to do, but never really felt immersed in it.  Some of that could be that while I played the game for a couple of months, I never felt like I knew what I was doing.  Drop in an area, shoot stuff, capture something, and run to the next area.  It's a fine game and a nice hybrid between the more traditional MMO and an FPS.  I always felt that it just didn't have much stickiness to it. 

I think the biggest challenge in MMO pvp is that you need to get to a point in the game where gear is less of a factor before you can enjoy the portion that is more skill based.  Most players will never reach that point due to the time commitment needed.  This is why I appreciated DAoC so much.  It was trivial to get to max level (could do it in less than 1 day played) and a decent template took a few days more.  Getting past the gear/level barrier was little more than a speedbump.  In WoW, I doubt I'd ever make it to the true pvp endgame due to insane time requirements.

[Ratman_tf]

PS: If you cant tell, Planetside held some of the most immersive experiences in any MMO for me. Due to what i said, more of a traditional RPG, and a very strong community of outfit mates and squads. I don't think ill ever get that from a game again that is in any way restrictive. I'm not the best writer, so its hard to explain in words. If you jumped in and played it like a Normal FPS, you would have missed this, if you jumped in and tried to treat it as a Normal RPG, you missed this as well.

I think anyone who enjoyed Planetside for what it was gets it. It was about being in a good outfit and kicking ass for your side. It was about bridge battles and zipping across the map in a Reaver to get fire support to your outfit.

It was about Galaxy drops. Fuck yea.

[Mrbloodworth]

No need for the flame suit.  We each like different things.  I can appreciate what Planetside was trying to do, but never really felt immersed in it.  Some of that could be that while I played the game for a couple of months, I never felt like I knew what I was doing.  Drop in an area, shoot stuff, capture something, and run to the next area.  It's a fine game and a nice hybrid between the more traditional MMO and an FPS.  I always felt that it just didn't have much stickiness to it. 

I think the biggest challenge in MMO pvp is that you need to get to a point in the game where gear is less of a factor before you can enjoy the portion that is more skill based.  Most players will never reach that point due to the time commitment needed.  This is why I appreciated DAoC so much.  It was trivial to get to max level (could do it in less than 1 day played) and a decent template took a few days more.  Getting past the gear/level barrier was little more than a speedbump.  In WoW, I doubt I'd ever make it to the true pvp endgame due to insane time requirements.

The second paragraph was why i loved planetside. Gear didn't matter, nor did Battle rank (AKA "Level"). The part where you never knew what you were doing, two things. It backs up my comment about the largest determent being the games complexity ( Need to look beyond shoot people and capture places, theres more to it), and what i was talking about in regards to community. Outfits and squads, they would have helped with this, and provided the "Sticky" you could have needed.

Thats why i said:

If you jumped in and played it like a Normal FPS, you would have missed this, if you jumped in and tried to treat it as a Normal RPG, you missed this as well.

[Ratman_tf]

The second paragraph was why i loved planetside. Gear didn't matter, nor did Battle rank (AKA "Level"). The part where you never knew what you were doing, two things. It backs up my comment about the largest determent being the games complexity ( Need to look beyond shoot people and capture places, theres more to it), and what i was talking about in regards to community. Outfits and squads, they would have helped with this, and provided the "Sticky" you could have needed.

I think I agree. I'm wondering how Outfits could have been more appealing in a long-term game. Maybe give outfits a rank like individual players, and give them little perks for being "teh awesome"?

[Krakrok]

Planetside needed the perk system from Fallout. The implants were a good try but they never added any new ones.