For those of you without access to SomethingAwful, I wrote this (updated below).
As a quick question to you and others here that DO KNOW this stuff. Does Amazon's Lumber Yard do well with networking? In other words, is it Lumberyard being choked by CIG's Frankenengine or is it an incompatibility with it?
Nobody knows, since there are currently
NO RELEASED GAMES that use LumberYard. The engine, as a whole, is all very experimental - and still in Beta.
What I do know is that the CryEngine networking layer was always rubbish; and isn't something that they were actively interested in improving because most of the games the engine targeted, were simple 16-player games, with lobbies. Forget about fucking MMOs. The only decent
CryEngine MMO on record, Archeage, had to toss out and re-write the entire networking layer. And then they built the game from the ground up as an MMO. And it's instance/shard concept.
And in the latest LY build, AMZ even deprecated the entire CryEngine network layer in favor of their own. Which makes sense, since AWS is network-centric and they would have top tier network engineers there.
The LumberYard engine was never designed for MMO games. At all. Even AMZ states this clearly in their docs and faqs about what the engine is designed to do, and the limitations/strengths of the networking component.
Whoever wants to use LY for MMO games, without reading the fine print, or starting from scratch, is an incompetent moron
I suspect that in the switch from CE3.x to LY, they ended up using the LY implementation, which would require them to strip the now deprecated CE3.x networking layer they were using in their Frankenengine.
There was also indication that they were either using, or planning to use this experimental bullshit (in comparison to SDKs like RakNet or ReplicaNet) call
yojimbo which they were Golden backers of. If they did end up using it, fucking :laffo: because it explains everything.
Star Citizen was never designed to be an MMO. They have missed that boat. They're never -
ever - going to get there because it's too late now. And the premise of them even attempting it, would mean a code/maintenance freeze of maybe
TWO FUCKING YEARS to re-jigger everything. When you consider that the last 2.6.3 patch was in April, and 3.0 is now almost a year late - and will be more than that eventually - it's easy to see how completely and totally
FUCKED they are.
As I
wrote here, an MMO architecture is not the sort of thing you just tack on at any time during development. The best they could have even got away with, was how Elite Dangerous - which isn't an MMO - did it. And that was a phenomenal fit of engineering, given how it works, the world size etc. AND it has a ton of caveats, regardless.
If they are now testing 60 client sessions, it's not because they magically came up with new networking tech (note that it's not listed anywhere in the dev schedule) at the spur of the moment. It's because they have realized that the AWS instances (
these are the different tiers) they were usingvfor severs, are simply incapable of handling the additional shit that 3.0 is now throwing at it. Unfortunately for them, moving to higher tier AWS instances is not only going to cost them money, but it's also NOT going to solve the networking/connectivity problem. It's just going to solve the server's ability to just fuck off and die at some point. And it was doing just that -
CONSISTENTLY - in the tests they just had.
To get a better understanding of what it takes to build an MMO using cloud tech - the dumbest thing to do since we elected a moron as POTUS - is to read these resources.
Using the cloud to build a MMORPG <-- This is theoretical and shows you what's possible, not that it's possible for a real-time game, with high fidelity visuals etc
Building a World in the Clouds: MMO Architecture on AWS (MBL304) | AWS <-- This is how Firefall did it. Multiplayer was pure shit. And the game died. As did the company.
Above is how Frontier did it. And they don't even
try to do anything more than 32 clients within a "bubble/island"
They're completely and utterly fucked; and Star Citizen will never - ever - be an MMO. Backers should just pray that they are one day able to play with 32 of their friends in a session. Fucking :lol: if they all have multi-crew ships.
