Will WvWvW technically be able to support 300 vs 300 player fights?

[Deleted]

Not discussing the gameplay design here.

Will a game engine be able to support 3-600 characters in one spot? Is the technology there? I found through some googleing that a wow character consists of some 19.000 polygons.
600 characters would make that 11.4 million polygons and thats not even counting the terrain and what not. I understand that there wont be displayed all 19.000 polygons at once because of clipping algorithms but theese surely will take calculation power aswel.

I would love this epic size battle but honestly I don't believe it untill i see it.

[DeanyKong]

I'm sure the engine can. I doubt a lot of computers will though.

Interesting tidbit: the original Guild Wars engine used a miniscule amount of bandwidth (like 5 kb/s in a crowded city I think) to track player activity (hence all that rubberbandin') I wouldn't be surprised to see a similarly optimized engine for GW2... but with a lot less rubberbanding.

[Deleted]

They've said WvWvW can support 1000's of players on each side. Since they want everyone to be able to get involved and on a popular server more than 300+ people will want to do it.

Anet built an entirely new engine for GW2 with all this stuff in mind, so aslong as they optimized it, people should be fine. Though you'll probably have to lower settings for WvWvW if you've got an older computer.

[Mif]

Not discussing the gameplay design here.

Will a game engine be able to support 3-600 characters in one spot? Is the technology there? I found through some googleing that a wow character consists of some 19.000 polygons.
600 characters would make that 11.4 million polygons and thats not even counting the terrain and what not. I understand that there wont be displayed all 19.000 polygons at once because of clipping algorithms but theese surely will take calculation power aswel.

I would love this epic size battle but honestly I don't believe it untill i see it.

The rendering of polygons doesn't effect the server. So if that's you're concern, it's not a technical issue, it's a buy a better computer issue.

However, I'm guessing you mean server lag. The reason it exists in Wow is that when player 1 hits player 2, player 3 has to calculate it, even though it didn't involve him. Go stand in SW/Org during peak and switch your combat log to view all, and watch the amount of crap fly past that has nothing to do with you. As if it wasn't bad enough for you, the poor server has to calculate everything everybody does relative to everyone else. It's simply poor engine design by Blizzard due to the fact the Wow uses an old modified Warcraft 3 engine.

Funnily enough, the man who coded the Warcraft 3 engine is a chap by the name of Mike O'Brien, who also happens to be one of the founders of a company called ArenaNet, who are currently making a game called Guild Wars 2. If I were to make a guess, I suspect the Mike learnt from his experience with Blizzard engines and filed it under "what not to do".

[Deleted]

Eveonline is doing it for years now. Battle's from 100-1000-3000 players.

massively.joystiq.com/2010/10/30/the-largest-battle-ever-held-in-eve-online-is-going-on-right-now

They use a system in which a group of players can announce a large battle coming up and CCp will reinforce the node the battle is going to take place in.
Quite heavy stuff, eve-online ships are polygon heavy too, but they have good programming.

[Deleted]

I'm not talking server side here. I'm talking client side. The graphic details looks amazing but scaling it up to include theoredically houndres of players in the same spot would cause even the best gamer PCs to lag out?

---------- Post added 2011-10-31 at 12:26 PM ----------

Eveonline is doing it for years now. Battle's from 100-1000-3000 players.

massively.joystiq.com/2010/10/30/the-largest-battle-ever-held-in-eve-online-is-going-on-right-now

They use a system in which a group of players can announce a large battle coming up and CCp will reinforce the node the battle is going to take place in.
Quite heavy stuff, eve-online ships are polygon heavy too, but they have good programming.

Thanks Defiler, this was the kind of answer i was looking for

[Mif]

The graphic details looks amazing but scaling it up to include theoredically houndres of players in the same spot would cause even the best gamer PCs to lag out?

GW2 features Umbra Occlusion Culling, which doesn't render objects that are hidden by other objects.

[Deleted]

Thanks Mif I'm less sceptical now

[Deleted]

The rendering of polygons doesn't effect the server.

Indeed, Mif is correct here: the server isn't involved in calculations of what will be shown and how it will be shown. It's client-side that handles all drawing.

However, I'm guessing you mean server lag. The reason it exists in Wow is that when player 1 hits player 2, player 3 has to calculate it, even though it didn't involve him. Go stand in SW/Org during peak and switch your combat log to view all, and watch the amount of crap fly past that has nothing to do with you. As if it wasn't bad enough for you, the poor server has to calculate everything everybody does relative to everyone else. It's simply poor engine design by Blizzard due to the fact the Wow uses an old modified Warcraft 3 engine.

In fact WoW is really poorly designed in the sense that it's the CLIENT that does a lot of the calculations. Client calculates if you can e.g. move up or down, and this is exactly why bots can go underground; they just fool the client that there is no ground and the client happily responds and then sends the new position of the player to Blizzard's server. Obviously client should NEVER EVER be able to tell the server where it goes or what it does, it should only tell the server what it intends to do, and then the server would handle the calculations and responding whether or not the action succeeded.

And yet, with a lot of calculations being pushed over to clients (and thus actually making it rather easy to create bots and hacks) their servers can barely handle WoW even as it is. As Mif said, the engine is really old, both on servers and clients, and it was never originally designed with such large loads in mind. For example the server relaying data to all clients within 80 yards distance of eachother is a really poor design-choice; it should only relay data that is relevant to each client. E.g. if I just fly by another player who happens to be fighting an enemy and I don't even have that player targeted I shouldn't be getting any data about the combat, either. It's just unnecessary data to shuffle around. Now, multiply all this redundant data by tens of thousands of clients and you should realize that the servers are constantly shuffling tens of gigabytes of redundant data every second.

---------- Post added 2011-10-31 at 03:10 PM ----------

Not discussing the gameplay design here.

Will a game engine be able to support 3-600 characters in one spot? Is the technology there? I found through some googleing that a wow character consists of some 19.000 polygons.
600 characters would make that 11.4 million polygons and thats not even counting the terrain and what not. I understand that there wont be displayed all 19.000 polygons at once because of clipping algorithms but theese surely will take calculation power aswel.

I would love this epic size battle but honestly I don't believe it untill i see it.

As for clients and their performance: there's many different ways of minimizing the effects of such fights having a huge performance hit. Like as Mif said, occlusion culling means that the client checks if the object in question is visible, partially visible, or completely non-visible, and then decides what to render if anything at all. Similarly, clients can render objects that are further away with less polygons visible and by completely discarding details that wouldn't be visible anyways, like e.g. eyes; you can't see the eyes of another player that is 40 yards away anyways, so not rendering them at all provides again a few less polygons to draw.

As for how much stuff can a modern graphics card push in theory? Well, this is a VERY simplified example and I'm skipping lots of stuff here just for the sake of an example (Yes, all you who understand more about graphics cards technology than the OP, you don't need to point out the flaws in this post. I know.), but a GeForce GTX560Ti can push 2 billion triangles per second, with tessellation (a method for breaking complex objects into simpler ones for the sake of speed in rendering). If we assumed that each player model used up to 50 000 triangles, the card could render 40 THOUSAND players each second on the screen. Of course that doesn't take into account the time spent on vertex and pixel shaders, textures and so on and so forth, but you get the point: there's plenty enough power even on older cards to do 300 players on the screen. It's just up to the engine itself to be able to handle that.

[Deleted]

Not discussing the gameplay design here.

1; Will a game engine be able to support 3-600 characters in one spot? -??
2; I found through some googleing that a wow character consists of some 19.000 polygons. -??
600 characters would make that 11.4 million polygons and thats not even counting the terrain and what not.

Ok so im talking about this as a games industry professional, not blowing my own horn here but thats just my job. im a tools designer for a well known games company. and before anyone asks... no i cant say which company or where i work or want game im working on, as its "top secret" and i would loss my job if i started chatting about it.

1: IF there was 11.4 million ploys on one point within any game engine it would crash even if your computer was the most high spec out there. but no games company in their right mind would do this. and yes you can have 300 ppl in one area. just look at org or stormwind in wow. they handle more that that on a daily bases for each server, plus all the environments and npcs. and if arenanet are saying they will have WvWvW and it only handle 50 ppl. then that would be a complete fail.
2: 19,000 polys for one character, /facepalm. never read anythng off the interent and believe it to be the truth. wht that probably was was a pre-rendered model for a cut scence. most character models will be of low poly (100-150, GW2 might be higher, i dont no for sure) as well as the enviroment u are in. so this will never happen. it up to the skill of the artists to give the models skins which have depth and texture without adding ploys.

and just one more thing. when u are not looking at a object in a game world (lets say a tree) it will not even be processed by ur PC. the PC only shows objects u are NOT LOOKING at. if its out of ur field of view. then the computer ignores it.

---------- Post added 2011-10-31 at 01:27 PM ----------

GW2 features Umbra Occlusion Culling, which doesn't render objects that are hidden by other objects.

this is a good example

... baking brownies

<.<
>.>

[Mothhive]

I found through some googleing that a wow character consists of some 19.000 polygons.

I thought WoW characters had a polycount of 500 max? Where'd 19,000 come from??? lol

If you saw that while googling, it would either be from someone doing some extremely inaccurate guesswork, or you came across someone who was remastering the current WoW models for their own uses.

[Shinshiva]

i thought that 19.000 meant nineteen point zero zero zero?

[seraph1337]

i thought that 19.000 meant nineteen point zero zero zero?

Many countries outside the US (and I think Britain) render numbers in the thousands with periods instead of commas, and vice versa. Whereas an item that costs a dollar and nineteen cents is $1.19 - it's written as $1,19. And nineteen thousand is written as 19.000 as opposed to 19,000.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

[Sandraudiga]

Many countries outside the US (and I think Britain) render numbers in the thousands with periods instead of commas, and vice versa. Whereas an item that costs a dollar and nineteen cents is $1.19 - it's written as $1,19. And nineteen thousand is written as 19.000 as opposed to 19,000.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

Mmm... I have lived in both Canada and Australia, and spent time in a few more, and i've never come across this. Everywhere i've been its been .'s for dollars/cents, and ,'s between each three digits in the dollars section. So 1.19 for one dollar and nineteen cents, and 19,000 for nineteen thousand.

I believe I found the original posters comment with a google search: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/367417-...n-a-wow-model/

Third post down, where it is claimed that a night elf female is the highest poly count in Wow with 19,000 polygons(with a ,). They referenced a sourceforge wiki to back up this claim, but the link is dead.

I personally doubt the female night elf models, or any player model, are this high myself. I would tend to side more with harjkuns estimate of 150-200.

[sephrael]

In fact WoW is really poorly designed in the sense that it's the CLIENT that does a lot of the calculations. Client calculates if you can e.g. move up or down, and this is exactly why bots can go underground; they just fool the client that there is no ground and the client happily responds and then sends the new position of the player to Blizzard's server. Obviously client should NEVER EVER be able to tell the server where it goes or what it does, it should only tell the server what it intends to do, and then the server would handle the calculations and responding whether or not the action succeeded.

And yet, with a lot of calculations being pushed over to clients (and thus actually making it rather easy to create bots and hacks) their servers can barely handle WoW even as it is. As Mif said, the engine is really old, both on servers and clients, and it was never originally designed with such large loads in mind. For example the server relaying data to all clients within 80 yards distance of eachother is a really poor design-choice; it should only relay data that is relevant to each client. E.g. if I just fly by another player who happens to be fighting an enemy and I don't even have that player targeted I shouldn't be getting any data about the combat, either. It's just unnecessary data to shuffle around. Now, multiply all this redundant data by tens of thousands of clients and you should realize that the servers are constantly shuffling tens of gigabytes of redundant data every second.

In MMO design, it's mandatory to shift most of the calculation work to the client. Mandatory, not even possible to have the server do everything. The server should check bounds on movement, which it usually does. It does this in WOW as well, as you can see when you are lagging and you start rubber-banding. The server checks to see if it's remotely possible that you got to X point in Y seconds and then throws you back. This is normal, and smart, behavior. If you had servers chugging every time someone pressed the W button on their keyboard, the bandwidth requirements of the game would quickly exceed the saturation point of the server's network card(s).

I don't know where you're getting the notion that the servers can barely handle WoW. They seem to be doing fine - that being said, you're just repeating what someone else said and I shouldn't lambaste you for another poster's absurd opinion on "game engines" when I'm too lazy to go and quote him directly. As for the "redundant data", you will find that any modern MMO sends the same data because the server can't afford to spend the CPU time to figure out where everyone is exactly every tenth of a second, run a crapload of if-checks on them to see if the data is relevant to them. So they use a formula based on how much is going on in the area that adjusts the size of the radius to receive events. Blizzard had problems with this back in BC and early Wrath, and then they changed the way the game sends events so they are essentially sending only a few bytes for each event, so now things are.. better. Internal processes on the Blizzard servers likely go through intensive algorithms to ensure it sends as little redundant data as possible, but there's always going to be a need to because the guy that's 20 yards away from you now might shoot you with a fireball or get a little closer and smack you with an AoE, and that math should be done by the client or else you end up with your character being invincible if you can make your connection drop every other packet.

All that said, we're essentially talking about n^2 problems here which all MMOs and large-scale multiplayer games need to contend with, and when you're dealing with that you have to make design decisions that seem antithetical to traditional design. In this case, your position of "don't let the client do anything but rendering" would normally be quite correct, but when you're dealing with MMOs that needs to be relaxed to "let the client do everything that isn't critical, and rules-check the rest". To their credit, Blizzard does a good job of making sure the memory addresses for WoW are a pain in the ass to manipulate and are heavily monitored by processes like Warden.

[AlamarAtMMOC]

In MMO design, it's mandatory to shift most of the calculation work to the client. Mandatory, not even possible to have the server do everything. The server should check bounds on movement, which it usually does. It does this in WOW as well, as you can see when you are lagging and you start rubber-banding. The server checks to see if it's remotely possible that you got to X point in Y seconds and then throws you back. This is normal, and smart, behavior. If you had servers chugging every time someone pressed the W button on their keyboard, the bandwidth requirements of the game would quickly exceed the saturation point of the server's network card(s).

I don't know where you're getting the notion that the servers can barely handle WoW. They seem to be doing fine - that being said, you're just repeating what someone else said and I shouldn't lambaste you for another poster's absurd opinion on "game engines" when I'm too lazy to go and quote him directly. As for the "redundant data", you will find that any modern MMO sends the same data because the server can't afford to spend the CPU time to figure out where everyone is exactly every tenth of a second, run a crapload of if-checks on them to see if the data is relevant to them. So they use a formula based on how much is going on in the area that adjusts the size of the radius to receive events. Blizzard had problems with this back in BC and early Wrath, and then they changed the way the game sends events so they are essentially sending only a few bytes for each event, so now things are.. better. Internal processes on the Blizzard servers likely go through intensive algorithms to ensure it sends as little redundant data as possible, but there's always going to be a need to because the guy that's 20 yards away from you now might shoot you with a fireball or get a little closer and smack you with an AoE, and that math should be done by the client or else you end up with your character being invincible if you can make your connection drop every other packet.

All that said, we're essentially talking about n^2 problems here which all MMOs and large-scale multiplayer games need to contend with, and when you're dealing with that you have to make design decisions that seem antithetical to traditional design. In this case, your position of "don't let the client do anything but rendering" would normally be quite correct, but when you're dealing with MMOs that needs to be relaxed to "let the client do everything that isn't critical, and rules-check the rest". To their credit, Blizzard does a good job of making sure the memory addresses for WoW are a pain in the ass to manipulate and are heavily monitored by processes like Warden.

Now now... Let's not bring logic and thought into a perfectly reasonable WoW bashing thread...

/sarcasm

Not that this is any different than laymen failing to understand any technical, medical, etc field, and make wild claims about how bad/wrong aspects of it are, that, again, they don't understand... I accept my ignorance... that's why I pay a mechanic 'way too much' to fix the things people with even a little vehicle knowledge scoff at ; )

As for the OP... Different engines have handled this issue in different ways, but it basically comes down to a Shooter (let's pick Rage) vs an MMO (let's pick GW2)... One has very highly detailed environments, and rarely shows more than a dozen characters on screen at a time, and the other can do many many more, because of the massive (heh) lack of detail. Beyond that, games like camelot, use a 'paper doll' system, where you get 'important' positional information about a new character (coming into range), then it's followed up by less urgent information, like clothing/gear...

In short, yes, some GW2 engineers have learned to improve things, the basic system hasn't changed in 20 years...

-Alamar

[Cuchulainn]

(hence all that rubberbandin') I wouldn't be surprised to see a similarly optimized engine for GW2... but with a lot less rubberbanding.

Just in case people don't know what "Rubberbanding" is:

rubberbanding

This occurs in online gaming when latency is relatively high. Players (or yourself) will appear to move in one direction, and then suddenly be teleported back several feet where they once were a few seconds ago.

This can be extremely annoying in twitch-based online games such as first person shooters, as it will hinder one's aiming and shooting. Rubberbanding also plagues MMOs, particularily in extremely filled servers with poor hardware configurations. While it isn't as damaging in an MMO environment, rubberbanding still takes away from the overall gaming experience and if at all possible, should be avoided.

Rubberbanding can also be called "telelag" which is short for "Teleportation Lag".

I get RBd in Team Fortress 2 all the time, but never did when I played WoW. Bad server quality is bad. I find myself playing TF2 a lot less nowadays.

[Eorayn]

Just in case people don't know what "Rubberbanding" is:



Rubberbanding can also be called "telelag" which is short for "Teleportation Lag".

I get RBd in Team Fortress 2 all the time, but never did when I played WoW. Bad server quality is bad. I find myself playing TF2 a lot less nowadays.

Happens in CoD: Black Ops sometimes. But mostly when something's wrong with your own connection. I have seen it in World of Warcraft too, also because of my network.

[Merendel]

I've only rarely ruberbanded in wow, normaly when my connection gets unstable and I get a lag spike. I've also seen it a few times when my conection was good but the enviroment was nasty, aka the old 4+raid group wintersgrasps. GW1 was actualy very very bad with ruberbanding mostly due to the colision with enemy targets. your client would think you managed to skirt around the target but the server knew it was actualy half a pace to the left, right in your way but the client does not figure this out for 2 more seconds. when both server and client realized you took a step out of bounds back you go to geting pounded on. Although sometimes you could even ruberband off static terrain objects so there was something wrong with the engine. Hopefuly Anet did a better job with the GW2 engien.

[Fernling306]

Gw1 is the only game I have experienced rubberbanding.