Does "serverside" mean "online somewhere in the cloud"?

After watching the latest LiveStream (witch was very interesting from a technical point of view) there was a burning question in my head:

Do i need a permanent online connection to some mysterious "server in the über cloud" to play the game?

Several comments in the live stream suggested so...
If you really plan so, then let me tell you: I do not approve this! :evil: The latest experience from SimCity should be a warning. :!:

I expect the game to run on my machine, not depending on a service which is not under my control and which will (murphys law) fail me in the middle of the most exciting battle! :x

No, it just means whatever server the game happens to be running on. Could be your same machine, another local machine, someone else's machine on the internet or a machine in the cloud.

The game will not force you to be online. You will be able to host your own server. If you press skirmish or lan, it'll silently create a server without you even noticing.

You will not need an internet connection at all to play lan or skirmish. If you wish to play larger games online, on dedicated servers, you will of course need to have an internet connection.

More advanced:
The reason they're talking about their client-server model is that in traditional RTSes all computers need to run the simulation locally, syncing up only the orders players give. In PA, the players will each send their orders to a central server, which will then do all the calculations and send the results to the clients. This means the clients will only have to do some simple interpolation and rendering, making the game have much lower system requirements.
You can have a huge game by having a central PC/server do all the heavy calculations and simply connecting with your low-end client PCs

A big part of the Sim City controversy is that it is a singleplayer game, and they added some BS online components that nobody wanted to try to justify adding always-on DRM to a singleplayer game.

This is hugely different from PA which actually has multiplayer, and actually benefits from a client-server model. It's basically just giving an RTS the same multiplayer model that FPS games have used for ages.

Great! That's the answer i hoped to hear.

PS: This "flowfield" stuff looked really amazing. The tweaking and tuning of this tech appears to take a good deal of time and work, but it also looks like hell of a lot of fun to play with. A part of me envy you for working on such a cool project. Thanks a lot for your enthusiasm.

Online servers mean that you use something like this:

Uber are Devs and players too.
They don't answer to non-gaming management or shareholders.
You can trust them not to lie to you, except those deemed lies-to-gamers (have cookie if you get that reference).

I'm just slightly concerned about what the latency effects could be if the server is doing the pathfinding in online games. If it's the one actually pathfinding over large distances, I may have misinterpreted that.

A client-server-model does not mean a noticable lag, assumed the network latency is low enough. If the server is a local process, then you can forget about it, it will do as if there would be no client-server-model. It just causes a strict seperation of calculation and rendering, which is an advantage on modern multicore CPUs.

I did some network programming myself, and i was suprised how fast an application can be (running in a company LAN with thousands of computers). If you have a bad connection then you will have an impact, sure. But then it does not matter if the clients do the math or if its done by a server.
Maybe the client-server-model is even better suited for such a situation, because the server can be placed at a "central" node, where each client has a decent connection to, instead of having one client as a bottleneck.

I said this somewhere else but i'll say it again here because i like it.

If you click the create game function in the online section, a server will be made for you in the cloud.

if you are in the lan section (or skirmish) there is no create game, there is host game where you are the server.

PA may or may not have such distinct sections but thats how it works.

Slightly off topic. I wonder what the latency would be like for us in Australia and New Zealand. I hope it wouldn't affect the gameplay.

I'd imagine there are two kinds of "Create game" in the online section - create a public game on an online (cloud) server, or create a public game hosted on your own computer (WAN instead of LAN)

The actual latency for most RTS games is usually around a tenth to half a second, inherent to the design of each game's networking. When you give an order to a unit in an RTS you usually get some kind of immediate animation and or vocalization masking the delay, then some time later the unit moves. This is because even though most RTS games don't have an explicit "server", your commands actually get sent to all other players, acknowledged by their games, and only proceeds after all clients agree.

As for Aussies / Kiwis, we've tried to be nice and make sure we have servers available for players in that region.*

edit: * For previous games made here at Uber.

In FA Forever, the conventional (but sadly not widespread) wisdom is a steady ping of up to 500ms results in perfectly acceptable gaming, although some margin is desirable to absorb any potential spikes.
After playing on a regular basis I can confidently say this bares scrutiny, and generally my down-under packets tend to only arrive too late to some Eastern Europeans (and theirs to me), so if you stay off Estonian PA servers you'll probably wind up OK.

Unfortunately the less technically literate in the FAF community just hit F11, and proceed to berate anyone with >250ms as a "lager" (they always leave out the 2nd 'g' for some reason), and refuse to be told otherwise.
This is despite the fact the "Network Stats" usually highlights that someone else slowing the sim down with their crap PC, thankfully this shouldn't be an issue in PA.

Unless Uber are deliberately hosting servers (they said they were considering it during one of the streams, but I've not seen any confirmation), the usual paradigm is that when you click "create game" for an internet game, you create the server process on your machine and advertise that. Which would mean that your internet connection becomes the bottleneck; you'll get instant response but the other players are at the mercy of your ISP.

Please note that when Neutrino mentions "the server" he means "the server process", which can be running on your machine (if you are the host), on a seperate machine (if they are the host), or on a dedicated machine (either yours, or one you rent / Uber provide on the internet). "The server" is the code that does all the calculations, keeps track of all the units, processes player orders and lets "the clients" know where to render the units and what pretty explosions to show. This is true even for single player games (e.g. The Sims, Bioshock Infinite); for a single player game, your PC hosts the server process, as well as the client process.

For big games, where you have thousands of units and/or tens of players, the machine hosting the server needs a lot of grunt to keep track of all those units and process those player orders. For only a few players, it's highly likely that an older PC you don't use any more would have enough grunt to host a dedicated server, or a new ninja gaming rig has enough horsepower spare to run a 4 player server without impacting local client performance.

For areas with known weak links to the rest of the internets (e.g. AU/NZ) just make sure that the server is running "locally" and it's the rest of us that'll get the lag

They are considering if they should host their own servers besides other servers. So players get the option to play on Uber servers but also on other servers like the one you host yourself. Take Simcity for example, players only have the option to play on AE servers.

So nobody is forced to play on a certain server and everybody can host their own server.

Have I told you how much I love you lately?

ping shouldn't matter too much in an RTS. The most you'll see if the connection is good on both ends is about ~300 which isn't the end of the world if the netcode is good.

I really really hope they make the 'ping' of old die a terrible death.

There are way way way too many players out there who have no idea what it really means, and it's irritating as hell to not be able to join games in the US just because your ping is 'bad'.

If anything, a utility that fires off a SpeedTest.net test and comes back with some numbers, along with a PC performance test that gives a proper rating, would be the most useful.

But ping / pc performance / etc may all be a moot point anyways with the new server architecture. Poor connection / pc will, as far as I understand, make YOUR experience bad, not everyone else's.

Ping definitely matters in P2P (ie. Sup Com). Also, it's very much not uncommon to get >300ms (even > 500ms) from Australia to Europe/USA. Netcode can't help with that.

Client/Server (ie. PA) it matters less, although it still defines the delay between a player issuing a command and the command being carried out. Half a second can be alot in many situations, but unlike P2P it only affects the player with the high ping.

I agree it matters less than in FPS's or games like DOTA though.

I agree, too many people think it's the only thing that matters. It was especially infuriating in sup com due to the enforced 500ms updates anyway.

Well I get about 300 to NZ. Bearing in mind that NZ is as physically far away as it is possible to get on planet earth relative to me. Conclusion: If you get more than 300 to anywhere then it is a problem with either connection.