Alpha dedicated servers?

Thanks for the replies, guys!

...I'll tell my HP solutions agent to chill out

Remember that most of the data used by a game is just visual data, mainly textures and the like, so for a sever that doesn't need to do any rendering all that data isn't going to be needed, I'd be very surprised if a planet used more that 100kb (yes just kilobytes) to represent what is needed for the server, and much less for units. The only real impact on RAM that I can think of would be the flow fields since they are essentially textures which may take up a fair bit of memory but for the most part I still doubt it would need more than 8gb as a 512x512 flow map only uses 256kb-512kb, so you could easily have hundreds without going anywhere near 8bg. But who knows what sort of data structures Uber are actually using for PA (well except Uber of course) so we'll probably just have to wait and see.

In our case though, the server is still gonna be doing a LOT of work. All the visual and such is client side, but the server, whether run locally or run on an actual server, is doing ALL the sim work. Unit movements, orders, queues, history management, anything else that needs to be tracked, calculated, recorded, etc. Your server will never be GPU bound, but it will certainly run into CPU limits, and likely even memory limits.

I love everything you just said. Having someone develop a game specifically with maxing out modern machines not only at the back of their mind, but as an up front design goal is just phenomenal. Far too many times in recent years we keep finding out a year after launch that the company was planning from the very begining to port to a consol and designed the specs accordingly.

The server bandwidth requirements may end up being the biggest concern for private servers it seems. If the server needs ~30 kB/s per player that may already discount a pretty large percentage of the world from hosting >8 player games on their own server.

Pulled that number out of my *** however.

I'm not too worried about that though - look at just how many games have servers available for rent. Battlefield BC 2 for example - lots and lots of servers that were definitely not just hosted in someone's basement.

If pings < 500 aren't an issue, it's also much easier to grab a server from another country / wherever is cheapest, and you can get some big pipes even if the ping is like 250.

Wel for the high speed FPS I play I usually get pissed by pings over 120.
But faf works ok.
And I think bandwidth wise you cant compare Any FPS with what they aim for with PA.

Well, that clears up quite a lot of my misunderstandings then

Still looking forward to the alpha though :mrgreen:

Host a LAN. Invite your friends. Bathe in Cheetos and Dew.
Bandwidth problem solved.

In a game like PA, any number under 300 should be playable when it comes to ping. When I play LoL on the NA server I have 200 ping and I simply can't play with a 0.4 sec delay cause the clicking needs to be very precise and the combat is ridiculously fast there.

I do believe playing PA with a big ping will not be a big issue unless you also lag, then it will probably be very annoying. Slight delay is okay with strategy but lag? Hell no :evil:

SupCom:FA forces the ping to a constant 500ms. So yeah, 300 will be totally fine.

The network model is asynchron. It mean that the server will only send you want you need at the moment. For example, you will to not have information about units on every planets, but only on the one you currently are.
It means that when you will look at another planet, you will have to wait before the units display.
I except that high lag will cause more problems than in Supcom for the lagging player.
Hopefully, the server and other players don't care as it will not impact their game experience.

They probaly will just send all the units, since to determine what you would need would also need the server to wait for a view frustum or anything from the client back, which would delay it even further. Just thinking about how a typical client-server model works, don't know how they will implement it ofcourse.

neutrino already said somewhere that they are sending only the units that the player currently can see.
I don't know if he meant "can see on his screen" or "are not under fog of war".
I would guess the first version could have pretty heavy lag problems (zooming around is way too fast for this?!), the second version however could work well, since the server already knows what a player is supposed to be able to see or not. It might be possible to only send the units of the planet a player is currently looking at, but only the units that are directly visible on screen? At least the 500ms ping from SupCom:FA would be far too high for this, zooming around would let units pop out and in constantly.