[Suggestion] Do Not Release The Server ! Instead...

Do not release the server !

It *will* get pirated away.

Instead, I suggest that the "Uber / PA " client-server infrastructure includes
an option to "publish content" (as in Starcraft 2 maps & mods),
which will then be available on the server in the custom games/modes/maps section.

Of course, this means that modders are able to privately upload content using their PA account,
so that they can test mods with server-side content.
Optionally they could invite other players to test their mods in private games.

Anyway, that's just a suggestion, I'll play the game anyway since I'm an early KS backer and it looks so awesome.

The server won't be released until late beta or so.

How would modders be able to mod without access to the server files? They have to release it as they plan to stick by the no-DRM policy they initially promised. Neutrino has mentioned a couple of times he is aware that the way to beat pirates is to offer a better service. I think this is the best way to go about it.

Indeed.

Not to mention the fact that in 20 years time, If I ever feel somewhat nostalgic, and want to fire up a game of PA on my future magical space computer, i wouldn't be able to do so if Uber no longer offers the servers anymore. As they release the server as well, future me shouldn't have too many problems other than spending ages fiddling with a VM, emulator or some other compatibility translation software.

And how does this make any aspect of anything related to PA better?

it does not.
Also it would clearly violate the terms that Uber stated at the KS: No DRM in the final Version.
Uber has already shown that they intended to keep the promises made on the KS, no matter what.

I'm pretty sure this idea isn't going anywhere.

On the other hand, EA has been doing a lot of corporate restructuring recently. Perhaps if they have a job opening for a "Content Control Distribution Advisor" the OP might want to have a look...

How in God's name will modders be able to write code if they don't know what they're modifying?

There is a good business case to be made not releasing the server. But not much else. I don't see a scenario where we don't release the server by launch. We'll be working hard to make sure the UberNet experience provides enough value to make people want to have it legitimately. That's the main way to solve the "pirate" problem.

That, and maybe check in code that makes your economy slowly degrade over time if you've downloaded it from TPB due to random space raiders attacking your bases. (JOKING. Not to be construed with a serious suggestion we do even MORE work, especially when it's just to **** with pirates)

^^ Truth be told, I do think that one is a fantastic idea.

In modern games, modders don't tinker with the engine, they rely mostly on scripting providing the right hooks are exposed by the engine scripting API.

E.G. Starcraft 2: you get an editor and you can pretty much do whatever you want, however servers are hosted by Blizzard only. (mayber there was a server leak but I'm not aware of it).

I don't think there is ANY technical issue that forces to release the server.
There is also a good business case to not release it.

I understand that the stance is to release it, and I guess that if PA is to be successful, pirating won't matter much (it does for some companies though).

Actually, I think that in a way, pirating is like getting a demo: if you really like the game you'll buy it. And if you don't like, it, you would'nt have become a regular player anyway, so you wouldn't contribute to the player base.

I was just kicking a random idea, that was probably already discussed internally by uber.

Sadly, this is not typically the case. It's often the excuse used by people who pirate, but reality rarely sees it actually happen. They're just lying to themselves.

That said, while it's easy to justify not releasing a server, for one thing, we pretty much said we would, and even if we hadn't said that, it is VERY hard to provide major gameplay hooks to modders without a server.

Requiring a server connection in Alpha/Beta only makes sense. But if we do our job right, people will want to buy it, rather than pirate it, to get the real experience. Dedicated pirated will be able to get most of the content they want, but they'll find a way to do that, no matter what we do. People will spend hundreds of their own hours to avoid paying $40. It's kind of stupid, but humans in general do a lot of irrational things. ;-)

And how will I know when/where the stock code base does things that I want to change?

If some of the default code is constantly setting conditions that I, as a modder, don't want in my mod, how am I to know what is going wrong if I can't see the code that's causing the problem?

And what if I want to do something that isn't offered by the engine or the API?

You understand Starcraft 2 network architecture wrong. Yes, it's using server for DRM purpose, but it's still synchronous P2P game. It's server not doing simulation of full game , most of calculations done by clients.

In PA server doing mostly everything, like in Diablo 3 or any MMO. But there is not 50 or 100 active objects, but 10,000+ or even 50,000 and more. Did you see what's happen with SimCity? I totally sure that PA servers need much more CPU/RAM and bandwidth.

There is also good business case to not develop any PC-exclusive RTS games, oh shi~! :mrgreen:

There is also many technical issues for that, for example Uber just can't host servers for extremely large games. Hosted servers also will kill modding mostly in PA case because it's not StarCraft.

Piracy never killed any good game or game development studio, bad business decisions killed many.

I say it's clear, for me as a gamer biggest problem of game without server available it's non-zero possibility of complete game death. There is tons of examples when developers/publisher shut down official servers, today one more was announced:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/16/ ... g-shut-off
People paid up to 60$ for some of these games, and now Sony won't spend few thousand $ per month for server support? It's not funny. I personally will never buy any game which can be dead only because some big boss decide it's not profitable anymore.

Yeah I love what's you at Uber doing, but I don't want to see situation when my beloved game is depend on your financial success. I seen to many games which dead because of stupid DRM.

PS: I still think that you should release server 1-3 weeks after game release. I also think it's will be very nice to make some free-weekend promo with online multiplayer only.

You just have to roll with it and find a work-around.

There are a lot of legal issues with releasing the engine itself, as well as the simple fact that most developers don't want to. They put a lot of work into their engines, and releasing it to the public for anyone to use and abuse is putting a lot at risk. Most developers charge more for their Engine's source code than they do for the actual game anyways.

As for modding things that aren't meant to be modded, we ran into this issue in SupCom a few times, and it was rather annoying. However, hopefully, because PA was designed from the ground up to be modded, there should be enough debugging tools and hooks to do anything you want. It also really does depend where "engine" ends and "script" begins. Uber could have done only the physics and rendering system as an "engine" and everything else could be script. Or the engine could go as far as defining all unit classes and the script might only be for unit blueprints and things. Nobody knoooows!

I don't think he mean "source code", I think it's mostly about having server binary for debugging purposes. You know there was multiple fixes in supcom community patch which made by executable editing. It's not easy to reverse and patch hex, but it's technically possible. When you haven't proper server executable or you not able to patch it at all it's impossible to fix stuff like was fixed in supcom, it's also hard to track why some segfaults happen.

I also like idea about source code released one day (e.g after 5-6 years after game release). But it's not really important because community can always create own engine like Spring from scratch, if we got proper game design. Programming not such hard and expensive as game design and balancing.

Oh! The server code. Yeah, you can usually edit that... I think... But I don't see why you would want to modify the server's source code. SupCom's netcode was buggy as ****, PA's seems to be a lot better. What with reconnects and all.

SupCom's was synchronous P2P. PA's is effectively the opposite of that.

But yes, I'm not advocating release of the actual source code - just access to enough stuff on my own machine so I can actually make stuff that isn't "increased damage by x amount".

Source code availability guarantee that game will live forever, even if source code and game content license still proprietary. Currently you can run Doom or Quake even on your toaster because id Software released it's source code under GPL.

You can also check "Freespace 2 Source Code Project" as great example. Volition released Freespace source code in 2002 (game released in 1999) and it's still in development by the community. And it's probably best space combat simulator ever made and it's have decent graphics quality.

You can easily play Warzone 2100 now on modern OS with a modern network stack because the source has been released and some people have been maintaining it.

I sadly can't play anymore TA with my friends because there is too much problems. Especially network connectivity.