Seamless Landscape, No Loading Zones...Possible or Unrealistic? Options

[Shadowmancer]

I'm sure you've discussed this before, but I cannot find any thread discussing it in detail. All of them seem to take the idea of a 'zoneless' world as a given. I'm no programmer, but I'm wondering just how realistic an option is this? Yes, it is a nice idea, yes it would be great -but if it's no big deal to do, why don't all MMORPGs these days have no zones? True, there are a few in which it works, but they are a minority.

I remember trying a game called Dark and Light once... (www.darkandlight.com)
It was in Beta and as far as I know it still is. They had no loading zones either, it was all one seamless game and it was free (however they said this was subject to change). The Biggest MMORPG Ever was their slogan.

* No zones, no loading time, all players within the same world.
* A medieval world of 15 000-square-mile of land (not including seas)
* A complete, original and easy-to-use automated transportation and warp system.
* Hot spot management system: wherever you are in the huge world of DnL, you can call for or be asked for help to conquest, fight, defend...

"Sounds nice!" I remember thinking to myself. But they had one BIG problem that none of the adverts told you about. Once you loaded up the game, MAJOR lag. Maybe it was my pc, but a friend of mine also tried it out and his lagged just as much. He asked what was up with the lag on ther game chat and the response was that it was always like this, but the game is still being developed.

Well, ok. But the game has been in this 'being developed, feel free to test' state for over a year now. It seems that Dark and Light are struggling to find a solution to their lag problem. Big game world, big lag.

To summarise: I think DnL took on more than they could handle with their 15 000-square-miles of land and no loading zones game world. I hope the same doesn't happen here and that you research how reasonable it is to make a seamless world. Loading zones are a pain, yes, but they are normally there for a reason and in the end they can solve bigger problems.

So, how realistic is it to say you will make a seamless game world?

[Jerky]

Every problem has a solution. I never played DnL, but I knew a it about it. To take a stab at why their game had so much lag, there are a couple of things to think about. First, is how much data needs to be be transfered back and forth. You need to find a medium between encryption and small packet size. They could have had a problem there. The other place they could have had problems was with the server itself. A lot of games, to keep their initial budget down, would test their tech on cheap servers, to create a proof of concept. This may have been their problem. If you remember, this wasn't Wish's problem. They bought their server up front. I do not know why DnL had that much lag, I'm just wagering guesses.

Now, as far as the zoneless, seamless world thing goes, there are 2 parts to the problem that need good solutions. The first is the client. You need the client to be able to "stream" information without noticeable slowdowns. The most common solution here is a form of paging. Terrain that is paged. Items that are paged, everything. This is a way of partitioning the information into manageable chunks. Now, assuming you can pull this portion off (the Ogre engine already has some solutions for this), you then have to address the second part, and probably the harder and more crucuail part.

This second part would be what happens on the server. This would also be a type of partitioning. Your server would need to know how to load balance and control the different "zones." Now, I use that word only because that is how the server needs to see them. Feel free to replace it with another word, if that one scares you. What needs to happen is the server being able to know what is happeneing in each zone, be able to do fast lookups to see what is going in in each zone. A more robust design would be able to change the size of these zones to be able to equally divide the load onto the server. You would then need to design it so that if one server goes down, you can have another take its place without taking down the whole world. This, as you can see, is goign to be the harder challenge to overcome.

Since I'm on vacation atm, I won't go into more detail, but that should get you started into deciding what is best for your particular game.

As far as whether its realistic or not, I would say that depends on your goals and your scope. I would say that its realistic for us, but we are not done with it yet.

[Shadowmancer]

Ok, no detail-wise that was perfect. Thanks for your reply, it's obvious this has all been/is being well thought-out. Glad to see that everthing is in capable hands

On a continued note however,

A lot of games, to keep their initial budget down, would test their tech on cheap servers, to create a proof of concept.

You hypothesised that this may have been the reason for DnL's lag problem. This hints that you will not be taking the same road and so I am wondering from where your funding is going to (hopefully?) come from...?

Enjoy your holiday by the way!

This post has been edited by Shadowmancer: Jun 3 2007, 11:35 AM

[Jerky]

Very good question. Worst-case scenario, we ask for donations, but I hope it doesnt come to that. We have been very lucky up to this point to not have needed any donations. I have received 1, while the rest has been put in by the leaders themselves. I know a number of our leaders have servers and bandwidth available to them for our internal testing phase.

I would say, for a public testing phase, this is the time when a cheap server will no longer cut it. If we make it to the public beta time, we better have something better lined up, otherwise we would fall right into that hypothesized scenario.

[Jerky]

Thought you might like to see this too:
http://www.drizzle.com/~scottb/gdc/continuous-world.htm

Its how they made Dungeon Siege's continuous (seamless) world. I have been going through my links, and I just found that one again.

[Hawkins]

I think the big world in DnL is driven by a blade-like server array, problem may arise when mass of players go back and forth between servers. "Seemless" means that coordinates, client messages must be handled correctly in the case when mass of players grouping together crossing the server borders. As far as I recall, that's how Dragon Empire failed, it failed to calculate the server boundary coordinates correctly, and they failed to optimize the mass of messages growing exponentially when mass of players grouping together and on the the server boundaries.

On the other hand, I believe that the advantage of a zoned design is that it doesn't have any server boundaries, player toons are brought from one server to another via the loading time.

This post has been edited by Hawkins: Jun 19 2008, 11:59 PM

[Jerky]

The disadvantage being the suspension of belief and the break in immersion. That is one of the reasons why I like the Gothic series more than the Elder Scrolls series. Looking past the many flaws, I find all the Gothic worlds much more immersive. Much of that has to do with the seamless world.

Obviously, this is a personal taste of my own that is not shared with many people, and I am willing to admit that, but we decided very early on that seamless was a must. Wish was the reason, not Gothic. Gothic only helps drive that nail deeper in my mind that it is a feature at the TOP of our list.

Now, looking at the technology, it is not an impossible feat. It will be a difficult one, and one that entails proper thought and design from the outset, but one in which we have had in mind since 2005. Can I make any guarantees? No. Will we try our darndest to make it happen? Yes. I think the benefits far outweigh the costs in this particular case.

Feel free to refute my side .

[Hawkins]

Of course, we like a seemless world. That's actually why we love Wish and PW. We are all getting sick of today's zoned EQ clones.

On the other hand, I was just comparing purely from the technology point of view.

This post has been edited by Hawkins: Jun 20 2008, 12:02 AM

[StaticGrazer]

Of course, we like a seemless world. That's actually why we love Wish and PW. We are all getting sick of today's zoned EQ clones.

On the other hand, I was just comparing purely from the technology point of view.

It seems that programming a world is more in-depth than I had originaly thought.

I can't wait for classes to start. 8)