How will Splash damage release PC dedicated server files?

(system) #41

There is the possibility that there will be no public server files. So the only way to have a server is to rent one.

(Nail) #42

“My guess would be we’re looking at some form of P2P for the “blurring of MP and SP” and that’s not going to go down well.”

now that’s an assumption I doubt anyone could make, what does SP, MP have to do with P2P ?
this kind of conjecture is just assinine

(Auzner) #43

[QUOTE=SuperWaz;279929]For example, they’ve been asked to explain how this supposed “blurring of the multiplayer and single player games” will work, with regards to servers, yet they choose not to answer.

Are the PC dedis going to be widespread, or only private and for competitive gaming? We don’t even know this. My guess would be we’re looking at some form of P2P for the “blurring of MP and SP” and that’s not going to go down well.[/QUOTE]
I imagine when you do single player it will make a your computer into a private server with certain permissions such as only one user allowed and no one can see it. Coop will be the same but your friends can join in and you can probably limit slots. That change can probably be made while still in the same game. The main point is no matter what you do with your character in the confines of the game they can be used anywhere with the same configuration. Fully human vs human games probably need dedicated servers but coop might be doable with just a listen server. Or maybe you can join servers set just for coop or competitive. It would be a better use of resources if most dedicated servers were competitive since that is 16 players whereas coop is just 8 connections. I feel all of this is pretty self explanatory for what they’ve said so far about the game. If I’m way off, it will be easy to figure out once the method of running a dedicated server is revealed.

Online doesn’t equal reading. It means the account is logged in and a browser tab is open.

Who wants to explain something around an NDA on a weekend? They’re not selective, they have jobs and lives which offer better things than a forum. They’re beyond sitting around on being “the bosses” here. Being a month away from release has probably made everyone extremely busy.

(ButchCassidy) #44

I think he’s refering to the campaign where you can start playing on your own and invite friends to join you…

Will you be able to put a campaign “in play” on a dedicated server and players simply join the campaign or are dedicated servers going to be more traditional with set map rotations etc…

Again I don’t think anyone knows except SD and they are not exactly talkative about the subject of dedicated servers at the moment…
There are almost two weeks of public holidays about to start at easter in the UK…and the following week is Brink release week.
I would hope that they will release the server info before that easter break?

(Cankor) #45

Yes they are, they were asked point blank in an interview and responded that they weren’t saying anything about how the servers worked. It was the interview with the really crappy sound quality where the interviewer had the recording device on the table closer to himself, you could hear the questions OK but not so much the responses.

My take on it was it was outside of their control, so they couldn’t talk about it.

[QUOTE=SuperWaz;279929]Are the PC dedis going to be widespread, or only private and for competitive gaming? We don’t even know this. My guess would be we’re looking at some form of P2P for the “blurring of MP and SP” and that’s not going to go down well.

PLEEEEEEEEEEASE SD, shed some light on the matter.[/QUOTE]

I’m sure it won’t be just for “competitive gaming”, but you do bring up a good point on how it will work on the blending between multi-player and single player.

[QUOTE=Nail;279944]“My guess would be we’re looking at some form of P2P for the “blurring of MP and SP” and that’s not going to go down well.”

now that’s an assumption I doubt anyone could make, what does SP, MP have to do with P2P ?
this kind of conjecture is just assinine[/QUOTE]

Not really. If you start your own match and allow only allow Friends to play, what server do you start on? It would have to be an empty one somewhere, or the peer to peer thing for that part, which would be weird and not really buying it but it’s possible.

[QUOTE=Auzner;279974]I imagine when you do single player it will make a your computer into a private server with certain permissions such as only one user allowed and no one can see it. Coop will be the same but your friends can join in and you can probably limit slots.
[/QUOTE]

Doubtful, very few your computers will have the bandwidth to act as a server themselves (what if you have 7 friends join you for co-op? what if you set it up so anyone can join yet you are playing your own campaign?), this is why peer to peer was developed.

(Cankor) #46

In regards to the possibility of not releasing the server files to the public, this would be just so they aren’t hacked right? What do people do when they hack server files? The only think i have heard was to make servers where you can rank up really quickly. If that were the case, you could counter it by having the master server check the XP/hour times and if one server is way out of wack just black-list it so it can’t update the stats.

You could still make it so you get more XP and stay within the bounds, but the only reason they might care is to make sure the stats they are checking for balance issues are real ones. For this they could just use stats from trusted GSP’s or something, some way so they know the servers aren’t hacked.

Seems like with no leader boards the only thing to care about is the leader boards for challenges. So maybe if you want to be on one of those leaderbaords you have to use a “ranked” server or something?

I don’t see it as the end of the world though if they only let “trusted providers” have the files. That’s how it was done on BC2; admittedly there were issues when trying to run Rcon tools, but it was workable. It would be a huge shame (and questionable in terms of giving the customer competive pricing from GSPs) if they went with a single provider though like BLOPS.

(Auzner) #47

It depends on the game for both. Some games being a server isn’t much effort on your processor but you need a lot of bandwidth. L4D is about 128kbit per player so I usually don’t have trouble hosting 3 other people. It’s when there’s a lot of activity my CPU isn’t strong enough to both play and host so everyone connected to me suffers. Or else I could probably run a dedicated server and no one would ever notice it’s on a residential connection.

For Brink one would probably have to exit or transfer over to a dedicated server in the rare event they have 7 friends jump into their single player experience. Once you figure out what your home connection is capable of you just limit it to 3 or 4 friends then switch over if more people are messaging you.

(SuperWaz) #48

All I am after is Splash Damage to confirm that my game playing experience won’t be dependent on someone hosting the game.

P2P can partially work on consoles since the hardware is all similar, even though connections obviously aren’t. Even so, it becomes very laggy with larger numbers.

This does not apply to PC’s, some of which will struggle. Put simply, we don’t want another IWNet.

Please, spill the beans.

(Nail) #49

“Not really. If you start your own match and allow only allow Friends to play, what server do you start on? It would have to be an empty one somewhere, or the peer to peer thing for that part, which would be weird and not really buying it but it’s possible.”

you realize that’s what dedicated servers are, empty till someone joins ?
if you have your own you can password protect it for a clan server or to only allow selected guests, peer to peer is a console thing much spit on with disgust by PC players, I have 3 servers just waiting

(Cankor) #50

[QUOTE=Nail;280047]you realize that’s what dedicated servers are, empty till someone joins ?
if you have your own you can password protect it for a clan server or to only allow selected guests, peer to peer is a console thing much spit on with disgust by PC players, I have 3 servers just waiting[/QUOTE]

Of course, but that’s a lot of servers with just a couple of people in them. Also, these would be servers either hosted by the GSP’s for advertising or by the devs themselves. Servers put up by clans most likely aren’t going to be used for this. Clan servers are going to be full of people using the server browser (playnow) in a classic sense.

Assuming you can set a server up to be used in campaign mode, what’s the incentive for clans to do that? Chances are you’d never get to use your own server because it probably wouldn’t be running the particular map you’d be in on your campaign (everyone will be at different points in the campaign at different times, needing different maps). The only incentive is to advertise the clan. So this means lots of 3rd party (non-clan) servers.

I doubt its done this way (I said that before) because it’s a whole other server mechanic in addition to the 3 they already have to deal with, but it’s not unreasonable and certainly not “asinine” to think they may have it set up that way for Campaign play.

(Nail) #51

I have 3 servers, I’m not part of a clan, the one that’s running is empty 99% of the time, it’s a nostalgia 6 stock map ETPro server, never know when I want to play W:ET on a proper server

PC servers will run maps in the order they want, it won’t be anything like consoles

you don’t seem to know anything about PC servers, that’s ok, just don’t assume things

here’s a bunch of servers run by guys like me

http://et.splatterladder.com/?mod=serverlist

(Cankor) #52

[QUOTE=Nail;280053]I have 3 servers, I’m not part of a clan, the one that’s running is empty 99% of the time, it’s a nostalgia 6 stock map ETPro server, never know when I want to play W:ET on a proper server

PC servers will run maps in the order they want, it won’t be anything like consoles

you don’t seem to know anything about PC servers, that’s ok, just don’t assume things

here’s a bunch of servers run by guys like me

http://et.splatterladder.com/?mod=serverlist[/QUOTE]

lmao

I know about servers, you just aren’t understanding what I’m trying to say. My point is IT MAY BE DIFFERENT than what we are used to. Why? Because of the whole mingleplayer thing and campaign mode.

Lets take your 3 servers as an example. For these to be useful to anyone else they would have to be public, so I am going to assume they are public and not passworded so just you and your friends can use them.

Say someone starts up a campaign game by himself, and marks it “friends only”. He is then loaded into an empty server which loads the correct map which matches the point in the campaign that he’s playing. Let’s say the system gives him your server. That server is now unavailable for you to play on, because you are not his friend. One guy has hogged a public server all by himself (or maybe a friend joins him so there’s two guys on it now) and made it unavailable for the masses, and also for the server owner.

This is what I mean by maybe not being able to play on your own server when you are playing campaign mode. Even if he marked his game open to anyone, if he started on your server what are the chances it’s running the same map you want if you want to play campaign mode? Sure you could still join him, but you’d be playing in his campaign and not your own.

Campaign mode and friends list stuff makes things different than what we are used to.

There’s lots of stuff we don’t know. We don’t even know if you need to tell your server to run in campaign mode or free play mode (I strongly suspect you do). If there is a choice, most people running their own servers (and I would incldue your 3 servers in this) will have there servers set up for free play mode so they can actually use them (see above for the campaign mode thing where someone else hogs them).

So who’s running the campaign mode servers? Not you. Not Clans. It would either be GSP’s trying to attract more business or Bethesda running them. Maybe they are making deals with GSP’s right now that if they want to host Brink they need to provide a certain percentage of public campaign servers or something. Who knows.

Campaign mode may have changed things, or maybe it didn’t. You don’t know yet, and neither do I.

(Auzner) #53

Campaign mode is probably just a map rotation order. If you join late then you miss those parts. If it gets empty then whoever first joins sets the map they left off on. Otherwise you have to do single player or a listen server to really play them “in order”.

One guy reserving a server for himself and his friends only is the reality of hosting. If he’s alone for 10 minutes maybe the server auto kicks him if it’s not public and no one has joined. That way it’s open to be public again or gives a private group a spot.

(Nail) #54

I guess a Listen Server would be sort of P2P same as a home hosted, although ded server files use less resources

(Cankor) #55

[QUOTE=Auzner;280070]Campaign mode is probably just a map rotation order. If you join late then you miss those parts. If it gets empty then whoever first joins sets the map they left off on. Otherwise you have to do single player or a listen server to really play them “in order”.
[/QUOTE]

It’s all speculation until they tell us how it works. But they have advertised that you can play campaign mode, and your Friends can join you. So I don’t think you’d ever be forced to play your campaign single player. It will just have to find an empty server for you if you want to play with friends.

I don’t doubt they’ll have a bunch of them available day 1, but they will need a lot more than they normally would because of the issue I noted above. So what happens in 2 years when the GSP’s are tired of hosting free servers and ready to move on? Obviously far fewer people will be playing campaign mode, but it could be those servers disappear and you don’t even have the option anymore.

Lot’s of the info they put out really seemed to be geared towards console users, and there was never a distinction between PC and console when talking about server migration and “losers walk” and stuff like that. It all made sense in a peer to peer world, but it raised lots of questions in a dedicated server world.

If you are playing “versus” and have a fireteam of eight guys and you lose a match in campaign mode, you are going to be moved to a different dedicated server. Unless there is another group of eight ready at the same time, on the same map, close to the same server you are close to so you all get decent pings, you will be waiting for the server to fill. This will happen after every map.

All that said, PC players will probably finish the campaign the first week and then it will be business as usual on “playnow” servers.

(Nail) #56

sorry, never really thought about it in those regards, I’ll play as always, offline SP, and for MP, LAN or go online, pick a server, can’t see PC players worried about that type of host migration, can’t see it working

(Cankor) #57

No worries. It will be certainly be interesting to see how it’s dealt with. I doubt it will affect me either after the first week or two anyway, at which point I’ll be done with the campaign and just playing on our own servers.

(Nail) #58

yeah, never really though that stuff would be included for PC, didn’t seem to fit, console stuff only I thought

[edit] when you go online it will probably be handled by Steam browser thing

(ButchCassidy) #59

Been doing quite a bit of research and just some general searching for Brink server details and came across these replies from Richard Ham about some server options…

[I]5) What happens if you don’t have 14 people playing together?
Does the game fill in the rest with AI teammates or you can have 4v4, 5v5 matches as well?
And how does this effect co-op single player and the story itself?

It depends on how you’re playing. Most of the time, if you’re choosing to play through one of Brink’s two storyline campaigns, AI teammates will automatically fill in for players if not enough are in the game (this is true for solo, co-op, and versus gameplay). But if you like, on PC you can set up your own servers and change the default rules (such as turning AI characters off entirely, changing the max team sizes, things like that).[/I]

[I]7) How mod friendly will Brink be?
Do you think the game will suit the desires and needs of the competitive FPS community?

We’re very keen on making a great game that supports a rich online scene. One example of how seriously we take that is our dedicated servers on the PC. Those of you that played Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars will remember that we had Ranked Servers there to ensure the integrity of player statistics being reported. Unfortunately that meant you couldn’t ever customize the server settings or run any user-created content on them without losing the server’s Ranked status (and with it the player statistics). A side-effect of this was that a lot players completely ignored any server that wasn’t Ranked, and thus never got to see any of the cool content created by the community. For Brink, we’ve decided to retool the way our servers work to allow people to customize their server to their liking while still having it report statistics. As for the competitive community, we’ve always supported competitive play in our games and look forward to continuing that with Brink. We’re bringing back the competition-friendly Stopwatch game mode from our Enemy Territory games, and also have some other cool things in the works.[/I]

Source
This all is all very encouraging as it suggests that we will indeed be getting freely available dedi files for PC.
No Ranked/Unranked crap either…

(Diablo85) #60

While this does all sound very good, I wonder how much of this still holds true. I think this is an old Q&A. That interview is from a year ago iirc. Things could have been changed by now. Hope I’m just being a pessimist though and things turn out like they said in that article.

It does make me wonder why they first release information like that and now keep quiet about it. If the things where still the same I would assume they could simply point to that information again.

This is also a good piece of (old) information aimed at the PC community : http://www.crossfire.nu/?x=forum&mode=item&id=28425

Shame they stopped being so open after the first delay got announced.