Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Guitarman]

when can we turn in our bonanza marbles anyways?

[dasva]

when can we turn in our bonanza marbles anyways?

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/index.shtml

[Guitarman]

750 points for cocatrice meat?! Good lord. Whoever made this month's campaign was high.

[NynJa]

Theyre all evolution items, but they blanketed it all as 750

[dasva]

So according to the latest freshly picked apparently they were completely unprepared for the fact people would actually transfer to windows when consoles got shut down lol

[Funkworkz]

I hate how they continuously discuss server load as an excuse, but the overall population is is nowhere near that of the 2006-2008 era. Where did all of the resources go when there were 10,000 people online on each world, with twice as many worlds?

[Mojo]

The game is different now though. The load put on the server per character is probably much worse given that they've never had a major rehaul and that they just keep bolting shit onto the side. Going by just what we can observe (client/server traffic), I feel like their servers are working much harder than they need to.

[fantasticdan]

The game is bottlenecked for 56k connections, how much data traffic can the servers really have with so few people playing?

And again, if they really wanted to reduce server costs, they could do merges and shut down most of them. I bet in reality, the servers cost so little to keep running that bothering to go through the effort to merge them is prohibitively expensive by comparison.

[NynJa]

they could do merges and shut down most of them

plsno

[Mojo]

The game is bottlenecked for 56k connections, how much data traffic can the servers really have with so few people playing?

And again, if they really wanted to reduce server costs, they could do merges and shut down most of them. I bet in reality, the servers cost so little to keep running that bothering to go through the effort to merge them is prohibitively expensive by comparison.

When's the last time you tried playing on 56k? Some events are unplayable when tethered to my phone on 2G (which is close to 56k speeds).

[dasva]

When's the last time you tried playing on 56k? Some events are unplayable when tethered to my phone on 2G (which is close to 56k speeds).

I did a long time ago tethered to my old phone. Even back in the day it was pretty bad in any zone that had a decent number of players and/or near large groups of mobs. Like basically any campaign battle, besieged or anywhere in jueno lol. And by bad I mean it was completely pointless to even try since in battle areas I'd be dead for a couple of minutes before I even saw a mob. And that was back in the day... nowadays just the static server load per character is way higher. It's nice that they are considering it but strange that they way they are getting around it is to introduce things that they figure most people wont actually use. Also wonder how it will work for people buying it once and using it as basically a storage for glamor gear or stuff they don't plan on using for a long time

[Byrthnoth]

I turned on wireshark and captured some packets between SE and my computer. Maximum observed incoming packet size was 1279 bytes (outgoing was typically <200bytes), and there weren't very many at 1200+.

If you get 2 packets per second and their maximum size is around 1300 bytes (maybe 1280 = 256*5 is their internal cap + 28 byte UDP header?), you'd be looking at 2.5kB/s down. I remember the 56k days, and that really would have been a pretty reasonable estimation of the minimum reliable 56k speed.

I guess point is that they are capping themselves well below the theoretical limit of UDP and 56k.

[arus2001]

I remember feeling like a king logging into AOL at 28800bps.

[geno3302]

I'm unsure if this is still true, but xbox/xbox 360 days as a developer you were limited to 7KB/sec including voice data for xbox live games and you had to assume around 50% packet loss.

Even today games don't really eat up much too bandwidth, it's mostly latency (which I assume is way higher on a phone tether) and packet loss that causes lag.

[Byrthnoth]

I'm sure every dev team sets their up/down limits to some extent, but I can't find anything official out about the PS2. This page has the most technical information I've seen, but it doesn't give a limit: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...es.php?print=1

Still, in practice it looks like it's about 2.5KB/sec down for FFXI and almost negligible up.

[Mojo]

I turned on wireshark and captured some packets between SE and my computer. Maximum observed incoming packet size was 1279 bytes (outgoing was typically <200bytes), and there weren't very many at 1200+.

If you get 2 packets per second and their maximum size is around 1300 bytes (maybe 1280 = 256*5 is their internal cap + 28 byte UDP header?), you'd be looking at 2.5kB/s down. I remember the 56k days, and that really would have been a pretty reasonable estimation of the minimum reliable 56k speed.

I guess point is that they are capping themselves well below the theoretical limit of UDP and 56k.

What were you doing when you measured this? Also just restating my original point that so much of the network traffic is not necessary. If that's the way their network code is I imagine the server code suffers from similar inefficiencies that have piled up over the years.

[Byrthnoth]

I was cleaving in Reisenjima.

You could argue that the real stress test would probably be to record it while zoning, as we know that's a time when SE is maxing out their packet capacity, so I did that just now and the maximum packet size I recorded was 1247 bytes (IPv4, 1205 bytes of data).

[Sechs]

Wonder how big of a mess it would be for them to raise the upper limit of the packets within their netcode logic.
Would that even be enough to improve performance without creating further consequences in their architecture, or would it require way more adjustments?

[arus2001]

I'm not sure the issue is so much them sending data as it is the servers routinely saving ever X whatever. Compared to back in the day, inventory is basically 3x as large with whatever KI bloat followed. Not entirely sure how they grouped zone servers, either, which would obviously need to keep track of what's alive and where it is even if no one's around. No doubt some of this could probably be mitigated by new tech that's come out since game launch, but do we really want to believe SE would've invested in it, particularly at this point?

Either way, after XIV leeched XI resources from like 2008 to Abyssea, I can't bring myself to trust them saying revenue from wardrobe and such is really for the game. :/

[Dew]

So not sure how accurate this is, but this is coming from jp side. In september they are adding augements to all the armor sets from ambuscade. They are also talking about REMA upgrades and Soa2. Supposedly 2 new areas and hard mode content coming. Again I'm not sure how accurate this stuff is, but jps are a buzz with this stuff.