How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[MistakeNot]

Black Desert Online has a character creation menu thats almost beyond belief and the game is popular enough that it will have that many players together. For all its faults it is a very visually impressive game.

It's funny. I hear lots of people talking about how great the character creation in Black Desert Online is. I hear very few people talk about how great the gameplay in BDO is.

[kikix12]

It's funny. I hear lots of people talking about how great the character creation in Black Desert Online is. I hear very few people talk about how great the gameplay in BDO is.

Black Desert Online is a game outside of any franchise, so it loses points on that alone, especially with critics. Considering that, the metacritic scores are:

Black Desert Online: 73 from critics and 7.0 from players.
Final Fantasy XIV - A Realm Reborn: 86 from critics and 7.3 from players.
Final Fantasy XIV - Stormblood: 87 from critics and 8.4 from players.

Considering that Final Fantasy is a famous, beloved franchise from a developer that does one thing very well, story, the scores show that mechanically, Black Desert Online is as good as Final Fantasy XIV but lacks in the story and brand. That being said, A Realm Reborn was graded by half of what Black Desert Online was, while Stormblood by about 2/5 of that.

So yes, sorry, but Black Desert Online is not a significantly worse game mechanically going by metacritic. I cannot really say personally, didn't play it, but it's most likely just "different".

[Adrestia]

It's not wireless, but there actually is the technology that allows much lower PING all around the globe. And it's also the same technology that have significant bandwidth potential, so much that used enough it would make even DDoS attacks irrelevant. It's called fiber optics. You're not going to get anything faster than light, after all.

Fiber is a beautiful thing and I’m very happy to have an ONT mounted to my basement wall. However, it doesn’t have much to do with these particular things.

1) When thinking of ping, you have a few factors, and the factor impacted by distance and line speed is called propagation delay. A toll freeway analogy used in one of my networking classes explains it very well.

Imagine each packet of data you want to send is a car on a toll freeway. When that car gets to the toll booth (router) at the start of the freeway, if it’s a busy time, the car sits there for 5 minutes (in memory on the router) essentially not making any progress. Once the car gets through the toll booth, it accelerates to 100 kilometers per hour and then travels a 100km distance (from your house to the game server; ignoring additional “toll booths”/routers which make the argument even stronger) to the desired exit (game server), where it sits in line to pay its toll for another 5 minutes.

Total travel time: 70 minutes
Time spent at toll booths: 10 minutes
Time spent driving: 60 minutes
Distance/speed effect on ping: 60/70=85%

Wow, that stings. What if they increase the speed limit to 200kph but don’t add toll booth operators?

Total travel time: 40 minutes
Time spent at toll booths: 10 minutes
Time spent driving: 30 minutes
Distance/speed effect on ping: 30/40=75%

Hey cool. Increasing the speed makes the distance less of a factor and the time at toll booths more of a factor. What if the car now moves at the speed of light in fiber, 12,251,428 kph? . . . Oh. Better hire some more toll booth operators, because even if the wait is a few milliseconds, it’s still a big chunk of round trip time.

[Adrestia]

2) DDoS is rarely about using up bandwidth. It’s not feasible, really. I’m not sure how the mods would like me discussing specific techniques here, even though it’s all academic and easily viewable on Wikipedia. However, common techniques usually revolve around filling up the RAM on devices like routers with what amounts to nonsense data because no one actually cares to have their requests handled. “Packet loss,” a term fairly commonly known, occurs when the router is so overburdened that it is physically incapable of storing your packet in a queue to handle when it gets time. It drops it instead because there’s nothing it can do to get to you no matter how much time you give it.

The defense to these attacks is partially more/more powerful hardware, but primarily programming the networking devices with some smarts to recognize garbage data and throw it out.

Incidentally, and I should really write a post about this sometime, because it’s BS that SE said “we’re splitting servers sorry not sorry” and then dropped the mic, leaving the players to defend the indefensible: the very same hardware that handles load balancing properly (read as: by network design, not by praying players will spread out the way you want them to) handles DDoS protection!

The go-to device is a Big-IP F5 LTM and it can eat several million requests per day (more than every player Aether has in total logging in every single hour) for breakfast. It’s also highly programmable to thwart practically any type of DoS attack without typically requiring a patch from the manufacturer. It’s not easy to quote a cost since the things are highly modular and it depends on exactly how a given network is set up, but you’re in the ballpark of $200-$400k for the level of traffic Aether sees, plus training your network engineers to administer the thing. How many whale sales is that?

[kikix12]

1) When thinking of ping, you have a few factors, and the factor impacted by distance and line speed is called propagation delay. A toll freeway analogy used in one of my networking classes explains it very well.

First, I will admit that at the time I did write that post I did not know that due to the bouncing around and need of strengthening aspect, light does not achieve its full speed (I did read that it achieves half of its speed?!, but it may be less or more) in fiber, so yes, that would slow down everything by a fair deal.

However, I am afraid that your analogy still is used incorrectly in this case. There are several steps along the way, yes, but if a player that lives right next to the servers can get 20PING and a player that lives on the other side of the world can get to an identical server very close to him 20PING, then clearly their and the servers hardware allow very low PING. At that point what is left?! Signal strengthening and signal speed. I'm afraid to say that electronic impulses from an old network need to be strengthened significantly more often than light in fiber on top of being much slower in-between them. So traditional internet have many more "toll booths" than fiber. As if that wasn't enough, light is unaffected by most of environmental effects on its travel. Electric impulses are very much so. A lightning strikes on the way of the impulse?! Light doesn't care. Copper?! You just lost packets and that skill you used?! Yeah, it doesn't trigger.

But that's not all. Fiber optics receive more dedicated line. So imagine that. When you ride the fiber optic road you'll know you drive on a road that does not have many cars even during peak hours. On copper cables...you may end up in a traffic jam along the way.

So yes. I have overestimated fiber to some degree. However the PING and stability with an all-fiber optic internet around the world would be far better than with copper. Do note that even with currently there being plenty of fiber around, there's also plenty of copper around and every time the signal moves from one to the other there is additional time wasted on "translation". With that happening only once at the very entrance to house and once at the entrance into the data center (if even then), you'd save additional time.

[Adrestia]

You’re correct that there are more toll booths. That makes the distance and travel speed even less of a factor, because even more time is spent sitting in routers waiting to actually travel.

I live in Northern Ontario. If the only factor were distance, my theoretical ping to servers in Sacramento would be 26ms. Feel free to double that to 52ms since it’s not like the cabling runs directly from my house to California. In actuality though, my ping is more like 100ms. 48% of my latency is caused by time spent in devices, not time traveling in whatever kind of wires actually exist between here and there.

[kikix12]

You’re correct that there are more toll booths. That makes the distance and travel speed even less of a factor, because even more time is spent sitting in routers waiting to actually travel.

That's the thing. That means that you save all that bonus "PING" when going from cable to fiber (well, not when an individual goes fiber...if the whole network was replaced with fiber). So on that alone, over continents, you're going to see fiber far outclass cable on PING, which is basically what I said.

What changes is the scale. Instead of going down from 400 to 50 PING, it's more likely to go down to 130-150 PING realistically. That's still a great deal of decrease that turns an unplayable game into a potentially playable. When starting with 200 PING, you'd end up bottoming below 100 most likely. That goes from "problematic" to "good".

[Adrestia]

The distances you’re talking about, underseas cable from continent to continent, even terrestrial cabling across North America, are already fiber optic. You may have heard of players using VPNs to reduce ping. They’re not defying the theory of relativity when they do this. They’re just transiting through less busy (by virtue of being semi-private) and less (by virtue of being arms of a single layer 3 network spread over a long physical distance) routers.

Devices like you’re mentioning for signal amplification are largely stateless and take “basically no time” to do their work. There’s no decision tree, it’s just “make it louder.” Routers, firewalls, and to some extent smart switches and the like have real processing time burdens. It’s all a really interesting topic if you want to nerd out about it, and I think it’s great you’re reading up on it. Just try to filter out the noise (typically, what ISPs, content providers, and politicians are telling you as a retail consumer).

To bring it back to game engine design, the question on the mind of a content producer like SE (besides “can we just pay to get on a better carrier?”) is “what can we do with the network available to us?”

The global cooldown and what we know as “animation lock” are soft answers to this: make it irrelevant how fast a player mashes the key. The input buffer at the end of your GCD is a hard answer: accept that lag is a part of network communication and solve it gracefully for the player. All sorts of these things are running in games and are designed to be as invisible to you as possible. There’s motion prediction to have your character continue on the last direction the game received input data for, until a very brief timeout expires or the game hears from your client again that you stopped moving or pivoted. Some games do this client-side (think Ultima Online and rubber-banding. When the client hears back from the server that it didn’t accept your movement, it slaps you on the wrist and sends you backward) and others do it server-side where the server allows a degree of leniency and when your client says “I spent the last 30ms moving north and got 2 steps” the server decides “ok, that’s feasible” and updates its record of your position to seamlessly match the client.

[MistakeNot]

It's not wireless, but there actually is the technology that allows much lower PING all around the globe. And it's also the same technology that have significant bandwidth potential, so much that used enough it would make even DDoS attacks irrelevant. It's called fiber optics. You're not going to get anything faster than light, after all.

Actually fiber optics won't give significantly shorter ping times.
Signal propagation for electromagnetic signals (which include both electric pulses as well as light) is about the same in copper wires as in optical fibers: ~200,000 km/s or 2/3 of the speed of light in vacuum.
Most of the long-distance connections (like the cross-Atlantic cables) are already using optical fiber anyway.

The main advantage of optical fiber over copper wire is not latency ("ping time") but bandwidth, especially over longer distances.