官方...<半神>出生的第一天
Demigod: Day 1 Status Report By Frogboy Posted April 15, 2009 23:32:44I broke my 56 hour day this morning and took a nap before coming back. One of the nice features of Stardock is that it has developers in theUS and in Europe so we can, technically, work on things around theclock if necessary which is something we’re taking advantage right now.
So where are we at?
Today
Thesystem works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online atonce.The system works…less well if there are tens of thousands ofpeople online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, youget horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive dueto simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign duringthe beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due tothe sheer massive number of calls that are being made.
Sadly,most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate.So anyway, we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (itwould require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if wedid, there’d be no friendly “ha ha pirate” message which would resultin people just saying the game is buggy).Mind you, the game makesrelatively few server calls, it’s just the sheer number of people.
Ourstress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at onceat peak and that wouldn’t be reached for a few weeks by which time wewould have slowly seen things becoming problematic.With Sins of aSolar Empire, the game was incredibly successful but its user base grewslowly and steadily over time.Sometimes on a peak time the serverwould start to get slow and we would adjust so that it would be betternext time.
But here, when you’re getting that many connectionsat once, you’re no longer talking about dealing with the basics likehaving a good SAN and lots of redundant servers. You instead fall intoall kinds of weird secondary issues that start to pop up likeyesterday’s case where an older network card couldn’t handle all thepackets (not bandwidth limited but # of tiny packets being sent out atonce).
So during the day today, people couldn’t even logonand in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affecteddatabases for some piddly thing were even down. Even getting the gamerunning was a pain today because a simple HTTP call to see what thelatest version would get hung leaving people looking at a black screen.Stuff of nightmares.
Before the game shipped, I wrote a scaryemail to our team saying how disastrous things would be and predicteddoom for us and GPG if there were problems with multiplayer. At thetime, my worry was about things like disconnects and CVP. It didn’toccur to me that we’d have near MMO user connections to throw in. http://web.stardock.net/images/smiles/themes/digicons/Smile.png
Tonight
Last night and all day today we’ve been working on multiple fronts.
First,we’ve been trying to shuttle off the warez users so that they’re notslamming our servers. Well, not slamming the same servers thatlegitimate customers are using.I’m feeling pretty confident that thatis working better because there’s a lot more people in games with lotsof people in them.
Second, we’ve developed a new connectionsystem (pictured below).The connection stuff in Demigod is not partof Demigod but is rather part of Impulse Reactor which in turn istalking to the various connection servers we have set up to get playerA to connect to player B and so on.It’s not done yet but amongst itsnew features is the ability for the host to eject players who justcan’t connect.
http://www.draginol.com/images2009/DemigodDay1StatusReport_13A55/image_thumb.png
This whole new connection service has been written in the past 48 hours.Third, we’ve greatly expanded our capacity.I tell you, anyone who wants to know why we delayed Society(MMO RTS we are slowly working on) need look no further than howpainful the first 24 hours since the official release of Demigod havebeen. That was done today and hopefully users have noticed animprovement.
We’re in the process of testing out this newupdate to put up tonight (less than 24 hours after the street date)that should largely fix this.
Early reviews
The early reviews of Demigod have been very good – in general.
Neoseeker gave us a 10 out of 10.
Crispy Gamer gave us a “Buy It”
But the GameSpot review nailed us because of the connectivity with a 6.5. I’m pretty disappointed about that. First, I totally understand that connectivity is central to a game likethis. I totally agree. But I think that should be weighted with whatthe average user who gets Demigod will experience and in reality, asannoying as this issue is, it’s not something that’s going to be anongoing issue, it’s something that is likely to be taken care of in thenext day or two.So this time next week, players will be happilyplaying but GameSpot’s review will live on.I suppose the solutiongoing forward isn’t to send out review copies until the game isreleased and we make sure there’s no network issues. Afterall, in aweek from now, the guy buying it from retail will have a greatexperience.
The IGN and 1Up reviews arecoming up.So we could be looking at a lot of reviews like that ifevery reviewer decides to take the same approach Gamespot did which Ihope they don’t (luckily for every other on-line centric game that’shad a rough first day or two most reviewers haven’t taken Gamespot’sapproach).
Video
We took a video about some of the stuff we’re working on and a little quick tour of Stardock. You can see it here:
http://www.draginol.com/images2009/DemigodDay1StatusReport_13A55/image_3.png
IGN Video
stardock和GPG正在全力解决问题，stardock和GPG相信玩家，没有将游戏加密发售（如果加密了大家现在就不会有偷跑版玩了），作为玩家更应该相信stardock和GPG。 SF
发一堆E文干什么~~
看不懂~~
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