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1000-Player FPS World Record Attempt This Month

by - source: MuchDifferent PR

MuchDifferrent will attempt to land in the Guinness Book of World Records by hosting a first-person shooter supporting up to 1000 simultaneous players on a single map.

Swedish tech company PikkoTekk -- now called MuchDifferent -- sent along a friendly email on Wednesday reminding us about its attempt to land in the Guinness Book of World Records with 1000 simultaneous players participating in an FPS. MuchDifferent asked if we wanted to participate, and naturally we gleefully agreed.

As reported back in March 2011, Man vs. Machine is an FPS based on the Unity engine that can support up to 1000 simultaneous players on a single map. The purpose of this game is to demo the capabilities of the PikkoServer load balancing product. By using the software, game developers can supposedly build any kind of high-player density MMO game that can handle up to 1000 players on one specific map across eight cell servers. It also supports eleven actions per second (10 movements plus 1 fire), a total bandwidth downstream per player of 420 kbit/s and more.

"MuchDifferent has created a dynamic traffic router/load balancer, PikkoServer, that divides the battlefield between the game servers and glues the result together for the clients, multiple times per second," the company said in a separate press release on Wednesday. "Although Man vs Machine is based on the Unity Engine, any modern game engine could easily be retrofitted with the technology to create something similar in a few months time."

"When we first announced it as Tanks vs Robots in Spring 2011, several hundreds of thousands took a look at the trailer that showed our pretty crude test game," CEO Christian Lönnholm said in his blog. "Even though we made a disclaimer where we kind of explained that this was by far not the best looking game and that the networking was the real eye candy, people simply assumed that there was some kind of trade off between graphics and having a massive battle."

He said that the resulting game which will be used for the Guinness World Records attempt stems from the studio's research into how the Unity engine can be tweaked for the best performance, graphics, animations and effects while still maintaining an acceptable framerate as 1000 players duke it out on-screen.

"I guess we might have overdone pouring love and time into this onetime event," he said. "However, it is not often that we network engineers get to stand in the general spotlight.  For network nerds such as ourselves, this game shows a new dawn to completely new types of online games where massive amount of players, advanced AI and complex interactions with physics can be achieved with great ease. As a gamer, I just can’t wait to experience the feeling of rushing towards the horde of enemies and anticipating the thrill and insuring chaos of battle."

For more information about Man vs. Machine, head here. The Guinness World Records event will take place on January 29 @ 16:00 CET. Gamers can actual participate by purchasing a ticket via the Engineers Without Borders - Stockholm organization’s website here. All earnings will go straight to the organization.

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Inferno1217 01/19/2012 6:40 AM
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lashabane 01/19/2012 6:45 AM
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This news is just in time for me to feel pathetic about my own attempts to create game within any sort of game engine.

Kudos to them. I have absolutely no clue how them came about doing this.

chickenhoagie 01/19/2012 6:51 AM
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dayummm talk about multikill...

hohohohhoooooly shiiittttt..

NuclearShadow 01/19/2012 6:53 AM
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darkchazz 01/19/2012 7:03 AM
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-8+

MMMMMonster Killll...

DOMINATING.

alikum 01/19/2012 7:12 AM
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One battlefield, thousands of grenades. Game over.

RabidFace 01/19/2012 7:14 AM
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PlanetSide on steroids, I love it!

But if you have a sub-par system, you will be left in the dust. Strait from their website:

"What are the system requirements for the game?

The exact minimum requirements will be made available soon. If you have a good enough machine to run Crysis 2 or any other modern FPS game you don’t need to worry."

I do wonder what the games objectives will be though. I can't seem to find any information. Doesn't seem like it has RPG elements, so it might actually be just a huge battlefield with no objectives, only carnage.

Can't wait to see some in-game footage once this day in gaming history is made. It will be interesting.

elcentral 01/19/2012 7:17 AM
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chaosgs 01/19/2012 7:28 AM
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All it took was 1 noob skill-less wannabe hacker to screw the whole thing over.

molo9000 01/19/2012 7:28 AM
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What about World War 2 Online / Battlegrounds Europe?

It's not exactly the most popular game in the world, but I'm sure they did that 1000 players on the same map many years ago.

RabidFace 01/19/2012 7:44 AM
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molo9000 :
What about World War 2 Online / Battlegrounds Europe?It's not exactly the most popular game in the world, but I'm sure they did that 1000 players on the same map many years ago.


You would be right. But with WWII Online the battlefield is split up in to different zones/areas.

The point of Man vs Machine is to have 1000 players in the same zone/area at once. As in, theoretically, you could have 500 vs 500 battle on your screen. Not little battles split up on the battlefield.

greghome 01/19/2012 7:46 AM
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Battlefield 1918 ? anyone ?

Trench rush at it;s best :P

molo9000 01/19/2012 8:12 AM
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rabidface :
You would be right. But with WWII Online the battlefield is split up in to different zones/areas.The point of Man vs Machine is to have 1000 players in the same zone/area at once. As in, theoretically, you could have 500 vs 500 battle on your screen. Not little battles split up on the battlefield.



I think WW2OL limits the maximum number of players a client can receive/display (probably something like the 256 nearest players), but apart from that everyone plays on the same map that covers a large chunk of western Europe.

This all depends on how u define "1000 player FPS".

JOSHSKORN 01/19/2012 8:27 AM
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I would love to try to do this with a game like Halo on the map Infinity. I've heard of hacks out there that have allowed for more than a 16 player server.

briteball 01/19/2012 8:58 AM
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X-WING vs. TIE FIGHTER

alidan 01/19/2012 9:00 AM
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NuclearShadow :
Interesting and brings hope that someday that the average game someday will be on such a massive level. Team based first person shooters should feel like a actual war-zone and even modern games like Battlefield 3 while they try they fall short mainly due to player limits. I also thought of a way to revise the method and make it easier to beat MuchDifferent's goal. A FPS simply just needs to be just that a first person shooter. It would be much less stress if this was also combined with a turn base element but restricting the player to the first person view. If movement and combat were turn based the stress on the severs and engine would be much less as only half the action is taking place.



like valkeria chronicles...
sounds fun, but could it work multiplayer?

nicodemus_mm 01/19/2012 9:41 AM
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Pre-Time Dilation EVE Online could support over 1000 people in fleet fights. With Time Dilation... I have no idea. No, it's not FPS, but the calculations on the server end may be more intensive. The server not only has to calculate movement for each ship, but a combination of up to 24 weapons/tank/utility modules as well as fleet bonuses, drones and area effects per ship. Just the calculations for a hit (tracking/transversal velocity/signature radius/explosion velocity/explosion radius/range/etc) are pretty daunting and that's per gun/missile/drone with thousands active.

The back end for the Guinness record shouldn't be that bad... it's the client dealing with the info and rendering 999 other humanoid players in detail. Something not necessary in EVE as you can zoom out to the point each ship is just a few pixels.

ivyanev 01/19/2012 10:23 AM
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I can just imagine battlefield on ^2 scale:Epic.

guardianangel42 01/19/2012 10:42 AM
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This. This is the future of professional gaming. And possibly warfare. And maybe gaming as we know it.

/hyperbole

I have to say though if they get this working it will be pretty darn cool.

jimmyjamesros 01/19/2012 10:51 AM
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I think Planetside pushed around 1,200 people live at SOE Fan Faire 2007 to introduce Black Ops to the game. Everyone logged on as TR and NC for the event, the devs could hardly keep the black ops testers alive as they were being chased down by an insane amount of people. They had to end the event when one of the devs used a meteor shower and it finally did the servers in.

Planetside 2 should be going to BETA soon and from what I understand it will be 1,500 players per continent (server). All I know is I can't wait for PS2, once you have played big no other FPS is the same.

warmon6 01/19/2012 11:43 AM
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Hmmm, guess it would be hard to miss with any shot. :lol:

"What do you mean you missed!? there over 500 guys just in front of you!"

nottheking 01/19/2012 12:10 PM
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I'm a little wary here; is the "10 movements and 1 firing command" per SECOND seems rather sparse for an FPS. The former could POTENTIALLY cut it, but it would invariably be laggy regardless of whatever smoothing algorithms are applied, and only 1 firing command per second would be horrendous. Assuming that the "420kbps downstream data" would apply to a fully-loaded 1k-player server, that means a measly 420 bits per second of data per player; in other words, it almost sounds like the game's solution to this issue with tons of players at once is to cut precision and fidelity to 1990s-era levels.

The end result is that this may likely wind up looking more akin to a typical "rubber-band-y" MMO than a smooth-running action-packed FPS. If smooth action was desired, I'd have to think that at least 20-30 movement frames would have to be transmitted for each player per second, with, similarly, more status frames for firing and other actions than just one every second.

nicodemus_mm :
No, it's not FPS, but the calculations on the server end may be more intensive.


Actually, at least on a player-by-player comparison, EVE Online's serverload isn't as intensive as it is for a modern FPS. While all the "spreadsheets" for those Internet Spaceships may seem daunting to look at, remember that this is ALL of the information the server has to deal with; it's a non-action strategy/RPG. Contrast this to server-backed FPS games, where it has to handle complex physics calculations, and more rapid movement.

memadmax 01/19/2012 1:14 PM
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CCCCCC COMBO BREAKER!!!!

chronium 01/19/2012 2:24 PM
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I was interested in helping them out but then I saw the 23 euro price tag for just participating and that ended up killing all interest.

igot1forya 01/19/2012 3:09 PM
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briteball :
X-WING vs. TIE FIGHTER


I thought that too and also the Freespace series taking on capital ships with hoards or fighters/bombers... this NEEDS to happen!

cybneo 01/19/2012 3:43 PM
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Yea i miss PlanetSide. The massive amount of players really adds a level of enjoyment. Lets see if Sony can use a better graphics engine. The game play was just fine... Even flying was awesome and quite easy without a joystick.

830hobbes 01/19/2012 4:00 PM
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If they get this tech out to real games, the first thing I'd want to do is fight in the battle for Minas Tirith!

nforce4max 01/19/2012 4:07 PM
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Hmm I can't wait for vids of this to be posted after the event. Lag grenades here we come!
1k players on a single map hmm I wish that there were pvp events in wow with that many ppl.

sliem 01/19/2012 4:20 PM
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Send in the banelings and infestors.

righteous fury 01/19/2012 5:08 PM
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I would love to help them out, but you don't ask someone to help you and then tell them they aren't allowed unless they pay you first... your buddies would never help you move to your new apartment if you demanded $30 for their having the pleasure of lifting all you heavy sh!t... how absolutely insulting.

Anonymous 01/19/2012 5:08 PM
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WWIIOL or Battlefield Europe already has done this. The Map is like 1/4 scale. So you could jump into a plane in England, and fly all across Europe, land in Brussels, get into dog fight over Liege, or get into a tank in Namur and drive to Ramet.

You could line up thousands of people on the road, and drive a Betty down the road and salute to all the troops as you drive by.

Great game.


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