1000-Player FPS World Record Attempt This Month
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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Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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lashabane This news is just in time for me to feel pathetic about my own attempts to create game within any sort of game engine.Reply
Kudos to them. I have absolutely no clue how them came about doing this. -
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.Reply
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. -
RabidFace PlanetSide on steroids, I love it!Reply
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 so how meny ppl can simultanius be in wow at a single spot ? well ofc its a mmorpg da! and dont take the kind of pressision needed, a fps has to update lokation and pointing axes alot more often. but it be cool to c how meny ppl you can scram in a place before wow servers go balistick and cant be played smothly eny more.Reply -
molo9000 What about World War 2 Online / Battlegrounds Europe?Reply
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.