Guild Wars 2

arena.net/blog

With Guild Wars 2 out the door, our programmers wanted to take a some time to answer the burning technical questions that players and aspiring (or current) game programmers may have about Guild Wars 2 and about working as a programmer at ArenaNet.

The Ask Me (Almost) Anything session will start at 10:00 AM Pacific Time on October 17 on the /r/gaming subreddit and will run for about two hours.

The initial post will come from the ArenaNet Team, and we’ll have ArenaNet Technical Director, Cameron Dunn, as well as most of our Guild Wars 2 programming team answering your questions. You’ll be able to ask our programmers technical questions about engines, tools, game play, and more!

Do you have a technical question about Guild Wars 2? Ask our programming team today on Reddit!

Original post.

I hope WvW community will prepare some questions about technical part WvW.

“Can’t answer that” “We’re looking into it” “We’re working on it and can’t comment at this time” “Working as intended”

Nah. They’re actually answering questions over there: 6/6/2012 Reddit ANet AMA

I remember when that one happened. Things are quite a bit different now. It’s easier to answer questions about intent than it is about actual outcome. We’ll see, though.

wtb someone to ask them about the great culling in WvW

It just started

Nevron.9413:

“Can’t answer that” “We’re looking into it” “We’re working on it and can’t comment at this time” “Working as intended”

This made my day.

+1 for you, sir.

Reddit is blocked at my work so keep me informed here please.

Well, atm is going more down the “Videogames dev work” than actually talking about game.

On of the few questions regarding game is about players culling tho.

Answer: "Actually we have plans to improve this a lot. "

Q: Is the culling issue in WvW (making other players invisible for sake of server/client issues) going to get better? Do you like the state that it is currently in?

A: (cameronjdunn) Actually we have plans to improve this a lot. The biggest problem is making sure that we don’t send too much data down to the client and make people on slower connections lag out. But we think this is solvable, we’re on it.
Cam

another dev’s reply to ^: (ArenaNetHabib) See, this is how it goes, I write up this giant reply and then Cam totally ninjas me with the tl;dr version :P

Better Answer: (ArenaNetHabib)
The issues with invisible players in WvW comes down to a couple of factors. One is to do with when the servers notify any given client about other characters in the game (I’ll call this reporting/culling) and the other deals with the time it takes the client to present the character on the screen after it has received that notification (I’ll call this asset load).
The asset load issue is all about how quickly the client can show you something it knows it should show you. We’re looking in to ways that we can make that process faster, but it’s always going to take non-zero time. However, that’s not where the bulk of the invisible players come from. For that we have to look at the reporting/culling side of things.
In the situation where the local population density is relatively low, when another character comes in reporting range of your character the server sends a notification to your client with all of the data that it will need to track and render that character. That includes appearance data, race, gender, profession, weapon sets, etc. etc. It’s an easy model to think about and works well, until the local population density goes up. When there are a lot of characters in reporting range we start to get into a situation where, under the current system, there’s an overwhelming amount of data to send to the client (hello n-squared problem!) – after all, resources like client CPU/Memory/etc. and bandwidth are finite. In order to deal with this situation we elected to change the criteria for reporting characters slightly. Rather than just using a fixed range we instead also limit reporting to the closest N characters. By doing this we help to ensure that we’re not overwhelming the available bandwidth and, since clients clearly can’t draw or process characters they don’t know about, we get some savings on client performance “for free”. This works out pretty well in PvE and doesn’t seem, at least as far as I can tell, to have a detrimental impact on gameplay.
Unfortunately in WvW, where large battles are quite common, we find that players are bumping into these limits quite often and the effect has a real, and unfortunate, impact on the gameplay experience. Do I like the state that it’s currently in? No, honestly I don’t. WvW has been my baby (though not mine alone!) for quite a while now and I really want to see EPIC battles play out in all of their glory. If there was a switch I could flip to just make this work then I would have flipped the hell out of it by now, believe me. However, when you’re dealing with resource utilization issues like this there are rarely any easy answers. I’m currently, actively looking into what exactly our options are in this regard. The fix is likely to be large-ish in scope, with changes on both the client and server, but we have some ideas that look like they may work out. So, will it get better? I can’t make any promises because we’re still experimenting and building new tech, but as a person who works on this every day I certainly believe that it can and will do everything in my power to make that happen.

Theres hardly any questions about ingame content and no answers about them.. its just ‘i wanna be a programmer’ questions that are popping up.. :/

Because it’s the programming team answering questions, not the content team.

Well, there are plenty of ingame content questions, it’s just mostly “teach me, sensei” get answered. If it take all the time I’ll hate reddit fanboys even more >__>

Halo.8976:

Well, there are plenty of ingame content questions, it’s just mostly “teach me, sensei” get answered. If it take all the time I’ll hate reddit fanboys even more >__>

From the top of the post …

It’s worth pointing out upfront that we’re programmers, not designers! So if you want to know why your favorite skill was changed or when you should sell all of your hoarded butter to maximize gold return, we probably won’t be able to help.

Am I the only one who hates Reddit’s format? Makes trying to glance over things almost impossible.

Q: (most upvoted question)
Any plan to implement multiple trait set? Because we need to use different traits for PvE, Dungeons and WvWvW.

A: (cameronjdunn)
That would be cool. I’d use that! We have a lot of things on the “cool to do” list though – we’re working through it!
——-

Q (full version):
With the rampant botting in GW2, what is the current status of fighting the botters and hackers? These same botters are using slots in WvW and is a part of the reason there are queues there. I’ll also add the hackers that cheat on WvW(fly-hack to orb, speedhacks). You can read these things in the official forums and other forums.

Is the stealth mechanic how ANet thought it would be used? (Mainly WvW)

(WvW) Dead players(Not downed) have a huge advantage of being scouts, are there any plans to give dead players a black screen(a la Counter-strike) or force them to waypoint?

…

Server balancing is a major problem in WvW right now, people think that the free transfers are one of the major reasons this is happening. When will free transfers stop and when will guesting start?

A: (ApochPiQ)
Apologies in advance for only hitting one of your questions, but I’m not certain of the answers to the rest of them, so ;-)

As for bots: we’re very reluctant in general to discuss our strategy publicly because we don’t want to tip our hand; however, I can say that we have a lot of great progress in detection and prevention in the pipeline, and we should start seeing a noticeable decrease in botting over the next few weeks.

So, Nevron was right >_>
——-

Q:
Why are you guys doing an AMA when you should be bug fixing?
I jest, I jest. I don’t really have an actual question, I just wanted to say ‘kudos’ and well-done for a great game. :]
EDIT:
01 – What, in your opinion, has been the most difficult feature/element of the game to program in?
02 – Which feature/element’s coding are you most proud/pleased with?

A: (ArenaNetHabib)
Well, I’m actually off today as I prepare to have surgery later this afternoon, so I wouldn’t be fixing bugs right now anyway :P

I think one of the most difficult things about working on a game like Gw2 is just the sheer scale of the thing. It is a massive undertaking, and the more code that has already been written and the more systems that have already been designed, the harder it becomes to take things in a completely new direction. But, of course, new directions are generally where all the new cool stuff happens, so we end up doing that a lot and it’s quite a challenge at times. Which is probably why I love it so much

I’m proud of a lot of my work on Gw2, but I’ll pick two relatively specific things:
1) Trebuchets! This wasn’t a huge amount of code or anything. We already had projectiles, etc., but making the change that let them have such a super long range was really, really satisfying. My screensaver at work is actually a bunch of screenshots that I took in a row of one of our first trebuchet tests. It’s like a flip-book of awesome!

2) I’m pretty kitten proud of the conversation system. It’s flexible, stable, clean, and relatively easy for designers to use. It’s also a fairly complete state-machine based scripting language which puts a lot of power into the hands of designers who then make amazing things with it. So that’s pretty cool
——-

Q:
What technical issue was the most interesting for you to solve with Guild Wars 2? Making an MMO of this scale couldn’t have been easy!

A: (ArenaNetHabib)
For me the most interesting set of issues (there’s always more than one) have been associated with WvW. It’s a very different game type from our PvE game in many ways and required us to build systems to support a new kind of server-to-server communication (which is how we get 4 maps that behave a bit like 1 map in terms of markers, etc.), game state serialization, world interconnection (so the different worlds can fight), etc.

Banono.4597:

Am I the only one who hates Reddit’s format? Makes trying to glance over things almost impossible.

Nope. I’ve always boggled at the fact that it’s so popular. It’s like mid-90’s forum design never improved, and became hugely popular. I can’t stand to use the site, even though it occasionally has good content. It’s ridiculously difficult to navigate and hard on the eyes.

mcl.9240:

Banono.4597:

Am I the only one who hates Reddit’s format? Makes trying to glance over things almost impossible.

Nope. I’ve always boggled at the fact that it’s so popular. It’s like mid-90’s forum design never improved, and became hugely popular. I can’t stand to use the site, even though it occasionally has good content. It’s ridiculously difficult to navigate and hard on the eyes.

Yeah, it operates and looks like something that would’ve been popular when Napster was.

mcl.9240:

Banono.4597:

Am I the only one who hates Reddit’s format? Makes trying to glance over things almost impossible.

Nope. I’ve always boggled at the fact that it’s so popular. It’s like mid-90’s forum design never improved, and became hugely popular. I can’t stand to use the site, even though it occasionally has good content. It’s ridiculously difficult to navigate and hard on the eyes.

Oh… my… god.

I think, for the first time ever since release, mcl and I have agreed on something right out of the gate.

I don’t understand why they don’t do these right here on their own forums. I guess maybe because Reddit is more populated? Maybe they don’t want to bring so much traffic to their forum? Not sure, but I always wonder because I also can’t stand the Reddit stuff.

Well, there’s no really any other good format for this depth of conversations. AMA on this forum would be just horrible, at least on reddit you can quickly find answers, upvote good questions and downvote bad ones.

From technical standpoint mid-90’s forum design is the only one that can handle such amount of data.
But this is offtopic.

I agree with Halo. There is way too much data to be contained in one of these threads- and the upvote, downvote, etc. format is easier for the programming team to bump heads on the most popular issues… without it simply being, how many times was this one question asked in 50 different ways on this one thread?

Q:

1. What are the hardest bugs to fix?
2. When it comes to the priority of fixing bugs, do you fix the easiest ones, the most important ones (even if they are hard) or both?
3. How many people do you have working on fixing bugs?

A: (ArenaNetHabib)

1. The ones that we can’t reproduce in house, or that happen only very, very rarely, and don’t result in an actual crash. From a player perspective crashes suck but they’re great when you’re trying to fix a bug because it’s often pretty clear what’s going on (and we get all kinds of good data from crash reports). If there’s a nasty, infrequent bug that doesn’t result in a crash it’s like hunting a ghost spy while wearing a blindfold.
2. We always try to focus on the most important bugs (which are also generally some of the hardest) but it can be nice to take a break from a giant bug and spend an hour fixing something that’s relatively easy. It’s good for the game and programmer morale.
3. All of them. Seriously, everybody is always responsible for fixing bugs in their code (or their content if they are designers). Of course we also have people working on new features, but since making a new feature generally includes making some new bugs they’re also fixing bugs as they go (ideally, and usually, well before those bugs go live). That’s just how programming works. Actually, that’s just how game development works. I’m pretty sure even the writers fix bugs.

A: (ArenaNetMike)

1. The hardest bugs to fix, by far, are the ones we can’t reproduce in house. If a crash only affects 0.01% of players, that means we might never see it ourselves, but could still end up seeing thousands of players with the issue.
2. Certainly the most visible and game-breaking bugs are worked on first, but we also look for low-hanging fruit that can improve the game for players without a lot of effort on our part.
3. There’s no fixed number who only work on bugs. We work on fixing things, making new features, or improving other parts of the game.
   __________________________

Q: (full question)

1. Can we please get a WvW queue number? This would REALLY help, especially since it’s gotten long on my server since we started winning more. Probably part of why we’re winning more.
2. Can you discuss if anything in the works (design or otherwise) to help with WvW queues, outside of swapping servers? Maybe more maps, overflow, or some sort of WvW guesting mode? Technically feasible?
3. edit: (sorry, steam of consiousness) How some form of way to get to the front of the line, with limited use? Say, allow a guild to skip to the front of the queue one night a week. Players can only use during one period of time so as to avoid multi-guild abuse. I’ve only spent about 15 seconds so haven’t thought it through, and this is more of a design thing, but this would allow casuals to better-plan a WvW night with their guild. Technically feasible, though?
4. I understand guesting would have to be done carefully so as not to mess up balance in a tight WvW match, but could also be great. Maybe only allow players to guest to “undermanned” servers or those who are behind on total or current points. Could help create more balanced matches, and maybe you could even put a small price on it, for either the joining players (pay to have no queue!) or the ones being joined (undermanned? hire mercenaries!).

A: (cameronjdunn)
Hmmm this is probably secret, but we’re all friends here! We have something in development which will greatly increase the number of people who can play WvW at the same time.
I think that answers most of your questions…

Not, it’s not >__>
__________________________

And this is pretty much it. There might be more answers later, but most of the team went off.
AMA has about 80-90 answers from programming team. Some answered questions are interesting, some of them are not (especially “teach me, sensei” ones). I think I posted here all WvW related answers.

Well. At least we got a one honest answer about rendering issue.

Balance questions avoided. I expect another infraction for saying my mind again in a non-offensive way.

Plenty of questions being asked on the forum without a response.

Fixit, they shouldnt post publically about what balance issues you want to tackle, its a double edge sword and no win for Arenanet to do so, until they are ready to implement.