Guild Wars 2

Why not just send all information about all players that are in range? This is is almost 2013. Other games did this ten years ago.

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Y’know that lag you get when your zerg combines with their zerg? Okay, now imagine that at all times. That’s what’d happen if there wasn’t some sort of information throttling.

Now I’m not gonna say that justifies the less-than stellar algorithm being used now, but that’s the reason why we need some sort of culling in WvW.

Because the engine is subpar and Arenanet isn’t willing to invest in better servers for WvW.

I am sure the developers are thinking hard if they could just reduce the data precision instead of simply culling out all data of some players. For example slower reporting rate for distant players and for the less volatile data – no need to report player’s name every 50 ms, only at map load and when new players join.

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Dark Age of Camelot, to name only one … make it 200-300 players in the early zerg days

suppenkasper.5371:

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Dark Age of Camelot, to name only one … make it 200-300 players in the early zerg days

To be fair a lot of those early relic runs were slideshows. A lot of fun though.

quercus.9261:

suppenkasper.5371:

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Dark Age of Camelot, to name only one … make it 200-300 players in the early zerg days

To be fair a lot of those early relic runs were slideshows. A lot of fun though.

That was largely just a result of it being before ‘gaming rigs’ caught on. We were still running Pentium 3’s and just upgrading off our Voodoo graphic cards, trying to run a game with fairly good graphics (they still hold up very well today).

The next time you run into a large battle turn your monitor off 5 seconds, back on for 1 second, and off for 5 seconds again. Repeat this process until the fight is over.

EVE online had to do an alternate system where time slows down if there was a huge battle with many players.
http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=900

Sadly that doesn’t really work in WvW, since WvW’s problems are probably due to different reasons. But ANet is working on a longer term solution, so let’s see what they come up with and complain then :P

To answer the question of the OP, culling occurs on the server side. The server determines which entities your client can see, and sends you information on what those entities are doing and where they are.

The reasons for culling are:
- Use server (and your) bandwidth efficiently by not sending you data you can’t see.
- Reduce “map hack” style cheats, because your client does not know anything about enemies you can’t see, so you can’t reveal it using a hack.

The problem seems to be, when a server decides that you can see a new entity, it seems to take a certain amount of time before it appears on your screen. Apparently this is due to a combination of time to load the new model, and the server to send information on the new player.

If a large number of entities appear onscreen suddenly, then the problem is more noticeable.

It’s quite possible there are expensive hardware-based fixes to this issue. Eg. buy more bandwidth / faster servers / etc. It might also be possible to fix this by making the server send less data or send data more efficiently.

Anyways, none of these things can be done quickly so we’re stuck with it for now.

quercus.9261:

suppenkasper.5371:

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Dark Age of Camelot, to name only one … make it 200-300 players in the early zerg days

To be fair a lot of those early relic runs were slideshows. A lot of fun though.

LoL… This made my day.. haha I’m picturing that now..

My understanding was we’re not allowed to talk about other games by name. But I’ve played a few that handled this. (I wrote the OP).

What’s the down side to having all characters revealed at 1200 range?

Waking.6052:

Why not just send all information about all players that are in range? This is is almost 2013. Other games did this ten years ago.

Because then all it would take is one a-whole with a Radar hack(map hack, whatever you want to call it) to relay the information to commanders so the other servers know exactly where everyone is at all times.

You’d never be able to take a keep from them because they would know where you are headed before you get there and they’d take everything from you that is on the opposite of the map from your main force because they would know where to go to avoid you.

Orikx.9671:

Waking.6052:

Why not just send all information about all players that are in range? This is is almost 2013. Other games did this ten years ago.

Because then all it would take is one a-whole with a Radar hack(map hack, whatever you want to call it) to relay the information to commanders so the other servers know exactly where everyone is at all times.

You’d never be able to take a keep from them because they would know where you are headed before you get there and they’d take everything from you that is on the opposite of the map from your main force because they would know where to go to avoid you.

This argument doesn’t work, simply because if you have an high end computer, you can currently see players even beyond both the targeting limit, and the LOD Draw limit (where 3D models change to ‘art’). The client already receives data from beyond the farthest draw distance the options allow.

For the record, I think this feature is awesome.

I can see the reason for culling when its zerg vs zerg but if culling is impacting my game when its 5 vs 5 or even 1 vs 1 then its poor programming.
Anet were too cheap to cash out for massive bandwidth and great servers thus they implemented culling which is a major pain the butt.
DAOC could do this 10 years ago, Anet can do this now but they chose not to.
TBH I would rather lag a little than I would run into 30 invisible people or having thieves get +2-3 seconds of free stealth.

Hah! I miss those old 200 vs 200 vs 150 relic fight slideshows in DAoC…staring at the ground just so my crappy PC at the time(i was a teenager then) can manage more than 1 frame a second…LOL

Dwok Immortalus.2763:

quercus.9261:

suppenkasper.5371:

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Dark Age of Camelot, to name only one … make it 200-300 players in the early zerg days

To be fair a lot of those early relic runs were slideshows. A lot of fun though.

That was largely just a result of it being before ‘gaming rigs’ caught on.

Yes, I remember that facing the opposite direction to the zerhg or pointing my camera at the ground resulted in a massive increase in framerate.

I dont get lag, i want to see enemies. dont hurt people with good computers, give us a slider to set how many players we want to cull

Just make enemy players all look like generic scarecrow graphics, maybe unique for class. Their appearance already doesn’t matter since they’re all colored generically red anyway.

Well ok, maybe add a “naked scarecrow” option for those running around in their skivvies…

Make it so thieves and mesmers are never culled. ANet can I get hooked up with a job offer?

if i remember well, there was a cap of 200 people in a chat group in daoc. we once had to start a third chat group in Odin alone because the first two were full. it filled half, that means Albion had roughly 500 players in Odin at that moment. add the Hibernia and Midgard players and you had about 1k players in that zone. that was in 2002. raid leaders were yelling constantly to people to disable their guild cloacks to reduce the amount of textures used even with only a small amount. most people had to play with spell effects set to ‘self’. (for the EU players) Add the woes of the horrible Open Transit in France that routed people all round Europe in incomprehensible ways towards the servers in France … it worked.

it’s hard to understand why 10 years later Anet seems unable to do a fraction of that.

It’s not about your PC, it’s about their servers. DAoC likely had to do two things: send out player information and calculate combat. GW2 has projectiles that can hit targets they’re not intended for. That means the servers now have to do collision detection as well. I won’t begin to speculate on the other things they probably have to do, but you have to give them some credit; there is likely a lot more to it than you think.

Personally, I’ve never experienced lag in live WvW. In BWE1, when three teams were attacking Stonemist, there were 10 second delays constantly. The culling, while annoying, fixes this problem temporarily while they work on a bigger solution. I think the alternative (lag) is much worse.

Dwok Immortalus.2763:

quercus.9261:

suppenkasper.5371:

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

Dark Age of Camelot, to name only one … make it 200-300 players in the early zerg days

To be fair a lot of those early relic runs were slideshows. A lot of fun though.

That was largely just a result of it being before ‘gaming rigs’ caught on. We were still running Pentium 3’s and just upgrading off our Voodoo graphic cards, trying to run a game with fairly good graphics (they still hold up very well today).

Hate to break the news to you, but those events were terrible on the “gaming rigs” of that time as well. And gaming rigs have been “caught on” to for a long time, they’ve just gotten substantially more powerful over time, like everything else.

Just because people don’t seem to get it:
Culling has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever your computer or even your internet connection can/could handle. It’s only about the bandwith of the game servers. The problem is that sending out complete information about players scales quadratically:

If the map contains 10 players and the server sends out all information to each of them, that’s 10*10 = 100 updates sent out per time interval.
With 50 players in the map, it’s 50*50=2,500 updates
With 200 players: 40,000 updates.
With 600 players: 360,000 updates.
That’s going to eat a lot of bandwith. So you need to come up with a plan on how to send only the relevant data. That’s culling. You need that.

And the problem is that, so far, ANet’s plan seems to have been “let’s just transmit the closest x players”, which isn’t a particularly good plan.
(And the other problem is that even if you have a better plan, implementing the new plan, and making sure the clients understand it, and there are no glaring bugs with it, and it doesn’t eat your server’s CPU/cache alive, … is a lot of work.)

Of course, there are other things that also create problems: ANet may be transmitting stuff that’s redundant or otherwise not interesting, e.g. armor skin/dye information. Or the fact that even after the information arrives at your computer, it takes a while for the textures to load.
But just trying to send send out all information to everyone is very unlikely to improve things, if it even works at all.

Noid.2871:

If the map contains 10 players and the server sends out all information to each of them, that’s 10*10 = 100 updates sent out per time interval.
With 50 players in the map, it’s 50*50=2,500 updates
With 200 players: 40,000 updates.
With 600 players: 360,000 updates.
That’s going to eat a lot of bandwith. So you need to come up with a plan on how to send only the relevant data. That’s culling. You need that.

And the problem is that, so far, ANet’s plan seems to have been “let’s just transmit the closest x players”, which isn’t a particularly good plan.

That can’t be right, if you have 10 players you only send 10 packets (1 to each player) each packet contains positions for 10 players.

Remember in Warhammer Online when your computer had to render hundreds of players in rvr? Yeah…

I’ll take gw2’s culling with playable fps and all the issues it causes over that any day.

That being said Aion actually had a system that handled this really well. They made it so you turned off all the player models besides people for your group and you’d just see the name plates for enemies and other team players. Anet should look into doing something like that.

Why can’t Anet make it so the green team is all green armour, blue team is all blue armour and red is all red armour and all with stock standard light/medium/heavy armour skins? That way each computer doesn’t have to render every single bit of different armour and colouring on each player…

I coulnd’t give too kittens about how shiny my shinies look too other people, I’d much rather be able to see that zerg of 60 instead of seeing 10.

So you are telling me culling only exists because ANET are cheap?

Wow…….

kane.1763:

Why can’t Anet make it so the green team is all green armour, blue team is all blue armour and red is all red armour and all with stock standard light/medium/heavy armour skins? That way each computer doesn’t have to render every single bit of different armour and colouring on each player…

I coulnd’t give too kittens about how shiny my shinies look too other people, I’d much rather be able to see that zerg of 60 instead of seeing 10.

Uh….what people are wearing has nothing to do with culling. Your computer would still has to display everything and it would still have to get that information from the servers.

How many FPS game servers can handle more than 64 players? As far as I know, most FPS for the past 12-15 years have set the stable limit at 32, with 64 being configurable and not guaranteed. You would think that after that many years we would have games that could handle more players (more bandwidth, better hardware) but we don’t. Why? Because as time goes by more powerful games introduces more powerful gameplay mechanics which then add more load to the servers.

How much security and anti-cheat code existed in these older X more players games? How much projectile path and collision detection did they have? Skills and rules enforcement? Data transmission rate? Multi-system data collection and processing synchronizations?

Hackuuna.4085:

How many FPS game servers can handle more than 64 players? As far as I know, most FPS for the past 12-15 years have set the stable limit at 32, with 64 being configurable and not guaranteed. You would think that after that many years we would have games that could handle more players (more bandwidth, better hardware) but we don’t. Why? Because as time goes by more powerful games introduces more powerful gameplay mechanics which then add more load to the servers.

How much security and anti-cheat code existed in these older X more players games? How much projectile path and collision detection did they have? Skills and rules enforcement? Data transmission rate? Multi-system data collection and processing synchronizations?

You cannot seriously compare an FPS server to an MMO server. I can’t pretend I know how much work a single GW2 server does, but I imagine it’s doing a lot more than just sending updates for 64-128 players and their gun calculations like an FPS server would.

Pinch.4273:

Hackuuna.4085:

How many FPS game servers can handle more than 64 players? As far as I know, most FPS for the past 12-15 years have set the stable limit at 32, with 64 being configurable and not guaranteed. You would think that after that many years we would have games that could handle more players (more bandwidth, better hardware) but we don’t. Why? Because as time goes by more powerful games introduces more powerful gameplay mechanics which then add more load to the servers.

How much security and anti-cheat code existed in these older X more players games? How much projectile path and collision detection did they have? Skills and rules enforcement? Data transmission rate? Multi-system data collection and processing synchronizations?

You cannot seriously compare an FPS server to an MMO server. I can’t pretend I know how much work a single GW2 server does, but I imagine it’s doing a lot more than just sending updates for 64-128 players and their gun calculations like an FPS server would.

That’s my point. An FPS server hasn’t been able to handle more players over the years despite the rise in technology. So why do some people expect an MMO to have some means of improving capabilities over the years?

As has been discussed before, if people are willing to sacrifice looking awesome and unique in WvW then making character models more uniform would reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to describe each character you encounter.

Galrukh.6532:

I can see the reason for culling when its zerg vs zerg but if culling is impacting my game when its 5 vs 5 or even 1 vs 1 then its poor programming.

This, it even happens out of combat for me.

Hackuuna.4085:

Pinch.4273:

Hackuuna.4085:

How many FPS game servers can handle more than 64 players? As far as I know, most FPS for the past 12-15 years have set the stable limit at 32, with 64 being configurable and not guaranteed. You would think that after that many years we would have games that could handle more players (more bandwidth, better hardware) but we don’t. Why? Because as time goes by more powerful games introduces more powerful gameplay mechanics which then add more load to the servers.

How much security and anti-cheat code existed in these older X more players games? How much projectile path and collision detection did they have? Skills and rules enforcement? Data transmission rate? Multi-system data collection and processing synchronizations?

You cannot seriously compare an FPS server to an MMO server. I can’t pretend I know how much work a single GW2 server does, but I imagine it’s doing a lot more than just sending updates for 64-128 players and their gun calculations like an FPS server would.

That’s my point. An FPS server hasn’t been able to handle more players over the years despite the rise in technology. So why do some people expect an MMO to have some means of improving capabilities over the years?

From my understanding the limits in FPS players online are more to do with 2005 console limits more than 2012 PC and/or server limits.

I highly doubt this is hardware related as Moore’s law suggests computer power doubles every 24 months. So, if an online game had 16 players on screen at 1 time in the year 2000 (many games had this in 2000), so when applying Moore’s law in 2012 we should have 1024 players on screen without any adverse impact on performance. Of course there are many factors to consider but culling most visible players in your view is unacceptable regardless of data traffic.

fellyn.5083:

Remember in Warhammer Online when your computer had to render hundreds of players in rvr? Yeah…

I’ll take gw2’s culling with playable fps and all the issues it causes over that any day.

That being said Aion actually had a system that handled this really well. They made it so you turned off all the player models besides people for your group and you’d just see the name plates for enemies and other team players. Anet should look into doing something like that.

Warhammer Online had actually handled players quite well, You have to remember the reason Fortress’s Lagged as bad as they did, as the entire server piled into one location…

DAOC was the same way, You would massive slide shows during Relic Raids, however outside of that the lag wasn’t bad, and I could see the enemy coming, They just didn’t instantly pop on the screen which is a 1000 times better then Culling system in this game.

I’d rather lag and know something was coming, then having it magically pop on me.

i agree that in general, game programmers seemed to have dropped the ball with being able to handle more players with equipment that is much better than it was 10-15 years ago.

to be fair however, one must consider that just because a machine is 10X faster than one 10 years ago, does not mean that can translate into 10X more players if they keep all game features the same. The problem is actually an exponential one

if we simply give servers a 10X increase in network bandwidth, could they handle 10x more players? The answer is both yes and no.

yes if you consider running 10x more instances where players have no interactivity with each other.

but the answer becomes NO if you want them all to be in the same room. This happens because the bandwidth needs increase on 2 fronts. the first need is from the extra players themselves, but the 2nd is that the server needs to send more info to each client about the state of those extra players. so if each player generates about 5k/s of info inbound and there is 100 players near by, then the server needs to send each player upwards of 500 k/s of info, or 50 meg/s total. if we increase the players to 150 while still at 5k/s, total server output could peak at 1.1g/s. at 200 players, server output would be around 2g/s. Every time you double the player count, your bandwidth usage could go up 4×.

Zeroumus.5402:

i agree that in general, game programmers seemed to have dropped the ball with being able to handle more players with equipment that is much better than it was 10-15 years ago.

to be fair however, one must consider that just because a machine is 10X faster than one 10 years ago, does not mean that can translate into 10X more players if they keep all game features the same. The problem is actually an exponential one

if we simply give servers a 10X increase in network bandwidth, could they handle 10x more players? The answer is both yes and no.

yes if you consider running 10x more instances where players have no interactivity with each other.

but the answer becomes NO if you want them all to be in the same room. This happens because the bandwidth needs increase on 2 fronts. the first need is from the extra players themselves, but the 2nd is that the server needs to send more info to each client about the state of those extra players. so if each player generates about 5k/s of info inbound and there is 100 players near by, then the server needs to send each player upwards of 500 k/s of info, or 50 meg/s total. if we increase the players to 150 while still at 5k/s, total server output could peak at 1.1g/s. at 200 players, server output would be around 2g/s. Every time you double the player count, your bandwidth usage could go up 4×.

5k of info for each player ? that seems like an extravagantly large amount of data when you consider that for a character standing still and doing nothing as little as 8 bytes (2 bytes for ID, 2 bytes for x, y and z location) could be enough. the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once. all the rest are just updates to location, boons, curses, action being undertaken, wounds.. an amount of data that probably is closer to 50 bytes than to 1 k.

muylaetrix.2096:

the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once.

I’m not sure about this. What if one of those people swaps weapons or armor? Not to mention just how much stuff actually has to be sent to describe a character. Even if it is just a string of IDs you’re looking at at least 7/8 variables for weapons/armor, another 18 for each dye field of each of the six pieces of armor, then dozens to describe racial characteristics (height, build, color, eye color, presence of horns, length of horns, etc.).

Tallis.5607:

Which game sent information about 100 other players to all other players ten years ago?

PlanetSide 1.

They very likely added culling because of the issues with SWTOR’s failed Ilum.

Ilum was supposed to be a massive PvP map, but it ran horribly even on the most powerful computers when you had 80 players rendered on your screen. Also, you couldn’t turn off titles and stuff so it clogged up the screen.

EvilExE.3460

That can’t be right, if you have 10 players you only send 10 packets (1 to each player) each packet contains positions for 10 players.

That one packet still would be ~10 times as large as if it contained only updates about 1 player. And since the game runs over TCP, nobody actually knows or cares how the data is fitted into packets. To everyone except the OSs involved, it’s just a stream of bytes.

Tulisin.6945

the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once.

I’m not sure about this. What if one of those people swaps weapons or armor?

Then you send a full update about that person again. Which doesn’t matter in the big picture, since even for swap-happy players, that won’t be more than once per minute on average. As compared to the several times per second they move or cast. So it won’t contribute much to the general bandwith consumption. (Until a WvW commander tells their zerg “on 3, everyone swap their armor, then run in and attack, so we lag out the enemy”.)

But it seems as if ANet is not completely doing it this way, otherwise thieves coming out of stealth would appear instantly. Rather than “lagging in” as they do now, because some of their data is retransmitted/reloaded into video ram.

ComeAndSee.1356:

They very likely added culling because of the issues with SWTOR’s failed Ilum.

Ilum was supposed to be a massive PvP map, but it ran horribly even on the most powerful computers when you had 80 players rendered on your screen. Also, you couldn’t turn off titles and stuff so it clogged up the screen.

Conversely, The Secret World’s open FactionVFactionVFaction PvP zone runs pretty great, likely as a result of their decision to implement “uniforms” that reduce the amount of data to be sent to which uniform and which faction.

Tulisin.6945:

ComeAndSee.1356:

They very likely added culling because of the issues with SWTOR’s failed Ilum.

Ilum was supposed to be a massive PvP map, but it ran horribly even on the most powerful computers when you had 80 players rendered on your screen. Also, you couldn’t turn off titles and stuff so it clogged up the screen.

Conversely, The Secret World’s open FactionVFactionVFaction PvP zone runs pretty great, likely as a result of their decision to implement “uniforms” that reduce the amount of data to be sent to which uniform and which faction.

GW2 was still in development while SWTOR was out and it’s no coincidence that several things added to this game were a result of SWTOR’s failure.

• SWTOR had no transfers for half a year which caused ghost town servers and players quit. GW2 launched with free transfers.

• SWTOR’s Ilum ran like complete trash. A mass 40v40 battle with a clunky game engine and every character high resolution model and five word title above their head rendered at once. GW2 has culling and no player titles.

• There’s no WvW/SPvP dailies because SWTOR had PvP dailies and people just came in for their dailies and left.

muylaetrix.2096:

5k of info for each player ? that seems like an extravagantly large amount of data when you consider that for a character standing still and doing nothing as little as 8 bytes (2 bytes for ID, 2 bytes for x, y and z location) could be enough. the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once. all the rest are just updates to location, boons, curses, action being undertaken, wounds.. an amount of data that probably is closer to 50 bytes than to 1 k.

Yes, this is how I would approach it ! You let the client handle most of the work through a temporary instance database built client side, in the primary load instance you send the required data for relevant players, then only update as required, you also queue players into the zone so you don’t flood update.

So what if they change armour or something, that’s really not important and totally irrelevant, I wouldn’t even update it(really WvW could be made like sPvP where what you go in with is what you’ve got), the only thing you need is to see is a change in weapons, so you know what you are fighting against, and that would be done in the preload, and a switch variable.

Noid.2871:

EvilExE.3460

That can’t be right, if you have 10 players you only send 10 packets (1 to each player) each packet contains positions for 10 players.

That one packet still would be ~10 times as large as if it contained only updates about 1 player. And since the game runs over TCP, nobody actually knows or cares how the data is fitted into packets. To everyone except the OSs involved, it’s just a stream of bytes.

Yeah but you would save the overhead of 90 other TCP packets, the processing and time required to send. Sending 1 larger packet is better than sending 100 packets (you stated) per time interval.

Well people do care, this is all about the culling, fitting the correct data in to least amount of packets provides the clients with the required information to render the appropriate characters on screen in the fastest time possible.

Most game engines usually have some kind of default model to load while the actual model does, while either the client makes memory to put more models, or the server sends the additional info about the models.

The guild wars engine simply do not present them until your client has received all the info about the model and it’s fully loaded, and then pops them right there, fading in from thin air.

Because of how this works, you can get things like a massive crowd of enemies appearing around you…
…after they have already defeated you.

If they are not going to have some kind of basic generic ‘misty’ models in place of the actual model while they actual model loads, at least they should make it so they can’t see you until you can’t see them, unless you are cloaked, of course. But even cloaked, your client should pre-load the model in the background, so they appear instantly if revealed, instead getting additional 0.01-3 seconds of extra cloak depending on your system specs.

Does this culling mean those with high-end PCs have an advantage?

On our family PC we have an old graphics card, and when playing on that there are people on chat saying “I went from 60fps to 20fps! lol”
Thanks great but then I went from 20fps to 3fps, the game is still playable at 20fps, but 3fps, it might as well be a photo.

We’re no longer on 56K dial-up, surely in this day of average speeds of 2-5Mbps, and top speeds of 20-100Mpbs, this culling could be better managed, right?

fellyn.5083:

Remember in Warhammer Online when your computer had to render hundreds of players in rvr? Yeah…

I’ll take gw2’s culling with playable fps and all the issues it causes over that any day.

That being said Aion actually had a system that handled this really well. They made it so you turned off all the player models besides people for your group and you’d just see the name plates for enemies and other team players. Anet should look into doing something like that.

I was thinking the same thing. In these situations I just care to know that there are 40 people in front of me and not what race or outfits they are wearing.

I miss the daoc lag, I felt psychic when I noticed even a tinge of lag and could predict enemies coming into visible range a good 5-10 seconds before they could be seen. Could tell about how many by the amount of lag too.

The slide shows were bad however, trying to climb ladders was often an exercise in frustration lol.

I’d prefer if they just used simplified models and filled them in as bandwidth allowed. Invisible is no good.