Dedicated Server?

[finalfantasy]

Will there be self hostable dedicated servers?

[The Sad Snail]

We'd like to support dedicated servers or something similar, but we'll most likely focus on this more after the launch.

[finalfantasy]

What is ment with "something similar"?
So at the EA-release it will be playable only online on official servers?

[The Sad Snail]

Originally posted by finalfantasy:

What is ment with "something similar"?
So at the EA-release it will be playable only online on official servers?

We only run P2P at the moment and this will be the case on launch, we don't have servers. We'll cover Dedicated support closer to launch, at the moment we're still adding pre-release content to the game.

There is also a larger discussion about how ASKA would work in a dedicated server scenario, because we have AI villagers, weather simulations, random events and invasions. Imagine allowing a game of Europa Universalis, Bannerlord or similar games that run AI sims running by itself.

There is the design challenge of allowing this game running in the background without player supervision - your settlement might collapse due to a shortage or because of an invasion. There you go logging in only to find your 300+ hour village completely in shambles because of an unfortunate series of events.

There's an entire list of scenarios we need to cover, it's a much more complicated dev challenge than obvious at first. The networking itself is the easy part (not to say it's easy).

I will pin your post because it's one of the FAQs and you can stay subscribed to it. Once we make a final decision I'll update this post as well.

[finalfantasy]

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

I see your point. Sounds similar to medieval dynasty.

[Vågmästaren]

Originally posted by The Sad Snail:

Originally posted by finalfantasy:

What is ment with "something similar"?
So at the EA-release it will be playable only online on official servers?

There is the design challenge of allowing this game running in the background without player supervision - your settlement might collapse due to a shortage or because of an invasion. There you go logging in only to find your 300+ hour village completely in shambles because of an unfortunate series of events.

you could "pause" the "serverplayer" when noone "real" is logged in :)

[finalfantasy]

Yeah, that's the way basically all games with regular occuring events handle this, like 7d2d.
They do this basically to not enable players to just log out before the bloodmoon/raid/purge/ just to skip it and log on back again after it happened. But there are neither NPCs nor players aging.

But if only one of 2 players keeps playing and so for keeps time running, the other's people are aging too. Also if they use seperate settlements, the other one might be raided anyway, the other player not taking even notice.

Still "doable", but players must comprehend not to play for a long time while others are offline. Might work for small groups of players, but for sure not for higher player count.
If time is essentiall game mechanic, this is really problem and imho nearly impossible to balance.

[Jinxster]

Originally posted by The Sad Snail:

Originally posted by finalfantasy:

What is ment with "something similar"?
So at the EA-release it will be playable only online on official servers?

We only run P2P at the moment and this will be the case on launch, we don't have servers. We'll cover Dedicated support closer to launch, at the moment we're still adding pre-release content to the game.

There is also a larger discussion about how ASKA would work in a dedicated server scenario, because we have AI villagers, weather simulations, random events and invasions. Imagine allowing a game of Europa Universalis, Bannerlord or similar games that run AI sims running by itself.

There is the design challenge of allowing this game running in the background without player supervision - your settlement might collapse due to a shortage or because of an invasion. There you go logging in only to find your 300+ hour village completely in shambles because of an unfortunate series of events.

There's an entire list of scenarios we need to cover, it's a much more complicated dev challenge than obvious at first. The networking itself is the easy part (not to say it's easy).

I will pin your post because it's one of the FAQs and you can stay subscribed to it. Once we make a final decision I'll update this post as well.

simple solution is a player must be logged in for those events to take place. this way friends can play while i am at work and upgrade the towns etc..

[Jinxster]

Originally posted by finalfantasy:

Yeah, that's the way basically all games with regular occuring events handle this, like 7d2d.
They do this basically to not enable players to just log out before the bloodmoon/raid/purge/ just to skip it and log on back again after it happened. But there are neither NPCs nor players aging.

But if only one of 2 players keeps playing and so for keeps time running, the other's people are aging too. Also if they use seperate settlements, the other one might be raided anyway, the other player not taking even notice.

Still "doable", but players must comprehend not to play for a long time while others are offline. Might work for small groups of players, but for sure not for higher player count.
If time is essentiall game mechanic, this is really problem and imho nearly impossible to balance.

or have the raids occur what town the player is closest

[HumanGenome]

I think it's worth delaying or pushing back launch if dedicated servers aren't ready yet, absolutely necessary for this game even at EA launch.

[Higgs]

If they add dedicated servers... Definite purchase.. +1 for dedicated servers

[nesðarus]

Whether I purchase this or not depends on whether this supports dedicated servers or not. If it's only P2P it might as well be single player. I don't play single player survival games.

:)

[protector23]

Yep dedicated server is a must other wise I'll be waiting for purchase. Made the mistake a few times recently on buying EA game without dedicated server.

[Jahon]

I'm ok with no dedi at EA launch. I could set up a game and AFK if my friends want to play with me as host. I leave my gamin rig running most of the time anyhow. :)

[Mladenius]

Originally posted by The Sad Snail:

We'd like to support dedicated servers or something similar, but we'll most likely focus on this more after the launch.

Good idea, also increasing player number in dedicated servers would be good, cause sometimes we have more than 4 people wanting to play together

[Roceh]

I post this for every promising survival game coming out, but Grounded's shared cloud save system is a good comprise for dedicated servers that does not require much engineering effort.

Basically you specify which friends to share your current game with, they can join your game if you are hosting. The game state is also saved to a shared cloud save periodically which all specified friends can access. When friends start the game from this cloud save their game checks to see if anyone else is already running the game from this shared cloud save, if so it joins their game, otherwise it hosts the game from the save.