Clearing up the confusion surrounding servers and online features.

[Gyson]

There seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around regarding the way severs and the online components in No Man's Sky function, at least from my understanding of it based on the information provided to the public over the course of the game's development. In particular, the mechanics behind how player encounters are handled and why some of the theories or "proofs" surrounding the attempted multiplayer encounter are not necessarily worthwhile arguments. Note that I'm not here to argue about what Sean Murray did or didn't promise during interviews, only to speak to the information that was provided to us and how it is possibly being misinterpreted.

The best way I know how to try and get everyone on the same page is for us to imagine an entirely different game, one that can be played single-player but also allows for drop-in/drop-out co-op. I'm sure most of you have played many games like this before, whether it was the Trine series, Torchlight 2, the Saint's Row series, etc, and our imaginary game works much the same way. We can both play it individually on separate computers without being a part of each other's game, but we can also choose to play the same game together.

For ease, let's refer to our imaginary game as "Game-X". Let's pretend you wanted to play Game-X with me, so I send you a message with my IP address and you load the game up and go to the multiplayer menu (where it has you input my IP address, searches for my game, and upon finding it prompts you with the option to join). A few moments later I receive a message that you've joined the game and then (after you've finished loading) your character appears near mine, and we go off and play it together. In this scenario my computer is playing the role of "host" or "server" for our multiplayer session in Game-X. Many multiplayer games work this way.

Now imagine, instead, that there's a matchmaking server somewhere that is automating this entire process for us, removing the need for us to ever communicate or arrange a multiplayer session. It's doing this by comparing our positions in the game's world, and when it thinks we're close enough for a viable player-to-player encounter to occur it quietly instructs one of our computers to act as the "host" or "server", and then it connects our two clients together. And, as before, suddenly we see each other in the same game. To us this is all seamless and handled behind the scenes - all we see is each other suddenly showing up in our world. Surprise! :)

That is how the mechanics of player encounters have been described as working in No Man's Sky. For those of you familiar with MMOs, you're used to logging in and connecting to a server farm that not only hosts your character information, but also coordinates all player activity and game activity (e.g. NPCs, events, storage, etc) as well. No Man's Sky's servers don't do that. The role they perform (in this context) is that of the behind-the-scenes matchmaker we described above, as well as a database tracking player discoveries, positions and the like. It does not perform the role of host the way an MMO does.


Which brings us to the recent multiplayer test - when it failed, people were making statements like "they're probably in different servers/shards/phases/instances". That's not an accurate description of the problem. There is no instance or phase to be assigned to, there are no server shards to connect to, etc. Instead, they were simply playing their own individual games on their own individual computers.

The problem was a connection had failed to establish between their two clients, which in turn prevented them from sharing information directly and syncing (which is why, for example, they had different times of day and could not see one another). As far as each of their clients was concerned, the other simply did not exist - there was no multiplayer session happening. When you play NMS your client is always ready to accept a connection from another client, but no connection request was being sent. It's like setting up a public co-op session of Torchlight 2, except nobody is interested in joining your game. [Enter QQ image here]


Understanding that, let's touch on a few other concerns that were brought up: game packets and pausing.

A player was monitoring his network to see whether positional information was ever being sent to the server. The problem there is the assumption that our clients freely push positional updates to the server without either the server first requesting it, or outside of a designated scenario. For example, with the setup described above you would not have a sever asking every single player playing No Man's Sky for a positional update every few seconds - that would be madness. Instead, it would happen at specific moments - like (I am guessing) when you're staring at the "warp screen" while transitioning between two star systems. That's a reasonable point to check where you're going and compare it to a log of star systems that other players were last reported as traveling to.

If, for example, you are attempting to move to StarSystemBabar and my last positional update has me registered as having also traveled to that same star system (and, equally important, never moving to another system), the server would recognize that a potential player encounter is about to occur and it would attempt to connect our two clients, and my client would be updating yours with everything you need to know about StarSystemBabar (like the position and orientation of the planets, so that your time of day matches mine). That way, when you arrive in StarSystemBabar, everything is in order and if we happen to get within visual range of each other, we'll see each other. Cue Beethoven's "Ode to Joy".

*However* - the thing to remember is that if the server is not requesting a positional update from the client (because it is, for example, overloaded by an unexpected volume of people playing the game and repeated attempting to connect to its online services), then the client would obviously never send that information to the server. And so, if you're monitoring your network activity looking for a positional update to be sent to the server, you would never see it - because you're client's not going to send anything until the server requests the update to begin with, and it's certainly not going to just send it outside of a designated moment.


Finally, "pausing". I don't know where this idea started that pausing = no multiplayer, but it's not accurate. There are plenty of games that allow you to pause a multiplayer gaming session, which in turn pauses the game for everyone involved in that session. However, that's usually limited to a smaller scale (2-4 player games) and not really comparable or relevant to No Man's Sky.

What *is* relevant is that No Man's Sky is a single-player game until it needs to be a multiplayer game. So yes, you can pause the game when you're running around playing alone, but the real question is whether you can pause it when another player is standing near you (although the question is fairly moot at that point), and the answer is probably "no". This is not the first game to do this - for example, anyone who has played Warframe knows that despite it being a massively multiplayer online game you can pause it when you're playing a mission alone, but when you join a mission with other players the game no longer allows pausing. So, yes, it is possible for a game to still allow multi-player interaction and still have instances of where it can be paused.


Final word, let's please keep in mind that from Sean's tweets it should be obvious that not only are they dealing with server loads they weren't prepared for, but said issues are causing us to not see features of online play that would otherwise be happening. What those features may be.. each of you has to decide what you believe, although by now I would hope everyone has seen the montage videos floating around of Sean stating players will be able to see other players.

[Around999People]

Great post!

[ringod123]

complete conjecture that does not clear anything up at all.

[Lechonk]

Originally posted by Around999People:

Great post!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdtKbq3Omkw

[Deadite]

im pretty sure the only online bit is when you upload planets/animals you have named and download ones that others have named....or at least that is my take on it.... i didnt buy the game to play it with others, i played it cos theres a f4cktonne of random planets to explore.. MP games have too much trolling in my eyes.

[Samurai]

Right...

Like it wouldn't be at all easy for Sean to say "You can see each other but there is currently an issue." after been asked multiple times about why the 2 who tested mp could not see each other.

Instead of saying nothing that explains anything about it i mean. Your impressions of how it supposedly works doesn't help with actually explaining anything.

They say the easiest explanation is usually right so how about "it never worked at all"?

[ringod123]

Originally posted by Cap'n Fk'n Obvious:

Right...

Like it wouldn't be at all easy for Sean to say "You can see each other but there is currently an issue." after been asked multiple times about why the 2 who tested mp could not see each other.

Instead of saying nothing that explains anything about it i mean. Your impressions of how it supposedly works doesn't help with actually explaining anything.

Yup he even tweeted saying "two players meeting on the first day blows my mind", did he say "shame they couldnt see each other due to a bug we missed" or something similar? Not from what i saw, so, in my eyes he basically confirmed with that 1 tweet that everything was working as it should, aka no multiplayer interactions.

[Saladbar]

Wonder how many planets I'll have to visit to translate that into Gek.

[Gyson]

Originally posted by ringod123:

complete conjecture..

Absolutely, and as you saw it was intentionally noted in the very first sentence of the opening post. However we've been given enough information to know that the comments regarding being on separate servers, shards, instances, phases, etc are completely wrong. These are elements that simply do not exist in a peer-to-peer multiplayer setup (which games like Watch Dogs, Darksouls, Dying Light and others use, as noted by Sean Murray below).

Originally posted by Sean Murray, Hello Games:

"What we can do is, like many games that you have at the moment, where you are flying around with an open lobby. People are coming into that lobby and leaving it – like if you play Watch Dogs or something like that. Effectively, we have players joining your discrete space. We're not trying to make an MMO where you can play with literally 60,000 people on screen. We handle the case like where other people can fly past in your game or that you can bump into other players in the game."

Hope that clears things up.

[Samurai]

Originally posted by Gyson:

Hope that clears things up.

It doesn't clear up anything. Why didn't the 2 players testing mp have an option to join any lobby? Why is there no lobby indicator?

Why does Sean refuse to give a clear answer?

Edit: Gyson? Gyyyyysooooon!?

[Nate Mc Bow]

A bit of a wall of text OP but thanks for the description. It might calm the toxic community parts of the community down a bit with all the facts in one place.

[KiM!]

loooool people still believe there is multiplayer

[Nate Mc Bow]

Originally posted by RexSol:

loooool people still believe there is multiplayer

And you keep spouting junk everywhere. You claim on one of my posts that every rumour is true. (Like the one with a forced game reset that is proved to be false) Stop harrassing every forum post around here.

Dont listen to him. He seems to be on a trolling spree.

[Haunt Fox]

Originally posted by Saladbar:

Wonder how many planets I'll have to visit to translate that into Gek.

"Only a trillion".

[ringod123]

Originally posted by (LOST)Nate Mc Bow:

A bit of a wall of text OP but thanks for the description. It might calm the toxic community parts of the community down a bit with all the facts in one place.

please point out the facts in this post, the vast majority is guess work and opinion along with interpretation. There are no facts here that will clear up anything about multiplayer or why those 2 players could not see or interact with each other, or why Sean commented on them meeting without saying it was a shame it didnt work as intended, just a click-bait title.

[Nate Mc Bow]

Originally posted by ringod123:

Originally posted by (LOST)Nate Mc Bow:

A bit of a wall of text OP but thanks for the description. It might calm the toxic community parts of the community down a bit with all the facts in one place.

place point out the facts in this post, the vast majority is guess work and opinion along with interpretation. There are no facts here that will clear up anything about multiplayer or why those 2 players could not see or interact with each other, or why Sean commented on them meeting without saying it was a shame it didnt work as intended.

I think you meant to say "Please" as the first word there.

Anyways facts arent always solid. These are the best facts we got to work with here and the "guesswork" here is probably the best we got to work with. So its the only facts we got at the moment.