EVE’s server architect, Lin Luo has said the team is working hard to make sure the servers being “hosted around the globe” for DUST 514 are fully optimized and ready for anything players can throw at them.
In a post over the PS Blog, Luo explained the tech behind the servers and how various scenarios, as far as load and utilizing the game’s speedy, FPS dynamics would be handled.
“Unlike normal FPS multiplayer games, DUST 514 has heavy MMO elements,” he said. “And unlike normal MMO FPS games, DUST has heavy interaction with EVE Online. This imposes challenges on what technologies we should use in order to have this level of interaction with EVE, while keeping FPS gameplay as smooth as possible.
“While continuing to rely on the Unreal 3 engine for the FPS multiplayer gameplay for DUST, the interaction with the rest of the EVE universe should naturally take advantage of utilizing some existing EVE online technologies.”
Luo explained that the technology will make use of clusters when the number of each team battling it out has reached a pre-determined minimum. The EVE server logic will “instruct an appropriate DUST battle cluster to spawn a battle in it,” providing the server with “all the necessary information regarding the prospective battle upon launching.”
After a battle is over, the server process will be terminated by the EVE universe.
“So the EVE universe needs to manage the lifetime of DUST battle servers as well as communicating with them when needed, while we also need to make sure that the latency sensitive FPS multiplayer gameplay goes fairly for the participating DUST players,” said Luo. “I won’t go into a deep technical discussion about how we solve the challenges involved here, as we are still exploring all the possibilities to find out the best balance point to map physical DUST battles nicely into the EVE universe.”
Since the centralized server hardware resources will be limited in number, the team will utilize existing server resources as much as possible, so instead of having a “dedicated server machine to host one battle, we aim to have a dedicated multi-core server machine to host as many DUST battle servers as possible,” he said.
CCP has been conducting numerous performance optimizations on both the server and client sides in order to make sure the battles will be “very scalable.”
DUST 514 is slated for a summer release with a beta confirmed, but a release still to be determined.
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