By Richard Cobbett on January 16th, 2012 at 12:06 pm.
Want to help market a company’s game server scaling technology set a world record for the simple fun of it? Man vs Machine will be taking place on January 29th, with the goal of bringing 1000 players and a hell of a lot of spider monsters into one epic hour long battle.
Trailer and more information about what to expect follows, just as long as our server hasn’t already joined the Machine side and decided to make this the first strike against humanity, in which case death, destruction and a lifetime of mining ore in the slave mines await.
(Phew!)
Well, it’s not the most awesome looking game, is it? Still, it’s a browser based shooter built on Unity, which is only due to be made available on a first-come, first-served basis, so awesome graphics, amazing depth, and lasers that obey the laws of physics actually might be a little too much to ask in this case. If you want to play, just visit the site on the day between 14.00 and 15.00 CET. No registration is needed, though you’ll obviously need to be quick.
Curious about the background to this war? Why? Why are you curious about that? It obviously doesn’t matter. Still, never mind. You can check it out in handy comic form, right here.
16/01/2012 at 12:16 Matt-R says:
To be fair, if they actually manage 1000 folks all at once i’d easily let the looks slide, shame that it coincides with the Chinese new year celebrations, could have been a fair bit of fun this.
16/01/2012 at 12:18 Mr Labbes says:
This sounds amazing. Unfortunately, it also sounds like I will remember it the day after.
16/01/2012 at 12:23 staberas says:
well everyone knows how this is going to end…
With people whining about laggggggggggggggggg
16/01/2012 at 12:53 ahluka says:
Yep. I’ll be ludicrously impressed if it doesn’t lag itself to death and / or start dropping connections / crashing / watching the world burn.
16/01/2012 at 13:58 wannabag says:
Well, it seems to be the whole point with this, show that it can be achieved! Without crashing / lagging and drops. Watching the world burn will probably still occur though…
16/01/2012 at 15:22 zaphod42 says:
Something tells me if it wasn’t feasible, they wouldn’t be doing this. They certainly aren’t just taking a typical FPS and some basic netcode and hoping 1000 real-time FPS connections is going to work.
I’ve read papers on methods to get around this, you still have some problems with latency vs bandwidth, but I’ve seen 100+ players in a single game of quake, IBM did that as an experiment. Instead of just having a single server, you form a mesh between all the users and have a torrent like peer-to-peer network transferring traffic each direction as fast as you can.
There’s other solutions too. I’m interested to see if it works. :)
16/01/2012 at 17:19 BAshment says:
Even the trailer lagged.
16/01/2012 at 14:31 MDPat says:
All your worries about lags and questions answered on the following page: http://www.muchdifferent.com/1000PlayerFPS/faq.php
Here’s an extract concerning the lags:
“The technology running on the servers behind this is developed to remedy this exact problem. We have tested that our servers can cope with the load from the gameplay with uTsung. But we haven’t tested it with you guys just yet. As long as you have an Internet connection capable of downloading 32 KB/s the amount of lag you experience should mainly depend on your distance from Stockholm, Sweden, rather than the number of players in the game. Read more below about our Technology.”
I hope this answers your questions. See you at the event!
Cheers!
16/01/2012 at 16:37 Dana says:
Im pretty sure Planetside had more then 1k players at once.
17/01/2012 at 10:15 BoZo says:
Only 750 on the same continent at once.
250 per team.
16/01/2012 at 16:52 rockman29 says:
The only appeal seems to be the novelty and limited time offer I guess?
I mean… why do it this way when it can be done so much better the other way. Oh well.
16/01/2012 at 18:53 Skabooga says:
I am intrigued by the novelty of it all. One match, and playing for keeps, and the chance to see people running around like schools of fish. Well, I’ll try and give it a go.
16/01/2012 at 19:07 YanDaik says:
Do i see there Star Wars Episode 1?
16/01/2012 at 23:25 tchuckss says:
I’ve met the team behind this when I was in Uppsala, in Sweden. They were working on a pretty kickass audio program when I was there, and I’ve been following this for a while. I have reason to believe this will work out just fine.
17/01/2012 at 04:05 INCA says:
I’ll try and be online at that precise moment.
29/01/2012 at 18:37 Hoaxfish says:
Today was the day