Originally Posted by sebbi
TeeMunny wrote:
You can set up these servers with home PC's running linux.
Unless I'm missing a HUGE key step here, I don't see where the problem lies.
We have soon one million players playing the game around the world. A home PC running linux would never ever be something a professional company (or publisher) would even consider being reliable and safe enough to serve a customer base of million users. And one server would never be enough to handle so many simultaneous requests. A good server infrastructure should be replicated around the globe to provide all players best possible service. All data on each server should be backupped (and restored) automatically. Naturally the server system should handle cases of one server breaking down (or being under DDOS attack for example, etc). Customers should always be able to connect to the server.
If you have played Trials HD lately (esp during Christmas or Eastern vacations), you have seen that during the peak weekend hours the leaderboards receive so much traffic (over 100 000 simultaneous players pounding the servers) that the leaderboards start to be slightly sluggish. And we have less than 100 tracks currently. Imagine having ten million user created tracks (each players creates just 10 tracks) with leaderboards on each. If we assume that just 1% of the players would play each track, we would have 10 000 leaderboards rows per track... a total of 10 000 000 000 leaderboard rows (million times 10k). Each leaderboard row would store for example player's gamertag, total time (in 1/1000 second precision), checkpoint times (15 time values), fault count... and hopefully replays also.
Also the players would not find anything good to play if we had over 10 million user created tracks. The sharing server system would need good rating and reviewing system and a good searching system (you can define your preferences and filter results by various ways). All the hundreds of thousands of database searches and updates to the track database on peak weekend hours would need some serious processing muscle to handle. And naturally we would need to show some kind of preview of the track (still image at least), before the user selects what to download. Users just browsing the database would likely cause much more traffic than the track downloads themselves. And the leaderboard requests and updates would cause order of magnitude more traffic than both of them combined. A single server would just die under the pressure, no matter how powerful it would be.
You have to be realistic here. A simple home linux box would be reasonable for a small freeware game with around 100+ simultaneous players accessing the server, and no required quality of service. But for one of the most sold XBLA games in the history... not enough.
TeeMunny wrote:
put a cap on how much people can download...10 tracks per month?
That would be silly. An hardcore player using the current sharing system downloads more than 10 tracks PER DAY (some players have over 1000 tracks downloaded already). A limit of 10 downloads per month (or even week) would make the server based download more limited than the current system. Most players would rather have the current one. And without the leaderboards there would be really no point of having a server based global sharing system (leaderboards are really important for Trials players).
But even if we had all the required server resources, we just could not patch in a feature of this scale to an existing game. It's just not about the servers, the whole level sharing system inside the game would need to be remade. I think we have already said this: Trials HD will never have a server based global sharing system. We are one of the few XBLA games having any kind of online content sharing, and we are really proud that we were capable of implementing the current system (with the tight schedule and budget we had). No other XBLA game has server based content sharing either, and it's unfair to compare Trials HD to some of the highest budget 60$ retail console games (with 20-40 million dollars to spend they can do pretty much everything they want).
Trials Developer
Maybe those were the West Coast servers, I don't know. Either way, I trust what you say, after all you're a dev.
Trials Developer
