drainedman

I feel its misguided to think about programming languages in this manner (x or y is slow we can't use it). Whilst I don't care for Python I don't believe it necessarily has a huge impact on speed - IDK maybe this is an issue with beginners but consider that experienced developers should usually understand how to use higher level languages without performance impact. It might be that only 1% of the processing power is spend with Python that does 99% of the game logic. Putting game logic into C++ would not only take far longer to develop but would be such a minimal gain (e.g. 3x of 1%) its simply not worth it.

C++ is overated Its more important to get hardware to do the heavy lifting by using hundreds of cores. Then it doesn't matter much what language you use. Remember these DU ideas are nothing new and are actually quite common. Now, does this approach work...? Kind of but not really. It depends how you design the game and impose limitations. I think the biggest problem is how to make the game be large scale yet offer players a vast amount of freedom. Typically you run into the n^2 problem - see below. Personally I think people are waaay too optimistic how well this server scaling works. In MMOs what people do is basically want large scale battles anywhere at a given instance where they can fire loads of shots at each and basically that breaks everything. If you remember HeroEngine? That did server side single shard scaling. I think this article does a good job of explaining the challenges: http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Scalability_and_Building_For_Massive_Multiplayer_Audiences A couple good quotes from the article: "For example, I personally have run 5000 AI controlled characters in an area server instance (a process). Great! That means we can have 5000 players in an area server instance easy right?" (This sounds a bit like the DU approach to testing :S) and, "It bears repeating...no engine, no programming language, no technology can make an N^2 algorithm anything other than an N^2. Game logic must take advantage of an engine's features to choose the right trade-offs for the game design. Engines whose marketing departments claim their engine solves the problem of N (for a large value of N) players who all decide to move to the same game location are selling you snake oil, don't buy any. There is no magic "Easy Button", the laws of physics still apply."

The terminology of "actor model" or "cloud" doesn't really matter. That's smoke and mirrors/hype train stuff. Often when people mention "actor model" with MMO I get suspicious as they tend to come from a background where they don't understand why service model, actors and Erlang don't work. Beware. Databases are comparatively slow and not suitable for games (re the ones mentioned above post). At the end of the day the problem boils down to how to encode a highly dynamic n-body simulation with certain parameters (e.g. every body have lasers and can shot 10kms away). Very well explored using super computers. Super computers usually have a very large bus which allows for great amounts of RAM. So lots of information can be shared very quickly. In theory. As far as real tech goes, most is deprecated (e.g. Shinra for no good reason). However there is still some. http://www.cloudgine.com/ I am told actually works, sort of. Here is one with a similar approach : http://bigworldtech.com/en/technology/bigworld-server/ There was a very solid associated article explaining limitations (can't find), and how to beware of all too common snake oil salesmen. This of course is underpinned by earlier tech that was used in 1990s. Second life etc. It works but with limitations mainly adapting to load is not dynamic enough to be "fun". Theres a bit of academic projects out there if you really dig around (project darkstar, and plenty more).

Do you know of any other technologies that use the Actor Model in a cloud server farm? I'm interested in finding out more about them.

Yes this is how n-body simulation is usually done with CUDA. Its a cheat but close enough as influence on bodies with other bodies very far away tends to zero. The relationship is linear not quadratic e.g. 50k x n number of neighbours not 50k x 50k.

FYI this "tech" is pretty similar was supposed to be used in Warhammer.(Actually these guys were pretty arrogant coming from finance background slagging of us "dumb" game network developers, now who looks silly?). https://improbable.io/ also, doesn't work (I have tried it). They brag about scaling to 1000s of servers and yet have the most pathetic demos. I have more examples than this even. Thats not to say that scaling with lots of servers can't be done, it actually has been done a lot in research and with GPUs, but these ideas just doesn't play nice in real world conditions - partly cause people do such random things. Thats why I'd like to see a little more exploration and explanation into showing the server tech and what its limitations will be.

What im saying is 50k bots running simple logic isnt that much you don't need 100s of servers. You could do some stress tests with the bots doing certain patterns, e.g. 1000 of the 50k bots suddenly and quickly swarming and swamping one location 300 meters radius. And then they all start firing shots at each other. Then they disperse and go to another location. Thats generally the problem in these games is upscaling the processing on demand for highly compact areas and then wide spread areas, maintaining real time responsiveness. As far as Age of Ascent goes...actually I know of a lot of server "technologies" that make this promise. Dual Universe idea is nothing new. I know of a dozen with similar(ish) approaches. So far nothing has actually worked yet.

50k bots, all persistent, flying around and taking pot shots at nearby bots. Since the claim is being made that the servers can scale up then they should demonstrate this. 10 or so servers should be able to easily accommodate this computation wise. If Ultimate Epic Battle simulator can do 100k+ bots on one machine then computation is no problem Age of Ascent can do 50k+ network players (supposedly).

I saw the video showing the basic principle but I'd like to see a more convincing test of some real stress being placed on the system. How about a fly through a planet with 50k simulated network entities?