This is wrong, it's not one mega server, and this is why the original stream should be watched. They never claimed it would be one mega server, otherwise the Node system goes out the window.

It's painful how much the concept is misunderstood. There will still be separate servers that you select (called realms). And it is not megaservers like other games like ESO do, because there is no layering. ESO has tons of different instances, and you can travel between the instances but you can't see people in other instances or interact with their characters, you and a friend could be in the same spot in a major city in the open world and not see eachother, unless you fast travel to the other to actually load in the same instance. What this tech does is dynamically splitting the world in sections to have different servers handling the calculations, but everything remains a coherent "realm", no layering, no different channels, whatever. You can seamlessly see and interact with people that are in a different section. And you can move from a section to an other without noticing it. This also means, if a server handling a section crashes. Nobody else is impacted. If hundreds of people are fighting in a bottleneck at the other side of the world, you're not going to lag while picking flowers. And what the dynamic scaling does is that it changes where the sections are drawn based on player density/activity. Big battle suddenly happening in the middle of nowhere away from any point of interest for whatever reason? The sections will be dynamically redrawn and more servers are put online to share the calculations etc ... All of it being totally transparent to the players. The goal is to keep good performance no matter the amount of players and the player density.

It's commendable to see MMO developers like them pushing the boundaries and attempting next-generation tech solutions. One realm is indeed a big promise and the anticipation is sky-high.

They won't do a megaserver. They've consistently mentioned that servers (or realms, in this case) will be unique because of how the node system works. If you have one mega server, then this feature doesn't exist.

my man didnt understand what the server meshing actually is

AoC isn't a one mega server. This is why it's important to watch the actual video from the company and not second hand. They are using dynamic, meshed servers for larger and more stable player counts in one area (without layering), so the game doesn't lag when there are hundreds of people in a similar space on the map fighting. There will still be multiple realms based on your location (West coast, East coast, EU, Oceania, etc.) that you'll have to log into. It's massively impressive tech, but this is plain misinformation.

people really need to stop doing informational videos when they have no idea what they are talking about. there is so much misunderstanding and misinformation its honestly incredible how wrong the original video is

Clicked off video at 1:50. Its not one realm for the whole game. Please go watch original vid from Intrepid ffs.

"A brand new concept known as microservices" made me laugh my aess off. As a software engineer, this is the bogeyman of complexity and projects that move slow as hell, but have the capacity to scale extremely well. They better have world-class engineers on this project.

Eve Online has been running on one shard or instance for twenty years. Now don't get it twisted, when there is a massive space battle with thousands of players in one space system, time dilation kicks in, slowing everything down. The company has the ability to add more servers to star systems when there is a big battle going on but it still slows down a lot.

As I heard in their live, they even break the limitation of Unreal Engine single threading limitation to multi-threading with their own way. It's really impressive for me.

I think gw2 had a good solution as well. If you were on an empty layer, you got the prompt to change layers and got awarded exp boost

This can certainly be done with the experienced gained from EverQuest and Planetside 2. They have a number of devs from those titles and those were done decades ago. I have high hopes for the technical aspect, hopefully the design aspect doesn't go the way those games went.

It makes sense. Most servers for how things are online, is there's a system hypervisor server, then a supervisor for each cluster of servers, so you can have overlapping processing based on how much traffic is on each cluster, allocating resources where it's needed. It's about time games use that overlapping tech too.

Dual Universe tried doing this the same way. Led to lots of item duplication bugs, doubling harvest/mining bugs, and cases where you could have different people in the same spot on "duplicated and different" terrain servers.

Honestly, Narc kinda of dropped the ball on this explanation/video. He didn't do a good job going over the actual meaningful changes/differences between their tech and a lot of people misunderstood what he said by One Realm. If you read the fine print, one realm has MANY servers, and servers can dynamically get spin up depending on the density of player population within an area.

I want a system like thst in EVE, big pp battles are sometimes as laggy as they were 20 years ago.

But the game will have multiple servers. It just won't have layers like wow. Meaning if you go to a spot where there are other players, you will see all of those players

Evs online had what 5000 players fighting in single battle in same system but they use time dilation to make sure everything is correctly applied at snail pace not optimal solution.

Eve online is one big server for everyone and has been since the get go.We frequently have 1000 player + battles. The large ones 1000 + players are handled by something called time dilation where time slows down and actions are queued up. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it works.

This is how you bring a genre forward. Next generation tech right here. Even if this game flops it’s attempting to revolutionize the genre and bring it forward rather than copying WoW. Big respect

well star citizen has been working on server meshing for nearly 10 years.. wonder how long it will be for ashes?

The amount of exploits or death by desync on the borders of those grids will be hillarious

So what this actually means is that there will be multiple realms and you create your character on one. That realm will be made up of many servers in a grid across the world that are seamless to the player. There wont be layers or shards to seperate the playerbase so theoretically everyone can all go to one point on the map. This will feel more like a "megaserver" than something that only allows 60 players in a layer in a zone. In the end what asmon wants is one massive server and so far that's not going to happen.

I know Runescape has been mentioned a lot recently and it solves this in a great way I reckon, theres a few hundred servers with up to date 2k people each, but your progress is identical on all of them, so if you want to meet a person in another country you just hop to their server in seconds, dont even need to log back in. Edit: though I admit while this is a fantastic solution, it doesn't deliver on the impressive scale of having tens of thousands of players living on the same map.

Only the final prpduct will tell us if this game is actually worth of our time.

I hope that whatever APIs they are gonna be feeding/serving player data above the main servers can handle the traffic. At least the nice thing about microservice architecture is that it scales up or down horizontally without any issue, assuming your replica orchestration is working as intended.

You cannot make a real-time combat game with one server it's physically impossible. There will be regions until someone figures out how to break the speed of light

I think gamer are passed the phase of "excited for the promise of nothing". I wish they made it, however if this is possible, others big games may already tried it. Just wait and see when it come out.

even the fps in stormwind is ass on cartoon graphics

Dynamic server meshing is the end goal for any "many players on screen" game. This technical challenge is mostly "How to work around the server bandwidth limit for exchanging information with other servers while still being performant on the player side." Remember that they want 100s of players in combat + NPCS + crafting nodes + every other system working on screen. And 1 server needs to run well while process all that info from every nearby server, and sharing it's own info with those same servers. Throwing more servers at the issue just means overloaded bandwidth. So you need to be ridiculously smart in limiting info that is transferred between servers to replicate, while having all the necessary info be transferred. And even if they crack it for Ashes that does not mean other games will be able to utilize it since it will be built entirely around their games needs.

I remember Margaret Krohn from Planetside 2. She knows the stuff. (The most players in an online FPS battle is 1,530, achieved on 5 November 2022 in PlanetSide 2 (USA). The peak was hit on the Amerish map on Emerald server, when 1530 players were recorded as online)

Can't believe an unreleased MMO completely changed and evolved the genre for the 7th time.

Wasn’t expecting another example of server meshing 👀 this is amazing, I hope all major online games start utilizing similar tech

Will it be able to be possible to walk the server mesh boundaries and glitch/lag hack like back in the day? UO comes to mind when people would zig zag back and forth so spells and animals chasing them would miss and deaggro

One realm that doesn't mean they are claiming not to have multiple names servers. Just that on your named "server " f you have 300 people in one area the grid will dynamically split the area into multiple servers. So you don't have to join a group to see everyone you just always see everyone.

Darkfall had one big server over a decade ago

GW2 already has this ever since release as do many other mmo's - there are no "servers" you log into, you log into the game and you get put in an "dynamic layer" with other people - everyone on the server can't be in the same place, it's simply not possible.

One virtual dynamic realm with multiple servers working merged together, this makes sense. And because they are dynamic they constantly shift and change based on population. Basically a far more advanced version of seemless zoning.

they are basically trying for the same tech that star citizen is going for you still have different realms BUT they are ALL interconnected so you can seamlessly move between them and see/fight others as well

I just hope it won't cost 100+ dollars every month to play

Dont watch this....... Watch original 1h video This is Miss leading

Man that was a very good point towards the end of the video. Me and my buddy was just talking about that last night on how there isnt a good mmo that felt like watching SAO for the first time. I do wish one day before I go to enjoy and play a really good mmo that doesnt die in two months.

The only doubt they left me is: what happens if every player go to the same node? Since there no layering and the server support a node, you have to close a node when capped? I don't get that

No comments, comments fell off

as someone who enjoys star citizen, this video sounds exactly like how i can see someone describing that game

The proof is in the pudding, how well it functions will be determined by how well it handles boundary transitions, and how well combat functions across those boundaries.

its not a mega server, its combining physical servers to all be for one realm so that you can have more players than regular mmos have per server and at the same time have a smoother experience. there will still be separate realms and we know this because of the Node System.

Alpha 2 was $250 and that included 6 momths playtime. Not sure what else.

Steven said early on, and over time with the node system that every server would have a different world experience due to it's dynamic nature. With 1 realm/server that seems like a big design flip.

one of the great things of OSRS i never hear asmon mention (cuz he doesnt play) is that you can server hop at any time, to any time zone, whenever you want. You can choose a packed server, or a low pop server, and they even have special servers for high level players, always thought that was cool.

I tend to play on RP servers and will not likely play any game without it or an option to load into a phased portion of the meshed servers that is marked for it.

So Star Citizen had like $712,746,168 att founding and they still can't use Server Meshing, and these guys already have a version 2.0 of Server Meshing? Surely one of them is lying.

Honestly this game looks incredibly promising.

Atlas did a really good dynamic griding for their entire world. Also EVE does this in a single system, with dynamic grids too.

I've waited for like 8 years for this game, i don't expect it to come out before another 8

"I hope this game is gonna be fun" Every single MMO player before every single MMO release

This is literally what the Ark developers did with their offshoot game Atlas. The single map was divided into 24ish servers meshed together. It wasn't as seamless as these guys are showing in their presentation. In Atlas you'd come to the edge of the server square and sail through a grey fog wall and appear on the other side in the next server.

In the past they've implied each server/realm would develop it's nodes differently

if the realm runs on migrating servers communicating with eachother for information and game state data, they are going to have to be tight on latency abusing exploits and bugs while also being super efficient with zone-server dependancy in the event a server goes down. Its a feature i imagine we will get one day, and this very well might be the start, but itll take years to perfect.

I want to full dive

so.... basically how Guild Wars 2, finally someone took the good idea from the others that do it right, this looks like Guild Wars 3

one realm economy, one realm player pool for any type of group content. phasing in and out of where ever your party member is/you are. thats such a huge win for an MMO.

Sounds like it might be similar to Eve Online. Eve is one giant galaxy where you can cross paths with everyone, but each region and star system has its own servers to reduce lag.

Try Finger, But Hole

The question is will this make it live. I feel like this has been talked about for many, many, years and we still waiting.

in AoC you have character on land. In CS you have character. 1)On a land 2)Underland 3)In scape 4)character inside of ships -You move ships with character -You move ships with others characters You move you items as a phyzical ipem that is visible for everyone. Tha is object streaming. AoC tech and SC tech is like windows calculator vs NASA super computer

I don't see servers to be much of a problem more so being restricted to a server, runescape world's ( servers ) are done perfectly. You can hop servers with a single click.

Ashes of Creation is promising way more than they can deliver, like Age of Conan. Remember Age of Conan? Yea, that's what I thought.

Hypothetically one realm seems awesome. Though I think that depends on how big the world is, and how many players there are. Imagine trying to mine iron ore with 500 other people circling the same area.

This is actually a common server infra for large websites like facebook. I don’t doubt they can do it BUT the biggest drawback with this approach is its very expensive vs the usual server infra due to the increased quantity + orchestration overhead. Im curious how they monetize this to be able to afford all those servers and how that affects gameplay

Eve Online has always been one server, and has been out for 20+ years

I want to give money to game companies who are willing to innovate and provide a good experience.

Dark Age of Camelot had this in the sense that every server had a frontier where the three fractions bordered. These fights could have the entire server fighting at once. Obviously it was laggy as hell, but I hoped it would survive WoW's obsession with instancing everything

Cannot believe it.. The game that never was already changed MMOs 4ever

Wasn’t expecting another example of server meshing this is amazing, I hope all major online games start utilizing similar tech

Asmon should have seen the original stream this time... It's not a simple topic and AoC staff explained it really well.

I don't really feel I'd want 1 mega server, simply because in most MMOs I played, you had different rulesets. Like Full PvP servers, roleplay servers etc... so depends on the type of game, but I tend to want to play full PvP but I know most people don't so its good to be on a server where everyone's opted in to that

Wow could have been made with a 1 realm strategy, with the Big Blue system, but the shards are much easier to push out when needed.

"Intrepid has made a brand new concept called Micro services".... So... What was it that I was working daily with for many many long years at work??? 😢

Last time I was this early Asmon had hair

Its almost the same as in Helldivers overworld but way bigger and way more details. Its gonna be glitchy.

Ok they won't have layers. But there will be separate servers. They said you can scale this solution but there are limits so you have to cut off the number of players at some point.

I searched up that they’ll be charging $15/a month for the game. It better be the best MMORPG ever with no technical issues whatsoever bruh.

There has been one huge misunderstanding here xD This has nothing to do with only being 1 server.

Eso did this 12 years ago. Their megaserver always worked great. Yes you would need to teleport to your friend to see them sometimes but it just worked.

Fun fact, Ultima Online used server meshing in it's server architecture.

It's going to have a crazy amount of players for 1 month, then be completely forgotten like every other modern mmo.

Expect this silly game to come out in 2030

I hope they can pull it off. I don't want to see their AWS bill tho.

@Asmongold need to watch this tech stream and te previous one. The tech demo is long but it's worthwhile.

The client side (your computer) should be doing all the rendering. The server shouldn't do any of the graphical computations, ever.

I mean Eve does this well, one server held together with duct tape 😂

GW2 has a similar system for years. The only differences between GW2 and Ashes, from what I can see, is that unlike GW2, you don't need to get prompted to switch to a "more populated instance" nor is there a loading screen? Thought that is most likely because of the way these games even work...

This world better be big or else its going to feel like disneyland

It's funny how they reinvent something that was done over a decade ago and sell it as new, same with Starcitizen.

It's not even on Steam, they should at least list the game on Steam.

dynamic griding was my first thought for star citizen as a solution

if this tech works, intrepid will have one hell of a patent for the future. i can see so much potential for the tech even outside of the gaming space

Speaking as an mmorpg game developer, the only way one server will work is if nobody plays. The technical reason it would never work is because everyone could gather in one area and crash the server by overloading the server CPU resources. Just do client requests that weigh down the servers and it'll cause everyone to timeout and disconnect. Additionally, imagine how difficult it will be to get a good unique name. There are ways to get around that, but it'll create more problems than it solves. Unique names are the best way to identify players.