Multiplayer questions

Hi Reiza

Going to dive in for the pre order soon but just a quick question on the multiplayer side, will it be the same system as PC2 currently uses with a hybrid type P2P/DS with Steam dependency or will it be more like AMS1 which had direct proper Dedicated servers which are not Steam dependant, i.e that you can I.P connect to.

The only reason I ask this is although PC2 has it all it's multiplayer issues really killed it for league racing with disconnects a plenty and some multiplayer bugs that were mainly down to how the dedicated server was handled.

These problems killed league racing on PC2 for us and if they are carried over then I think it will be a huge mistake.

TIA

 

From what I remember from Renato's interview, it is a bit early to say something more technical about multiplayer. And maybe, depending on the workload, an improvement could be done before the release, maybe after. Anyway, be sure there is an eye on it.

 

If i'm allowed to hijack this thread with another multiplayer question?

Will the multiplayer part play a bigger role in AMS2?
I'd wish for events and ratings like iRacing has, but i'm aware that's too much to ask most likely.
But are there any plans on boosting multiplayer participation?
Like for example promoting official server races after launching the game and such.

 

I think the best answer would come directly from the source: (around 25min30s)

Switch subtitles on

 

That's good to know. The Dedi server (hybrid and even p2p) netcode was quite a weak link in MP, especially for clubs/leagues. Disconnections, lag problems, as in the entire grid of cars shifting position, etc. Incident reports (league races) where quite high and after reviewing replays from two sides, showed completely different circumstances (one view, nowhere near, others view, impact).

Also, the reliance on steam was also problematic, if steam itself has a blip or goes down for maintenance temporarily, everybody gets disconnected, even when playing on a dedicated server, unlike a lot of other titles.

One thread for ref:
Helping AOR

Sadly, it took a more "high profile" series / selection of players in order to get some attention on this, even though many people and clubs where reporting the same issues for quite some time. But, by that time it was already too late because development had ended for the title. That post doesn't necessarily include or refer to most of the problems that exist in multiplayer.

Other than that, the execution of multiplayer, in the ability to create p2p lobbies easily, change cars/tracks in-game, even on a dedi, and just generally get going, was IMO, pretty well done, better than most racing titles I have played. But needs work.

Fingers crossed AMS doesn't just re-use the dedi/netcode how it was in PC2 and fixes/improves upon it

 

My reading of the interview is AMS2 will use the Madness engine online racing system. Lets hope SMS have made (or will make) some improvements in this area in the 18 month time period between the last PC2 update and the release of AMS2. My own experience of casual on-line races, mainly with GamerMuscle, doesn't reflect yours.

Lets get real. If SMS can't fix the issues you have, I don't think its realistic to expect Reiza, who I'm fairly sure have never developed their own netcode, to do so.

 

Well I can tell you this that our club was very vocal in the SMS forums about the multiplayer experience and more agreed than disagreed and a lot of the responses were as yours, i.e 'I don't have a problem it must be your end' type of responses.

Let me clarify ours and others situation including AOR, we have a dual Xeon rack server paid for and owned by us and run by us, it is under utilised and overkill but that's what we wanted, we ran PC2 races daily and weekly leagues with usually 32 racers.

The daily races with say up to 20 racers were fine for up to 10 laps but the weekly league race where we were doing 32 racer lobbies with up to 90 mins races just could not cope with the load and disconnects frequently happened to a lot of racers randomly, no reason for it, this is beside the Steam drops that caused mass disconnects.

When you have invested 2000 hours per person in a sim as club you start seeing the problems, the ones that had no problems were the ones playing offline or doing a few hours a week randomly, our individual hours per racer per week were more like 30 odd hours a week racing together so we saw every bug going.

By contrast when we league raced AMS we had zero disconnects apart from the Audun who mentioned above it was his end to do with his ISP, also Raceroom we are currently running leagues in has been rock solid, this is on the same server so we know that the issues were not with our end at all but the netcode in PC2, we have network, software and hardware engineers in our club and it was scrutinised under a microscope and the only conclusion we came to was the hybrid dedicated set up PC2 has going was not stable and Steam dependency didn't help either.

Just go on YT and watch some of the AOR races with full grids and see how many times it happened to them getting maybe 4-5 players all disconnect at a time for no reason whatsoever.

I came here to voice my concern on this as it is real and it is my main concern with AMS2, everything else in PC2 as a sim was fine or we could work around but the above issue was game breaker for us, I just hope that it can be looked at.

Just because AMS2 will use the madness engine and seta tyre model does not mean it is tied to the SMS online system as the engine and tyre model are not tied to it.

Oh also SMS never tried to fix it, once the last patch came in that was development over for them, the core MP experience never changed but it did actually get worse towards the end.

 

Let me also add as it sounds like I'm bitter with Reiza and I am not, I have more faith in Reiza to pull this off where SMS failed as my experience with AMS was top notch so I really have high hopes for them and even though some of our players got stung by PC2 they are still willing to invest and have invested in AMS2 and Reiza based on their prior performance, myself included.

I just wanted to come on and ask a few questions before I bit the bullet.

 

I am a regular viewer of both the official AOR stream and Jardier's stream - I know they have had issues. The 4-5 player disconnects seem to have stopped now SMS removed their "anti-piracy" measure. And yes I agree that "anti-piracy" measure was a bad idea.

Of course, but writing netcode is a specialist task. Kunos have been writing netcode for well over 10 years but still manged to screw ACC netcode up, to the extent they had to re-write it and it was still a mess at game launch. Reiza used rFactor netcode for AMS - to my knowledge they have never written netcode for a game. You might feel Reiza are in a better position than SMS to fix the Madness netcode or replace it completely but I don't share this view. And nothing Renato has said in RD interviews or the interview above indicates to me they intent to use their own netcode for AMS2.

 

Hence the reason I came on to ask the question and if your speculation is correct this doesn't fill me with confidence.

I agree also Kunos has really dropped the ball with ACC at the moment, I hope it can recover.

 

Thanks for starting this thread RWB. I am an RF1/SCE/AMS1 veteran and a PC2 noob. I am wanting to know answers this these questions/concerns as well as I run a league that is certainly planning on moving to AMS2 in 2020. I do have faith in Reiza 100% but understand your concerns that (as far as I know) they have not messed with netcode much in the past. I believe we need to be patient and see how it all comes out and then help Reiza build upon it with our feedback and testing. Renato has said that AMS2 will be several years in development so even if multiplayer is not the top concern, it is part of the deal. Also if disconnects are the main issue, and if Davis is correct in saying they have been resolved with the removal of the SMS "anti-piracy" measure, I think we are at least on the right path.

 

The anti piracy measure to my mind was a smoke screen, Ian Bell pulled it out of thin air.

No one in the AOR league would be a pirate so the reasoning that the disconnects were down to anti piracy is a moot one, they may have done something on the back end but I can assure you disconnects still happen although more infrequent, although as we canned it for leagues because of the netcode problems we haven't really been able to test it with full grids again.

I can also guarantee that everyone that raced in our leagues actually bought the game, no pirates here ;-)

Who in their right mind would put anti piracy measures into a game that if one pirate joined a multiplayer lobby it would spoil the experience for everyone else, it's 'madness'.

Also being that Steam authentication for a given sim is nearly impossible to circumvent these days and play online with a pirate copy, it just doesn't make sense.

One big issue is the Steam dependency, one minor glitch with it and you are disconnected, they do maintenance and everyone is disconnected, I don't know why they do this as other games out there will let you finish the session and warn you that Steam is down and others like AMS, RRE, RF2 don't rely on it and as long as you are connected when Steam goes down you can carry on racing, that is the way to do it.

 

No one accused anyone of piracy? David just said SMS removed that measure and it helped the disconnects.

 

I can confirm what David said. The problem was not the piracy copies in online sessions, it was the too much intrusive antipiracy system that was causing the disconnections, probably by excecive querys to the security server. That was happening even with only legitime users in the lobby.

After they removed (or tuned) the protection system, the issues dropped dramaticaly. There still other problems caused by the excesive Steam dependecy, but stability improved considerably from that moment.

One interesting thing is that SMS removed/tuned that system without any patch, so there is part of the protection system in some server where the engine updates security policies.

Hope the antipiracy system for AMS2 will be different and doesn't affect online stability.

 

Other thing that was causing problems in online was the Livetrack syncronization. Probably the system initialy designed, defined the parameters of the weather for the session and it evolves localy in each computer of the lobby. But in some situations and for some players, the track changes slightly different during the race, causing that not everybody got exactly the same conditions.

They solved syncronicing the livetrack status during the race between players, but probably that increased the network traffic. I suppose that this will be job of the Madness engine, but it's important assure that the system guaranties equal conditions for all players with no network traffic overload.

 

To be honest I have not noticed any difference after the anti-piracy "fix". I race in 5 PCARS2 leagues every week, I was getting a disconnection (so losing a race) every 10 or 20 races, the ratio has remained the same now. I was seeing often others disconnecting, I still see probably as many now.

Indeed a lot of the cases have to do with Steam, it may go unavailable for a few seconds, then bang, game over, you're out. That's what was mainly happening in the AOR races, for some reason Steam was quite unstable on Wednesdays and this was hurting them a lot (that was clearly visible in their stream that Steam was down). Later Steam was just more stable. Sometimes it's some other thing, for example last week happened to me for the second time the same problem, I disconnected on purpose from a race to change some setting, then connected back and after I did it, every one minute the game would disconnect me again.

And then there are the disconnections with no obvious reason, possibly having to do with too much network game traffic as Asturbo mentioned. But all that has to do with the engine as it was 9 months ago, this was the last update we got. Possibly/hopefully it has been improved since then.

 

I think in response to Jardiers Twitter it was Ian Bell who implied that some users of AOR may indeed be triggering the anti piracy measure, you can read into it either way.

Ian Bell CEO SMS‏@bell_sms
Replying to @bell_sms @Deerladog and
This experience flows to other users online as we use a semi 'client/server' rebroadcasting system. Now as 99.99% of all users are having no stability issues, and as we introduced these for those without a legal copy in the last patch, I'd look closer to home regarding 'issues'.

 

@Heitor Facuri Cicoti is it still too early to ask questions about the multiplayer system? We league guys would love to know if we will basically have the same PC2 system or if you guys are maybe adding a new UI and more admin controls.

 

It's not very advanced yet, but the plan is to have a Dedi Tool, which PC2 doesn't have

 

That would be AWESOME if you guys can make it!