1911 replies to this topic

[Kamikaze Viking]

Thanks Karl & everyone. Great to see a constructive conversation about how the back end works.

[SnagaDance]

Even though I'm missing 95% of the actual content that is discussed in this thread I'm really enjoying a Dev communicating with people of the community in such a way as this.

Gives me all kinds of fuzzy feelings like trust and such, positive feelings! (never thought I'd use this smiley on the boards)

[StalaggtIKE]

Thanks, Karl.

[Klappspaten]

Thanks Karl, wish some of the other guys at PGI would take a look into this thread and watch how its done.

[Rebas Kradd]

Karl Berg, on 27 March 2014 - 02:00 PM, said:

@Rebas Kradd

Hrm, well 2013 was indeed a weird year. UI 2.0 has been in the works for that entire period, which was pretty much blocking any major new feature releases. It's not really my place to discuss exactly why it took as long as it did. That's best left to a post-mortem done by production or the UI programmers. My talk was entirely related to the Systems team, and MWO server tech; and has little to nothing to do with UI 2.0, beyond the fact that UI 2.0 is now starting to use our systems to autogenerate small amounts of action script and C++ binding code to simplify their lives.

Right, and I wasn't asking you about UI2.0 specifically, more about how those other new methodology stuff (the stuff you talked about at GDC) was impacting development pace.

Karl Berg, on 27 March 2014 - 02:00 PM, said:

The effect on the systems team was we could implement all the new features we wanted server-side, but without a UI to expose them they're not of much use. So instead we built up new functionality, like the recently released achievement systems, in isolation in a branch, and then shelved the work to move on to the next thing, waiting for the time when the UI team could come along and write the presentation layer for public release. We did a very large amount of work in this manner...

I have noticed fleeting references to this "backlog" in the comments of various devs. Can we get a glimpse as to what else is in this backlog?

Edited by Rebas Kradd, 28 March 2014 - 09:06 AM.

[Sandpit]

Shar Wolf, on 27 March 2014 - 04:04 PM, said:

When you are done could you give me a hand?
Partially because breakup (as in the seasonal change between winter and construction) has me feeling less than brilliant - and I have no idea what most of it meant.

short version

It's talking about the backend of the software and hardware (mostly software) and how the servers, code, etc. function on the backend.

Consider it the "guts" of the game, servers, etc. and how they all talk and work together. I've only had time to skim some of it but it sounds like, coding wise anyhow, a LOT of the stuff is backlogged but ready to go because they had been working on it but couldn't implement it until the new UI. Once UI2.0 got here it removed that bottleneck and they should be actually ahead of schedule on some of their stuff.

Short, skim, but that's the gist of what I've understood thus far bud

[Karl Berg]

Rebas Kradd, on 28 March 2014 - 08:03 AM, said:

Right, and I wasn't asking you about UI2.0 specifically, more about how those other new methodology stuff (the stuff you talked about at GDC) was impacting development pace.

It means we can now run out even further ahead of the UI team? In all seriousness, it means the server/systems team can iterate significantly faster than we could otherwise. The autogen system means we maintain just a tenth the code we would without it. The coroutines mean we keep our maintainable code base massively simpler (and thus less buggy) that it would be without using coroutines. Etc... The talk focused heavily on specific examples and metrics where I could provide them.

Ultimately less time spent on backend server support systems allows us more time to dig into the engine, fix HSR issues, go back over our outstanding bug list and fix things, fix/build cool stuff that you guys actually see and use in the game.

Rebas Kradd, on 28 March 2014 - 08:03 AM, said:

I have noticed fleeting references to this "backlog" in the comments of various devs. Can we get a glimpse as to what else is in this backlog?

Lots of obvious stuff that has been pre-announced and/or heavily marketed. Some less obvious stuff that we've seen repeated requests for, or that we know would make the game more immersive or provide a better player experience. 'The Backlog' is just our term for outstanding or incomplete work. That's as much of a glimpse as I can give unfortunately, as I'm not prepared or authorized to announce specifics, and most especially not dates.

[Loc Nar]

Quote

Some less obvious stuff that we've seen repeated requests for, or that we know would make the game more immersive or provide a better player experience

Please tell me TrackIR support is one of them! It's way overdue and this would go a loooong way towards instant immersion for many current players, and open the door to a lot of new ones as well as bringing a lot of old ones back. There are games I have on my drive -just because- they have TrackIR support and I'm not alone in doing that, not to mention when people start making videos of actual fun being had will not be such a bad thing...

[Karl Berg]

Spent a chunk of Friday looking into TrackIR. There were definitely plans made to integrate this. I'll see what I can do to get this revisited and back on track.

[Dracol]

Thank you for the comms Karl. Just a long shot here, but do you know of anything been tested on the test server tonight?

[Karl Berg]

Yes, we're working to get PT up right now in fact. Goal is to have it up ASAP.

[Dracol]

wow, thanks for the quick reply.

[Tekadept]

Whether you can comment or not, But as far as the public test server, how much extra effort is to have these instances running? as a lot of other games have constant "development build" servers running. even if you only had limited slots, people could join it if they want at anytime and provide feedback so long as they are able to get in, would be more beneficial then running them in such a tight window where a lot of timezones can't make it.

[Karl Berg]

The servers are normally always 'running', although we can escalate the login credentials required to get in. We recently did some data-center shuffles and minor hardware changes for extra redundancy, which lead to some extra firefighting for this particular PTS build, which was fun.

Normally it's our process of getting a solid build out that's our limiting factor. Our pipeline here is still not as good as it could be, so it requires enough effort to get the build up and active that we tend to want to minimize public releases. As to why we don't leave PTS up and running for, say, 12 hours instead of 2 or 3 hours, not entirely sure. Some of it is motivated by us wanting to be on hand to respond to any issues with a relatively untested build.

I'm sure there might also some business motivations in there as well, not wanting to cannibalize users from the production environment. I can't really provide too much insight there, as I'm not really involved in this aspect of decision making at all.

[Loc Nar]

Karl Berg, on 31 March 2014 - 11:30 AM, said:

Spent a chunk of Friday looking into TrackIR. There were definitely plans made to integrate this. I'll see what I can do to get this revisited and back on track.

I hope that wasn't April fools talk! Ooh, please please please...

[Karl Berg]

Loc Nar, on 02 April 2014 - 07:01 AM, said:

I hope that wasn't April fools talk! Ooh, please please please...

It wasn't; we'll make this happen. I'm in contact with NaturalPoint now, working through the various integration issues.

[Heffay]

Karl Berg, on 02 April 2014 - 11:32 AM, said:

It wasn't; we'll make this happen. I'm in contact with NaturalPoint now, working through the various integration issues.

So... April 15th patch?

[Karl Berg]

No dates But the 15th is highly unlikely.

I'm waiting on an email from the NaturalPoint dev's right now, and once I'm done I'll hand off to gameplay / UI for finishing touches, then it goes through QA where they'll kindly inform me that pulling the USB cable on the TrackIR approximately 1.3 milliseconds after launch crashes the game 3% of the time (this is a joke about console cert, our QA is great, really), then it gets integrated to our Main branch where it goes through the typical stable => stage => live cycle.

That turnaround is a minimum 2 week cycle, but as you can tell it will probably take a bit longer than that.

[Heffay]

You make it sound like "Sure, no problem, we'll slap in the integration code in a couple of hours, do some QA and *poof* TrackIR support.

New bug: Hitting the control key to enable free-look in 1PV causes the mech to Stackpole.

[Rebas Kradd]

Karl, this is the kind of insight that would really help flesh out the company to your customers. Not that shutting up the belligerents is or needs to be a priority, but still, I dig this stuff.

You should have your own weekly "Karl's Korner" or something equally cheesy, where you just casually answer the question "What did you work on this week?" Far more interesting than a monthly Vlog halfway devoted to stuff that was already answered in greater detail in a Command Chair post.