A Chat With the Creators of Age of Ascent, an Ultra-MMO Powered by the Cloud

A Chat With the Creators of Historic period of Ascent, an Ultra-MMO Powered by the Deject

Let'southward face it, indie gaming has been tremendously of import for the industry in the past few years and that'southward coming from someone who doesn't even play that many indie games.

Why? Well, indie developers are the ones taking risks and braving uncharted territories, while AAA studios are often shackled by the logic of investors who want solid revenue on a yearly footing. Indie developers, on the other hand, demand to innovate in order to be noticed by the public and thus survive in the large sea of the gaming industry.

UK studio Illyriad Games are literally aiming for the stars. Their latest project, Age of Ascension, is an Ultra-MMO where dozens of thousands of players can play in the same boxing (they've tested up to 50K concurrent players) and across various platforms such every bit Steam, Xbox One, Windows Store, iOS/Android and more.

We've interviewed CEO James Niesewand to learn more about it. Brace yourself, for information technology is a long merely very interesting read...

How did you come up with the thought for Age of Ascent? Was that something you had been because for some time?

We started thinking about our second MMO title Age of Rising in mid-2012, and began working on prototypes in 2022.

It's always best to make a game on a subject that you're passionate about, and the Illyriad team's shortlist of all-time favourite games includes Elite, Freelancer, Wing Commander and Eve Online.  I'm too an apprentice astronomer, and my part is but up the road from Cape Canaveral, then I go to spotter nearly of the rocket launches from my rooftop.  On a practical level, this also ways nosotros have a lot of real-world space expertise nearby that we can tap into when nosotros take questions.

And so it was pretty inevitable that we'd make Age of Ascent (AoA) - which can be essentially defined as a sandbox-universe, infinite-based, twitch-combat Ultra-MMO running natively in 3D in the browser.

The idea behind Age of Ascent'south "Ultra" scale was driven by a combination of necessity and hubris!

To explain, we're a tiny contained game studio (vii of us in full) and the space game genre is having quite a renaissance at the moment, so we had to come up with a programme to clearly differentiate our game from all of the other games out at that place in a mode that went across pure game design.

Ane thing that's always struck united states is that if you lot look at the technical progression of games over the final 20 years they've become e'er more than beautiful graphically, and they've had e'er more realistic physics engines... but the something that hasn't really changed in this time is the number of concurrent players that a game can back up in a single shared battle experience.

Of course, at that place are outliers like the frankly awesome Eve Online that can clasp 4k players into the same battle, just they but get to these numbers by slowing the framerate to 10% and they're not really a twitch, direct-piloting game, which is where the challenge of calibration really occurs.  Fundamentally, we're notwithstanding experiencing twitch combat with a limit of dozens/scores (and very rarely, hundreds) of players concurrently in the aforementioned battle.

When we began asking our industry contacts why no one had actually pushed the concurrency limits for twitch combat, we were told that it was impossible to do because neither the networking layer nor the physics engine could cope with that concurrent data and compute load.  Nonetheless, if you lot tell someone similar our CTO, Ben Adams, that something is impossible then he essentially sees it equally a problem that no ane's yet solved 🙂

Information technology sometimes surprises people to hear this, merely not a unmarried member of our team has had whatever experience working on video games prior to coming to work for united states.  I actually think that'south a huge benefit, as it means that no one has any pre-conceived ideas virtually how things should exist done, or what'south possible.  And then we began piece of work on devising an architecture that could back up the stop-to-cease challenge of a twitch-combat total-3D boxing with tens of thousands of simultaneous participants, borrowing ideas and concepts from commercial structures such as Wall Street algorithmic trading systems: systems that live or dice past their performance.

Overall, it's a tough problem to solve because the game volition only run equally fast as the slowest component.  We have to become the networking layer running at the aforementioned speed every bit the physics and interest management MMO engines, data handling and transfer - everything - otherwise the organisation doesn't work and the end-user'due south framerate volition stutter.  The volume of data we're talking at scale is staggeringly large.  When nosotros tested to 50k concurrent players in the same battle, we were handling 267 million event network awarding letters per second.  That'due south 23 trillion a twenty-four hour period beyond the cluster(southward), and that'south pretty extreme by anyone's standards.

How exactly are yous leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure's cloud, and why did yous cull this particular service over others?

We knew that the but possible solution to the sheer network and compute problem thrown up past AoA's scale could merely be handled in the cloud, as whatsoever attempt to provide your own inhouse solution would be both prohibitively expensive and utter madness.

The load has to be spread out.  And non just that, it has to spread out and to fold and unfold space based on unanticipated demand.  Say, for instance, 2 large player clans suddenly decide to go to war on a whim (over asteroid mining rights or, more likely, some smacktalk in chat!) and they suddenly see upwardly in an area of space to knuckles information technology out.  Equally the number of players engaged in combat in that pocket-sized clamper of the universe skyrockets from l players to 500 players to 5000 players to 50k players... nosotros take to be able to cope with the load seamlessly.

And that means bringing in additional servers quickly on need, quickly bringing the new nodes upwardly to speed with what's happening in realtime and and then sharing the fluctuating load amidst them - without skipping a beat.  Later on the spacedust has settled on the debris field we then have to de-provision those additional servers so that we're non (equally a company) paying for server resource that we no longer need.

We chose Microsoft Azure over other cloud solutions for 3 primary reasons:

Firstly, we're extremely familiar with Microsoft technologies; we know what they're awesome at and we know where the rough edges are - and so it's a natural fit that way.

Secondly, Microsoft themselves accept been extremely supportive, providing aid and advice throughout.  Uniquely amongst all the people we talked to most what we were trying to exercise with AoA their first reaction wasn't a wave of laughter 🙂 simply instead the offer of an Architectural Design Session to validate and critique our plans.  That relationship has continued and deepened throughout the development process and has given usa access to build AoA against, and to influence the direction of, essential core Azure technologies such every bit Service Cloth and Nanoserver.  The BizSpark programme, where MS give free Azure fourth dimension and software licences to startups, has also been exceptionally useful.

Thirdly, Microsoft's determination to open-source .NET and ASP.Net a couple of years back made it a no-brainer.  Nosotros're extremely focused on open-source and open up-web and we participate in W3C activities, contribute conformance tests to the Khronos group, and piece of work exclusively at the forepart-cease in HTML5 technologies - which is why we insist that Age of Ascent needs to non only run natively without plugins or installs in the web browser, but that it should also run without requiring expensive hardware. AoA runs happily at 30fps on a $200 chromebook, for case.

When MS open up-sourced we could finish working on our ain server solutions and kickoff working, in conjunction with Microsoft and the rest of the open-source community, on solutions that would benefit everyone.

For example, the new MS libuv-based webserver chosen Kestrel that's currently in development for ASP.Internet 5 Cadre is open source.  Ben, our CTO, is the #one correspondent to this projection, including Microsoft developers, and has helped make it more than 10 times faster than the previous version, and then that it's now pushing way over 1.25m requests per 2d.  Nosotros didn't do this solely out of the goodness of our hearts, but because our game actually needs our Azure webservers to exist handle millions of http requests per 2d.

So it's true, and then, that the Azure cloud tin can really provide boosted computing power like Microsoft advertised for its Xbox One console? Most people dismissed that as a joke.

Yes, it is absolutely truthful.

Games similar Titanfall on the Xbox used Azure to provide locality, dedicated servers and an external AI system, and similarly Crackdown 3 uses the compute power of Azure to make entire cities destructible.  However, both games had their gameplay focus on small-squad multiplayer rather than massive/ultra concurrency among the players themselves - which is a very different set up of challenges to overcome.

The gameplay model for Age of Ascension has a high-concurrency multiplayer focus from the ground upward, where we treat the game client essentially every bit an input/output and rendering device; and utilize Azure to spread out the staggeringly-large (and rapidly fluctuating) bandwidth and compute demands that nosotros accept to cope with.

Merely aye, the essential purpose of the cloud is to offload compute and I/O, and to scale them rapidly, every bit required.  One of the main challenges is getting the results of that cloud-distributed compute back to the clients that need to know, whilst keeping track of the bigger picture beyond all of the cloud nodes and clusters that need to know more.

Do you think that a game structured like Age of Ascent in the cloud, perhaps scaling dorsum the sheer size a little, could work with high fidelity graphics akin to a triple A game?

That's a really interesting question, and I think the respond is 'maybe' 🙂  To explicate:

The graphics for AoA are fairly low fidelity past design; but we don't believe that affects the gameplay or the fun.  There are two reasons we've deliberately designed the game this way.

Firstly, as I've already mentioned, we're firm believers in 'any device, any time, anywhere' and the open-web.  So, choosing the web browser as the client is a natural fit.  That means that not only do we have to cope with the dissimilar capabilities of the different browser vendors, but we also don't really take a minimum equipment requirement.  Whilst I remember you'd have problems playing AoA on a low-end cellphone, it does run only fine on loftier-terminate ones as well as $200 Chromebooks etc.  These devices certainly don't have powerful GPUs, and some of them don't have GPUs at all!  So nosotros've kept our customer engine and graphics rendering every bit lightweight every bit possible.

Secondly, there'due south a very difficult issue to address with the sheer volume of rendering when you're in the midst of a multi-1000 player realtime twitch dogfight.  Yes, GPUs and CPUs do go faster every yr - merely, for example (and *many* apologies for the post-obit horrible over-simplification...) let'due south say your game's minimum spec customer tin render 30M polygons with textures, lighting etc at 30fps - but begins to struggle at higher numbers.

If there'southward a choice betwixt fluidly rendering one hundred spaceships of 300k polys each vs x thousand spaceships of 3k polys each... Assuming all the other scale difficulties such equally networking, physics engines, IM algorithms etc have been cracked, I know which option I'd choose!

Basically, unless you take the highest spec gaming rig on the planet, we all already know that there are limits on the graphic fidelity that'southward able to continue footstep with the framerate of whatever game under load, whether that's a single-player or an MMO title.  Most people who play triple-A games that allow loftier levels of onscreen concurrency will - at the starting time whiff of a huge battle - dial down every graphics setting they can to a minimum just to proceed their framerate up and savor the epic gameplay, instead of fighting with their graphics card.

Yet, Age of Ascent is not intended to be a high fidelity graphical experience, because at our scale it'll bring cipher but grief to anybody involved.  I'd urge your readers to accept a look at some of the gameplay videos from our playtests, and make up one's mind for themselves whether they'd rather have a perfectly rendered high-fidelity model (but merely, say a few dozens or and so of them) or the mayhem of a thousand-player twitch gainsay.

Of course, in that location may be a half fashion point between the two extremes and - peculiarly if GPU-equipped cloud machines become more generally affordable and available to developers - there may also be ways of further off-loading some of the render compute load into the deject itself so the rendering threads can keep step with the physics threads (and I retrieve that's where Crackdown 3 was going).

So, to answer your question directly - I'm sure it'd be possible to have a high-fidelity game with, say 256/512 concurrent players in the about time to come; and that number will surely just rise over time; given that the developers have cracked the other problems that hit you at this calibration.  Cloud gaming is a developing field and I think we're all but beginning to scratch the surface of what it's capable of.  At the end of the day the disquisitional question is whether the game is any good or not; players don't really intendance nigh the specific technologies that deliver their game feel to them - information technology's all about immersion & amusement.

Why do you recollect AAA games oasis't really used the cloud until Crackdown 3? Practise you reckon there will be an increase in the usage of this technology even in big projects?

Fundamentally, I call back it's because the technology is both new and "difficult".  I don't mean, necessarily, that it's hard to utilise.  I do, however, mean that it requires a very different mindset to your typical programming model.  You take to carelessness everything you think you lot know well-nigh typical customer-server architectures, and think very 'differently' about what you're trying to accomplish with a cloud architecture.  Writing for the cloud is entirely unlike, and requires dissimilar modes of thought.

For example, when I was speaking at //build a couple of months ago, I was asked what our "server tick" was.  (For those who don't know, you lot tin can consider the server 'tick' every bit the fundamental "framerate" of the game's MMO engine).

And the question flummoxed me: because we don't have a server "tick".  We sorta have an average physics/IM framerate beyond the cluster(s); merely the nanosecond that a server is getting likewise hot, y'all pull another server in and 'share' the heat.  In the cloud, you want your servers to work as difficult equally they can happily work - no more, no less - and you pull in more resources equally the demand increases.  There'southward not actually any kind of 'heartbeat' to a cloud arrangement and in that location shouldn't be - by design!

I also think that a lot of the game engine tools that many game developers use are horribly ill-equipped for cloud infrastructures, and that's certainly a limiting factor also.  Writing a deject-savvy game does *not* mean running the same server hardware in the cloud, rather than in your own datacenter 🙂

Take you ever considered whether to release Age of Ascent on consoles, like PlayStation 4 or Xbox Ane?

I'll probably get spanked past the Microsoft PR department for mentioning this - as I don't think this is public noesis, yet.... 😀

But if you freeze-frame at 1m33s on this video (a video produced about a month ago by Microsoft themselves, I hasten to add together)...  I think it's pretty clear, and yous can attain your own determination 🙂

Having worked with Microsoft closely, did y'all have the chance to evaluate the Universal Windows Platform?What do you think of information technology in comparison to the Win32 format? Epic's Tim Sweeney has non been kind towards UWP.

We're heavily involved in getting AoA onto UWP.  In fact, UWP actually runs slightly better for AoA than pure native spider web, considering we can actually run multiple concurrent rendering threads in-app (eg separating the UI and the inspace combat rendering layers from each other).  Technically, UWP is a actually good platform for the states - as we're all well-nigh universality and writing code only once; and so deploying it to every platform we can get our hands on, via UWP, Xamarin, or even Atom/Electron shells for (eg) Steam executables.

I read Tim Sweeney's commodity in The Guardian very closely - and I am sympathetic to his point of view.  I practice go what he'due south saying, even if that ways I'one thousand a "boiled frog" 🙂

Nonetheless, speaking as a tiny indie studio, we've got much bigger fish to fry than worrying almost the possible time to come monopoly of UWP.  For example, for Age of Rise information technology's *much* harder to convince game journalists that a native browser-based game can actually be Triple-A quality.  That's an infinitely harder trouble for us to overcome than any concerns nosotros might accept well-nigh the possible monopoly of UWP.  Whilst my eyes h2o at the thought of paying thirty% of our revenue to a 3rd party in render for access to their platform, information technology'south the same on iOS and Google Play as it is with Steam and Microsoft.  Fundamentally, I call up the view from the top is probably pretty different to the perspective nosotros take 🙂

More often than not, information technology is believed that such huge player numbers may diminish the importance of private players besides much. How are yous countering this issue in Historic period of Ascent?

I don't remember that's true at all.  History is full of epic examples of single individuals turning the tide of a battle through heroic efforts.

Sure, non everyone can be Commander-in-Chief... simply that'due south not to say that everyone tin't take a part to play.   This is the stuff that myths and legends are fabricated of.  Legendary storytelling and heroic acts - from Pheidippides at Marathon to Beowulf's slaying of Grendel - isn't going away anytime soon!

Do you plan to accept a full launch of the game within 2022? Also, are you going to be on Steam?

We'll be launching AoA this year, aye.  The exact shape and size of the launch is however to exist determined (a few things are out of our control - for example, the xbox release schedule); but it will definitely exist bachelor 24/7 in 2022.

And yep, we'll definitely also be on Steam.  For us it's all about having a game that's accessible on every bit many platforms equally possible, and Steam is certainly an important platform.  The more availability, the merrier!

Will there be cantankerous-play with PC and if and so, will information technology be with both the Windows Store and Steam versions?

Yep, the universe will be concurrent, shared and ubiquitous.  The xbox players will play with the Windows Store players, the Steam players, the iOS players, the Android players, as well as the native spider web Chrome/Firefox/Edge etc players.  One universe, shared by all.

What was your experience developing for the Xbox One? Did yous have whatsoever troubles using the esRAM module?

It'southward been very easy via UWP to port to the Xbox One.  Nosotros don't accept admission to esRAM via UWP, and then that'due south non been a concern or a help/hindrance at all.  The simple fact is that if the game can be played on a $200 Chromebook, it can be played on an Xbox one without admission to the specific hardware abilities of the device.  Universality is the name of the game for us.

Did you have to tone down the graphics or calibration of the game on Xbox Ane at all? Tin yous tell us the target resolution and frame rate?
No, we haven't had to change the graphics or calibration in whatever style.  Almost of the hard-stuff-concurrency-scale of AoA is handed off to the cloud anyway; so the actual device that renders the game globe matters adequately little.  As mentioned earlier, a phone without a dedicated GPU might struggle a bit - simply we've tested AoA on a 950XL cellphone, casting via Continuum to a 1080p Television receiver at 60fps... and that worked fine!

We target 60fps at 1080p, with a minimum playable baseline at 30fps (any resolution).  We've had players playing on 4k+ super-widescreen custom rigs quite happily sending united states videos of their PvP combats at 60fps, whilst playing the game in Chrome (!) - which is great to see.  Depending on hardware etc, ymmv.

We've always felt that players should exist able to control their rendering environs directly.  The software shouldn't fight the hardware unnecessarily.  The most of import thing to a player (in the fast-paced depths of an epic PvP gainsay) is that the framerate stays upward at that place and that their control inputs and rendering outputs lucifer the false shared world physics engine at par value with anybody else in the aforementioned gameworld.  And if a player is on a specific device that can't practice X or Y thing as well (be that lighting fx, shadows etc) and then they should be able to punch that downwards to a setting that satisfies their hardware - if they find it's getting in the way of playability.  We will, of class, provide recommended settings for each devices' capabilities as far as we can define them - merely players should have the command to override these up and downwardly, as they wish.

What practice you remember of the rumored enhanced Xbox One and PlayStation 4 console as a programmer? Would they be useful or more of a hindrance, with more platforms to target?

It'southward wonderful for us.  As the Age of Ascension code broadly exists in a "write-one time" environment, we really don't take any particular platform preference.  So the more platforms we can get our easily on, the better information technology is for our shared-universe players - and the meliorate for our distribution!

Thank you for your time.

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Source: https://wccftech.com/chat-creators-age-of-ascent-ultrammo-powered-cloud/

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