Bungie: The GDC'15 Presentation

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Gives you a good idea of how patrol zones work, though.

I really do question if it was worth the effort, given how uneventful running into other random players is. The best part of Destiny, without question, are the raids, and very little of this applies to them.

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I still feel like Patrol mode is the thing in Destiny with the most untapped potential. At this point, the small size of the zones and relative sparsity of public events really hurts the experience. Imagine if Old Russia, exactly as it is, with the same public event schedules and locations, was only partitioned into 3 or 4 zones. You could detect public events from much farther away, each "zone" would be home to events more frequently, and you'd have more players drawn to each event from greater distances.

That alone would help a lot, IMO.

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Yeah, it would be cool if your ghost just said "Event detected in the Rocketyard!" or something, regardless of where on the cosmodrome you were. That would cause an influx of players.

I love public events, and I love patrol mode. I hope they both get fleshed out more in the future.

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I still feel like Patrol mode is the thing in Destiny with the most untapped potential. At this point, the small size of the zones and relative sparsity of public events really hurts the experience. Imagine if Old Russia, exactly as it is, with the same public event schedules and locations, was only partitioned into 3 or 4 zones. You could detect public events from much farther away, each "zone" would be home to events more frequently, and you'd have more players drawn to each event from greater distances.

That alone would help a lot, IMO.

(For context: the "zones" I refer to below are things like the Divide, Rocket yard, Steppes, Etc. )

But the way patrol zones are currently set up (from their description, and my interpretation of it), what you're asking for isn't possible. Technically, the only thing linking patrol zones together is the actual geometry you see, locally loaded on your console. Server-side, each of those zones is running on an independent mini-version of the Destiny Executable, and they don't interact with each other. When your fireteam moves toward a new zone, you send that request to the matchmaking server, which tries to find an instance of the particular zone already running and match-make you into it.

We're not going to see any major improvements unless they change this- and the architecture would become even more complex if they did. If that happens, it'll be a Destiny 2 thing.

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But the way patrol zones are currently set up (from their description, and my interpretation of it), what you're asking for isn't possible.

Exactly. I can't say for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that this is again a case of the previous gen consoles putting serious constraints on the game. They probably couldn't handle larger environments in patrol mode.

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I really miss the experience I had in the beta where you get into a public event and you aren't going to win. Then suddenly some new players show up and join the event to pull out a clutch victory. Part of the problem is that now everybody is 20+ so all the events are easy with the exception of Uzok the Hated.

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I still feel like Patrol mode is the thing in Destiny with the most untapped potential. At this point, the small size of the zones and relative sparsity of public events really hurts the experience. Imagine if Old Russia, exactly as it is, with the same public event schedules and locations, was only partitioned into 3 or 4 zones. You could detect public events from much farther away, each "zone" would be home to events more frequently, and you'd have more players drawn to each event from greater distances.

That alone would help a lot, IMO.

It already pushed last gen consoles near the limit. The only way this gets better is if it becomes current gen only. Zones can't get any bigger right now.

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It already pushed last gen consoles near the limit. The only way this gets better is if it becomes current gen only. Zones can't get any bigger right now.

I have to wonder if dropping PS360 will actually allow significantly larger contiguous combat. A big part of why Halo went with lockstep networking in PvE was bandwidth, not processing. Destiny is itself very careful with how much networked physicsable stuff can exist in a space.

Destiny's networking model gets impressive results with minimal server hosting, but P2P is a big limitation.

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Gives you a good idea of how patrol zones work, though.

I really do question if it was worth the effort, given how uneventful running into other random players is. The best part of Destiny, without question, are the raids, and very little of this applies to them.

That was really interesting. Some thoughts:

1. I wonder why the public Bubble Hosts can reconcile the world state as clients come and go but the same kind of on-the-fly reconciliation is not possible with the stuff handled by the Activity Hosts? Or, to put it more understandably: Why can players seamlessly move in and out of areas picking up the details of AI respawn timers and public event states but have to bounce to orbit to join the fireteam of someone standing right beside them?

2. I wonder how the Crucible seems to manage to mostly avoid game pausing host migrations. Obviously, horrible lag can make the game unplayable, but under normal conditions players disconnecting never seems to affect much. I suspect those "long" periods where you can't respawn are caused by the game settling on a new Physics Host but even then it always seems like players who aren't dead yet can still play just fine. You can be stuck unable to respawn but you can watch on the score screen as friends and enemies fight and die just fine. Are Crucible Matches just public bubbles with PvP scripting that you can only join from orbit, or are they hosted differently from the PvE world? Full dedicated servers for Crucible, perhaps?

3. Did I read correctly that the public Bubble Hosts are always running even if their specific bubble instance is empty? Does that mean each one is assigned to Mothyards, or The Buried City, or The Hellmouth? If so, I wonder if some zones, like the ones players start Patrols in, have more Bubble Hosts standing by to pick up new players while others, like deep in the Hellmouth, have fewer since less players will be passing through at any given time?

4. It's a shame they didn't talk more about what happens during some missions and public events. It seems like when a Public Event comes along the event takes over the bubble and despawns any unneeded enemies. And when a public event ends all traces of it are despawned before returning the bubble to its default state. But what about something like the Omnigul Strike that crosses through The Array section of Old Russia? That would seem to be a public bubble location since you can wander through there during Patrol... but during the Strike it is a private area with very different enemies and scripting. I wonder how that works. The same thing happens other places too. Like during the mission where you kill the Crota crystal places within the Hellmouth that are usually public are private and spawn those waves of Cursed Thrall...

5. It would seem that adding new world / locations means adding more server capacity to run the public Bubble Hosts but adding or opening up private areas on existing worlds, like Rasputin's bunker on Earth, wouldn't affect much since the number of private Activity Hosts goes up or down with the number of players/fireteams actually playing at any given moment?

Anyway, yeah, they need to get those public Bubble Hosts talking to each other somehow so they can do bigger, grander, cross world events instead of only being able to notify you of an event as you cross into the area it's taking place in. Surely that's an easy task... just flipping a switch or setting a 0 to a 1... :p

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and are available missions linked to your fireteam host rather than the location you're in? Otherwise why would the missions be consistent from one area after you leave and return? If those can be linked to your fireteam to remember their gamestate as you move through different bubble hosts, why can't world events be linked as well?

Also, god I want the game to read your friends list and try to match you to bubble hosts where your friends are playing. It seems like giving server preference that way wouldn't be too taxing. 40 available servers of which 1 has a friend, attempting to join friend... etc.

Furthermore, if the bubble hosts are all independent servers, why are they all identical? You could easily put a few random variables in there to make each host have slightly different spawns (location, number, type of enemies could all change), or to have slightly different geometry (a blown up devilwalker, a crashed spaceship, a vex conflux). Little touches to give variety would help the game out a lot.

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and are available missions linked to your fireteam host rather than the location you're in? Otherwise why would the missions be consistent from one area after you leave and return? If those can be linked to your fireteam to remember their gamestate as you move through different bubble hosts, why can't world events be linked as well?

What do you mean by world events? Like Public Events? Those don't cross between bubbles because they are run by the Bubble Activity Host who's job it is to run just that one bubble. Things like Patrol beacons are remembered across bubbles because they are controlled by the Mission Activity Host which is presumably spun up for you (and your fireteam) when you launch a Patrol activity. That saved state goes away when everyone connected to it goes back to orbit. That's why you get an entirely different set of beacons if you hit orbit and come right back.

But yes, it would be nice if more was shared between bubbles allowing more complex persistent world events to span an entire destination world.

Also, god I want the game to read your friends list and try to match you to bubble hosts where your friends are playing. It seems like giving server preference that way wouldn't be too taxing. 40 available servers of which 1 has a friend, attempting to join friend... etc.

Yes, but the chief concern there is latency... and rightly so. ZackDark, who I play with sometimes, lives in Brazil and sometimes the connection between us suffers a good bit of lag. If he enters a bubble with no one else around he gets made the Physics Host which is perfectly fine since at that point its just his box running the entire game on its own. If Destiny placed friends above latency then it would connect me, in Texas, to him in Brazil... and my game quality would have a greater chance of suffering AI lag and other weirdness because of our distance from one another.

I'd wondered what networking magic Bungie had pulled between Reach (who's co-op would often grind to a halt due to lag) and Destiny. Turns out there really wasn't any! They just make sure to connect you to a Physics Host with low latency and they give up and make you the Physics Host if they can't find anybody suitable within five seconds of looking! (They start loading in map assets at ~15 seconds out from crossing into a new bubble, start looking for players at 10 seconds out... and give up and make you the host at 5 seconds out if no one is found.)

Furthermore, if the bubble hosts are all independent servers, why are they all identical? You could easily put a few random variables in there to make each host have slightly different spawns (location, number, type of enemies could all change), or to have slightly different geometry (a blown up devilwalker, a crashed spaceship, a vex conflux). Little touches to give variety would help the game out a lot.

Beyond the possibility of it being "Cody Miller Easy"? I don't know. Halo would do that. Think back to the circle room filled with sleeping grunts and those two patrolling Elites. Those Elites were not always in the same place and you had to actually approach cautiously if you wanted to clear the room without firing a shot. Maybe with Destiny they ran out of memory or development time?

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"Untethered Freedom to explore"

Lol. Then what are kill zones doing in the game?

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"Untethered Freedom to explore"

Lol. Then what are kill zones doing in the game?

You're confusing issues. This was a networking talk, not a level design talk. Untethered Freedom mainly refers to the game's networking model allowing co-op players to spread out across a much larger area than in the Halos. It is not about being able to jump up on that rock there or squeeze out of the map.

The overuse of kill barriers might be a legitimate issue with Destiny, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

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"Untethered Freedom to explore"

Lol. Then what are kill zones doing in the game?

You're confusing issues. This was a networking talk, not a level design talk.

I read it. They wanted you to be able to stay in your fireteam, and separate by distance. So like, one of you could go one place, the other somewhere else.

And Destiny's networking and level design go hand in hand. All of this necessitated gutting level design to have areas where players would funnel, congregate, and visit frequently, in an effort to be able to run into people.

Cyber's post is right, and I said it many months ago: randomly running in to random people is so minimal in terms of impact, and doesn't make the sterile world feel any more alive, yet it comes at such a huge cost.

One thing they should have done was make sure that if two unrelated people are moving between bubbles, that they get assigned to the same one. Nothing is dumber than seeing someone vanish in to thin air.

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Complaints about kill zones in Bungie games have existed for more than a decade and have very little to do with Destiny's new hybrid networking model. If anything, Destiny's better networking allows more player freedom not less! I think you have a legitimate argument about level flow vs the limited benefit of seeing but not really participating with randoms.

What I don't understand is why you would mock a networking talk over the placement of kill barriers of all things... It comes off as mean spirited and dismissive of real advancements... :/

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Bungie: The GDC'15 Presentation (Destiny)

Awesome.

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

Missed potential

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling

Untethered Freedom

Untethered Freedom

Untethered Freedom

Untethered Freedom