That fourth one on network architecture is mind-boggling (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 17:25 (3527 days ago) @ CyberKN

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