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Comment by brucethemoose2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how it can scale?

Even with the battle royale craze, it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode (or at least amassed a playerbase big enough to show it off).

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> it seems like nothing has really replicated Planetside 2's black magic netcode

Or tried to. From what I’ve read online they massively rely on client-side computation, even for hit detection.

It seems more like trading security for performance than any sort of technical miracle black magic.

Unless I’ve missed something?

I know Planetside 1 was pretty heavy on client side - not sure about PS2 (but my impression was that it would be less client side logic - to avoid some of the cheating.

I think some time ago (2 years or more?) there was this guy, I believe from The Netherlands, who had made a game that seemed to be to support a massive number of players with minimal hardware requirements.

I wish I could find the post, but I tried to search it in the past, without success. He did have a video with many players in game on YouTube.

Perhaps someone else remembers and can find the post.

Planetside 2 netcode is terrible, people forget that it runs at 5hz, at that sim speed any game can put 100's of people on screen.

Also client side hit detection, lol. Full of cheat and completely inacurate gameplay.

found a small thread on reddit which posed the same questions [0]. it looks like the above comment hit it on the head; mostly client side with server just handling messages. looks like it didnt scale well either.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/8hx7t1/comment/...

Perhaps that is the compromise, but that also feels like an oversimplification of the challenge, and I'm happy with the in-game results.

It scaled very well as long as you didn't have any hackers in your region. I remember having battles with well over 500 players and very little lag.

Improbable claims that their SpatialOS service can scale beyond what Planetside 2 achieves.

Yeah they've claimed that for awhile with no results. Dual Universe (which I backed) also demoed a many player test, but its never accumulated much pop and is not really a "fast" fps either.

EVE online also has mad scaling through time dilation

which is an incredibly unfun awful mechanic

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