Orbit: EA's first open source project | Hacker News Reader

Orbit: EA's first open source project

blog.bioware.com

86 pointsfrostmatthew39 comments

So this isn't exactly true. EA has many open source projects that are not well publicized.

http://gpl.ea.com/

Additionally, EA purchased ESN which also has open source contributions that are maintained after the purchase. It might be fair to say that Orbit is the LATEST EA open source project, but not the first.

Yeh. This is BioWare's first open source project but it is not EA's.

Those aren't projects developed by EA. They are just source releases of the LGPL components used in EA games.

These are just the GPL releases, but they contain bits of code from EA if you start digging. IIRC the EAWebKit release contains a big chunk of EASTL. EASTL is EA's implementation of the C++ STL that was for a long time considered so great as to be a competitive advantage.

If anyone is interested in the EASTL here's the source code

https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL

Apparently works out of the box with G++/GCC, some modifications were made to get it working Clang/LLVM

We talked EA into releasing the source code of SimCity Classic under GPL v3 several years ago:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

https://github.com/Eonblast/Emysql for example, was originally written at EA.

I just surprised myself with how low my opinion of EA is. My first instinct was that EA would never be so benevolent as to do anything open-source or give anything back to the community and therefore this had to be an April Fool's joke.

I see some commits on the github are from 5 days ago, though, so now I'm not so sure.

I can assure you it isn't an April Fools joke :)

Same here, hopefully they won't bill me because I look at their github page

Fork this repo for only 2000 EA-Bux!

You can mess with it on GitHub, but the actual code is DRM'd so that you can only open it in U-Code, and there is no offline single-player; you have to have an Internet connection to run it under the debugger.

Agreed. Presumably there's a shortcut pack to become a contributor. For a small fee.

SALE!: Buy 650 Pull Request Points for the low cost of $39.99!

I've been looking at it for a couple minutes now, and I'm still not sure if it's an April Fools joke

My initial response was "will it have DLC?", but after reading this part again

> This initiative is the result of a lot of effort from people across BioWare and EA

I can imagine "lot of effort" it took. I feel excited about this direction and I hope that there are more projects coming.

My initial response: "Oh right, I forgot it's April Fool's day"

> Orbit is a modern Java framework that makes it easier to build and maintain distributed, secure, and scalable online services. It is inspired by a variety of existing frameworks and brings some exciting new things to the table.

Except both bioware and EA have dismal track record of massive online services. Origin barely works, SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City - you know the story, Battlefield launches are terrible and so on.

citation needed.

Origin works pretty well (i've seen this echo'd in various internet outlets... reddit, gaming communities, etc), Sim City was launched by maxis a studio that has little (apparent) online knowledge, battlefield launches suffer from buggy gameplay, but their servers are generally solid. Also, most of the BF stuff you interact with is Frostbite, not online (apart from battelog and online connectivity)

Now, how about FIFA and Madden which have userbases that absolutely dwarf those games? All of the news feeds, user statistics, video/image sharing, etc? It works well and consistently. the people who do online at EA studios proper are very knowledgable. I can't speak for Bioware, but you must realize that studios inside EA have a fair degree of autonomy wrt technical decisions.

this is a huge step for EA. I applaud them and am rooting for the active movers inside EA to keep pushing for more OSS.

> citation needed

Okay.

http://kotaku.com/5990165/my-simcity-city-thrived-offline-fo...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2013/03/09/ea-simc...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/simcity-launch-dumb...

http://techland.time.com/2013/03/12/were-ready-for-always-on...

http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/8/4079894/ea-suspends-simcity-...

http://www.pcgamer.com/simcity-refund-ea-origin/

In fact, look up 'Battlefield', 'Origin EA' or 'Sim City' on Google News between 2010 and 2014.

Not too many happy people.

I only included Sim City stuff because it was mentioned by your comments' parent.

>Sim City was launched by maxis a studio that has little (apparent) online knowledge

Sim City was launched by EA. Very little of "Maxis" existed when that product came out. It was entirely an EA project and EA has ample experience with online gaming.

>Now, how about FIFA and Madden which have userbases that absolutely dwarf those games?

If you've ever tried to play an EA game beyond casual 1v1 online matches you would rethink your praise of their online systems. As an avid NCAA 14 player believe me when I say that they have a basic misunderstanding of what players want out of an online experience. They're not even good at 1v1, to be honest, when you're playing over a network their solution to input lag is to just slow down the gameplay entirely. EA is a cheap company.

>I applaud them and am rooting for the active movers inside EA to keep pushing for more OSS.

EA has made so much money off of shit products they would have to do 100 Open Source projects before I felt they deserved praise.

The problems with the SimCity launch, and the insistence on requiring a connection to play, were thanks to Origin, not Maxis.

> Origin barely works

Never had an issue with it.

> SWTOR was barely loaded, Sim City

All of them: now fixed. It's not an excuse but online game launches, nearly without exception (most certainly not exclusive to EA), always go like that. The reason is as Blizzard described it with the Diablo launch: during a launch you have a massive influx of players of which a good amount completely lose interest over the next week or two. Buying servers (which, keep in mind, the majority of game publishers still do) would be a huge waste of money.

It's set to improve as the cloud comes into use (e.g. Titanfall, Camelot Unchained, ESO) but there is still resistance against it.

> Battlefield launches are terrible and so on.

Be fair, that had nothing to do with capacity - that was a rushed product. I played it from beta, through early access and into release never being denied a login due to capacity. The game crashed, the sound didn't work, it was extraordinarily buggy and unfinished; yes, but don't claim there was capacity problems.

You are confusing EA's ability to write code and manage infrastructure with their tendency to be greedy and willingness to release unfinished products. The EA greed debate has nothing to do with Orbit.

So if you admit that EA releases buggy, unfinished games and has a tendency to not be able to handle large influxes of users on launching products why would a critique of a framework for an online service (of which they have a TERRIBLE track record with) be unfair?

Your comment seems to contradict itself and needlessly defend EA. No one should be defending this company. Good for them for "giving something back" but I doubt their motive is honest charity.

What do you suspect their motive is?

> All of them: now fixed.

I just tried to fire up Mass Effect 3 and it couldn't connect to the DRM server. Three years after launch and it only manages to verify itself ~30% of the time. Mirror's Edge has never worked but it isn't a problem because the game lets you play without logging in.

They're 0 for 2, even {3,7} years after release.

> You are confusing EA's ability to write code and manage infrastructure with their tendency to be greedy

Do you really think they're intentionally saving money by taking a PR hit at every release vs giving the DRM / multiplayer teams the time and resources they need to build a robust system? Also, even if they are, why would I want to use software with such a dismal reputation? When I'm making my choice I don't really care if the team that built the software has an excuse or not, I care if the framework is going to work.

EA should be congratulated for contributing BSD licensed code and technology back to the community. They're contributing of their own free will and adding to the collective pool of knowledge. Maybe its not of use to you, however that's no reason to piss on their work and generosity.

This seems to be similar in scope and architecture as Microsoft's Orleans. Interesting.

EDIT : After more careful review noticed this : "It was developed by BioWare, a division of Electronic Arts, and is heavily inspired by the Orleans project."

Interested to see how this stands up against alternatives like Akka.

The interesting innovation (at least on the JVM) seems to be the use of _virtual_ actors. At first glance this looks similar to Microsoft's Orleans project: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/210931/Orleans-MSR-TR-201...

I was about to suggest that they seem to have leaned more toward Orleans than Akka. Orleans on Github: https://github.com/dotnet/Orleans

Orbit Actors is a framework to write distributed systems using virtual actors. It was developed by BioWare, a division of Electronic Arts, and is heavily inspired by the Orleans project.

http://orbit.bioware.com/orbit-actor-overview.html

The first EA open source project I remember was their own implementation of STL [1] many years ago to deal with STL slow parts.

[1] https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL seems to be a clone of it and has commits from 4 years ago

That's not an official repo, it's what someone pulled out of the GPL code that EA has posted. the EASTL is much larger and some parts have been changed. Perhaps someday the EASTL will see the light of day in a full, supported form :-)

To be strict EASTL is not an "implementation of" the STL, it's a "replacement for". It has similar functionality (containers, algorithms) but the API is not compatible. In particular, EASTL has different memory management that is more suitable for games and especially consoles.

I used to maintain EASTL. I think it's more accurate to describe it as an implementation of the STL than a replacement. As far as possible it is API compatible with the STL, the API differences are primarily in the allocator model and it is possible to write EASTL code that compiles against another STL implementation with fairly minimal changes, almost none if you're not using custom allocators. There are a few extensions / extra containers but we went to great lengths to keep as much of the API identical as possible.

The building in the graphic looks like the International Congress Centrum in Berlin.

Here a pic for comparison: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationales_Congress_Centr...

It's a really cool building. Not pretty, mind you, but as a curiosity it's super cool.

Microsoft released something similar they used for halo 4 called Project Orleans[1]. I stumbled on it when I was looking for a C# Akka port, but it ends up being much more than just what Akka provides with actors.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/Orleans

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