Celaria - closed multiplayer alpha [recordings]
I was doing a secret multiplayer test for Celaria (in a closed enviroment.) This is some of the footage i was able to capture during this session. I though that this would make nice material for a youtube video so that people know that the game is still in active development. :)
Now first things first: Why didn't i do an open multiplayer test? The answer is simple: Management. It was far easier to manage a small group of people through (more or less) direct communication than a bigger group which may not be able to communicate directly. And this was the right choice! The first attempt at the multiplayer stresstest resulted in the server pretty much imploding. A bug in the code caused the server to crash wich resulted in broken chat, invisible players and not being able to log in anymore... (This would have been a disaster to manage in an open enviroment.)
The main goal was to test how the server performance actually is, to find any major flaws in the code which result in crashes and to determine how good the networking code is.
After fixing this dangerous bug in the code which resulted in crashes the server ran pretty fine!
Due to heavy multithreading (the server is java based) i was able toget the most out of my multicore PC. Even my old Core2Quad 2.0GHz processor (is still my main rig... lol) was able to run the server without any problems (even while having the game open on the same machine).
The only real issue are some minor bugs in the code that i have to iron out and that some people tend to disconnect with timeouts far to often (it may be that my timeout criteria are a bit too draconic.)
Eitherway, it was in the end a successfull test.
I'm also thinking about releasing the source code of the server so that people can mod it and (potentially) add new features (or even gamemodes?) to the server. (I'll try to allow/Implement some form of server sided gamemode control to make it possible.)
So yeah, looking forward to the multiplayer alpha release. :)
