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Tera Development Presentation Slides (from 2010)

PascallePascalle
edited June 2016 in TERA PC - General Discussion
In case people haven't seen this China Game Developers Conference presentation on Tera in 2010.

I'm bored, so some highlights:
  • Initial development cost about $30 million USD (using today's currency conversion, though the Chinese currency is pretty stable over time) and took 3.5 years to make. It still cost less than an average Hollywood movie to make.
  • The goal was to do something special, to make a true action-oriented MMORPG, without the crappy boring targeting.
  • The action-oriented nature means high CPU usage on the server-side, and greater cost to run servers than with simple targetting MMORPGs.
  • The game actually goes into over-drive (on the server and TERA.exe end) when doing heavy combat, broadcasting packets more often (in an optimised fashion) when there's lots of action.
  • The server doesn't use a physics engine, collision detection, etc is done on your PC.
  • The world is broken down into zones, but those zones do not have a dedicated CPU thread, instead something more complicated is implemented (with some stream of non-blocking threads) so that an area doesn't lag or crash when there are lots of players in it.
  • In prototyping each server (like CH) was actually composed of multiple servers for the action, and one server (backend) which is the database of all your items and progress, etc.
  • Another prototype had an intermediary broadcast server for communicating with the two (in addition to the original connection between the two). The many connections made it too much of a pain in the butt to implement.
  • What they decided on was having you connect to a single server, no matter what you're doing (somehow inspired by Starcraft?), this is the arbiter server and it communicates with the pool of servers which take care of the actual game mechanics.
  • The way the game works is that threads are non-blocking, and things happen in an ad-hoc manner (hence the timing on ghosts in FINM is sometimes off, and things go out of order in places like KDNM/HM when the bolt stuff happens).
  • The arbiter server actually does packet optimisation with spare CPU cycles. There is more concern about bandwidth than the server becoming overloaded (for better or worse).
  • A main (e.g. CH) server can be kept alive even if a particular dungeon instance or continent server craps out.
  • The game has been tested with some dummy clients (roughly speaking bots) running around in the game world, with an average latency of 200ms (this is probably why the game is playable even at higher ping, which is insane for an action game, quite an achievement)
  • Worker servers are optimised according to their roles
  • The developers believed in "impossible is nothing", to make an action-based MMORPG a reality.

I have much respect for the developers.

Comments

  • RokubyouRokubyou ✭✭
    I have to admit, tera and it's gameplay is on a level of its own to which no MMORPG I've played can compare. I really do have respect for the Devs. (except they are quite sucky at listening and doing balancing.) but yea, they cannot just listen to everyone's opinion because that would totally wreck the game more than it is now.
  • JuudeJuude ✭✭✭
    They did do some amazing things with this game, i find myself unable to play MMO's anymore after playing TERA because of their crappy 16 year old tab-targeting system. They could do with hiring someone who can actually balance the game thou.

    Or give us the talent tree which they use to make the new classes...until that happens, we'll see serious imbalance here.
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