Phil Harrison's GDC keynote - Home, LittleBigPlanet & more

[Mordecaii]

I just want to say that I think a lot of people are vastly underrating Home and what it could become. For example, I could easily see this scenario happening one day after work:

I come home, turn on the PS3, and load up Home. I appear in my virtual apartment and decide I'm tired of the decorations, so I decide to change them around. My guild leader messages me and says that the guild is having a meeting over in his apartment, so I walk on over. As we discuss strategy for the upcoming matches later that evening, we're all listening to some awesome background music stored on his PS3. After we're done, we crowd around his virtual TV to watch film of the previous week's matches to laugh at them and learn from them.

Later on after the matches, some of us decide we're sick of killing things so we head on over to (insert random company name here)'s sports building. We hang out and play virtual bball (for free), maybe watch some streaming matches from earlier, etc... We then decide to head on over to the arcade and play some multiplayer arcade action, which we do for about an hour.

After all this, we all head over to my place and sit down and watch a movie that's stored on my PS3 that I just downloaded while I was at work. We then decide to head back out to a dance club to mingle with people we don't know and make some friends. So we head to the nearest virtual dance club and hang out and chat while dancing to the people around. A couple hours later and after having made a new friend or two, we hang it up for the night.


Now I'd like someone to sit there and tell me that this doesn't completely blow away everything currently out there.

 

[Qroach]

Years ago when MS announced X-Box (1) Live, and bragged about how it cost a billion dollars, I though they had purchased a huge commodity server farm that would allow devs and users to rent server space (invisibly and on the fly) to host games. I complemented MS on the effort, because I though it was the right decision -- computing as utility. I was disappointed to find out the reality.

Yes, there are many games on consoles that work P2P. IMHO, 32 player FPS games don't. You get a few people with lucky good connections (close to host), the rest disadvantaged, and even then, you get more lag than a PC FPS. Only the super-craptastic aiming of console shooters hides it.

Jeez dude this was debated years ago. live didn't cost 1 billion dollars. That was a misquote. They were including the costs of live along with the advertising budget for the xbox console itself (not just live). anyway there's no way live cost a biilion dollars to develop.

 

[one]

Apparently something new was announced at the SCEA party and the embargo will lift in hours.

 

[Moonblade]

It's impressive but what would you do with a neighborhood?

I think Playstation will also serve as an interactive lobby room to play minigames.
It's a community build around the gamers and the games. The idea of building your own room is great. You could create a clan hall or a discotheque and charge people for entering.

Hell, sony could promote home like sh*t by inviting VIP's like paris hilton or eminem and allowing gamers to have live sessions with them. They could set up virtual sony party to get the casuals online with the PS3.

 

[-tkf-]

Apparently something new was announced at the SCEA party and the embargo will lift in hours.

Impossible, my smile cant get any wider....

 

[-tkf-]

So we head to the nearest virtual dance club and hang out and chat while dancing to the people around.

I plan on buying the absolute biggest apartment i can get my dollars on, house on the "HiFi" and porn on the walls.. i will be your dance club.

 

[Mordecaii]

I plan on buying the absolute biggest apartment i can get my dollars on, house on the "HiFi" and porn on the walls.. i will be your dance club.

Only if you attract enough ladies

 

[valioso]

Now I'd like someone to sit there and tell me that this doesn't completely blow away everything currently out there.

it doesnt appeal to me at all.

 

[Mordecaii]

it doesnt appeal to me at all.

I didn't ask if it appealed to you, honestly I could care less if it does because people's opinions are subjective (just like most people could care less what my opinion is). My point is that it's well beyond what is offered elsewhere. Not everyone will care to use it, but there is no such thing as something that everyone will like.

Edit: Sorry if I sounded harsh, I'm a bit tired.

 

[Crossbar]

I plan on buying the absolute biggest apartment i can get my dollars on, house on the "HiFi" and porn on the walls.. i will be your dance club.

That brings up another question:
Will there be mods that PG-rate peoples apartments?

 

[DemoCoder]

That's utter nonsense. I've seen a massively multiplayer game with over 100 players handled over a dial up connection.

Have you seen a FPS *HOSTED* by a dialup connection with 100 players? Sure, you could host 100 players on a dialup connection if it was a turn based RPG with auto-lockon everything, where aim and position accuracy are mostly irrelevent. I bet you could run a game like Knights of the Old Republic on really shitty connections, but that's not what's being discussed and you know it.

Why don't you read this IEEE paper I just dug up, which provides hard facts for what anyone who ran a CS server implicity knows (or anyone who runs "net_graph 1"): http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/net-game/, and the CS network layer is already known to be more efficient than UE.

This shows CS (not CS Source mind you) consuming over 20Kilobytes/sec outgoing bandwidth from the server peak for just *3-10* players, and they didn't simulate voice traffic (add another 4.8kbps per speaker). Moreover, the Source engine consumes more bandwidth because of multiplayer physics objects. There are tons of DSL connections with upstream bandwidth from 128kbps-512kbps. 20k/sec would consume 160Kbps and that's not even taking into account overhead as well as the fact that you are not going to reach the theoretical upstream limit of your DSL in most cases, especially with small packets.

And you must be able to handle the peak, not the average, otherwise the game will massively churn packets during the most intense (and fun) parts.

Again LAG isn't somehting that is automatically fixed by having a dedicated server. Network conditions can NEVER be predicted.

No one claimed it was *FIXED* by a dedicated server, only that it is *BETTER* than client-hosted servers on asynchronous DSL. This much is obvious, and it would be surprising to me if you tried to refute it. Bringing up MMORPGs, turn based games, RTSes, et all is irrelevent. It is well known why these games have good network performance, and has nothing to do with the arguments for why a dedicated server is better.

One could make an interesting argument for P2P given it eliminates a network hop, but it also multiplies outgoing bandwidth requirements as well as imposing more complex synchronization. Unfortunately, NAT issues cause huge problems. Like the lovely frustrating of two people both behind a NAT with restrictive hole punching policies trying to host a game or play with each other. Oh, the many joys of joining games and getting stuck waiting to connect.

BTW, network conditions can't be predicted with certainly, but one can choose a network topology and architecture to shift the probabilities around. I can't predict at any moment what my outgoing latency will be from my server, however, to think that this means there is no point deciding where to host the server is completely wrong. One also can't predict conditions in a queue on any given day, but that doesn't mean one can't using queuing theory to design one's service stations to minimize the probability of worst case behavior.

 

[rabidrabbit]

I'm very impressed and excited about Home, Little Big Planet however... I've never been that much into level editors and such, so I'm mainly interested in that title because of the absolutely lovely graphics.

The Home obviously won't be all that it could be when it launches. Like the Playstation Network, it will evolve after launch and it'll be exiting to see what it will be a year from launch.

Wonder if the PS button on the SIXAXIS will also launch the Home? Wasn't this hinted at some point, so that you wouldn't need to scroll through the XMB.
This brings another question, will you be able to launch Home mid-game with the PS button and continue the game when you leave Home?

What I'd really like to see implemented in "Home" is EyeToy2 integration. Being able to map yourself and even some objects and furnitures as 3D objects would be amazing. Wasn't there some rumours going on about some tech Sony had patented or bought that enabled automatic 3D modelling from 2D photos?
Another feature that would be even more cool would be motion sensing via te camera, so that your avatar would not be limited to some precaptured simple handwaving animations and such, but would mocap it's movement and maybe even facial expressions (just upper body) from the camera feed.

 

[Geo]

Jeez dude this was debated years ago. live didn't cost 1 billion dollars. That was a misquote. They were including the costs of live along with the advertising budget for the xbox console itself (not just live). anyway there's no way live cost a biilion dollars to develop.

I think that rather thoroughly misses his point. He's talking about his context as it existed at the time of the announcement and why it made him think what he thought at the time (i.e. about the giant server farm).

 

[DemoCoder]

I think that rather thoroughly misses his point. He's talking about his context as it existed at the time of the announcement and why it made him think what he thought at the time (i.e. about the giant server farm).

Exactly, I wasn't talking about what I thought now, but I thought when the announcement circulated. I thought "what the hell did they spent $1 billion on? Match making services and some databases, billing servers, and account/single signon servers don't cost that much!" And the only thing I could think of was: "cpu utility/server farm" and I though "cool! MS is going to make renting servers easy for devs and end users, making it painless and idiotic proof....click X to launch a Halo Dedicated Server for 32 players.." etc

Sure, it came out later that they didn't spend $1bil on the network. Hence, the disappointment, but the realization "ok, XBLive's suckitude now makes sense."

 

[swanlee]

I think people are vastly overrating HOME, PS3 fans are so giddy when they don't have bad news for the PS3 they seem to spaz out on anything. it is the sims for the PS3, as a person with a job, a life and a woman that actually lives with me, the whole internet sims deal has no appeal for me. If anything it is another distraction from actual game content.

 

[-tkf-]

I think people are vastly overrating HOME, PS3 fans are so giddy when they don't have bad news for the PS3 they seem to spaz out on anything. it is the sims for the PS3, as a person with a job, a life and a woman that actually lives with me, the whole internet sims deal has no appeal for me. If anything it is another distraction from actual game content.

As a person with a life, gf, kid and a job i can safely say that Home appeals to me, sims on the other hand, i let that up to those woman out there that aparently doesn´t have a life,job,bf and kids, at least thats the gist of your post isn´t it?

 

[macabre]

I think people are vastly overrating HOME, PS3 fans are so giddy when they don't have bad news for the PS3 they seem to spaz out on anything. it is the sims for the PS3, as a person with a job, a life and a woman that actually lives with me, the whole internet sims deal has no appeal for me. If anything it is another distraction from actual game content.

No it`s a bonus. And it`s free.

 

[Qroach]

Have you seen a FPS *HOSTED* by a dialup connection with 100 players? Sure, you could host 100 players on a dialup connection if it was a turn based RPG with auto-lockon everything, where aim and position accuracy are mostly irrelevent. I bet you could run a game like Knights of the Old Republic on really shitty connections, but that's not what's being discussed and you know it.

No NOT a turn based RPG's that's NOT what I'm talking about. Ever heard of fighter Ace or Air attack years ago? They were massively multiplayer flight combat based games that could support an (X) amount of players. Don't jump to conclusions thinking you know what I'm talking about before asking, ok?

Why don't you read this IEEE paper I just dug up, which provides hard facts for what anyone who ran a CS server implicity knows (or anyone who runs "net_graph 1"): http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/net-game/, and the CS network layer is already known to be more efficient than UE.

Interesting but I doubt it was more efficient then the limitations the games VR1 made 8 or 9 years ago. The games I'm talking about predate both CS and starcraft by years, supported more players via the server, and ran on dial-up connections. Those games are dinosaurs by todays' visual standards but the networking software could still hold up anything out there today.

And you must be able to handle the peak, not the average, otherwise the game will massively churn packets during the most intense (and fun) parts.

Well obviously the connection hosting the "server" would need to support peak bandwidth numbers and not an average. Even still just because this article says these two games have a small packet size doesn't mean they are the most optimal games out at the time. Either way this doesn't refute the claim people with a 300kbps connection not being able to host a multi-player game of varying size.

No one claimed it was *FIXED* by a dedicated server, only that it is *BETTER* than client-hosted servers on asynchronous DSL. This much is obvious, and it would be surprising to me if you tried to refute it. Bringing up MMORPGs, turn based games, RTSes, et all is irrelevent. It is well known why these games have good network performance, and has nothing to do with the arguments for why a dedicated server is better.

Sure no one is saying this is "fixed' by having a dedicated server, but I see people alluding to that, and it's not correct. yes sometimes having a dedicated server makes sense and sometimes it is better, but this isn't always the case.

It's better depending on the type of game. Or it might not matter at all depending on the size of the game. You know there's lots of games out there that used servers and when you meet up with someone it disconnects you and re-connects those users directly. Again I wasn't talking about turn based online games MMORPG, or RTS games. Stop putting words in my mouth please. I mentioned massively multiplayer. that doesn't mean it's an RPG.

Anyway this is way off topic, but I find it annoying to see people assuming dedicated servers mean a lag free gaming experience . As I was saying before I don't think a dedicated server is needed for anything bigger then 64 players. Now note I said "needed" (depends on the game and how the networking is structured) the article you provided was interesting and all but they didn't actually dissect the packets to find out what information was being transmitted to all players. I wouldn't be surprised if CS transmitted lot's of info that could have been compressed or optimized further.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I think people are vastly overrating HOME, PS3 fans are so giddy when they don't have bad news for the PS3 they seem to spaz out on anything. it is the sims for the PS3, as a person with a job, a life and a woman that actually lives with me, the whole internet sims deal has no appeal for me. If anything it is another distraction from actual game content.

I agree that its being blown way out of proportion.

I like that it was announced following the Game 3.0 presentation yet there was no real description of what the content creation tools would allow you to do. All that they mentioned was fairly static content, with the exception of streaming video and music on virtual home entertainment devices, which seems very gimmicky. The rest of the features are very standard fare for the mmo scene. And on top of that, they limited the options for customizing your home and character, and have upgrades available to purchase on their online store. I see Home mostly as an alternative revenue channel for Sony, without a lot of really interesting content, or unique abilities.

 

[Crossbar]

As a person with a life, gf, kid and a job i can safely say that Home appeals to me, sims on the other hand, i let that up to those woman out there that aparently doesn´t have a life,job,bf and kids, at least thats the gist of your post isn´t it?

I agree, and HOME may appeal to someones wife and kids as well.