Respawn Update: Round Robin Community Starts

Project Clinic

A month ago we started our Vulcan playthrough and we've been busy playing ever since. We've talked about our processes before but it's worth talking about again as it is core to how we make games at Rocketwerkz. This kind of play session is not a traditional development play test but rather us truly playing. Sure, we note our issues and ideas down but our goal is to actually just play the game like a normal player.

We played on the same server the whole time, but lived separately in our own independent bases. At points when we started to hit performance problems we identified the issues and increased performance significantly. We'll go over them in detail later in the post, but these changes were profound and allowed us to have a server with multiple, large, complex bases while still getting excellent performance.

As time went on in these play sessions, we start to divide our time more between development and playing. We started to tidy up a lot of what we had been adding and working on the more complex systems that we wanted to tackle. Generally in these final few weeks we end up with: 1/3 of our day spent playing, 1/3 to do small task and fix small issues, and 1/3 used to fix large issues or work on big changes.

A New Way of Playing

Before we started our play session we decided that we wanted to try all making our own, separate, bases. To do this we added what we call "Round Robin" start. This works by spreading the players across all the spawn points on the map. If there's a free spot it will put a new player there before it starts to double up.

Along with this new way of spawning we added "Community" Start conditions which provide each new player with their own set of full supplies in a lander, which allows a game to be made up of a collection of bases, instead of a single one.

Respawn Overhaul

With this spread out base play style, when a player died, it could take other players a long time to prepare and make a trip across the rough dangerous Vulcan terrain. This helped us identify some issues around the process of dying, being dead and the few ways of respawning.

Known Issue: Desync for some players

We have managed to identify long-running issues with a "desync spiral" that is experienced by some players, even when not using SteamP2P. Players get stuck in a state where they are severely behind in updates. This tends to occur where a user has a high-ping to the server, and the bases (or network updates) become large. We are producing a new version of RakNet (which we have revamped into "RocketNet") which addresses these issues. It was not ready in time for this update, but we expect to have progress in the new year.

Body Bags

Dead player bodies can have a big effect on performance and are prone to bugs, both while lying on the ground and while being dragged. Player bodies will now more quickly decay, and when they do they will enter a body bag, and their belongings will be placed in a large cardboard box.

Since body bags now exist as a transitory representation of the players state, reconnecting to an active server, and finding yourself dead is now possible. Previously, corpses would explode into dropped items, and players would reconnect with the server no longer having a reference to