BeGone Released! - Multi-player Shooter

Hey guys,

I'm happy to announce that BeGone has now been released! Check it out:

http://www.nplay.com/BeGone/

BeGone is a round based multi-player shooter.

Of course it uses Photon for networking, and I am looking forward to scaling it up!

And, here's some screenshots:
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Comments

  • nice, thanks for sharing!
  • Cool! Impressive graphics and very polished.
  • Online shooting games are often thought to be a great way to relieve stress when you are at work. In fact, many studies have shown that you can take to attend a 15 minute break from work to play shooting games can significantly improve productivity. The reason is that these types of games you can immerse yourself in an environment that is both fun and interactive. Needless to say that some workplaces do not allow this type of game.



    Mahjong online
  • Version 1.3.2 Just Relased
    http://www.nplay.com/BeGone

    Since the last update to this thread we now have 3 levels (with a 4th one on the way):

    Warehouse
    attachment.php?attachmentid=22427&d=1310501192
    Tower
    attachment.php?attachmentid=22426&d=1310501185
    Crane
    attachment.php?attachmentid=22425&d=1310501185
    Pipeline (Coming Soon)
    attachment.php?attachmentid=22428&d=1310501364

    So far the highest number of peers we have seen at one time is 260. The server is a 2 core 1GHz with 2GB of RAM and has been able to handle this without any noticeable lag. And bandwidth usage is about 500GB per month right now with combined up/down. We just increased a few rooms from a max of 12 players to 24, as we know even though the player count doubles it way more than doubles the resources required. Will see how this goes, but so far it is looking pretty good.
  • Thanks for the update. Cool news!
    Do you have additional in-game logic on the server?
  • Congratulations!

    How do you handle collisions?
  • The only additional logic on the server side is for round logic. I extended the LiteLobbyGame and added a RoundLogicProvider which is just a small state machine independent of Photon libraries. There is also a system timer to call an update on the RoundLogicProvider (so it can count down the ingame clock, check for game / round wins, and fire any necessary callbacks).

    So server side is kept pretty simple, if I could have done the round logic client side I would have, but did not see a good way of doing it.

    All collisions are client side. All clients send their key input to all other clients and the simulation runs for everyone. Of course this will get out of sync, so there are re-sync events sent when necessary. It still needs some work though, you may notice players sometimes get stuck on a physics object (like the edge of a box) and then pop to their real position. Manually moving opponents and adding interpolation can cause headaches with people falling through the ground or walking through walls.
  • Very interesting, thank you!

    How much CPU do 260 CCU consume from the available 2 core 1GHz server?
  • Did you like launching on Kongregate?
  • CPU usage is not consistent so it is hard to judge. Now that the rooms hold more people it takes more CPU as well. I think 300 is probably the upper limit of what this server can handle, but time will tell.

    And to figure it out we will be re-launching on Kongregate. The last version on Kong was made with Unity 2.x and only had 1 weapon. This is a much improved game, so I hope the Kong audience will like the changes. The one thing is that their computer's are not often capable of doing high-end graphics, so keeping the framerate high on lower end hardware is important on that site.
  • Interesting, thanks!

    What's your target hardware for client?
  • We just launched a new version of BeGone on Kongregate, much improved since the last time the Kong audience saw the game.

    And we broke a new concurrent peer record, highest I have seen previously was 260 but today I saw 444!

    And on NPSF3000's advice we switched hosting to https://www.nfoservers.com/. With their 8 core VPS I am seeing only 20% cpu usage with this many players.

    We also just upgraded to the Photon Unlimited license, so we will try to see if we can get this player count even higher :)
  • Great news! The game definitely deserves the attention - very playable and polished.
  • Weird, on my shitty pc the new one is unplayable where's the old one had like 40 fps. Note both of them were on lowest possible settings.
  • perhaps it has some effects that are not quality level controller and just are hw disabled on the old one (higher quality SM3 effects for example and alike - depending on how old your old one was) or it has a dynamic scaling capability like island demo and your card was just deemed to be "shit" and got a host of visuals disabled out of the box ... or your new pc just has a very bad gpu (like you bought a new pc with onboard or near onboard vs having an old on a 7800GTX or alike)
  • The new one is using deferred rendering instead of forward, not sure if this could cause a problem. I thought it would fall back to forward if the card doesn't support deferred anyway. The warehouse level is significantly lower polycount and texture usage, not too sure what the problem would be. The new multi-treading mesh skinning stuff in Unity 3.4 takes load off the CPU, so dreamora's likely right that it is the GPU.

    One problem that I know exists is intermittent lag, I think it is due to garbage collection from using OnGUI, we're phasing all OnGUI stuff out of the game starting with anything visible while playing.

    One of the problems with being addicted to playing games is that my computers are all pretty powerful, I'm looking into getting a slower computer for testing though.

    BTW, we made a new record for simultaneously connected players: 773!
  • dreamora wrote:
    perhaps it has some effects that are not quality level controller and just are hw disabled on the old one (higher quality SM3 effects for example and alike - depending on how old your old one was) or it has a dynamic scaling capability like island demo and your card was just deemed to be "shit" and got a host of visuals disabled out of the box ... or your new pc just has a very bad gpu (like you bought a new pc with onboard or near onboard vs having an old on a 7800GTX or alike)
    My new pc? I don't have a new pc. And if my gpu was deemed shit (which it is) for the old game, why wasn't it for the new one?
  • Deferred Rendering changes the performance massively.
    its base overhead is extreme especially if you target anything below 8800GTX, 9800GTX or GTX260 / 460 / 560 and higher

    It should really only be used if you have a lots of realtime lights and shadows, otherwise its gain (that its overhead with lots of lights and shadows is low) will become a major lose ...

    Lower end GPUs can easily handle half a million+ polygons and lots of textures, but deferred makes the scene not render 1 or 2 times, but 5 (or 6, not fully sure), to fill all the buffers required for deferred. Even my GTX280 on a halfway reasonable level won't get beyond 100 frames, which for average casual user machines means that they can be happy to get out at 30FPS. And the problem is just removing lights or shadows won't affect it as the buffers and pixels get rendered none the less (thats why adding more of them is not as devastating as in forward rendering where affected objects are redrawn, not just some more pixels in screenspace affected)

    In short, if you use deferred, you also need to write "Requires a NVIDIA 9800 or equivalent graphics chip" at least onto the requirements list

    as such its definitely favorable to have all but the top 2 qualities use forward rendering (for the lowest one I would even consider the pure vertex renderpath fallback)

    @Johanz: sorry missunderstood your message, thought you meant pc not version of game.
  • Thanks dreamora, you are always a wealth of knowledge.

    I've changed it so that when "Image Effects" are set to 'Low' it uses forward rendering. Tried vertex-lit but the terrain looks horrible with that method.

    Maybe it will run faster for you now johanz. I've already had a couple players report their framerate doubled.
  • I've changed it so that when "Image Effects" are set to 'Low' it uses forward rendering. Tried vertex-lit but the terrain looks horrible with that method.

    Wouldn't call it horrible if a user really needs it.
    GeForce 4 and older, people with Intel GMA 500 and 900 benefit of it too, for the 900 series it depends on the rest to what a degree - Unity Technologies didn't reduce the terrain detail and foliage - detail distances to nearly nothing when detecting an Intel GPU in the Unity 2.x Island Demo cause they hate Intel but love the users ;)

    But yeah with Vertex Lit render path Unity does not use any shaders at all, its pure fixed function rendering on the gpu ("dinosaur" or DX8 earlier) and the "nice texture repetition painting" on the terrain is pure pixel shader unhappily.
    Due to this in Vertex Lit it actually bakes down the stuff to the size of the detail texture you define (unsure if per terrain or terrain chunk) and uses a single static texture which gives you a very low texel density compared to the realtime blended.
  • Yeah, I attached an image of what the fixed function rendering does to the terrain incase anyone is curious.

    I remember playing Day of Defeat as a HL1 mod and realized that lowering the settings so all textures looked flat and without detail changed the nature of the game. It made it so that enemies stood out like a sore thumb even when they were in an area where they should have been somewhat hidden due to blending in with the background. It was kinda sad to think that to compete against players I would need to play in such an ugly world.

    That's also why we got rid of the vegetation density toggle. The vegetation does play into the strategy and I find it fun, but if people can just toggle it off, then everyone has to toggle it off just so they aren't at a disadvantage. The trade-off is to have levels without terrain like warehouse.
  • haha agreed, in any game that uses foliage as cover, a vegetation toggle or scaling is definitely no option :D

    As for the terrain: Your terrain must be pretty large, even with the filtering it still looks as if its basically 2x2 texel per unit which would imply a 2 : 1 ratio on the terrain size vs splat map texture size. But yupp its not possible to go far beyond that as unity does not support vertex splatting (wrote such a system back in Blitz3D days on DX7, looks like unity terrains then just with no shader but instead with multiple meshes), only texture splatting
  • 773 is a good count, congrats! :D

    How much bandwidth do your players consume?
  • I've found a folder called "Begone" in /AppData/LocalLow/Unity/Cache/ and it weights 191 mb,
    does this mean you've purchased a special license from UT?
  • Sounds like they licensed the Cache Licnese from UT yes (its not buying, you have to license it as its ongoing payment, either share if you make revenue or a beefy per mb cache size yearly fee)
  • We just broke the 1000 concurrent user mark today with 1035 players connected! Scaling from 100 to 1000 concurrent players with Photon has been very smooth.

    Running the latest Photon 3 RC3 on client and server.

    1035.jpg
  • congratulations :)
  • Some more good news. PC Gamer released the
    "Top 10 free PC Games of 2011"

    And BeGone is rated the 5th best free PC game of 2011!
  • thats very cool, congratulation
  • Looks... beautiful :o

    Can't wait to try this out when I get home from work. Anyways, great job!