Codemasters: We Have to be Clever to Get Around Sony and Microsoft Restrictions
Restrictions are good and bad with F1.
SPOnG caught up with Stephen Hood of Codemasters, Chief Game Designer for F1 2011 recently to ask many things (full interview later). One thing that popped up were the problems in getting 24 players online.
Stephen told us that, "You can say in an ideal world that the PC could have 24 players over a peer to peer connection, but the problem is not the power of the PC, but the variation of the technology everyone is using. This extends to variation in connection quality as well.
"At least with consoles, Microsoft and Sony quite rightly put certain restrictions on things in order to make sure that for a large majority of people, the game experience is going to be very good", he continued.
Before he gave us some insight into the thinking underlying a developer and platform holder relations:
"With Sony and Microsoft on the other hand, we have to work within their restrictions and we just have to become cleverer about how we get around those restrictions. With another year’s development time, we can go for 24 cars online."
Stay tuned for the full interview.
Stephen told us that, "You can say in an ideal world that the PC could have 24 players over a peer to peer connection, but the problem is not the power of the PC, but the variation of the technology everyone is using. This extends to variation in connection quality as well.
"At least with consoles, Microsoft and Sony quite rightly put certain restrictions on things in order to make sure that for a large majority of people, the game experience is going to be very good", he continued.
Before he gave us some insight into the thinking underlying a developer and platform holder relations:
"With Sony and Microsoft on the other hand, we have to work within their restrictions and we just have to become cleverer about how we get around those restrictions. With another year’s development time, we can go for 24 cars online."
Stay tuned for the full interview.
Comments
DrkStr 22 Jun 2011 12:22
1/2
How is it so hard to have 24 cars online when MAG had 256 players in an FPS?
Not a snarky comment there, just an actual question. Any devs here?
Not a snarky comment there, just an actual question. Any devs here?
Anon 22 Jun 2011 12:47
2/2
I'm no expert but i imagine it's something to do with the frame rate as a racing game moves a lot quicker than a FPS. Good luck to Codies, 24 players online would be a feat. Even with 12 on the current version things get a little choppy, in fact sometimes it's unplayable.