Horrible! Actually playing this kind of game!

After returning to Neon, Qing Zhiyuan spent a few days hastily drafting two business plans for pokeni's future strategy, and then convened a meeting with important core members of the company.

…

"What?! Pokémon online?! What is this?"

In the conference room, Akanishi Ken only felt that one person was as big as two people.

After listening to what President Qing Zhiyuan said about online games, everyone inside was shocked.

"Yes, Pokémon Online, this game is made into a game where you can team up to fight, PK, and communicate with each other through network connections." Qing Zhiyuan smiled and described vividly:

"In this game, each player will play the role of a Pokémon trainer. Of course, the game will also provide different trainer levels, ranging from level 1 to level 60, and as the levels continue to increase, we will also open Corresponding skills and rewards.

Then, in the game, the map is divided into many regional modules. Players can experience the fun of catching pets in the game. Pets range from level 1 to level 60. Each pet can be cultivated. Leveling up is the same as the Pokémon battle we do now.

It's just a massively multiplayer online RPG that makes the game larger in scale and can support more players playing the game at the same time. It's called an MMORPG game for short, and that's about it. "

The main focus of online games is a social need.

The idea provided by Qing Zhiyuan is actually a combination of Pokémon Online and Fantasy Westward Journey in the previous life. It can even be said that -

Fantasy Westward Journey itself has strong Pokémon elements in it, but due to IP restrictions, NetEase has not directly made Pokémon online.

Now Qing Zhiyuan is equivalent to further restoring it and directly making a large-scale online game of Pokémon.

This is also the result of Qing Zhiyuan’s careful consideration during this period——

After finally acquiring Penguin, and also investing in Google and NVIDIA, what else can stop pokeni from entering online games?

Especially for China, we must know that the Chinese market will be the largest market in the world in the future. With the population base here, we can make a lot of money.

…

What's more, Pokémon is a big global IP. As long as it is done well, players all over the world can enjoy the fun of online games, and at the same time, Pokémon's influence will become greater.

In Pokémon Online, players usually carry out activities in the game based on the character, that is, the trainer set when creating. This part is real-time. Players can move on various maps in the Pokémon world. Walk around in the module, capture Pokémon, and engage in a series of social behaviors such as fighting and teaming up.

Moreover, Qing Zhiyuan also brought over the Fantasy Westward Journey set to provide life skills in the game, and each player can only choose one of them for training and improvement.

For example, in this world, there are those who specialize in making weapons, there are those who make clothes, there are those who make medicines, there are those who make food, there are those who specialize in making raw materials, there are those who process materials, there are those who make equipment for Pokémon, and there are those who make props to improve abilities. of……

After the differences, needs and social division of labor are generated, the interaction between players actually comes, and it greatly enriches the social nature and playability of the game.

A powerful and complete society.

It is equivalent to truly creating a Pokémon world. In this world, each player is not only a trainer, but also plays different functional roles in the game, just like a curator or other trainers in Pokémon. Same.

When there is a battle, they are trainers. When there is no battle, they can be teachers, principals, dancers, chefs, office workers, hunters... etc.

Shinji Mikami listened very carefully, and he could almost paint a magnificent picture of Pokémon life in his mind.

Isn’t the president too awesome?

Not only is the imagination amazing, the most important thing is the execution, the powerful driving force to turn the idea into reality, which is really amazing.

"Then if you want to fight, just enter the battle interface, which is consistent with the turn-based game." Qing Zhiyuan said.

Just listening to it made Akanishi Ken feel like his head was going to explode. Frontier can now support 10 people playing at the same time. Does Pokémon Online also support so many people?

"How many more people are there?" Ken Akanishi asked the most critical question.

"Hmm..." Qing Zhiyuan thought for a moment and responded, "The number of players may be relatively small at the beginning, but we must be able to support at least 200,000 people online at the same time."

What? !

200,000 people? !

Akanishi Ken was completely stunned.

Hearing Qing Zhiyuan's crazy thoughts, everyone in the conference room frowned in unison.

Director of the programming department Ken Akanishi, art director Taiji Sakata and game director Shinji Mikami are all in this conference room. So far, there is no need for music and operations intervention. They are still in the planning stage, so Qing Zhiyuan did not call. Operations Director Kazuma Takahashi and Music Director Atsushi Shirakawa.

In this meeting, Qing Zhiyuan just talked about the future plan of online games with everyone. This is a large-scale level that is far from being implemented, so many details have to be discussed and decided by Shinji Mikami. You can only know the specific requirements document.

However, even hearing a rough description is scary enough.

"How do we support so many people online..." Takeru Akanishi frowned, thinking that the president was just talking nonsense, a complete fantasy.

Urban legends don't even think of this situation.

This is a wonderful story about the world.

"Being online at the same time does not mean sharing the screen." Qing Zhiyuan emphasized, making everyone here feel a little more awake, "Multiple people sharing the screen means that many different players appear on the same screen.

The pressure on the client must be great. Our current border can only support 10v10 battles at most.

If I want to make a turn-based Pokémon, my requirements are not too high as long as it can support up to 100 players on the same screen. "

"Simultaneous online refers to the number of players logging into Pokémon Online at the same time and playing games there. This is determined by the server's carrying capacity.

Two different things.

Just like the Bird Soul we are doing now, the number of rooms open at the same time determines the server pressure, and in a single room, there can only be a maximum of 4 players playing on a mahjong table.

See what I mean? Qing Zhiyuan asked.

After Qing Zhiyuan's explanation, everyone suddenly realized that players may not necessarily appear in the same scene, nor may they see so many other players.

However, the number of players online at the same time and the actual number of players are two different concepts.

There will be three very important game data here.

The first one is called the number of registered players, which is the number of players who have registered accounts in the game.

The second is the maximum number of people online at the same time, which represents the peak number of players online at the same time.

The third one is the average number of people online, which will be much lower than the peak data.

Under normal circumstances, if 100 people can register at the same time, only 20% of the players may remain, and the retention rate of 20% is already quite high.

And among the remaining people, everyone will be different due to occupation and time. Not 20% of the players will be online in every time period.

But the program must be architected according to the peak value, otherwise it will easily crash.

“First we split the region into regions, and then each region is composed of multiple servers,” Qing Zhiyuan said.

"In this case, the pressure on the server will be too great." Akanishi Ken said.

"If it's not enough, buy it. Just configure more servers," Qing Zhiyuan said.

In this way, although 200,000 people are online at the same time, only 40 to 50 relatively good servers are needed, which is equivalent to each server supporting about 4,000 to 5,000 people.

This is Qingzhiyuan’s assessment considering the current hardware level.

The first online games were probably like this. A large area was divided into many districts, such as Telecom District 1, and then Guangdong Telecom District 1 and District 2...

In other words, South China District 1 is divided into Guangdong District 1, Guangxi District 1 and so on.

Then a partition is one server or multiple servers. If one server fails, it will not affect the games in other areas.

But in the future, when there are larger-scale servers with stronger performance, the opposite will happen. One server may host several different regions, and if the server hangs up, a large region may collapse.

Once Alibaba's cloud server went down, hundreds of companies were affected.

In addition to the server itself that is needed to support the game.

Some backup servers are also needed to be used in some special circumstances, such as when the server is overcrowded due to too many people, or when a bug causes the server to go down.

Data must be backed up and exchanged.

In fact, it is not an easy thing.

…

Under Qing Zhiyuan's explanation, Akanishi Ken's doubts were gradually solved.

hateful!

How come this guy, the president, has already thought of a solution? !

and……

For some reason, Akanishi Ken always felt that the president had already thought about making Pokémon Online, otherwise the transition would have been too smooth.

From small-scale online battles on the border, to "Sparrow Soul" that can support hundreds of thousands of people to play, but "Sparrow Soul" is in the form of open rooms, and there will be so many players walking around in the game. And now——

Players can now walk around in the game, and the number of people is not small. Everyone does not enter the room in teams of 4, which is a big step forward based on the spirit of the bird.

One after another, each one made further progress based on the previous one, which always gave Ken Akanishi the illusion that he was being deeply plotted by Qing Zhiyuan.

However, he was a little relieved that the battle of Pokémon online was turn-based. If there was a real-time large-scale MMORPG in the future, he really didn't know what to do.

ah……

very scary.

Is this a game that humans can make?

The heads of everyone here are about to explode. In fact, everyone's thinking mode is still stuck in the way of serving one person, or serving 3 to 4 people, or at most 8 people.

Now Qing Zhiyuan suddenly asked them to serve hundreds of thousands of people. Just thinking about it makes me feel like dying...

"You don't have to think too complicated," Qing Zhiyuan said with a smile. "Individuals are still measured in single quantities. Although the games we make have to serve hundreds of thousands or millions, or even thousands in the future. More than 10,000 million..."

What? !

Akanishi Ken almost fainted, President, what nonsense are you talking about?

It's scary enough to have 200,000 people online at the same time, but you actually think about hundreds of millions? !

“But, these are all games played on an individual basis, and to put it bluntly, we still have to serve individuals well.

If you don't think about the interaction between so many people, it's actually very simple. We only need to consider the single-player game experience.

After playing alone, go up one level and make the team a unit, and the rest can be left to the players. "

Seeing that everyone was still a little confused, Qing Zhiyuan clapped his hands.

Everyone broke away from their contemplation and looked at him with blank eyes.

"Thinking about it too much will only make you dizzy.

Think about Bug Master, think about the Pokémon battles we did before.

In fact, what we have to do is very simple -

Play the role of the creator, create the world, and give some rules at the lowest level, then put the players in and let them explore on their own.

A world that is excellent and complete enough, players will definitely find fun in it.

do you understand? "

if it is like this……

Mikami Shinji touched his chin and carefully recalled Qing Zhiyuan's words.

There is really no need to consider the interactive behavior of most players, and the human brain simply cannot calculate it.

It is enough to just follow what the president said, simulate the behavior of a single player in the game, and plan out some basic guidelines.

A good designer should design the world, not the players.

After figuring this out, Shinji Mikami immediately became enlightened.

…

"However, players' behavior is uncontrollable and will cause a lot of trouble." Ken Akanishi raised his right hand and asked, "We cannot guarantee that players are dispersed in different map levels at the same time."

"If players, let's say there are thousands of players running to a map page at the same time, and so many people appear on one screen, it may cause the client to crash, and it may also cause the server to crash instantly."

This situation is actually a bit like the company opening up different mailboxes from 1 to 100, and each mailbox has a dedicated person to handle players' complaint letters.

In the beginning, if the players were scattered, it would not be a big problem. Each mailbox might be able to handle 100 emails a day and serve 10,000 players.

However, suddenly one day, these 10,000 players seemed to have gone crazy, became particularly tacit, and invested in mailbox No. 1 at the same time.

Because there were suddenly 9,900 more emails, mailbox No. 1 was filled up instantly and couldn't be processed at all.

This is the situation described by Ken Akanishi.

The server's CPU is now a single core, and its own memory is also limited. It usually provides multiple different platforms to process multiple game scene information by dividing it into multiple threads or using a rotating slice mechanism. However, one of the platform information suddenly exploded. Then the server thread is stuck.

It's even possible that the CPU is dry-heated, but that's not certain.

"Divided lines. This is number one." Qing Zhiyuan said, "You know about parallel worlds, right?"

"It seems like they are in the same scene and in the same partition. Even if they overlap in the same position, they are invisible to each other, just like they are in two parallel worlds."

Qing Zhiyuan drew two parallel lines on the whiteboard. One of the villains stood on the upper line, and the other villain stood on the lower line.

"Then, set the upper limit for the same screen display." Qing Zhiyuan continued, "You can test it and count the maximum number of players in the game."

"The server also has an upper limit," Qing Zhiyuan said. "If it exceeds the upper limit, subsequent players will not be allowed to join. And once an overload situation is discovered, we will automatically kick people and kick them offline to ensure the smooth operation of the server." .

Then give a reasonable pop-up window explanation to the players who were kicked off the line, and give a queue countdown prompt to the players who failed to join the game. This should not be a big problem. "

"What should players do if they want to form a team to play the game?" Ken Akanishi continued to ask, "They are not on the same screen."

Qing Zhiyuan frowned and thought for a while, "Actually, this problem is easy to deal with.

As long as a friend is online, you can invite him to form a team.

After the team is successfully formed, the server can just pull them to the same line when the map page jumps.

It’s not a big problem, I’ll leave it to the players to choose later. "

Of course, there is a more trouble-free method, that is, the program does not do any processing and leaves it to the players to handle it themselves.

When they discovered the rule of simultaneous screen and asynchronous play, they naturally thought of switching lines to keep several people together.

…

For extreme situations, Qing Zhiyuan also explained to Akanishi Ken how to deal with it.

Qing Zhiyuan expressed his understanding of Ken Akanishi's worries. He had never made a large-scale online game like this before, but after making Sparrow Soul, he had a certain foundation and communication would be smoother.

If Qing Zhiyuan were not a time traveler, he would probably be at a loss just to think about these rules and how to deal with them. He would not know how to start. It would take a long time just to cross the river by feeling the stones.

However, he came now with ready-made answers, so he was basically trying to find answers. Qing Zhiyuan had already designed many things from the beginning.

The discussion lasted about a whole day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and everyone discussed the general content and issues of Pokémon Online.

The rest is just a matter of minutiae.

"In addition to Pokémon Online, let's turn Border into a real-time large-scale online game. This is the task in the next one or two years." Qing Zhiyuan said lightly.

Once Frontier Online is completed, the shooting game will be complete.

However, the difficulty of making just-in-time production is not even the slightest. It can only be done as a topic first.

Let them study the program first, and it doesn't matter if they wait a few years before taking it up.

What? !

Ken Akanishi and Taiji Sakata next to him looked at each other, and he almost wanted to die.

What did I say before?

Never create a large-scale real-time MMO!

I'm so open-mouthed, whatever I want comes to me.

Ken Akanishi really wanted to stab himself twice in the chest.

Taiji Sakata, on the other hand, looked indifferent——

We artists don't have much pressure, it's mainly because you programmers have a lot of pressure.

…

…

——————————————————————————————

I don't know whether I caught a cold or ate something wrong in the past two days. I have been experiencing diarrhea from the day before yesterday to today. I feel a little exhausted.

No updates tonight

thank you all

See you tomorrow (end of chapter)