Ken Ahn

Groups are intended to be able to contain organizations and their features, which is why we had to make such a broad approach for the first time. But those two things aren't linked yet in Alpha 3.2.

Something worth mentioning too, at least for internal terms: when we're saying groups, it's usually the more generic thing. This could be just a group of friends that like to talk to each other. So that's the generic thing. Whereas a party is specifically: we're all online playing together right now. So groups could be everything. Party is a specific case of a group.

Well, you don't actually have to be online to be part of a party. Sort of.

Yeah, group is more of a thing that will be mostly used on Spectrum, but the party system will be on Spectrum but also effectively doing something gameplay-wise.

Yeah, it also handles all the stuff about if you get disconnected, how do you get back into the same instance, if you're doing any matchmaking at all.

Yes, so party is more of the gameplay-wise groups.

So it sounds like there's a distinction between groups and parties that we'll probably be chasing around for the next couple weeks or months over development, trying to better delineate what constitutes a group versus what constitutes a party.

Yeah, right now they're the same, but in the future you could have groups that are not parties. Like 10 guys, we all talk and play together, but maybe only two are online right now.

You could use a group to turn it into a party and be like, all these people are in my party again, but now I'm going to go play with these people instead.

Like during the Vulture promotion, we mentioned, I think it was a Wayfarer's Club. That would be a group.

So group could be everything. It's like the rectangle and a square thing, right? A square is a rectangle, because it's just a subset of what a rectangle could be. Groups are everything. Parties are a specific kind of group.

Maybe I can answer the question. For now, it's set to eight, but it can be decided by design when we push it out the door. So it's not decided yet. For now, internally, it's eight.

You might want to talk about the reason why it's eight, because of the old party system.

No, I just realized that it's not something about it. So it's just fixed to eight somehow.

Yeah, well, I actually know a little bit about this from other conversations with Kirk. You have to start with an arbitrary number. Whenever you're doing anything, these processes start with: let's just pick a number and see if we can hit it and see how it works. And then from that, you decide whether that's too much and you go down, or it's not enough and you go up. One of the great things about running a live environment in the middle of our development is we don't have to make those final decisions on our own. We can pick an arbitrary number like eight, put that system out in 3.2 as eight, and then watch for the next three months, six months, nine months how these parties come together, how easy it is to fill, what they can do versus what they can't do, and then adjust that number holistically, based on what we see in YouTube videos, what we see on Twitch channels, what we see in Spectrum conversations. So it's one of the great advantages that we have of having a live environment in the middle of our development. We don't have to do tons of internal focus testing to figure out what that number is. We can start a place and let you guys tell us what that number should be in many cases.

One thing to add about the max number of the party: the system is designed to hold, I'm not saying unlimited, but a potentially unlimited number of players in the group.

But there's a lot of unknowns in that. The amount of data that the party needs to keep track of, of each other's members, having that be unbounded is potentially problematic. So eight felt safe. Let's not deal with those problems just yet. We have so many other problems.

Yeah, many, many problems. News to me, I thought eight was coming from the old party system. It is coming from the old party system. That's what's really interesting, maybe for people interested in a more technical aspect of what we're working on. To deliver what we wanted to deliver for 3.2 with new UI for the party system and various new features, there were a couple of critical features that were locked behind the old party system that we could not just redo. So the biggest thing is getting into the same server as your friends from the main menu is handled by our back end. Guys in Austin are writing it. The General Instance Manager is this big piece of code which gets people into servers. The GIM. If this has been talked about before on RTV, it's the GIM. And so we need this to get people into the same servers. And we talked to the guys in Austin, like, hey, we're redoing partying. We want to get people into the same server. What do we do? We need your help. And basically they're jam-packed with tons of work right now. They could not separate out the party aspect from the GIM that we needed right now. To bring it full circle, the thing that's interesting, technically speaking, is the old parties are not fully deprecated right now. A new party also has an old party, and they're basically functioning in parallel. So all the old UI still works. You could bring up F11. You could still do that, because when we make a new party for you, we're also making an old party behind the scenes that you don't have to worry about, so that you could get into the same server as your friends. So they're both in parallel.

And that's just because the feature teams don't always work in parallel. You guys have hit this part, but our platform team in Austin haven't been able to...

Yeah, they're scheduled out up the wazoo. So next quarter, I think they're trying to separate some of these features out of the GIM. But currently, that's where the eight comes from, I believe: because the old party's at eight. So we need to say, all right, well, we're keeping parity with the old party system for now.

I think I saw a bug that's currently being throttled by streaming, that if you get too far away, it'll just stop updating your information. I don't know if it's a bug. I just saw that was a thing.

So there's a problem: when the entity goes outside of a certain range, it stops updating. And since the marker is also an entity, it is getting affected by it. We are planning to fix it, but I'm not entirely sure if we can get this out in 3.2.

We're deciding if we're planning to fix it.

Well, I also have to imagine there are some performance considerations too, because sometimes that culling, the thing that you refer to as a bug and you say is not a bug, might actually help us in performance. If we don't have to update people from eight different locations around the Crusader system, that could be a benefit, especially as server populations begin to expand past 50, and now you've got everybody sending constant updates. It's not a bug, it's an emergent behavior. So it's a thing that needs continuing investigation. We need to decide whether that's something we even want to address, because, like anything, a big part of bind culling and object container streaming and all that stuff is about limiting the information that we send halfway across the galaxy for no reason.

In the future, we can decide whether we want to manage this design-wise, or technically by updating the position.

We just tell design what they get and they're happy about it.

Okay, so when the party leader disconnects, he'll be kicked out of the party, and the party leader will be transferred to the next player.

Okay, so the party leader doesn't get five minutes?

They also get five minutes.

So when the party leader disconnects, he doesn't get kicked out of the group. Is he still the leader in those five minutes?

No, he'll be kicked out of the group.

No, no, no. Those five minutes when he's not yet kicked out: is he still the leader?

It's 12 noon, and I'm the party leader, and I get disconnected. Up until 12:05, am I still in the party?

Yes.

Okay, so I'm not removed from the group for those five minutes?

No.

For those five minutes, am I still the party leader?

Yes.

Even though I'm not online?

Yes. As long as you're in the party, you preserve your role. When you get kicked out of your party, that's a different story.

So for those five minutes, you'll have a party that can't actually invite anybody else to the party?

Technically, yes.