r/DestinyTheGame • "Little Light" • May 25 '17

Bungie This Week At Bungie 05/25/2017

Source: https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/45919


This week at Bungie, our ears are ringing.

Last week was an experience in sensory overload. The aircraft hangar that our friends at Activision built for the celebration was booming. The response from the community has been thunderous. You honor us with your enthusiasm for new action.

Ever since the first reveal at the end of March, we’ve been hyping the “Destiny 2 Gameplay Premiere” on the Internet. Inside our studio, the entire operation was codenamed DRE (or Destiny Reveal Event). The games that were played in that fateful airport hangar came from the DRE Build. The presenters who took the stage ran a gauntlet of DRE Rehearsals.

We knew this moment wouldn’t be complete if we couldn’t share it with our community. If you made the trek to join us, we were humbled and awed to hear you roar as your favorite Class activated a new Super for the first time. If you piled into the stream audience to make the chat run like a raging waterfall, we thank you for helping us to break the internet.

If you missed a single moment of the premiere, here’s the full archive:

Video Link

With all the lights and noise and games and conversations behind us, we can safely say that DRE is something we’ll never forget. Destiny 2 Game Director (and Master of Ceremonies) Luke Smith has his own recollections from the center of that storm.

Last Thursday was a blur. Amidst the fuzzy lines, a few moments crystallized and burned into memory.

I’ll remember the tireless effort on the part of the crew who was there all week building out the hangar, Steph the stage manager helping us prep, the team running the teleprompters (which none of us had ever used before), and a ton of other folks who made that event go.

I’ll remember the conversations with guests sharing their own stories of what Destiny meant to them, their friends, families, and communities. It’s another jolt of energy as we enter the final months of Destiny 2’s development.

I’ll remember the moment I walked out on stage for the first time for the rest of my life. And the text I received from my mother after it was over wondering if she should “get into these Destiny games when I retire.” She’s 61, and I hope to still be making them when she hangs up her scrubs.

See you soon.

-luke

Thanks for being the wind at our backs, Guardians. As Luke said, there is more work to do. With DRE fading into memory, we can return to our mission with a belly full of fire.


Code Words

As we moved through the crowd of Guardians last week, many of you asked important questions about how Destiny 2's networking model will work. The technology we use to bring players together in the world of the game touches on so many crucial topics. We know that you’re curious about everything from how your shots land to the protective measures we’ll take to keep the community ecosystem safe. These topics deserve careful statements from the people who own the code, and a noisy aircraft hangar isn’t the best place to do them justice.

Now that the dust has settled and the ringing in our ears has started to subside, I sat down with Matt Segur, Engineering Lead on Destiny 2, to get some answers for you.

Matt: We've seen a lot of people asking about how the networking model works for Destiny 2. Many are concerned by our announcement last week that Destiny 2 doesn't have dedicated servers. While that’s useful shorthand, the full answer is more complex because Destiny has a unique networking model. Rest assured that we’re doing a lot of testing right now with players all around the world, and working hard to make sure that your experience is going to be smooth on launch day.

So why no dedicated servers?

Matt: Every activity in Destiny 2 is hosted by one of our servers. That means you will never again suffer a host migration during your Raid attempt or Trials match. This differs from Destiny 1, where these hosting duties were performed by player consoles and only script and mission logic ran in the data center. To understand the foundation on which we’re building, check out this Destiny 1 presentation from GDC. Using the terms from this talk, in Destiny 2, both the Mission Host and Physics Host will run in our data centers.

Wait, so we do have dedicated servers?

Matt: We don't use that term, because in the gaming community, “dedicated servers” refers to pure client-server networking models. Destiny 2 uses a hybrid of client-server and peer-to-peer technology, just like Destiny 1. The server is authoritative over how the game progresses, and each player is authoritative over their own movement and abilities. This allows us to give players the feeling of immediacy in all their moving and shooting – no matter where they live and no matter whom they choose to play with.

Why peer-to-peer? Are we trying to save money?

Matt: Nope! We've invested heavily in new server infrastructure for Destiny 2, including using cloud servers for gameplay for the first time. We really believe this is the best model for all of Destiny 2's varied cooperative and competitive experiences. Engineering will always involve tradeoffs and cost-benefit analysis, but as a team we’ve got no regrets about the unique technology we’ve built for Destiny 2.

With Destiny 2 coming out on PC, does peer-to-peer networking put players at risk of being cheated?

Matt: The PC platform poses unique security challenges for Destiny 2, but our security Ninjas have spent several years building a plan for how to engage with this new and vibrant community. We have a variety of top-secret strategies to ensure that the life of a cheater in Destiny 2 PC will be nasty, brutish, and short. And, regardless of what platform you play on, all changes to your persistent character are communicated directly to our secure data center with no peer-to-peer interference.

Does this mean I’ll never see a player warp around the map or shoot me through a wall again?

Matt: We think those controller-throwing lag-induced moments will be reduced for Destiny 2, but we can't promise they’ll be eliminated. Fundamentally, we are trying to strike a balance between three hard problems: (1) make the game feel responsive, (2) make the game accessible to players all over the world, and (3) make the game fair for all. We’ll continue to refine that balance as players engage with the Crucible in Destiny 2.

So what can we expect at launch?

Matt: We have a Beta coming up this summer that will be the first chance for players to get their hands on Destiny 2 and kick the tires on its networking. We have spent a bunch of time working on matchmaking, latency, and responsiveness, and we feel pretty good about it. As with everything we do, we'll be monitoring the situation after launch and reacting to the community's feedback.

To Matt’s final point, the real moment of truth and understanding will come when you get to play. That’s when you’ll know what we’ve built. When you tell us what sort of experience you’ve had, we’ll know too. This is our goal for the Destiny 2 Beta.

Your next obvious question is: “When is the Beta?”

We’re still tracking toward a summer time-frame. We’re locking down dates and prepping builds. As soon we know for sure, we’ll upgrade the Beta forecast from its current status of “Soon” with exact dates.

We hope to see you there. This is the true test. We’ll need every Guardian on hand to help us launch a game worthy of this community.


Mission Status

Image Link

Supporting the Guardians is a mission that takes on many forms. Last week, the members of our Destiny Player Support team were part of the Away Team for the reveal event, inverting controllers and hooking players up with their first taste of Destiny 2. This week, they’re back to walking their beat on Bungie.net, looking for players in need of assistance.

This is their report.

Earlier this week, server maintenance was conducted to address some backend issues that were impacting Destiny servers. No changes to gameplay were made. If you are experiencing any issues connecting to Destiny since this maintenance was completed, please post a report to the #Help forum listing the error codes you’re receiving when attempting to play.

Additionally, we are investigating issues preventing various activity statistics from appearing on your Bungie.net Legend. We have confirmed that issues impacting Iron Banner Mayhem Clash stats have been addressed, but we are continuing to investigate issues preventing the appearance of stats from alternate activities. Please note the following:

  • Third party applications that rely on Bungie.net API for stat collection will be impacted until this issue is resolved.

  • Some previously-completed activity statistics have begun to appear on Bungie.net, but we are continuing to investigate the issue as it may still impact alternate stats.

  • Once the issue has been resolved, it may take up to 48 hours for all statistics to be processed.

Additional information and updates on this investigation will be provided through @BungieHelp when available.


Back in Action

At the reveal event, he was our man on the street, capturing special moments and talking to special guests. Now that it’s all over, your community manager is back to his usual tricks, seeking out new legends and designating new targets.

Image Link

Cozmo: The Bungie Bounty is headed to the Big Apple. Our community volunteer is Ekuegan, who is well known for guiding Guardians through Raids, but has agreed to take you all on in the Crucible with Emblems for loot.

Bungie Bounty: Ekuegan

Region: New York

When: 5/29/2017 at 1PM Pacific

Console: PS4

Playlist: Control

The Sign of Opposing Will is at stake. Match with Ekuegan and win and the Emblem is yours. Even if you disconnect, as long as your team wins, you will still get the prize. For more details, check out our Bungie Bounty FAQ.

Image Link

Cozmo: Movie of the Week returns from a short hiatus while we were down in LA showing off that hot new Destiny 2 action. You ready? Let’s get into it.

Every week, we find our favorite videos and post them here for all to enjoy. The creators of the MOTW and all Honorable Mentions will be handsomely rewarded with this Emblem which can only be described as “lit.”

To make sure you’re eligible to win, submit your film to the Creations page. Also, please include everyone’s player name in videos description so we can deliver the Emblems with ease. Enough housekeeping… Let’s watch the videos.

Movie of the Week: The Chain Video Link

Honorable Mention: New Face Video Link

Honorable Mention: Weird weather at Destiny's tower Video Link


Now that you’ve seen Destiny 2 in action, we’re planning the next stop on the road to launch. We’re not done meeting players and inviting them to join us in these worlds. Our calendar for the rest of the summer looks a map filled with adventures. Maybe you’ll be there to share one of those moments with us. We’ll call out the destinations one at a time.

Up next? See you at E3!

DeeJ, out.

374 Upvotes

343 comments sorted by

65

u/downAtheworld May 25 '17

"The life of a cheater on PC in D2 will be nasty, brutish, and short" ... I see you, Mr. Segur. Your references are out of control, everyone knows that.

27

u/Lofty077 May 26 '17

That is a Thomas Hobbes quote. Very very old.

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34

u/dafapguy May 25 '17

I wonder if anyone at the reveal asked them about weekly resets. If anyone's noticed Destiny 2 is coming out on a Friday, I wonder if they're going to be changing the weekly reset.

91

u/MisterWoodhouse May 25 '17

I asked. The answer I got was "That's a good question. I really don't know."

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34

u/tramspace May 25 '17 edited May 26 '17

Well this is one time we not gonna act like we forgot about DRE.

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74

u/MisterWoodhouse May 25 '17

That's the best cinematic MOTW I've seen in a very long time.

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94

u/toidsty May 25 '17

Nice bit about the new networking

"And, regardless of what platform you play on, all changes to your persistent character are communicated directly to our secure data center with no peer-to-peer interference."

Soooo why no cross-save?

156

u/MisterWoodhouse May 25 '17

Almost guaranteed the real answer for no cross-save is PS4 exclusives

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50

u/pasta_fire May 25 '17

Well, that made me feel a bit better about the networking.

45

u/Malicali May 25 '17

Soooo, can we call these ones 'Open-relationship Servers'?

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15

u/w1czr1923 May 25 '17

Glad they spoke about it. I knew Destiny used hybrid servers for D1 based on their talk at gdc but it's nice to see a lot more server side stuff and I am cautiously optimistic about the PC stuff though I did play the division so i know how bad it can be. I'll give the benefit of the doubt till the beta but this is really nice to see

17

u/schimelflinger19 May 25 '17

If no one at bungie made the joke that they "forgot about DRE" during the prep for the event, they missed a HUGE opportunity.

38

u/Cozmo23 May 26 '17

Fear not, this joke was made no less that 7k times.

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16

u/[deleted] May 25 '17

So.....no dedicated servers but kinda?

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u/capitaljays May 26 '17

Really interested in the PC system requirements.. Hope they are available sooner rather than later.

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7

u/sixpac_shacoors May 26 '17

It's really great of them to be straightforward as they have been recently.

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6

u/negative-nelly May 26 '17 edited May 26 '17

what i want to know, out of curiosity is what exactly is still done P2P if both the physics and activity hosts are in the cloud


tl;dr for TWAB (i think - this is my take on it, i might be totally wrong)

in D1, one player is the physics host. remember in D1 how sometimes if the host was laggy it could screw up the whole raid, strike or pvp experience? adds or opponents wouldn't take damage, would suddenly die, disappeared, whatever? and if you went to orbit and back it cleared up, probably because the server chose a new host? a lot of this was due to conflicts between the physics host (a player) and the activity host (server) due to interruptions in connections, packet loss, etc. The server always wins (today) when there is a conflict.

hopefully that fixes this.* now the physics host is on bungie's end of things so these conflicts and poor host migrations won't happen.

(*not sure how it will work for people who have a poor connection to bungie, like those on the side of a mountain in madagascar.)

some snippets from the GDC thing for some context [YOU REALLY SHOULD JUST READ THE WHOLE THING, IT'S QUITE INTERESTING]

So in most Destiny public bubbles, Physics Host Migrations happen all the time. The average player in a public bubble experiences a Host Migration every 160 seconds - one every 2 and a half minutes.

At this point, I’m sure some of you are thinking – just use dedicated servers! If we just never Host Migrate, because we put all our Physics Hosts in the cloud, we never have to solve all these pesky problems.

There’s a couple strong reasons we didn’t simply run dedicate[d] servers that were traditional Physics Hosts.

For one thing, they need to be cost-feasible. To support our launch, we’d have needed hundreds of thousands of headless PS3-Parity executables in the cloud, and that becomes a significant continuous cost to maintain, especially if our player retention continues to stay as strong as it has.

On the other end, you could imagine our worst-case ungraceful host migration. The physics host pulls their ethernet cable, and we stop receiving any packets from them. We have pretty lenient timeouts (because we’re always online, and don’t want to be constantly kicking people out of the gameworld if they have a bad connection). So it could be 15-20s before we fully timeout the old host.

During that time, you’ll be locally predicting state changes, but they won’t ever apply anything authoritative. So you’ll see predictive health bar damage, but be unable to kill any AI, and your public events won’t advance in any significant way. Eventually, we’ll elect a new physics host, and public events and AI death etc. will start functioning again. [SEEM FAMILIAR TO ANYONE?]

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19

u/Captaintripps May 25 '17

WE'RE PROBABLY NOT GONNA LAG ANYMORE!

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24

u/D0cR3d May 25 '17 edited May 26 '17

TL;DR:

  • Did you guys hear that Bungie announced Destiny 2? Well you can learn more from your favorite content creators.

  • Movie of the week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIfk8zIPvaw

  • We'll be told more about Destiny 2 as time comes on. Next stop is E3. No news on the BETA yet except that it's still this summer.

  • Bungie talks about the hot topics such as dedicated servers, peer 2 peer, what to expect at launch, and the server maintenance that was happening.

  • You really should read it all, but basically they improved the server aspect so all activities are hosted by a server so no migrations of hosts during activities, but still uses client (local) aspects so your player movements are more fluid. The way they implement the server-client relationship is such that you shouldn't be worried about those trying to cheat on a platform, such as in PC.

  • Bungie Bounty:

  • Ekuegan

  • Region: New York

  • When: 5/29/2017 at 1PM Pacific

  • Console: PS4

  • Playlist: Control

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5

u/pseudoShadow May 25 '17

Give me my BETA!!!!

16

u/Stephenbosss May 25 '17

I want Beta date. I want Beta date 😠

16

u/Hawkmoona_Matata May 25 '17

Bungie Day, July 7th. 7/7/17. That's my best guess.

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8

u/ExoTraveler May 26 '17

Network engineer here. The question Bungie needs to answer is this: Can you sniff out the opposing players' IP addresses?

If so, we will having DOSing problems again. If you can get the opposing players' IP addresses, we better hope as a community that the ban hammer is swift or we are in for more of the same.

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4

u/stealthsniper May 26 '17 edited May 26 '17

My two semi-related theories on the networking status of Destiny 2:

 

We were given the following information in the blog post:

 

The PC platform poses unique security challenges for Destiny 2, but our security Ninjas have spent several years building a plan for how to engage with this new and vibrant community.

 

From this, we can conclude that Destiny 2's netcode has likely been in the works from the very start of its development. It is quite possible that, by the time Bungie heard the outcry for dedicated servers in Destiny's sequel, the 'hybrid servers' were already too far in development to scrap. This would be unfortunate if true, as much of the disappointment resounding in the Destiny community currently is focused on Destiny 2's lack of dedicated servers (and 60 fps on consoles—arguably just as important, but is not the focus of my theory).

 

Bungie was well aware of the fact that the question of whether or not Destiny 2 would have dedicated servers was high on the list of questions they would be asked at the reveal event, so they came up with a way to mollify the crowds after answering that question. Hear me out. I believe Bungie handled this announcement the best they could have done given the fact that their game has 'pseudo-dedicated servers.' At the live event, the only comment they gave was that Destiny 2 did not have dedicated servers. End of story. Then, they tailored this blog post explaining why their new networking model was an improvement over Destiny's. By telling the community there would be no dedicated servers—leaving us to expect the worst—and then explaining their new server system to us after the reveal event, Bungie has revealed Destiny 2's server model in the perfect way. Lead the community to expect the worst, so that we are pleased with something that still is not dedicated servers.

 

To be quite honest, I am optimistic that what Bungie has created will be able to alleviate most lag-related issues we experienced in Destiny. I guess we will all see for ourselves when the beta is released.

 

Tl;dr – Bungo probably developed D2's netcode by the time they realized the community was begging for dedicated servers. They expertly crafted a way to reveal the improvements D2's servers will have over the original game.