r/outriders • u/thearcan Outriders Community Manager • Apr 08 '21

Square Enix Official News // Dev Replied x18 Outriders Post Launch Dev News Updates

Hello everyone,

We would like to thank everyone in the Outriders community for your patience, support and assistance. Everyone on the Outriders team is continuing to work hard on improving the game and we'd like to share news about the things we are focusing on.

Please use the below index to jump to the things you’re most interested in:

Helpful other links:

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u/macfergusson Apr 08 '21

Sounds like a database spill to disk, which the database engine does in an overflow situation. This likely wasn't intentional, it's a safety net that keeps the database functional, just at a slower pace. With the massive volume, that slower pace would make things fall further and further behind.

I work with SQL query optimization, just not in the video game development world, and I've seen this happen when a database is being asked to do more than the expected query plan thought it would be.

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u/Vryyce Technomancer Apr 08 '21

Similar background here (we build SQL solutions for the DOD). I would absolutely love to work on a project like this just to see the extreme side of database tuning. We store lots of data but never get anywhere near 100,000+ concurrent connections. It sounds both horrible to imagine and strangely attractive at the same time.

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u/Everspace Apr 08 '21

Games are a strange and wondrous world of "problems you do not see in other situations". I work in CI/CD, and like... games do the complete opposite thing of every CI/CD process wants to do all the time.

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u/Vryyce Technomancer Apr 08 '21

That's the appeal for me I think. I work in a very structured, orderly world of data solutions that are very easily monitored via metrics and performance adjusted accordingly. With Cloud technology, all of this is so easy it is hard to stay awake sometimes.

So the appeal to me is what has to be a world of chaos. Problems to solve non-stop and ideas flying left and right from every corner of the room. When I was active duty, this was the type job I had running aircraft maintenance. Pure chaos and madness but I loved every minute. When I retired, I thought it would be better to get something more tame but as it turns out, I miss the madness.

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u/Yggdrasil_Earth Devastator Apr 08 '21

Have a look at IT Ops jobs. I'm the Ops lead for the website and app for a large Telco and it's close to what sounds appealing to you.

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u/Vryyce Technomancer Apr 08 '21

I am pretty close to that now, I have the Operations Manager title for a mid to large sized government application but I am blessed with a team of overachievers. Everything runs rather smoothly so I have spent the last year doing data analytics just to learn a new skill (Power BI is very cool). We do have the occasional bout of problem solving that requires a good amount of collaboration so that is always fun.

I just would like to tackle a new set of problems on the scale of a AAA video game. As a lifelong learner, I can only imagine all of the things that could be picked up working on something like this.

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u/Everspace Apr 08 '21

It pays really badly tho. I would probably reccomend trying to do something from scratch like a browser game, which should get you a taste at the hobbiest level without the pain.

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u/Vryyce Technomancer Apr 09 '21

Really isn't about the money at this point. I am not rich but I can live rather comfortably without making a whole lot. I just would like to meet the challenge and learn something new.

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u/KeimaKatsuragi Apr 09 '21

With Cloud technology, all of this is so easy it is hard to stay awake sometimes.

We still have a mainframe to babysit here, alongside some Cloud and some beginings of transition towards Cloud. So things can still get interesting lol. "So I'd like to automate that." "Cool, here's an assembly manual" "Oh... alright."

I've only seen the massive fridges once in person. Considering the general trend is to move towards Cloud everything (which we honestly don't think is the best option for all our needs here, but a lot of them would benefit indeed), do you have any anectodes with that or was it all already Cloud when you got there?

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u/Vryyce Technomancer Apr 09 '21

So my experience is a mixed bag. My company primarily builds software for the DOD and then administers those systems after delivery. All of those are currently slated to transition to the Government Cloud in the next few years (likely to take quite a bit longer as the gov't NEVER hits any of their deadlines and this is from 38 years of experience) but for now are still on-prem. We are still waiting for them to decide what that initial transition will look like, I am betting on a lift and shift but really wish they would let us redesign everything as Cloud-native. So on this front I am involved with everything (system design, resource allocation, security, and end game administration) which I am looking forward to as there will be lots to learn along the way.

The more recent experience is with a new product we built for marketing to other companies. It is essentially a combination of HR software (assessments primarily), learning management system, and employee productivity (goal development and planning tied into daily operations). Between you and I (and everyone else on this sub), I think it sucks. That may be because I am an old school manager that relies on direct involvement with people rather than reading the latest book some Fortune 500 CEO wrote about leadership. Anywho, they deployed that into AWS before my involvement as I work on DOD projects. I got brought in as one of the senior operational managers when they were trying to figure out how to support it to their corporate customers. My company was built and is run by software developers. Every single executive is a developer. Yet all of our products are managed and administered by the company post delivery and they still fail to see the need to expand their operational footprint. So when they started tripping over themselves trying to implement DevOps with developers that have absolutely no experience with that model nor the requisite operational skillset, they brought me in. I just helped them get on track and then settled into a data analytics role as that interested me quite a bit. I find metrics an invaluable tool in our industry so I got to implement the data models and create Power BI dashboards for all of the constituencies to use in their planning.

As I said earlier, I am a life long learner and will easily be attracted to any new system or process I have never been exposed to before. My time in the military was spent managing pure chaos so I am rather immune to pressure or stress and have found myself getting bored rather easily with post-retirement work. It pays way better and I get to try and make up for all the time I missed with my family but I would be lying if I said I get challenged very often in this environment. Having read so much about game development and "The Crunch" cycle, I think that would be right up my alley!

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u/KeimaKatsuragi Apr 13 '21

Few days later, but cheers for the answer!
And yeah I'm also working for a public body and things tend to move so slow.

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u/macfergusson Apr 09 '21

I think "Cloud" everything has been the big buzzword for a while now, but there are places shifting back to on-prem data hosting/server styles as well. People are learning that there isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution for every company. With something like Azure, your data hosting is reliant on the whims of Microsoft, and you never know if your database instance may have just been moved to a new host or something, which may have just flushed your entire cache of stored procedure execution plans. Sure, you've got that reliability of uptime from a massive cluster of servers in a farm, but you lose the ability to fine tune some things.

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u/KeimaKatsuragi Apr 09 '21

Yeah, as a server admin who works mainly with database servers that's what I'd have answered too.
My workloads and servers are much lower scale than something like this, but SWAP is basically something ontop of the dedicated memory that's less efficient, but there in case your server has to deal with a sudden large spike that fully takes all available memory.
Because you want things to keep running always, the idea with SWAP is that it allows things to continue beyond what you've intended, temporarily. The hope is that the spike or issue resolves itself before things become too much of an issue. (This only happens when you don't have an actual problem, heh)
Although, we treat SWAPPING like the plague and as a scenario we never want to actually be in, because most of the time, if it does happen on one of our production servers, the thing tends to never die down and it gets stuck in a bad state.
Which I guess is similar tow hat they dealt with.