Anyone else play this (or try to play this) this morning?

It was a one-time-event game developed by MuchDifferent, a non-profit organisation based in Sweden, in order to promote their new server technology designed to support a massive number of players:
http://www.muchdifferent.com/?page=game-pikkotekk

The goal was to have 1000 simultaneous players in a FPS, making a Guinness world record!

Game trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dKcVS7YakY

The teams were split with up to 500 players for "men" fighting up to 500 players for "machine," so 1000 players total, and no bots.

The game was up for about 2 hours, starting at 10am EST. I tried to get in at the beginning but they had way more than 1000 people trying to play, jamming the server. The main site actually went down, and they posted a link to a mirror on twitter.

I went away and watched TV and came back a little before 12:00PM EST, and was able to finally get in. I played as man for a few respawns, then someone got switched over to a machine, which I played until the end. The map was fairly small and open, likely to show the scale of the number of players. They reboot the server a few times as I was playing, i think attempting to rebalance the game on the fly. On the last "rebalance," the favor tipped way in favor of the machines, and we ended up slaughtering men as soon as they respawned. Then the game ended. From what I heard, they did manage to reach 1000 simultaneous players for the world record.

The developers streamed video from their offices as the game was on, you can view it all here (approx 2 hours split into various chunks):
http://bambuser.com/channel/muchdiff...adcast/2324661

Some captured footage of gameplay (not mine):
http://www.twitch.tv/gooncraft/b/306924549

Additional game footage, apparently from a point in the game when the game balancing was clearly in favor of the men:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_MN2V9L5gA

Looks like an exciting game, only...not.

This is the sort of thing I wish I'd heard of before it happened, not after.

I was actually kind of surprised that a thread hadn't been made already. I'm not typically on top of gaming trends. As it was, it was near impossible to get into the game.

The map and play wasn't that inspired or great. It was mostly the scale of the operation that made it exiting; there was typically anywhere between 900-1000 players at once during any part of the game (excepting immediately after reboots). Also, it was kinda fun to experience the developers attempting to rebalance the game on the fly.


This video shows what I think is about the same period of play that I experienced. The part at the end looks like what I was playing at the end as a machine: it basically turned into shooting fish in a barrel. Warning: language NSFW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1YAawzqV1I

Sounds somewhat cool but if you think about it you got dot a blank sheet of paper a thousand times but if there is stuff already on it then it will be difficult. I would like to see them pull this off with a fleshed out map that eats up some of the memory and bandwidth.

Well, they're not going to pull it off, this was basically a tech demo for the scalable server software.

However, the game ran in my web browser using Unity, on a 6 year old system with 2GB of RAM, without any issues.

As for bandwidth, from the tech description:
http://www.muchdifferent.com/?page=g...kk-pikkoserver
It'd be interesting to see something like Team Fortress 3 integrate this into their tech.