When the devs of a game say something like “we’re working on our server issues” what are they exactly working on? And what causes some issues like lag or “lack” of servers for players?
In: Technology
A server is just a computer that a client connects to.
A online game will connect to a server that handles whatever the developer has decided should be handles on the server.
If you host a multiplayer game yourself then your computer is the server.
Many online game want to have many of the calculations done on the server instead of the client to prevent cheating and a more fair environment.
This will require more power from the servers ( there can be more than one )
An analogy for servers is like the field, referee, and line referees for a game of soccer. If you want to play soccer with your friends, you need a place to play and something to handle the rules of the game. The server does this for videogames like the pitch and refs do for soccer.
They are computers that handle the signals that each player’s computer sends out as part of the game in order to manage each player’s experience and outcomes. When you take a shot, you tell the server “I shoot in this direction.” The server then checks to see what the shot hits and rules accordingly; if you hit the enemy, he takes damage or dies. Likewise, the ref/pitch is the checks the soccer players if their shot scores (legally).
Server problems could be problems with the hardware or software of the server. Imagine if the pitch was flooded or the referee was blind; you can’t really play soccer there. Likewise, anything wrong with the server would prevent you from playing.
Lag comes from delays in a player’s computer communicating with the server. The soccer analogy breaks down a bit here, but imagine if you could only move by telling the ref where you were moving. If he can’t hear you across the field due to you having a soft voice (player’s bad internet), then you won’t be able to move quickly since you have to keep shouting. If the ref is hard of hearing (server bandwidth issues), then you might be moving erratically, because he might only hear 3 out of 5 moves you are making.
A server is the data center where the game is hosted – you connect to it from your computer or console as the *client*. It’s the same idea as connecting to a website with a web browser, except instead of getting a website with text and pictures in a browser window, you’re getting a game session inside the game.
Some games use centralized servers – all players in the game connect to the specific location for the server. Some games make one of the players a host, so that you’re going through a central game server to connect to the player (this happens a lot with certain console games, which is why you get a “Host disconnected – migrating to new host” issue in the middle of some games – it’s connecting you to whoever is now the “server” for the game).
Server issues can be caused by all sorts of things. The location where the server is located could be having internet connection issues. Other services (websites, data hosting, and other games) that are on the same servers could be getting a lot more hits than usual and slowing down the connection for your game. Or a lot of players might just be trying to connect at once and it’s too much for the server to handle. When they’re “working on server issues” it could be trying to fix one of those issues – maybe getting an additional server set up to meet the demand for the game, getting the internet connection issues resolved with their main server, etc.
Lag is caused by a slow connection to the server. If the server is overloaded, it might not be able to send and receive data as fast as it should, which means your game is going to start glitching out/jumping around as it gets old data and new data all jumbled up instead of in one cohesive story like it would when there’s a normal connection. It can also be caused by physical distance to the server – if you’re on the US East Coast trying to connect to a server in Australia, that data has to travel all the way from your computer overseas really far away. Someone playing in Australia doesn’t have that issue, they’ll get the data at a much faster rate.
It’s kind of like talking on a phone where there’s a delay in the connection – you’re trying to say a message and someone else is trying to say a message but you have a hard time having a normal conversation because you can’t get the timing right.
Lack of servers can just be caused by servers being overloaded (if they can only fit 100 players in and there are 100 players online, then no one else will be able to join) or if the game has gone offline entirely for whatever reason (maybe the player community became too small and it wasn’t worth it for the company to keep paying to maintain the game, for instance).
So a server…is just a big container of data that allows incoming connections to it to fetch that data (and upload sometimes).
Take, for example, Netflix. (I’m scaling it down for the example). Let’s say Netflix has like 5 movies they have collected on a hard drive that they want to share to other people. So what do they do? They take their five movies and set up a connection to the internet. And then they set up a username/password verification system to control access to the five movies. Where the five movies are stored is called the server. It is serving up the information (in this case, movies) to the people who are sending in requests to view them. In this example, the server would be very small since it only has 5 movies worth of information. In reality, Netflix has an extremely large server since they have much more information they handle than just that. They also have to manage the traffic requesting access to their data.
Does that make sense?
What an IT guy calls a server is a physical box in a rack somewhere.
What a player calls a server is just whatever they are connecting to that other players are. Let’s call it an Endpoint for arguments sake.
Sometimes those endpoints will reside on the same physical server as other endpoints, as different processes running on the same physical hardware (perhaps in Virtual Machines, but not necessarily).
Sometimes a game may route you from one endpoint to another, such as when entering a dungeon in an MMO. A different physical server is setup to handle dungeon content, and your connection gets rerouted inside their network to the right endpoint.
A server is a just a computer that’s responsible for handling all of the traffic for a given application/system. In this case, it’s a computer that handles all the traffic from the people playing the game. It’s the “single source of truth” for where players are located, what actions they’re performing, and what ultimately needs to get rendered to the “clients” (the people playing the game on their computer/playstation/xbox or whatever). So, the game is tracked on the server, and the clients (you) send requests to the server to perform an action, which the server is responsible for resolving with all the other requests it gets each “tick” of the game (games are not actually real time. They are interpolated and so there’s always “turns” that happen, which is why ping/lag can affect gameplay).
This, of course, assumes a multi-player online game. For single player games, servers are basically just checking to make sure the game is valid, handle updates/patches and some other administrative things.
A physical server is a computer like any other, but designed and programmed specifically to connect to many ‘clients’ (the players’ computers/games). They’re normally quite large, noisy, powerful, and have a very good internet connection.
A game server is the software side of this. It is the program that all of the clients talk to. It is what tells everyone’s client what is going on, and sort of runs the game.
Say you are sharing your printer in your house on your PC – your PC is a print server.
It’s often easy to get bogged up in terms – but they can be very simple things or very complex things. Every industry (but also sports and many other things) has it’s own terms and they often are used to sound fancy (my opinion), but also often mean very simple things.
Any PC can be a server – a server is a function – so hosting a database, sharing a printer, sharing files, etc etc – that’s a server (the function). People also tend to call a server the actual physical unit – without really thinking about the function (because the physical unit hosts the server), it’s just a simpler way of talking really.
So –
A PC, has windows installed on it (or linux/unix/whatever), has a function installed – that function is a server – and we call the PC also a server.
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Working on server issues could mean a lot of things. From actual hardware problems (faulty hard drive), to os/windows crashing (needing a update, reinstall), to an internet outage, to a huge load (ddos attack or bad hard ware on the network or too weak internet connection), a too big load on an individual server (needing to upgrade the hardware or needing to add more servers to handle the load – simultaneously).
To – we fudged up/designed our game poorly and are just saying we are working on the servers – so calm down, and when you guys not try to all play at once it will be magically fixed.
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