Man Vs. Machine: Sign Up For World Record Attempt, 1000 Player Browser Carnage
A world record attempt is being planned and you can sign up now to be on the side of the gamers or the developers in Man vs. Machine – a once-in-a-lifetime event, which will have one thousand players battling it out in an in-browser FPS match.
MuchDifferent are a Swedish tech company who, when challenged by other companies, decided to develop a way of having literally thousands of online players inside a browser playing in the same match. DICE (Battlefied) and CCP (Eve Online) were amongst those who admitted to facing difficulties in the scalability of virtual worlds. The project to somehow solve this was initiated three years ago, now, MuchDifferent say they have not just cracked the problem but may have found a way to revolutionize how games are made, as well as have an influence on other consumer web areas.
How was this done? MuchDifferent created a dynamic traffic router/load balancer called PikkoServer, which divides the battlefield between the game servers and glues the result together for the clients, multiple times per second. In the process of developing this breakthrough, MuchDifferent created the UnityPark Suite to provide a full backend solution for Unity developers, which was released on January 2nd 2012.
The world record attempt coming off from this new technology, Man vs Machine, is based on the Unity Engine, however, any modern game engine could easily be retrofitted with the technology to create something similar in a few months time.
Now for the fun part! Anyone can sign up to be part of the world record attempt by heading on over to the Engineers Without Borders website. The only real catch is that there are only 1000 places and one entry costs about 23 Euros or $30.
The event will take place on January 29th 2012 at 16:00 CET. Those who sign up to be part of it will receive plenty of notifications before hand. All of the money made from the event will go straight to Engineers Without Borders who are a network of more than 200 engineers, scientists and students and are based in Stockholm.
More information on Man vs. Machine can be found on the official website.
