GLOBAL RAGE wrote:KA24DERT wrote:Actually AWS's EC2 instances are pretty famous for having terrible performance and IO in general, especially for their smaller instances. It's so bad they actually started advertising "Fast Network" on their extra large instances, for the low price of $200 a month. A dedicated server or "Private Cloud" is a much better fit for game server hosting. I've tested EC2 myself, it's not that great, there are cheaper and faster options out there.
Also, Steam is trying very hard to transcend windows, and their populations are pretty healthy for being dead:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/There's 8 million people online currently, never mind the people who have their machines off, or who have their Steam client closed, or the people who aren't using Steam for gaming...
IO off an array, a dust server is probably cacheable so I'd question the comparison.
My family has a number of steam accounts and our ps3's and 4's are much more active. The steamOS is in danger of becoming a disaster, if not already a fiasco of monumental proportions. How much longer will the folks at companies like ASUS and Gigabyte stay silent after their 10's of millions of invested capital languish in perpetual stagnation.
Steam is in trouble!
An FPS game server is basically the most uncachable thing in the world, especially in Dust where there's no per-server unique game assets(maps, models, textures, and the rest are distributed with the game via PSN, not at connect time to a game server). Most of what a game server does is keep track of client locations and relay those locations to other clients. How the hell do you cache that?
Answer: You can't.
What you need for a good FPS game server is pure speed, and that is exactly what EC2 doesn't have. Even assuming you had an FPS game server that was deployable as a multi-node cluster, EC2 will still be terrible because the networking between EC2 instances is slow and unreliable. You'd have to get a special setup with Amazon to ensure all your instances spin up within the same physical location in their datacenter, and at that price point you're better off going with real hardware.
But all that is besides the point, as I said Dust using/not using AWS is a non factor( and if they ARE using AWS, it's probably the reason certain maps always stall at certain parts of the game....).
SteamOS, just like their Linux and Mac ports, are crucial to avoid letting Microsoft define PC gaming. This is good for everyone. Even if SteamOS fails, Valve isn't going out of business any time soon, as they are probably the world's single largest distributor of non-mobile games.
I'm happy that your family is playing your PS4, and I'd be happy for a PS4 port in the future, but in the meantime, and for ease of development/deployment/growth, PC is where Dust needs to go to grow up.