Spectre Divide was an immersive multiplayer game packed with strategic gameplay and powered by Unreal Engine. Its unique gameplay hook in the competitive tactical FPS shooter realm...

Editor's note: Mountaintop Studios shut down Spectre Divide in November 2024. This article has been reframed as a historical case study. The infrastructure patterns it describes remain relevant as a reference for game developers evaluating server architecture approaches.

Spectre Divide was an immersive multiplayer game packed with strategic gameplay and powered by Unreal Engine. Its unique gameplay hook in the competitive tactical FPS shooter realm with giants like Valorant and Counter Strike was the "two-body mechanic", where players selected a 'sponsor' at the start of each match.

Beyond its unique gameplay hook, Spectre Divide offers valuable insights into advanced server orchestration and backend architecture. In this deep dive, we explore how Spectre Divide leveraged container-based orchestration with a hybrid of bare metal and cloud, and discuss best practices that game developers can gain from this title.

Container-Based Orchestration

Spectre Divide employed container-based orchestration, utilizing a hybrid model of cloud and bare metal for game server hosting, to efficiently manage its server infrastructure. This approach involves deploying containerized applications that run consistently across different computing environments. Here's an in-depth look at this process and its benefits.

Understanding Containers in a Hybrid Model

Containers are lightweight, standalone, and executable packages that include everything needed to run a piece of software, including the code, runtime, libraries, and system tools. In the context of Spectre Divide, leveraging both cloud and bare metal through container-based orchestration allowed the game to tap into both types of game server hosting to maximize flexibility and performance.

Cloud-Based Resources: The cloud environment provides scalability and flexibility, allowing Spectre Divide to dynamically tap into cloud computing resources based on demand. This enabled the game to deploy game servers in-sync with fluctuations in player numbers without compromising performance. As these resources should be deployed just-in-time, it should enable developer Mountaintop to minimize the overall cost of its game server hosting. If Mountaintop's orchestration service is like Edgegap's, it would allow game developers to deploy across multiple regions worldwide (10 listed at time of writing) -- however, that is fewer than other orchestrators -- Edgegap, for example, operates 615+ locations as of writing.

Bare Metal Servers: Bare metal provides the baseline of game server hosting as bare metal is the least expensive game server type available. This technically allowed Spectre Divide to minimize its hosting cost by first driving all traffic to available bare metal resources it had purchased.

This bare metal pool was likely divided into specific regions, which provided the "always available" community server regions. At time of writing, 10 community server regions were listed: Northwest US, Western US, Central US, Southern US, Eastern EU, Central EU, South Africa, Northern APAC, Western APAC, and Oceania.

Benefits of Container-Based Orchestration

The integration of containers in a hybrid cloud and bare metal environment provides several key advantages:

• Scalability: Containers can be easily scaled up or down to meet the demands of player traffic. This means that Spectre Divide could handle peak loads efficiently, ensuring a consistent gaming experience.

• Resource Optimization: The use of cloud and bare metal hybrid environments ensures that the game optimizes resource utilization. Cloud resources can be employed to manage variable loads while bare metal servers handle steady, intensive workloads.

• High Availability and Redundancy: By deploying containers across both cloud and on-premises servers, Spectre Divide achieved high availability. Load balancing ensures that if one node fails, others can take over, minimizing downtime and service disruptions.

• Cost Efficiency: The hybrid model allows for a tailored approach to resource usage, optimizing costs by balancing cloud service expenses with the capabilities of owned hardware.

Limits of Limited Regions

Mountaintop's footprint of 10 data centers may have constrained its ability to deliver low latency across all player regions -- a tradeoff studios commonly face when balancing infrastructure cost against geographic coverage.

One effective path is to access a global, public edge computing infrastructure. However, this is complex to manage, and requires optimized, automated orchestration to ensure game server deployments in the optimal locations for all players.

Providers like Edgegap remove the cost problem by offering multi-tenancy, just-in-time game hosting in hundreds of regions without committing to a specific set of regions.

Per Edgegap's AAA Publisher Case Study, using traffic from 600,000 transactions and comparing results against a large studio's existing architecture -- one with more locations than most studios would be able to afford -- Edgegap demonstrated an average latency reduction from 116 ms to 48 ms. In the same study, 78% of transactions came in under 50 ms latency, compared to 14% in the studio's prior architecture.

Anti-Cheat Measures with BattlEye

Spectre Divide integrated BattlEye, a leading anti-cheat system, to protect the game and its players from hacking, cheating, and other forms of attacks. By leveraging BattlEye, the game maintained a fair and competitive environment, ensuring integrity and trust among its player base.

Conclusion

Spectre Divide's backend structure provides key insights into the future of game server hosting. By prioritizing robust server infrastructure, scalability, data persistence, and security, developers can enhance the player experience and foster long-term engagement.

The server management strategies demonstrated by Spectre Divide are available to studios of all sizes with services like Edgegap's, thanks to its streamlined integration and affordable pay-per-use hosting without commitments. Indie developers and smaller game studios are increasingly turning to these platforms that facilitate complex server management regardless of the team's development size or its playerbase.