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Spectre Divide - Multiplayer Game Backend Deep Dive

Spectre Divide is an immersive multiplayer game packed with strategic gameplay and powered by Unreal Engine. It’s unique gameplay hook in the competitive tactical FPS shooter realm with giants like Valorant and Counter Strike is the “two-body mechanic”, where players must select 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'll explore how Spectre Divide leverages container-based orchestration with hybrid of bare metal and cloud, and discuss best practices that game developers can gain from this innovative title.

Container-Based Orchestration

Spectre Divide employs 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 allows the game to tap into both type of game server hosting to maximizes flexibility and performance.

Cloud-Based Resources: The cloud environment provides scalability and flexibility, allowing Spectre Divide to dynamically tap into cloud’s computer resources based on demand. This enables 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 Mountain Top to minimize the overall cost of its game server hosting. If Mountain Top’s orchestration service is like Edgegap’s, it should allow game developers to deploy across multiple regions worldwide (10 listed as of writing) – however, that is less than other orchestrators like Edgegap’s 615+ locations.

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 allows Spectre Divide to minimize its hosting cost by first driving all traffic to available Bare Metal resource it purchased.

This Bare Metal pool is likely divided into specific regions, which provides the “always available” community server regions, namely as of time of writing – Northwest US, Western US, Central US, Southern US, Eastern EU, Central EU, South Africa, Northern APAC, Western APAC, Oceana.

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 can 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 achieves 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

Mountain Top’s decision to leverage 10 data centers limits its ability to deliver low latency to players regionally while maintaining ultra-low latency between regions.

The only solution is to access a global, public edge computing infrastructure. However, this is very hard to manage, so it requires optimized, automated orchestration to handle it and ensure game server deployments in the optimal locations for all its 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.

This is proven by Edgegap’s case study with a AAA publisher. Despite that large game studio having massive ressources that allowed it to have a larger number of locations than most game developers could hope for (readL more than what even most studios would be able to afford!), by using traffic from 600,000 transactions and comparing the results with a AAA studio’s current architecture, Edgegap demonstrated an average latency reduction from 116 milliseconds to a drastic 48 milliseconds. On top of that, 78% of the transactions had a latency below 50 milliseconds, compared to only 14% without the Edgegap solution.

Anti-Cheat Measures with BattlEye

Spectre Divide integrates 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 maintains a fair and competitive environment, ensuring integrity and trust among its player base.

Conclusion

Spectre Divide's backend structure provides key insights on 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 proprietary server management strategies behind Spectre Divide is available to studios of all sizes with services like Edgegap's thanks to its easy integration and affordable pay-per-use hosting without commitments. Indie developers and smaller game studios are turning to these innovative platforms that facilitate complex server management regardless of the team's development size or its playerbase.

Written by

the Edgegap Team