MuchDifferent is a non-profit organisation that put excellence before everything else. We want to build stuff that make us proud. We want to provide solutions that are unmatched in every aspect and that amaze our customers. But maybe most of all, we want to express our own capabilities without compromising. We always make sure that what we do allows our talents to grow. Because as we grow our abilities, our customer’s abilities grow as well.

As a support engineer, you spend about 30 % of your time helping people make multiplayer games. The rest of the time you develop the tools and make games, so that you get to use the tools that you yourself help develop.

We have offices in Uppsala, Sweden and in Seoul, Korea but you are free to work from anywhere. However, we always have a lot of fun when we are together. Yes, that sounds really cheesy but it is true. Be yourself, have fun and amaze the world – it’s what we do every day.

Submit a CV and a personal letter to staffan.einarsson@muchdifferent.com and join us!

MuchDifferent have been awarded an additional contract to provide technical support and tailored applications that will be used in training of sonar operators. Swedish Defence Materiel Administration and MuchDifferent thereby expand the cooperation in providing tools and systems to better understand and explain signals.

SHADOWGUN: DeadZone revolutionises what we think of as a mobile game. Its detailed 3D graphics, fast pace and real-time networking is something that we used to associate only with PC and console games. MADFINGER has really broken the limits with this game and it would not have been possible without uLink and UnityPark Suite.

We would like to send a big thank you to the guys at Madfinger for their hospitality, friendliness and beer. We hope to be going to Czech Republic soon again!

Please visit our Korean homepage for more information.

HAST will replace several old tools and systems used for training and teaching sonar operators to detect and classify marine vessels. The new system will partly be accessed through the Internet and live up to the military’s strictest security requirements.

At the end, we will have built something together with the Swedish Naval Academy that will impress others with its thoughtfulness, care for details and passion. Too bad it will be top secret so that I will not be able to brag in more detail about it.

Making Unity into a powerful seamless MMO engine.

As you might have noticed, we have made:

1. uLink – a network integration showcasing the future of network development.
2. PikkoServer – a server layer that scales Unity servers into a dynamic cluster.
3. Man vs Machine – a browser 1000-player FPS game.

For most people, we might seem to have popped up from nowhere so I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain a little bit about who we are and why we did such a crazy thing. And to take the opportunity to mention the main technological challenges we encountered.

As it happened, our team got the chance to spend a few years on whatever we wanted to do and we decided that we wanted to change the way networking for games was done.

Network development in games used to be a disaster from so many angles and it suffered from both technical and organisational problems. It was very unforgiving to be a network programmer and the task did not work well with the “crunch n’ patch”-development culture. In this stressful environment, your tools need to be just as your best friends: reliable, helpful and direct. They should be able to handle that you happen to have a bad day, support you when you get that crazy idea you want to show the world and they should just be there, making those boring everyday chores joyful.

We had been talking to CCP about a great way to demonstrate what our group thought would become the future of network and server software technology. We agreed that if we could retrofit Unity and make it into the most powerful MMO engine in the world – and show that you could play a fast paced MMOFPS-game with it, it would be the ultimate proof. Since there is a small but significant trade-off between a little more latency for a lot more CPU-power in the Pikko architecture, a massive FPS seemed like a great idea.

uLink

We already had a small crush on Unity long before we started developing these products. However, we thought that it was only half of an amazing engine since it had very rudimentary networking capabilities. At first we didn’t think we would build a complete network integration but after learning that Unity was pushing network developers out of their editor, we realized that something needed to be done about it. That something was uLink.

The more we worked with uLink, the more we fell in love. First with uLink itself, then with Unity and then with uLink, again. We built a special network torture chamber for it (using the automated testing tool Tsung), in which its every little aspect got hammered to the extreme, over many months. We put it in the hands of 3D artists with no real network experience as well as in the hands of veteran network programmers. The more we abused uLink, the closer to perfection it became. I would be very surprised to hear someone do something horrible to uLink that we had not already done in cubic-metrical-dimensions worse. We simply wanted uLink to be that friend that you always could count on. So we tortured it like a sadistic little kid.

But having built a network integration from the ground up was necessary because we needed to know every little row of code and every little package in the network in order to be able to do what we were about to do next.

The road to PikkoServer

We come from a pretty small Swedish town, Uppsala, that is most famous for its university. Our professors decides who will get the Nobel Prize but in general nothing really exiting happen here. Surprisingly, Uppsala University had become the scene of a small but stubbornly growing community of telecom programmers that used and developed Erlang. Erlang is a functional programming language originating from Ericsson and it has some truly amazing properties for networking. It is scalable, concurrent and very reliable. We dreamt of making a game engine’s server side behave as if it was programmed in this network optimized programming language.

We were not alone in thinking along these lines. Our friends at Artplant went for the straightforward approach when they made the Battlestar Galactica MMO with Unity as the client, and their entire server side in Erlang. I met their CEO, Jack, not long ago and he told me that they had not had one (1) server crash since they launched. He smiled. I smiled. He smiled more. Then we said the word we were both thinking out loud together. “Erlang”. (I imagine there are quite a few guys reading this and nodding in recognition of the similarities between the Erlang community and a religious sect). Even though Battlestar Galactica is a great game, and even if we have been helping out Artplant a (very) little bit with both the database and software design issues for their game, we do not believe that game developers should be forced to learn functional programming and have to throw away all the hard and excellent work that have already been put into their game engine.

Being a tool

I often bore my surroundings by regularly finding reasons to tell them that we as humans are defined by our tools. You and me are genetically the same as our cave crawling ancestors but as we look at our civilization and our human capability today, it is all there thanks to our tools. It is usually at this point that the other people in my team starts hiding away the red wine and clear the room of fragile minds and stuff. What if making tools made you into a tool? Or even stranger, what if you could take the idea of a tool and then use that tool in such a way that you could change one tool into another tool? Well, it doesn’t make that much sense but this is actually what we did with Pikko Server. We took the idea of Erlang and made a server layer that made the rest of the server side behave as if it was all done in Erlang even though the game programmer didn’t have to type one single row of functional code.

But we didn’t stop there. No, we had just opened the door into something that held much more potential than simply solving scalability over the CPU. We could now deal directly with the traffic between the client and the server, which enabled us take a broad and serious grip on addressing bandwidth management, network LODing and other optimizations.

One thing is many things

We have of course done many brilliant and stupid things along the way that would most likely deserve to be mentioned, but really, most things are better experienced rather than talked about. Still, one thing that have made people understand the potential in the technology we have been working on, is worth mentioning. That is our load balancing simulator demo MastSim.

I’ll post a video about it later.

A world record

We made an early prototype of Man vs Machine working with PikkoServer and Unity, pretty fast. But at the very moment we had made it we understood that it was pretty pointless. Of course, we had made an MMOFPS and it worked just as we wanted it to do and that was pretty awesome. But it was a little bit like being the first to climb Mount Everest and finding out that all the people you wanted to celebrate it with was still down at base camp. Or at home. So we either needed to spend a lot of time explaining how wonderful it was on top of the highest mountain in the world – and still not be able to make the feeling justice. Or we could build an escalator up to the mountain top and make it so damn easy to be there with us, and we all could party together like furry animals! You already know what we did…

I’d like to thank all who helped make this happen. With a special warm and loving “thank you” to the people that played! Thank you for bringing such creativity to both the battlefield and to the chat. You had me laughing, giggling and spilling coffee throughout the event.

As for the game, it was something of an execution of the Team Machine in the beginning. After the first half hour, the score was overwhelmingly in favor for Team Man. We did some adjustments to the gameplay balancing but it was not until the end of the two hour session that Team Machine had turned the tides and now the roles were reversed and Team Man was not even able to leave the spawning area.  Getting a game balanced is hard and our guesswork proved to be quite off the mark. In the end, I think most people had an enjoyable experience of the sheer massiveness of it all and having the game run smoothly helped with that.

We never managed to get the full thousand though, because of the inherent unpredictability of the Internet with players constantly timing out and logging out. But its ok. With 999 players, we still managed to raise the unofficial PlanetSide record with 600 players. For about two hours, people could experience a smooth massive game experience.

What will happen now is that we will make scores and other enjoyable stuff available online. Our independent industry expert who was monitoring Man vs Machine, Derek Wise, is hard at work going through the data we have recorded and will soon present his findings to Guinness World Records. And finally, we will continue to improve the technology and tools for making online games.

Thank you all once again for making online history!

Update: Guinness World Records approved it and it is now a new official world record!