Gamasutra recently did a feature about the company which centered on its use of dedicated servers for its first person shooter (FPS) game, Section 8.

Early in development, the coders at TimeGate realized dedicated servers were going to be a necessary evil. For gaming purposes, using dedicated servers to allow larger scale games meant that the company needed to host its own bank of servers in an approved XLSP environment (Xbox Live Server Platform).

In short, this threatened to be an expensive endeavor in regards to hardware and management overhead.

In a Gamasutra feature, TimeGate’s chief technology officer Denis Papp explained why his company had to harness user-hosted dedicated servers for the console versions of Section 8. TimeGate wanted to implement 32 player battles in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game, which meant it would need to harness user-hosted dedicated servers for the console versions of the game.

Papp said, "Traditionally, shooters on the PC support both "listen servers" (where one of the clients is also the host) with up to 16 players, and "dedicated servers" supporting upwards of 32 players. However, the majority of shooters on the console support only listen servers."

Thus, the availability of dedicated servers became a requirement.

To facilitate success, TimeGate managed to negotiate Microsoft’s (News - Alert) blessing. Which was another necessary evil, considering certification was required for the game’s binary to communicate with Microsoft Live.    

After Section 8’s launch, there were a few hiccups along the way. As per Papp, a number of users wanting to run dedicated servers were not very comfortable with the Windows command prompt.

But they learned to adapt. Now, players on the console of their choice are now able to enjoy large scale 32-player games and run their own servers.

To read more about the technicalities behind harnessing dedicated servers for gaming, please visit the feature article at Gamasutra.