Eagle-eyed readers of our UI sneak peek article will have noticed a navigation tab called ‘servers’ at the top of Hytale’s main menu. Hytale’s server browser will let players quickly find community servers to play on.
We will allow you to sort and filter by the types of games you’d like to play – adventure mode or minigames, co-op or competitive – as well as by other factors like languages supported. A tagging system will allow servers to designate the type of content they provide alongside traditional server list features like banners and graphics. As an example, users can favorite servers that they enjoy, and you’ll be able to sort the server list by the total number of favorites that each server has received in order to quickly find the most popular places to play.
The Hytale server browser will be actively moderated, and all server operators – from large minigame networks to smaller community servers – are required to adhere to a lightweight terms of service. Appearing on Hytale’s server browser won’t be necessary in order for players to join a server, but we expect that it’ll be the way that many players find servers to play on.
PLAYING WITH FRIENDS
Furthermore, we’ve implemented technology into Hytale to make playing together as painless as possible. The friends list allows you to jump into servers that your friends are currently playing on, and also allows you to connect to their adventure mode worlds. To ensure that this is a smooth process, we’re using UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocols to handle port forwarding automatically when possible – if that is unavailable, then we attempt NAT punchthrough. What this means in practical terms is that you can join your friends’ worlds through your friends list as long as you’re both connected to the internet without ever having to set up port forwarding – regardless of your router’s settings. Making it easy to play with your friends without a hitch is very important to us.
A PLATFORM TO BUILD ON
We’ve poured everything we’ve learned in more than six years of running game servers for millions of players into Hytale’s server technology. Our ambition is to eventually implement solutions to all of the difficulties that we’ve encountered over the years – to anticipate the issues that players and server operators may face and have an answer for them. We’re looking forward to working closely with the community, and we’ll be reaching out to ensure that we factor in your requirements and ideas.
