"Niantic's Paul Franceus on Pokemon Go on Software Engineering Podcast"

#PokemonGO: The Software Engineering Daily Podcast had a very interesting episode Friday with Niantic's Paul Franceus on the show. He spoke about a lot of general issues that Niantic has worked on with its AR toolkits and also had a lot of other interesting stories, as well as mentioning a bunch of points that are secret sauce or proprietary, so he would not explain further (detecting cheaters being one). There is even a transcript.I see a lot of cynical discussion of Niantic's engineering, even here on Silph Road, so it was nice to hear a serious discussion of the real technical issues they faced and have solved.Just a few points from the podcast:How 5G can improve game latencyThe earliest version of the game was very memory intensive and needed lots of refactoringBest description of Ingress that I ever heard (including spoilers) [21:38]Putting all players in the same universe is a key feature that is challenging and they are proud ofHere's a bit of the story of how Pokemon Go exceeded all estimates at launch [30:27]So, remember that we spun off from Google in 2015. There were 35 people at the company. By the time the game Pokémon Go launched, I think we had about 20 engineers. We had four server engineers that were working on Pokémon go. We did some projections. We did some planning. We looked at other MMOs. We thought about what we thought the traffic was going to be like. We did five times over provision from what we thought we would have. The game launched in Australia and New Zealand a few days before the US. I don’t remember what day it was, but it launched in Australia and New Zealand first. We exceeded our worldwide traffic for the whole world in just Australia and New Zealand. It turns out that the real traffic was 50 times our worst case scenario. So, we were going crazy. Thank God, we had Google cloud to support us. They literally were moving other people out of the data center that we were in so that they could give us more space. We found all sorts of interesting problems. Like, example, I don't know if you knew this, but the Apache HTTP library has a bug in it. If you have more than 10,000 open connections, it stops working. That's not something that we could load test. So we were fixing things like that. We found all sort of weird data store contentions and other kind of the things like that on-the-fly and we were kind of like rewriting the server on-the-fly as we went...Good explanation of Unity [42:21]And there is still a lot more. Check it out! via /r/TheSilphRoad http://bit.ly/2WXV2tX