3.0 Testing 60 players per server!

[FZD]

With 60 players, we can almost have a decent fight between two fully crewed capital ships. So there is still much work to be done, but at least we're getting somewhere.

 

[Richard Bong]

This is actually really good news. Most other games support somewhere between 40 and 100 players per server instance, so this sounds like middle of the road right now, and they're not done yet.

What I'd like to see is the way they implement shards, but the main thing I learned doing cloud based architecture is, take baby steps, one at a time.

SWTOR will have 255 players in single instances and doesn't have anything that allows more than 4 players in a party other than single instance operations where that 8 or 16 is the only players in the instance.

With Capital ships and no loading into different instances, that is too small for Star Citizen. The minimum server capacity has to be 10 times the crew of the biggest ship in game and even that will be tight.

 

[Richard Bong]

With 60 players, we can almost have a decent fight between two fully crewed capital ships. So there is still much work to be done, but at least we're getting somewhere.

Presuming everyone drops what they are doing and joins one of the crews. :)

 

[Vavrik]

I'm not sure if this is the whole truth. Also i can' say much about the practical aspects of instances and programming. But what imagine is that a battle 30 vs 30 players would always need to happen in one instance (Imagine six crewed idris, with dedicated fighters operating in a small area). So unless CIG has some weird kind of "instance creating and transition system" which can transfer data between instances on a very small scale, like every Idris has ist own instance while they move through space

Well no, I simplified it, a lot, and I'm not going to get into the nuts and bolts much more than I have. But this is what the communications backplane is for. All servers in a shard are in a single cluster and can interact with each other. They share the same objects, what's happening with them etc, so all of the players logged into that network can see and interact with all of the objects represented by those servers. No special instancing is required, as long as everyone involved in the battle is logged into the same shard.

The game development team for Dual Universe is one of the teams working on the single universe model. Here is their description. https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2014/09/26/a-single-shard-continuous-universe-one-world-no-boundaries/

 

[Stevetank]

How can they TEST a server without all of us being there?

 

[BUTUZ]

60 is a good start but we need MOAR!!!!!!!

 

[Vavrik]

Arrrrrrr MOAR!!!!!!!!!!!

FYI. I found this.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UieVs5k0abU


Listen to the video played by the Glorious Leader, and how Chris Roberts describes the system. He's obviously new to the concept when this video was taken, but he gets it. This is cloud technology being applied to a game, and not game technology simply moving to the cloud. That's also why it will still take a bit of time to do. In fact, they need to be done almost the entirety of the 3.x tasks before implementing this. There is a spot on the current roadmap when it makes sense to begin to implement it. alpha 4.0, and by then the'd have worked out the network modeling they need to work out.

Just imagine if they had implemented the MMO capabilities in 2.6.3, you'd have a thousand players, or thousands of players trying to take off from Port Olisar. Oh yeah, that sounds like fun. Port Olisar gets busy with just 20 people on a server.