Fleet vs fleet on PU

[B3aT]

Test theory-crafting

What was the highest number of concurrent players in an instance/shard/zone CIG told? I saw like max 100 players, I'm worried ..is like few capital ships and some support :/ I know it will never have eve 10000 ships in battles but still...we have capital ships..to fight :/

I estimate that a 50 players vs 50 players fight will only last 10 minutes or so, because the firepower will be so big, the damage is very high at start an estimate will be
2-3 capital ships (15-40 players - 15 hopefully NPC's will fill the rest, or (40) we need extra backups)
1 ground combat boarding unit? 5 players
10-15 fighters and bombers - 10-15 players
1-2 hospitals - 2-4 players
1-2 fuel tanks - 3-5 players
And ..that's it on one side.

The respawn rate (even with 2-3 hospitals) will be slow because you need to recover the body, so I don't take it into account.

More players than 100 will fight a separate battle, in the same zone, but on a different shard so I imagine this weird but 100% probable scenario:
* a squadron with 3 fighters are going a long range (exit the current zone to chase someone)
* when they return to the fleet they are redistributed to another instance (because the previous one is full)
* no fight for them, no backup, no fun
Hope the technology will not allow it.

Scenario B:
Fleet A is stationary, prepared for battle, but has 80 players
Fleet B comes to attack - only 20 players enters the zone because..is full

 

[Kortheous]

https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing

 

[ThomSirveaux]

CIG is working on getting 1000 players and almost as many ships available on the instances. This doesn't include NPCs and their alliances, either (*Ahem* Vanduul *cough cough*).

This means that a full fleet battle can be anywhere from 100 to 500 ships (no definite number has been given), which would include capital ships, support craft, etc.

With that in mind, we're probably looking at well over an hour of PVP combat. Smaller ships, fighters, etc, can land on carriers to repair, rearm, and refuel. So, if you survive, you can slip back to the Idris, Polaris, or Bengal and patch your ship up, or just have Crucibles on standby. People can be repairing the big ships from inside, as well as having repair drones, so it would be a pretty long, drawn out battle. Probably on the order of a few hours or more, similar to EVE, but maybe not as long or "system wide".

 

[B3aT]

https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing

I know about how he visioned the system, I was just asking for newer details on " battle instances. " how CR calls them.

1000 is a lot, I'll be happy with 200-300 too :D

 

[Kortheous]

Should be quite entertaining. I never played EVE or the like, so I have no idea what to expect.

 

[B3aT]

CIG is working on getting 1000 players and almost as many ships available on the instances. This doesn't include NPCs and their alliances, either (*Ahem* Vanduul *cough cough*).

This means that a full fleet battle can be anywhere from 100 to 500 ships (no definite number has been given), which would include capital ships, support craft, etc.

With that in mind, we're probably looking at well over an hour of PVP combat. Smaller ships, fighters, etc, can land on carriers to repair, rearm, and refuel. So, if you survive, you can slip back to the Idris, Polaris, or Bengal and patch your ship up, or just have Crucibles on standby. People can be repairing the big ships from inside, as well as having repair drones, so it would be a pretty long, drawn out battle. Probably on the order of a few hours or more, similar to EVE, but maybe not as long or "system wide".

In 2014 CR said their highest hopes is 50 max 100 players per instance do you remember where did they said 1000?

Do not mistake the players in a system with an instance, here's another quote

It depends, but the very biggest ones that you can fight and take over, will still be instanced. You can't have a single bengal over 4 instances being fought to be taken over all at once for example. We'll have similar rules for instances where the bigger ships exists as we'll have with space stations and asteroid bases. Space stations exist in just one instance, and that instance can't be copied. The difference is if you're in orbit around Earth for example, there might be thousands of people around there, so there might be 100 people per instance and 1000 players, there might be 10 different instances supporting them, which could potentially be at different places around Earth. If you're one of those players you'll never really be able to see ALL the players around Earth at once, and the people you DO see will be those that are friends, POI's or enemies. In the case of a space station or bengals etc, only one of those instances would have that large ship/station in it to be able to be taken over. There might only ever be 100 people that would be on-board or approaching, or fighting the ship at any time, and the matchmaking system would play a part in who gets put in that particular instance.

Another quote from 2015

I don't think we have ever talked about 1000 players per server. I think the number we wanted was between 50 and 100 and currently as of the social release we are at 25 and hoping to bump that up significantly with the next social release. In the game right now we have to do quite a bit of optimization on the space ships and vehicles because they are very heavy and they are not as simple as just a player because I think just a hornet itself has 70 items that all work and do their own thing and have to be networked so they are much heavier than a person running around Arccorp but with the game we have a whole bunch of optimization stuff we are going to do next so we can have much more ships flying around. So there wasn't talk of 1000 per server instance. There was talk of something that was a longer range goal that was the possibility of multiple servers to work cooperatively on one big area or instance so if that was the case and you had 10 server then every server would handle 100 people then potentially get 1000 people but that is a long term goal and it does have some issues because at some point you run into rendering issues and all the other things that would happen. But in terms of arccorp I think we have discussed having more than one but it's segregated in such a way that the landing pad to the customs to going through the customs that is to allow us to almost instance the landing pad area so while you go out someone else could be landing in that pad while your ship was put away in its hangar somewhere. This is all stuff we want to get moving as smooth as possible. We got some stuff we are going for the multi crew that is sort of in that direction but in general we will normally allow you to land if their is slots in arccorp. So there will be several options for that and we will go from there.

There will be 2 problems in this game (as in most MMO's anyway) and hope the players understand this before they pledge

* we will never have hundreds of players fighting in the same battle
* we will never have a proper TEST meeting in-game, maybe just on the ground/hangars special areas :(

 

[Printimus]

In 2014 CR said their highest hopes is 50 max 100 players per instance do you remember where did they said 1000?

Do not mistake the players in a system with an instance, here's another quote



Another quote from 2015




There will be 2 problems in this game (as in most MMO's anyway) and hope the players understand this before they pledge

* we will never have hundreds of players fighting in the same battle
* we will never have a proper TEST meeting in-game, maybe just on the ground/hangars special areas :(

You've never played EVE online, have you...

 

[BenjiMac]

You've never played EVE online, have you...

EvE is a far less resource intensive game, without physics and even then the games have in occasion had to be slowed to one tenth of real time to allow large battles to happen.

with current tech and this engine, Im sceptical even 100 players per combat instance is acheiveable. Honestly, I think they sold player cap ships thinking only of the market and not about implementation and Im happy to be quoted on this.

50 players per instance would be impressive in my book. another engine and maybe, we see 64vs64 in less complex games with better engines to handle it.

24 to 50 would be an impressive jump.

 

[Printimus]

EvE is a far less resource intensive game, without physics and even then the games have in occasion had to be slowed to one tenth of real time to allow large battles to happen.

with current tech and this engine, Im sceptical even 100 players per combat instance is acheiveable. Honestly, I think they sold player cap ships thinking only of the market and not about implementation and Im happy to be quoted on this.

50 players per instance would be impressive in my book. another engine and maybe, we see 64vs64 in less complex games with better engines to handle it.

24 to 50 would be an impressive jump.

It was in response to his:

* we will never have hundreds of players fighting in the same battle
* we will never have a proper TEST meeting in-game, maybe just on the ground/hangars special areas :(

Both of those can be accomplished in Eve, which is an old game, which means its very very possible for CIG to accomplish this as well.

 

[BUTUZ]

In 2014 CR said their highest hopes is 50 max 100 players per instance do you remember where did they said 1000?

Do not mistake the players in a system with an instance, here's another quote

You can quote stuff from 2014 and 2015 all you like it means absolutely nothing as the game has moved on massively since then. They said Squadron42 would be out this xmas a long time ago - whatever happened to that??

They figured out how to do server instance meshing where each thread on the server will take the load of several players that are near each other, as players move away and come near they get moved around the different threads accordingly. Each server has 48 or more threads and so can sustain many players. They are expecting to get hundreds of plays and they did say that they were aiming for 1000 per instance somewhere recently,. might have been a live stream, gamecon one?

Also the game is incomparable to eve as eve "cheats" to enable massive multiplayer battles by slowing down time. This won't work in a first person shooter but it does work great in a spreadsheet based space game.

 

[BenjiMac]

You can quote stuff from 2014 and 2015 all you like it means absolutely nothing as the game has moved on massively since then. They said Squadron42 would be out this xmas a long time ago - whatever happened to that??

They figured out how to do server instance meshing where each thread on the server will take the load of several players that are near each other, as players move away and come near they get moved around the different threads accordingly. Each server has 48 or more threads and so can sustain many players. They are expecting to get hundreds of plays and they did say that they were aiming for 1000 per instance somewhere recently,. might have been a live stream, gamecon one?

Also the game is incomparable to eve as eve "cheats" to enable massive multiplayer battles by slowing down time. This won't work in a first person shooter but it does work great in a spreadsheet based space game.

can you really see this being pulled off? All the variables to be monitored, all the calculations and all in a fast paced, twitch environment with servers maintaining Performance for 100 clients or more with minimal latency?

I just dont see it.

 

[B3aT]

I just started watching all the videos from behind, and that's why I asked for you guys to find out more recent news about this subject.

@BUTUZ CR said and is true that the bottleneck are the clients, the ships are very complex systems (mechanically speaking) and you need to simulate all the ships internal structures, systems, controls etc, not on the server side. Servers can scale horizontally, PC's not much. I'm sure in 3-5-10 yrs optimizations will be made and nw technologies will appear and evolve, so if we start with 50 now, it will only go up.

Also EVE cheated with that timelapse, avoiding this problem from start.

Anyway it will be hard for the Casual players to understand what the hell is happening and stay alive in a 50-100 dogfight scale, tons of action, missiles, projectiles, all kind of ships. I know for me it will, I probably do more friendly fire damage by mistake :))