Originally posted by Xpheyel I suspect mapping as much land as that would require would be far too expensive and time consuming.
Not really. Just dish out some gnerated maps with a simple perlin generator, seed them with vegetation, seed animals, seed ressources, let players shape the landscape and build things on it.
The only thing that will take a lot of time and research is the terrain streaming and rendering, and the whole crafting aspect. The map itself isn't that much work..
Ever since EQ and UO invented the 'shard' design of multiple, unconnected servers every designer thinks its a standard. I think its garbage. Look at EVE, which best represents it's success. The community of the ENTIRE game is united. Games with servers arn't really virtual worlds, but rather hosted instances. How many times have you found a RL friend that plays the same game as you, but then pops up "Oh, I player on X server, sorry." That's just despicable to me. We need game worlds, if you play So-and-So Online, you should be united in a comminuty with every other player of that game, not separated by 10 year old design rules. The shard idea was made when every PC ran dialup. The technology can handle it, the problem is that the trend is running too hard, devs are afraid to change. In most MMOs, you can walk through an area for ages and never see another player. The worlds are HUGE. A good example is the recently release WAR. Even on the highest pop servers you barely run into anyone, and the game has like 30 shards. EQ2 is bad about this too. And these devs refuse to merge servers because they think its a PR nightmare. The most important part of an MMO is high population. The multiple share design needs to be updated, it's no longer a viable design choice. Make bigger worlds, not smaller ones that you can break up.
I want a 1 server design as well, and I am willing to pay my part in making it viable. What I mean is, how many people do you really think are willing to cough up some money to make this viable? EvE can do this, because they don't have a lot of objects to make you lag in space, like there would be in a MMORPG (ie. foilage and mobs wondering around constantly). So here's what would have to happen. EIther we take a huge hit in graphics, so that everyone can run the game smoothly with several hundred thousand players on one server, or everyone is forced to upgrade their computers to play the one server game with great graphics.
MMORPG's w/ Max level characters: DAoC, SWG, & WoW
Currently Playing: WAR Preferred Playstyle: Roleplay/adventurous, in a sandbox game.
Eve works partly due to it's low poly ship models, whose only saving grace is mid range texture set ups. By low polys, I mean really low. Take a look at many warp gates. They are not circular for a reason, and that reason being the low polys it takes for that shape, compared to more of a circle. We call them isolines. From a distance they are smooth, but up close they are very polygonal.
Then you have the planets and stars. The stars are just random light sources. The planets are sphere primitives with maps on them, and the occasional torus. Astroids are spheres with displacement maps, to get the contorted shape. Nebula is a series of large 2d static particles, in a 3d space. The "space" around you, is actually a large 2d background texture map.
Finally a small secret in the build of the server itself. Each zone is on a seperate hard drive. For the pc geeks, think a large network where each terminal is a seperate zone, but as all are linked together- you get the overal affect of a sort of supercomputer. In the graphics business, this is akin to a render farm.
Put all together, and Eve has the lowest computational cost per account, of any game around. That is why they can bundle everything onto one server, because from a graphics standpoint- the cost is minimal. However, the WIS expansion, will introduce something akin to seperate servers, where each station interior is on it's own drive or network.
Take a planet based game now, and you find you have to have multiple light sources, skydomes, landmass meshes, with rocks (astroids), trees, etc., scattered across the mesh in specific areas. Then you have grass, which is going to take more planes depending on the view distance of it. This alone would tax such a hardware setup much more than Eve, thus reducing the number of accounts that can access that "world" at one time.
What's even more taxing, is the characters themselves in a world setting. You have 'x' number of character types of models that would be have to be far more polys than the ships of Eve, or the whole game would be shunned graphically. Throw onto those models armors and weapons, all of which have to be seperate models, and likewise more detailed than the guns and cannon of Eve, in both polys and textures. Now you also have to have each of those characters access a database that tells them how to animate given certain perimeters. Any animator can tell you that the file sizes needed for believable animations of humanoids and animals, is far more than a ship moving from point 0,0,0, to point 0,0,500.
All of that has to be loaded, and executed in as much a lag free time as possible, for players to be able to play the game with any comfort. To get around that, they break it up into servers (shards), to reduce the number of accounts that can access the "world" at any given time, so that their servers can execute the program without crashing, or freezing up.
Eve doesn't have nearly the same issues and thus can support a larger number of accounts accessed into the world at any given moment. That is also why you will most likely NOT have a "one server" setup on ANY world based mmo. Either there will be more graphics/animations programmed into the files or there will be more complex databases to have to be accessed as technology evolves- thereby rendering the "one server" design unacceptable.
Waiting for- Tera, Jumpgate Evo, WH40K, WWE, WOD, TSW -- -- "Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," Double Fine President Tim Schafer said. "Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."
Ever since EQ and UO invented the 'shard' design of multiple, unconnected servers every designer thinks its a standard. I think its garbage. Look at EVE, which best represents it's success. The community of the ENTIRE game is united. Games with servers arn't really virtual worlds, but rather hosted instances. How many times have you found a RL friend that plays the same game as you, but then pops up "Oh, I player on X server, sorry." That's just despicable to me. We need game worlds, if you play So-and-So Online, you should be united in a comminuty with every other player of that game, not separated by 10 year old design rules. The shard idea was made when every PC ran dialup. The technology can handle it, the problem is that the trend is running too hard, devs are afraid to change. In most MMOs, you can walk through an area for ages and never see another player. The worlds are HUGE. A good example is the recently release WAR. Even on the highest pop servers you barely run into anyone, and the game has like 30 shards. EQ2 is bad about this too. And these devs refuse to merge servers because they think its a PR nightmare. The most important part of an MMO is high population. The multiple share design needs to be updated, it's no longer a viable design choice. Make bigger worlds, not smaller ones that you can break up.
I want a 1 server design as well, and I am willing to pay my part in making it viable. What I mean is, how many people do you really think are willing to cough up some money to make this viable? EvE can do this, because they don't have a lot of objects to make you lag in space, like there would be in a MMORPG (ie. foilage and mobs wondering around constantly). So here's what would have to happen. EIther we take a huge hit in graphics, so that everyone can run the game smoothly with several hundred thousand players on one server, or everyone is forced to upgrade their computers to play the one server game with great graphics.
I don't understand why people aren't listening. short of adopting very strict geographical limits for people, it doesn't make sense to do this.
Not only would you have to force people to certain starter zones, you would either have to instance cities (something that people don't want) or you would have to end up with a mess.
Let's say servers could easily do this. You will then either have a city that is so swamped you can't move (if it has collision dection) or a glob of arms and legs as players try to move about to to certain areas.
Eve works because it is one big open space. If a ship is someplace it doesn't matter if another ship is next to it and next to it, and above it etc. It works because players can easily be using all axis in space. but in a ground based game, you are dealing with a lot of x and y axis stuff.
In a game where avatars are going to be walking around, you are going to run into crowding.
the only way I can feasibly imagine (assuming that servers could even handle this, as space ships don't take as many resources) this working is for players to not only be assigned to certain starter cities, but they would also have t be assigned to certain areas to buy/sell, repair, train, etc. They would have to be artifically segregated.
You can't have 100 people in a building. Or, you CAN have 100 people but it would have to be a very large building. It would have to have very large rooms to accomodate players as you don't want to have a visual mess.
But in the end we aren't talking about 100 people in the same room. We are talking about thousands. How many people were playing simultaneously in Eve? Now imagine 15,000 of that number in one city. All crowded in the same area trying to do the same thing.
The flow of traffic is a lot different in a space game then a game where people are moving about on a planet.
The other way you could do it (again, assuming that servers could handle such a thing) is to instance all the shops. Because essentially, if I recollect that is what happens in Eve. you go to your port which is your own private instance and you buy and sell there.
But people won't like that. They will say that it kills immersion.
Believe me, I've tried to imagine a game with a vast vast city where if you went up to a spire, you could see usable city as far as the eye could see. But what always thwarted my fantasy was the control of player traffic.
Have any of you actually been to New York City (or a comparably large city) during a very crowded time? You don't move about at a comfortable pace but you have to sometimes wait.
Heck, I remember once, during the Boston marathon, I got caught in a "people traffic jam" and it took 30 minutes to go 20 to 30 feet.
And as we all know, players would be as equally patient.
I think if the lines to get into the server didn't kill them the lines to move about the server's cities would!
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Originally posted by Kainis Eve works partly due to it's low poly ship models, whose only saving grace is mid range texture set ups. By low polys, I mean really low. Take a look at many warp gates. They are not circular for a reason, and that reason being the low polys it takes for that shape, compared to more of a circle. We call them isolines. From a distance they are smooth, but up close they are very polygonal.
The thought that eve works just because the devs were able to intelligently hide a lot of polygons without sacrificing look is kinda funny. Kainis hard-disk comment is complete nonsense, though. Sorry.
Eve has a zoned model, i think people should know that by now. That is, by the way, in no way different from a lot of ground based fantasy mmos. This lets them split the players into independant zones, that can be processed individually on different hardware nodes. This is, still, in no way different from other games out there. The graphical processing in the client is completely irrelevant, by the way. The polycount in a scene with 100+ ships is about the same as the polycount in a crowded area in a fantasy mmo. (yes, that is a horrible generalization, but it's what i measured with ryzom vs. eve)
The only difference in eve is, that they have over five thousand of zones. Each of those zones, or star systems, is interconnected with a few others. By travelling through them you can reach any other zone in the world. Nothing special here.
The real difference is, that ccp chose to not shard a few hundred of those zones, but just pile up a few thousand of them, distribute wealth around them so people have a choice for going to system a or b,c,d,n instead of z. This is the only real difference to a game like wow, where you level around linearly, and a zone you visited earlier in your career is not really interesting anymore.
What this means, is that they found a way to distribute tens of thousands of players around their world. Of course, this is not trivial, as the jita-case shows (1400 players was the peak). This would have to be avoided by better game design in a ground based game, and travelling times would probably do this. If it takees an awful lot of time to travel to the main trade hub, people will build local tradehubs instead.
If you ask me, the system eve uses could be directly translated into a ground based game. You would have to let go of custom quests though and invent a well working quest generator system instead. You'd have to let go of the linear raiding and leveling progression system, too, so people don't let your starter zones crash on the first day, and so there is a motivation to visit zones again. Also, you'd have to find a good way to build large areas of land without dev interaction, seed them automatically with trees, animals, and ressources, and then maybe do some tweaking manually.
For this to succeed, you will have to go with a well executed sandbox model. Crafting and world shaping would have to play a large role, with territorial wars between clans over ressources and strategical points.
What i'm speaking of is basically a larger, more polished version of wurm online. The only problem i see there is player congestion, which has to be avoided. The key to this is ressource distribution and travel times.
p.s. short summary of the eve server:
Every physical blade server can run several nodes. Each of those nodes can run several zones (starsystems). Each player is connected to a proxy server, which manages his movements between zones. Each zone can run on one cpu max (hard limit in python which is biting ccp in the rear now) Each node is connected to a very, very mighty database that uses a ramsan as mass storage. The client is just a dumb terminal.
Ever since EQ and UO invented the 'shard' design of multiple, unconnected servers every designer thinks its a standard. I think its garbage. Look at EVE, which best represents it's success. The community of the ENTIRE game is united. Games with servers arn't really virtual worlds, but rather hosted instances. How many times have you found a RL friend that plays the same game as you, but then pops up "Oh, I player on X server, sorry." That's just despicable to me. We need game worlds, if you play So-and-So Online, you should be united in a comminuty with every other player of that game, not separated by 10 year old design rules. The shard idea was made when every PC ran dialup. The technology can handle it, the problem is that the trend is running too hard, devs are afraid to change. In most MMOs, you can walk through an area for ages and never see another player. The worlds are HUGE. A good example is the recently release WAR. Even on the highest pop servers you barely run into anyone, and the game has like 30 shards. EQ2 is bad about this too. And these devs refuse to merge servers because they think its a PR nightmare. The most important part of an MMO is high population. The multiple share design needs to be updated, it's no longer a viable design choice. Make bigger worlds, not smaller ones that you can break up.
Hey tell that to Turbine for AC1. They still haven't merged their worlds and they have maybe a few hundred people playing in each now left.
Let's get things straight. One server does not mean one computer hosting the game. It means a cluster of computers connected together.
So on weekends, when people are shopping and lagging out JITA, the game still remains unlaggy in other region. Just a few weeks ago, CCP made some important upgrades to some of their cluster.
However, here's the thing...
EVE has around 30 000 people online on weeknights and 40 000 on weekends. In EVE, a single solar system is the size of the entire WOW world. Sure, it's mostly space and such but soon, we will have stations and planets to walk around as well. Now a game like WOW has maybe 60 zones right? In EVE we have over 5000 Zones. Most of them are player controllable.
Sadly, I doubt EQ, WOW, Darkfall or any other MMO aside from EVE, MAnkind and Dune (if it still existed) can hold 30K plus people on one server.
Let's get things straight. One server does not mean one computer hosting the game. It means a cluster of computers connected together. So on weekends, when people are shopping and lagging out JITA, the game still remains unlaggy in other region. Just a few weeks ago, CCP made some important upgrades to some of their cluster. However, here's the thing... EVE has around 30 000 people online on weeknights and 40 000 on weekends. In EVE, a single solar system is the size of the entire WOW world. Sure, it's mostly space and such but soon, we will have stations and planets to walk around as well. Now a game like WOW has maybe 60 zones right? In EVE we have over 5000 Zones. Most of them are player controllable. Sadly, I doubt EQ, WOW, Darkfall or any other MMO aside from EVE, MAnkind and Dune (if it still existed) can hold 30K plus people on one server.
Yes but remember, the zones aren't really anything other than a wallpaper background and of course whatever items populate the space.
Granted, the Eve server clusters seem to be very impressive (what did that article say? ONe of the few super computers being used by a gaming company?
I highly doubt the Eve game is going to have highly in depth planets to wander around. Once they have to build worlds they will run into all the issues that any other game has.
To that end, I believe they are only making space stations for players to wander around so it will be very interesting to see how they handle that. Again, I highly doubt a space station will be able to accomodate 5,000 players at once.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I can count the number of competently launched MMORPG's in the last 5 years with multi servers and instances, on one hand.
Until devs master that, I seriously doubt you will see a whole lot of "1 server designs". At the rate these games are failing its a wonder anyone is even bothering to make them at all anymore.
Let's get things straight. One server does not mean one computer hosting the game. It means a cluster of computers connected together. So on weekends, when people are shopping and lagging out JITA, the game still remains unlaggy in other region. Just a few weeks ago, CCP made some important upgrades to some of their cluster. However, here's the thing... EVE has around 30 000 people online on weeknights and 40 000 on weekends. In EVE, a single solar system is the size of the entire WOW world. Sure, it's mostly space and such but soon, we will have stations and planets to walk around as well. Now a game like WOW has maybe 60 zones right? In EVE we have over 5000 Zones. Most of them are player controllable. Sadly, I doubt EQ, WOW, Darkfall or any other MMO aside from EVE, MAnkind and Dune (if it still existed) can hold 30K plus people on one server.
Didn't Jita get brought to it's knees after that change? Sure the numbers are impressive on how many are on a system at once.
But what is the average player per zone? Number of zones/Number of players.
What is the maximum number of players on a zone before you can't put any more people in it?
Let them put a detailed land area like azeroth and let players abulate around it and see how many people will fit onto that area.
Didn't Jita get brought to it's knees after that change? Sure the numbers are impressive on how many are on a system at once. But what is the average player per zone? Number of zones/Number of players. What is the maximum number of players on a zone before you can't put any more people in it? Let them put a detailed land area like azeroth and let players abulate around it and see how many people will fit onto that area.
You have to differentiate between dedicated nodes, e.g. jita, and usual nodes. As usual, things are a little more complicated.
Jita, with the changes, starts becoming considerably less responsive with about 800+ players. It is a physical node, though. Taking 35k users and 5k zones, we end up with only 7 people per zone ON AVERAGE. Certainly not a lot, and manageable.
Sadly, the world is not an ideal world. People form trade hubs, mission hubs etc. And when a lot of people band together to fight for a specific ressource that is not evenly distributed, things get nasty. Eve usually starts to choke on the load of two large fleets running into each other.
This is, in my opinion, a conceptial flaw in the design of eve. The devs did at no point think of such large numbers of people in their game during initial development.
The problem with a gameworld of thousands of zones is, that people crowd up. The challenge is to stop them from doing that, so you can run it smoothly.
If you ask me, high travel times and regional "ressource hubs" could help with this. What i mean is that your world is split up in regions that hold all required ressources. Within these regions, which could consist of hundreds of zones, there could be ressource spots to fight over. High travel times would assure that people prefer using the ressources in their current region and fighting over those, or moving into another region.
So, basically, you'd end up with a quasi-sharding. While you can move from every region to another, meet friends, trade rare things, you can live without ever leaving your region. Regions are unique, but there are many of them, and all feature the same basic set of ressources. Basically, a bunch of traditional servers wit instant character transfer, no transfer fee, and people moving around as they see fit.
Eve is already roughly structured like this, but not consequently enough. As a result of this, their design has a lot of problems - with people. So, to get back to your azeroth, an eve azeroth would consist of a few hundred interconnected azeroths, which are all randomly generated and populated. Each would feature unique landscapes, paths, vegetation, but the same basic ressources. Now you could watch people spreading around your hundreds of azerothes, building regional communities, and fighting each other. Some people might find an azeroth that allows them to defend its ressources easily. They start building a giant fortress. Some other people lived in the largely flat azeroth2, decide they like the other azeroth, and try to conquer it for its ressources. This could be happening all over your new world. And stuff would matter, because things HAPPEN, they don't happen on just another shard.
Long story short, the eve way isn't the best. But in the right direction if you ask me.
Btw. actual numbers are very difficult for eve. One physical node might host several zones, so sometimes a starsystem might lag horribly with only 50 people, because a fleetbattle is happening somewhere else, or a 700 people battle runs smoothly because the other systems hosted on that node idle with 1-5 people in them.
Ever since EQ and UO invented the 'shard' design of multiple, unconnected servers every designer thinks its a standard. I think its garbage. Look at EVE, which best represents it's success. The community of the ENTIRE game is united. Games with servers arn't really virtual worlds, but rather hosted instances. How many times have you found a RL friend that plays the same game as you, but then pops up "Oh, I player on X server, sorry." That's just despicable to me. We need game worlds, if you play So-and-So Online, you should be united in a comminuty with every other player of that game, not separated by 10 year old design rules. The shard idea was made when every PC ran dialup. The technology can handle it, the problem is that the trend is running too hard, devs are afraid to change. In most MMOs, you can walk through an area for ages and never see another player. The worlds are HUGE. A good example is the recently release WAR. Even on the highest pop servers you barely run into anyone, and the game has like 30 shards. EQ2 is bad about this too. And these devs refuse to merge servers because they think its a PR nightmare. The most important part of an MMO is high population. The multiple share design needs to be updated, it's no longer a viable design choice. Make bigger worlds, not smaller ones that you can break up.
Thats why its even wursh and they design games like AoC with max 50 peeps at anytime in a instance:P
And it will get even more wursh becouse more and more mmo's need to be supported for there main gameplatform consoles:(
But im content when Darkfall will have server with 10k players that enough:)
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Comments
Not really. Just dish out some gnerated maps with a simple perlin generator, seed them with vegetation, seed animals, seed ressources, let players shape the landscape and build things on it.
The only thing that will take a lot of time and research is the terrain streaming and rendering, and the whole crafting aspect. The map itself isn't that much work..
There is no lagg in jita th-th-th-the-the-the-there is n-n-n-n-n-no-no la-la-la-la-gg in ji-ji-ji-jita
I want a 1 server design as well, and I am willing to pay my part in making it viable. What I mean is, how many people do you really think are willing to cough up some money to make this viable? EvE can do this, because they don't have a lot of objects to make you lag in space, like there would be in a MMORPG (ie. foilage and mobs wondering around constantly). So here's what would have to happen. EIther we take a huge hit in graphics, so that everyone can run the game smoothly with several hundred thousand players on one server, or everyone is forced to upgrade their computers to play the one server game with great graphics.
MMORPG's w/ Max level characters: DAoC, SWG, & WoW
Currently Playing: WAR
Preferred Playstyle: Roleplay/adventurous, in a sandbox game.
Eve works partly due to it's low poly ship models, whose only saving grace is mid range texture set ups. By low polys, I mean really low. Take a look at many warp gates. They are not circular for a reason, and that reason being the low polys it takes for that shape, compared to more of a circle. We call them isolines. From a distance they are smooth, but up close they are very polygonal.
Then you have the planets and stars. The stars are just random light sources. The planets are sphere primitives with maps on them, and the occasional torus. Astroids are spheres with displacement maps, to get the contorted shape. Nebula is a series of large 2d static particles, in a 3d space. The "space" around you, is actually a large 2d background texture map.
Finally a small secret in the build of the server itself. Each zone is on a seperate hard drive. For the pc geeks, think a large network where each terminal is a seperate zone, but as all are linked together- you get the overal affect of a sort of supercomputer. In the graphics business, this is akin to a render farm.
Put all together, and Eve has the lowest computational cost per account, of any game around. That is why they can bundle everything onto one server, because from a graphics standpoint- the cost is minimal. However, the WIS expansion, will introduce something akin to seperate servers, where each station interior is on it's own drive or network.
Take a planet based game now, and you find you have to have multiple light sources, skydomes, landmass meshes, with rocks (astroids), trees, etc., scattered across the mesh in specific areas. Then you have grass, which is going to take more planes depending on the view distance of it. This alone would tax such a hardware setup much more than Eve, thus reducing the number of accounts that can access that "world" at one time.
What's even more taxing, is the characters themselves in a world setting. You have 'x' number of character types of models that would be have to be far more polys than the ships of Eve, or the whole game would be shunned graphically. Throw onto those models armors and weapons, all of which have to be seperate models, and likewise more detailed than the guns and cannon of Eve, in both polys and textures. Now you also have to have each of those characters access a database that tells them how to animate given certain perimeters. Any animator can tell you that the file sizes needed for believable animations of humanoids and animals, is far more than a ship moving from point 0,0,0, to point 0,0,500.
All of that has to be loaded, and executed in as much a lag free time as possible, for players to be able to play the game with any comfort. To get around that, they break it up into servers (shards), to reduce the number of accounts that can access the "world" at any given time, so that their servers can execute the program without crashing, or freezing up.
Eve doesn't have nearly the same issues and thus can support a larger number of accounts accessed into the world at any given moment. That is also why you will most likely NOT have a "one server" setup on ANY world based mmo. Either there will be more graphics/animations programmed into the files or there will be more complex databases to have to be accessed as technology evolves- thereby rendering the "one server" design unacceptable.
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Tried- L2, Ryzom, WAR, DDO, PWI, Tab Rasa, Requiem, Champs, AA, JD, PWI, SUN, Dawntide
Played- SWG (pre-cu), AoC, VG, WoW, LoTRO,CoX, EQ2, DAOC, GW, PotBS, Aion, MO,APB, NASA, Fallen Earth, DCUO, Rift
Playing- EVE, Black Prophecy, TOR
Waiting for- Tera, Jumpgate Evo, WH40K, WWE, WOD, TSW
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"Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it," Double Fine President Tim Schafer said. "Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."
Agreed completely. Sharded games are a real turnoff to me.
I want a 1 server design as well, and I am willing to pay my part in making it viable. What I mean is, how many people do you really think are willing to cough up some money to make this viable? EvE can do this, because they don't have a lot of objects to make you lag in space, like there would be in a MMORPG (ie. foilage and mobs wondering around constantly). So here's what would have to happen. EIther we take a huge hit in graphics, so that everyone can run the game smoothly with several hundred thousand players on one server, or everyone is forced to upgrade their computers to play the one server game with great graphics.
I don't understand why people aren't listening. short of adopting very strict geographical limits for people, it doesn't make sense to do this.
Not only would you have to force people to certain starter zones, you would either have to instance cities (something that people don't want) or you would have to end up with a mess.
Let's say servers could easily do this. You will then either have a city that is so swamped you can't move (if it has collision dection) or a glob of arms and legs as players try to move about to to certain areas.
Eve works because it is one big open space. If a ship is someplace it doesn't matter if another ship is next to it and next to it, and above it etc. It works because players can easily be using all axis in space. but in a ground based game, you are dealing with a lot of x and y axis stuff.
In a game where avatars are going to be walking around, you are going to run into crowding.
the only way I can feasibly imagine (assuming that servers could even handle this, as space ships don't take as many resources) this working is for players to not only be assigned to certain starter cities, but they would also have t be assigned to certain areas to buy/sell, repair, train, etc. They would have to be artifically segregated.
You can't have 100 people in a building. Or, you CAN have 100 people but it would have to be a very large building. It would have to have very large rooms to accomodate players as you don't want to have a visual mess.
But in the end we aren't talking about 100 people in the same room. We are talking about thousands. How many people were playing simultaneously in Eve? Now imagine 15,000 of that number in one city. All crowded in the same area trying to do the same thing.
The flow of traffic is a lot different in a space game then a game where people are moving about on a planet.
The other way you could do it (again, assuming that servers could handle such a thing) is to instance all the shops. Because essentially, if I recollect that is what happens in Eve. you go to your port which is your own private instance and you buy and sell there.
But people won't like that. They will say that it kills immersion.
Believe me, I've tried to imagine a game with a vast vast city where if you went up to a spire, you could see usable city as far as the eye could see. But what always thwarted my fantasy was the control of player traffic.
Have any of you actually been to New York City (or a comparably large city) during a very crowded time? You don't move about at a comfortable pace but you have to sometimes wait.
Heck, I remember once, during the Boston marathon, I got caught in a "people traffic jam" and it took 30 minutes to go 20 to 30 feet.
And as we all know, players would be as equally patient.
I think if the lines to get into the server didn't kill them the lines to move about the server's cities would!
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
The thought that eve works just because the devs were able to intelligently hide a lot of polygons without sacrificing look is kinda funny.
Kainis hard-disk comment is complete nonsense, though. Sorry.
Eve has a zoned model, i think people should know that by now. That is, by the way, in no way different from a lot of ground based fantasy mmos.
This lets them split the players into independant zones, that can be processed individually on different hardware nodes. This is, still, in no way different from other games out there. The graphical processing in the client is completely irrelevant, by the way. The polycount in a scene with 100+ ships is about the same as the polycount in a crowded area in a fantasy mmo. (yes, that is a horrible generalization, but it's what i measured with ryzom vs. eve)
The only difference in eve is, that they have over five thousand of zones.
Each of those zones, or star systems, is interconnected with a few others. By travelling through them you can reach any other zone in the world. Nothing special here.
The real difference is, that ccp chose to not shard a few hundred of those zones, but just pile up a few thousand of them, distribute wealth around them so people have a choice for going to system a or b,c,d,n instead of z. This is the only real difference to a game like wow, where you level around linearly, and a zone you visited earlier in your career is not really interesting anymore.
What this means, is that they found a way to distribute tens of thousands of players around their world. Of course, this is not trivial, as the jita-case shows (1400 players was the peak). This would have to be avoided by better game design in a ground based game, and travelling times would probably do this. If it takees an awful lot of time to travel to the main trade hub, people will build local tradehubs instead.
If you ask me, the system eve uses could be directly translated into a ground based game. You would have to let go of custom quests though and invent a well working quest generator system instead. You'd have to let go of the linear raiding and leveling progression system, too, so people don't let your starter zones crash on the first day, and so there is a motivation to visit zones again.
Also, you'd have to find a good way to build large areas of land without dev interaction, seed them automatically with trees, animals, and ressources, and then maybe do some tweaking manually.
For this to succeed, you will have to go with a well executed sandbox model. Crafting and world shaping would have to play a large role, with territorial wars between clans over ressources and strategical points.
What i'm speaking of is basically a larger, more polished version of wurm online. The only problem i see there is player congestion, which has to be avoided. The key to this is ressource distribution and travel times.
p.s. short summary of the eve server:
Every physical blade server can run several nodes.
Each of those nodes can run several zones (starsystems).
Each player is connected to a proxy server, which manages his movements between zones.
Each zone can run on one cpu max (hard limit in python which is biting ccp in the rear now)
Each node is connected to a very, very mighty database that uses a ramsan as mass storage.
The client is just a dumb terminal.
Hey tell that to Turbine for AC1. They still haven't merged their worlds and they have maybe a few hundred people playing in each now left.
Let's get things straight. One server does not mean one computer hosting the game. It means a cluster of computers connected together.
So on weekends, when people are shopping and lagging out JITA, the game still remains unlaggy in other region. Just a few weeks ago, CCP made some important upgrades to some of their cluster.
However, here's the thing...
EVE has around 30 000 people online on weeknights and 40 000 on weekends. In EVE, a single solar system is the size of the entire WOW world. Sure, it's mostly space and such but soon, we will have stations and planets to walk around as well. Now a game like WOW has maybe 60 zones right? In EVE we have over 5000 Zones. Most of them are player controllable.
Sadly, I doubt EQ, WOW, Darkfall or any other MMO aside from EVE, MAnkind and Dune (if it still existed) can hold 30K plus people on one server.
Yes but remember, the zones aren't really anything other than a wallpaper background and of course whatever items populate the space.
Granted, the Eve server clusters seem to be very impressive (what did that article say? ONe of the few super computers being used by a gaming company?
I highly doubt the Eve game is going to have highly in depth planets to wander around. Once they have to build worlds they will run into all the issues that any other game has.
To that end, I believe they are only making space stations for players to wander around so it will be very interesting to see how they handle that. Again, I highly doubt a space station will be able to accomodate 5,000 players at once.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I can count the number of competently launched MMORPG's in the last 5 years with multi servers and instances, on one hand.
Until devs master that, I seriously doubt you will see a whole lot of "1 server designs". At the rate these games are failing its a wonder anyone is even bothering to make them at all anymore.
Didn't Jita get brought to it's knees after that change? Sure the numbers are impressive on how many are on a system at once.
But what is the average player per zone? Number of zones/Number of players.
What is the maximum number of players on a zone before you can't put any more people in it?
Let them put a detailed land area like azeroth and let players abulate around it and see how many people will fit onto that area.
You have to differentiate between dedicated nodes, e.g. jita, and usual nodes.
As usual, things are a little more complicated.
Jita, with the changes, starts becoming considerably less responsive with about 800+ players. It is a physical node, though.
Taking 35k users and 5k zones, we end up with only 7 people per zone ON AVERAGE. Certainly not a lot, and manageable.
Sadly, the world is not an ideal world. People form trade hubs, mission hubs etc.
And when a lot of people band together to fight for a specific ressource that is not evenly distributed, things get nasty. Eve usually starts to choke on the load of two large fleets running into each other.
This is, in my opinion, a conceptial flaw in the design of eve. The devs did at no point think of such large numbers of people in their game during initial development.
The problem with a gameworld of thousands of zones is, that people crowd up. The challenge is to stop them from doing that, so you can run it smoothly.
If you ask me, high travel times and regional "ressource hubs" could help with this. What i mean is that your world is split up in regions that hold all required ressources. Within these regions, which could consist of hundreds of zones, there could be ressource spots to fight over. High travel times would assure that people prefer using the ressources in their current region and fighting over those, or moving into another region.
So, basically, you'd end up with a quasi-sharding. While you can move from every region to another, meet friends, trade rare things, you can live without ever leaving your region. Regions are unique, but there are many of them, and all feature the same basic set of ressources.
Basically, a bunch of traditional servers wit instant character transfer, no transfer fee, and people moving around as they see fit.
Eve is already roughly structured like this, but not consequently enough. As a result of this, their design has a lot of problems - with people.
So, to get back to your azeroth, an eve azeroth would consist of a few hundred interconnected azeroths, which are all randomly generated and populated. Each would feature unique landscapes, paths, vegetation, but the same basic ressources. Now you could watch people spreading around your hundreds of azerothes, building regional communities, and fighting each other. Some people might find an azeroth that allows them to defend its ressources easily. They start building a giant fortress. Some other people lived in the largely flat azeroth2, decide they like the other azeroth, and try to conquer it for its ressources.
This could be happening all over your new world. And stuff would matter, because things HAPPEN, they don't happen on just another shard.
Long story short, the eve way isn't the best. But in the right direction if you ask me.
Btw. actual numbers are very difficult for eve. One physical node might host several zones, so sometimes a starsystem might lag horribly with only 50 people, because a fleetbattle is happening somewhere else, or a 700 people battle runs smoothly because the other systems hosted on that node idle with 1-5 people in them.
Thats why its even wursh and they design games like AoC with max 50 peeps at anytime in a instance:P
And it will get even more wursh becouse more and more mmo's need to be supported for there main gameplatform consoles:(
But im content when Darkfall will have server with 10k players that enough:)
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.