Single Shard

[Dal]

Are there any plans to make this game single shard?

 

With the expanding capabilities in cloud based virtual computing, it isn't out of the realm of doable to break up the galaxy into servers.

 

or...

 

We as a community all chip in on a super computer with thousands of slot, and all choose to play on the same server.

 

Hell with EVE being the most popular, single shard, internet space ships game they top out at 50-60k players during peak hours and peak season.

[Ohm is Futile]

I really doubt that would work. One is that Avorion has a limited amount of resources available. Two is that standard factions do not "respawn". I suppose you could say that pirates and Xsotan are an infinite source of minerals, but that's about it.

 

Also, EVE may be the most popular single server MMO game out there, but that is probably because it's one of the few. That does not mean it's anywhere near the most popular game of its genre or anything.

 

That said, nothing's stopping you from trying to build a powerful server and hosting over a hundred players at a time. Could be interesting.

[cepheni]

The trouble with Avorion is that it calculates a lot of physics, which is why we currently would not encourage to build a server with more than 15 people online at any one time.

 

The next update will bring a lot of performance optimizations that hopefully will make bigger servers possible. We will try to optimize even further. But having ships that are blockwise destructible and differently shaped means a lot of calculation has to go on in fights.

[Dal]

Fair enough.

 

I just wanted to add that a friend and I were discussing how to achieve better performance while also increasing features, calculations or scripts.

 

We opened the galaxy map and saw that the map is broken into a 10x10 grid. If the game designers granted the ability to chunk out those portions of the galaxy into separate servers, you could have 100 servers assigned to each portion of that map grid. Assuming there is exactly 1,000,000 sectors in the entire universe, 1 server would only have to manage the calculation of 10,000 specific sectors at any given time.

 

The only thing past that is clustering, that way servers that do not have activity in them could be used to help the load for more populated section of the galaxy when needed.

 

Anyway I just wanted to throw that out there if the devs read this stuff. This kinda of design strategy would be awesome, and if they could allow it to be done, they could either build the server farm themselves or let the community build infrastructure if they had the desire.