Sector Internal Clocks?

[Sellywelly]

I remember reading somewhere that you were thinking about what to do about sectors with player stations. Perhaps you could have an internal clock running when the sector unloads, and when the sector is reloaded, the clock is applied to the station, generating the resources/money it would have generated had you been there? I don't know if it's possible with the engine, but it was a thought I had.

[Kane Hart]

It does sound like Koonschi has some sort of plans for the future.

 

It sounds like the Internal clocks would not really work well. It sounds like we almost need some sort of fake simulation happening on a seprate thread and stuff if this is where the game is going.

 

Rather then it physically happening in the game world and being precise it would be maybe simulated in the background with a formula. Unfortunately few people have come to me thinking w as like X3 and their going have production chains and stations, and auto miners, and the works :( Not really going to happen or at least not yet.

 

But I do know Koonschi is going to do something with stations at least.

[koonschi]

Solution will probably be to keep sectors with player crafts alive as long as the player is online.

[Kane Hart]

How taxing is a system footprint wise do you have any kind of numbers? I'm a bit interested in this if you happen to know off the top of your head.

[koonschi]

Depends on a lot of factors. A sector with nothing in it will basically have 0 footprint, a few ships and stations (like most sectors) should be a few ms max. This changes dramatically when battles are going on, where it can grow to 20 - 40 ms easily. We're doing our best to keep it below 50 ms, even during large battles.

 

This goes for sectors with players. Sectors without players however are very cheap, since they're only updated every 0.5 seconds and collision is mostly skipped. They do have a memory footprint of a few megabytes (again, totally dependent on what's in the sector, can be 0MB, can be 50MB).

[Kane Hart]

Thank you I assume when you say players you mean physical client in the sector? Either way sounds not too bad it's actually really good. After playing so many games like Space Engineers, and Empyrion and even a bit of Starmade you sneeze and the server is lagging. So far I have had no performance issues myself but for sure looking forward to some sort of simulation of factories and ships like you stated if the users online :)