4 ms·

How does this handle a load too large for a single server in an extremely small area? Say, the Halloween War in Eve or just a bunch of morons - say 10k people -

How does this handle a load too large for a single server in an extremely small area? Say, the Halloween War in Eve or just a bunch of morons - say 10k people - gather within a single small valley in a game? Sure, you can subdivide it as small as you want, but that just increases the overhead by requiring the servers to communicate more. But even if the servers can figure it out, what the client sees seems like a hard problem too.

rl3 9y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. Segmenting workloads is far from a total solution.
troymc 9y ago
I think you're worrying about a problem that most users don't care about. Improbable could cap the density if they need to, and over time they can do optimizations to increase the maximum.
- dvanamst 9y ago
  To answer eximius. In your valley battle example there would be multiple game engines handling the valley. Whereas it is entirely true that you can always find a counter-example that would break a given technology, troymc is absolutely right in the fact that those counter-examples still leave an overwhelming majority of use-cases that we can handle perfectly well with our approach.
  - eximius 9y ago
    I don't mean to disparage the technology, but I disagree with that my examples are unrealistic. I think people would love large scale battles like that.
    - dvanamst 9y ago
      No problem. You should definitely ask such questions. If you want to dive into the technicalities, see what people are already doing with SpatialOS and ask your own questions I really recommend having a look at the forums (https://forums.improbable.io https://forums.improbable.io). That said, my previous response was actually targeting your example as being a use-case that falls into the 'realistic' category that we want to address with SpatialOS. Again, I am not suggesting that you can and should pile-up 1000 players onto 10 square meters, but if you take care when defining your world's characteristics (SpatialOS's entity & components) you will be able to scale up your player density in your battle scenario to a level that significantly exceeds anything that you could achieve with any existing monolithic game server and for a fraction of the trouble as you do not really have to deal with any of the usual networking issues because SpatialOS takes care of that.

rl3 9y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. Segmenting workloads is far from a total solution.

troymc 9y ago

I think you're worrying about a problem that most users don't care about. Improbable could cap the density if they need to, and over time they can do optimizations to increase the maximum.

dvanamst 9y ago
To answer eximius. In your valley battle example there would be multiple game engines handling the valley. Whereas it is entirely true that you can always find a counter-example that would break a given technology, troymc is absolutely right in the fact that those counter-examples still leave an overwhelming majority of use-cases that we can handle perfectly well with our approach.
- eximius 9y ago
  I don't mean to disparage the technology, but I disagree with that my examples are unrealistic. I think people would love large scale battles like that.
  - dvanamst 9y ago
    No problem. You should definitely ask such questions. If you want to dive into the technicalities, see what people are already doing with SpatialOS and ask your own questions I really recommend having a look at the forums (https://forums.improbable.io https://forums.improbable.io). That said, my previous response was actually targeting your example as being a use-case that falls into the 'realistic' category that we want to address with SpatialOS. Again, I am not suggesting that you can and should pile-up 1000 players onto 10 square meters, but if you take care when defining your world's characteristics (SpatialOS's entity & components) you will be able to scale up your player density in your battle scenario to a level that significantly exceeds anything that you could achieve with any existing monolithic game server and for a fraction of the trouble as you do not really have to deal with any of the usual networking issues because SpatialOS takes care of that.