If this wasn't coming from a nearly half billion dollar squandering piece of vaporware that's enriching a family of grifters, I could see this as a brilliant teaser for a space sci fi Lovecraftian horror game.
If this wasn't coming from a nearly half billion dollar squandering piece of vaporware that's enriching a family of grifters, I could see this as a brilliant teaser for a space sci fi Lovecraftian horror game.
How does that even happen?
Because, very roughly, the one server is handling every action that happens and every object that spawns at once, and as the server ages those things build up in memory because they're being actively managed (until quite recently they'd be loaded as objects even if no one was anywhere near them) and clog the server, meaning that after a few hours AI and other cycles like trade begin to bug out and switch off as the server tries not to crash.
This is supposed to be solved by "Server meshing" which in fairyland will allow thousands of players to dynamically play together as multiple servers shift the loads. As of last year they were still trying to get two servers to connect to each other. They've been trying to do this for about 5 years now
Server meshing is possible because thats how eve online has operated. The star system is divided up by a bunch of servers so hopping from one area to another effectively disconnects you from one and connects to another when going through the space gates.
However eve online only manages to achieve large player numbers on a single server cos the game itself is super simplistic and operates at a tick rate of 1 (lul) and even then it struggles to handle large numbers of player is single zones during big fights.
Star citizen trying to do the same thing with i assume 64 ticks and much more complex interactions with the game world is most likely impossible.
eve has built in server lag as a feature, super cool but hilarious at the same time
Its pretty clever as well. The entire game is built around the feasibility of players all over the globe being able to connect to a single server cluster. But unlike star citizen i imagine they actually thought about the architecture first instead of running on a kickstarter pipe dream like sc.
Why do multiplayer servers still suck shit when handling more than like 100 players at a time? What's the bottleneck exactly? The network?
Cost mostly. Its a constant struggle between balancing performance and cost of running the servers. As we all know companies dont like cost only profit which is why any game that uses dedicated servers should allow community run servers.
Also the server needs to distribute each players interaction with all other players.
And handling serverside logic over clientside to prevent hacking.
Many things but mostly just cost. Having worked briefly even in simple games the servers are always more underpowered than they should be even for crappy games i made where it was just single users interacting with the server.
What's the biggest cost though? The bandwidth or the actual CPU calculations that need to be done server-side?
Cpu and ram. Bandwidth comes pretty cheap and games dont need much.
Modern game servers will do lots of validation to see if the client is doing something "legal" before shipping that out to others. Lots of processing work needs to happen for every tick in the simulation which means the more players you have the more validation and processing per simulation cycle. Then there's various lag compensation and other faff.
Bandwidth wise though not much data is being sent at any one time. Most data centers can handle massive file transfers whereas games use very little data in comparison.
Also limitation in the possibilities of netcode itself. Networking for games is hard. And the limitation of physical distance and speed packets can transmit over a network.
Some problems can never really be solved.
Planetside 2 could handle hundreds of players. Idk why no one else has tried it. That was back in 2013.
probably exponential complexity when they start interacting with each other