Correct, increase does virtually only move the "sector borders" outward,
and thus the distance from one sector center to the next one increases.
Before shrinking them you have to make sure all entities are inside the new borders, or you can have issues getting back to them, as you would switch the sector before reaching them.
Also please consider the possible additional load for the server.
If you play with few players, it should be fine, but on larger servers this has a sure impact on the overall demand in hardware.
Part one of this:
If using default sectors that are round about 5km in diameter, you load a 3x3x3 sector area, and thus 15km * 15km * 15km of space, with 10km diameter, you already load 30km * 30km * 30km, which is 8 times the cubic room, and thus a lot more possible entities.
This leads to part two of the performance issues that may arise:
If you have 10 ships in a sector, an any to any collision check needs to cover 100 possible combinations.
With increased sectors and 100 ships for example, its already 10000 possible combinations.
Starmade has already a quite optimized and multi-layered system for collision checks, but you need to walk through the entities at some point.
And larger ship boxes with more turrets in them, cause more entities go into the more expensive checking layers (chunk to chunk phase) on overlapping boxes. And they also have the exponential increase with size and amount of entities.
So if you just want more space between objects of current sector size, then its fine,
if you and your players start maxing out the new space around them,
you will sooner or later experience an additional load on the server and clients.
- Andy
