Not sure if sharding is the right word, anyway:
TLDR: Make an official server that can hosts thousands of people by distributing the processing to several machines.
This should also be usable by normal servers in a couple different ways:
1. Allow completely seperate servers to connect such that each simulates its own star system with an instant free of charge warpgate between their spawns cause however fast the FTL is it will be too slow/expensive for inter system travel.
2. Allow seperate machines to share the load of running a server by dividing the processing according to various factors. For instance, nearby sectors are controled by a single machine while far away ones are divided between them. As a secondary thing you could also connect players to the machine which gives them the lowest ping.
There should be a master machine which handles server wide things like chat and death messages.
Presumably sectors are only loaded if a player is in them or nearby, so the most important way to divide processing is via which machine handles which players. Probably decide this with some sort of equation that has assigns a high weight for nearby players with a lower one for players that are located closer to the server irl.
If server performance is similar to minecraft with performance being higher when players ore tightly grouped, then this would change it so that the server performs best when the number of player groups is equal to the number of servers?
Hopefully you can acheive seamless transition between machines.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that if there was a single official server that could hold all players that would be boss. Perhaps with its own nice big button on the start menu. It would probably need some extra features like letting you choose a star system to start in, maybe set up quests and stuff.
I just think that it would be really cool if this was the first Real MMO voxel based game. I do not think a game is really a MMO unless all players can be on the same world at once.
And its probably easier to implement this earlier in game development.
TLDR: Make an official server that can hosts thousands of people by distributing the processing to several machines.
This should also be usable by normal servers in a couple different ways:
1. Allow completely seperate servers to connect such that each simulates its own star system with an instant free of charge warpgate between their spawns cause however fast the FTL is it will be too slow/expensive for inter system travel.
2. Allow seperate machines to share the load of running a server by dividing the processing according to various factors. For instance, nearby sectors are controled by a single machine while far away ones are divided between them. As a secondary thing you could also connect players to the machine which gives them the lowest ping.
There should be a master machine which handles server wide things like chat and death messages.
Presumably sectors are only loaded if a player is in them or nearby, so the most important way to divide processing is via which machine handles which players. Probably decide this with some sort of equation that has assigns a high weight for nearby players with a lower one for players that are located closer to the server irl.
If server performance is similar to minecraft with performance being higher when players ore tightly grouped, then this would change it so that the server performs best when the number of player groups is equal to the number of servers?
Hopefully you can acheive seamless transition between machines.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that if there was a single official server that could hold all players that would be boss. Perhaps with its own nice big button on the start menu. It would probably need some extra features like letting you choose a star system to start in, maybe set up quests and stuff.
I just think that it would be really cool if this was the first Real MMO voxel based game. I do not think a game is really a MMO unless all players can be on the same world at once.
And its probably easier to implement this earlier in game development.
