Thousand player fights?

[DviddLeff]

They keep saying this, but I keep finding it unbelievable.

I really do wonder how this is going to change the dynamics of fighting on continents; with potentially 3 times as many troops I really hope they not only have platoons, but companies as well.

[CutterJohn]

Perhaps they have some method of splitting a continent into chunks so it can be hosted on different servers? But I too am wary of the figure '1000s'.

[kklkit]

I think PlanetSide 1 was around 500 players? (498 to be exact?)
If what they say is true, that will be a double.

I also doubt if a thousand players fight is really feasible in terms of networking or population control.

[Dreamcast]

What exactly was the limit for Planetside 1?


I hope they create a map where all 1000 players just clash on an open space

[SKYeXile]

i think its possible, they did 500 in 2003, scaled it back to like 400 in 2005/6?

with changes to the netcode, more pc power, sure why not.

[Bruttal]

Well to top it off not only are there advancements in netcoding and such, but if they make this game required broadband IE 1.5up at lest then theres alot more they can do. Planetside 1 was built with dial up still in mind.

[Levente]

What exactly was the limit for Planetside 1?


I hope they create a map where all 1000 players just clash on an open space

Even the new Intel technology couldnt handle that all at once, try ask a rig from NASA to make that possible. good luck :lol:

[Bruttal]

what makes you think its a single server?, even in games where zoning takes place they have multiple zone servers. here could be done the same way. This area is controlled by this server and this mid section is controlled by this and over here in the part farthest from the first is controlled by this, then another server that just tracks everything and sends it back to the correct "zone server".

also while you may have 3000 on continent there spreed out over vast lands where 200 might be trying to secure a bunker or 400 may be flying vehicles so there in and out of alot of the zone servers or there could be just alot of people gathering for a max crash some where. from what i been seeing anything will be posabile.

[SKYeXile]

I don't think we will see more than 1000 players on a server.

the problem is as you add more players the servers load and data it needs to transmit becomes exponentially larger.


1000 is alot of people to have on one continent, like i say its capped at 399 currently, and when its full, theres more than enough people to shoot at, 1000, shits going to be intense. the problem is if they allow 3000 people on the one content, they could all cluster to the one location, and i highly doubt any server or netcode could take that.

[basti]

Their current goal is to allow 1000 players on one continent, means 333vs333vs333.
The server technology is there, broadband connections are there, its is in theory possible. The only limitation would be player rigs, but if the engine is done right, then those problems would go away as well.

In any way, we will see bigger battles than in PS1. Thats a fact.

as for servers: With one continent having a 1000 player limitation, and lets say 10 continents for that game world (server), that would allow up to 10k people on that server.
And that is actually possible, its not one physical machine handeling every continent.

on top of that, Smed explained that in theory the game could become One giant server. All they would have to do is to add enough space for people to fight, means multiple planets with multiple continents on each one.


You need to keep in mind that this is indeed not planetside 1. The limitations of the engine are gone, this giant clusterfuck of code is gone, this is all new, all fresh, with endless possibilitys. And the game is much much deeper as it seems.
I dont think we will ever end up on one giant server like eve online has it, but in theory it is possible.

[Raymac]

They are repeatedly saying thousands. And during that dev panel, when Smed said thousands he had this look on his face like "That's right, I said it."

It seems hard for me to grasp as well, but that may very well be what we have in store for us.

[2coolforu]

EVE Handled 4000+ Players.... Regularly handles multiple 1500 player battles every day.

Don't forget the exponential law of computing increase, the power of CPU's and multicore technology along with broadband speeds have come so far since 2003. I don't think a doubling of players is at all unfeasible. I don't see the disbelief at doubling the players in 8 years? The Virtual Reality engine (OFP, ArmA, ARMA 2, ARMA 2 OA, ARMA 3) has been increasing the number of players supported in multiplayer over the development of the series despite increasing graphics and hardware demands hugely.

[Sifer2]

Server technology has come a ways since Planetside 1 was new. It used to be you had to split the load up over zones with each one having certain servers dedicated to hosting the traffic in that zone. If too many players clustered in that zone it could crash those servers an potentially bring the whole world down. Or at least disconnect all the players in that zone.

These days there is new server technology that can adapt to the situation. As more players enter the zone more servers can be assigned to that zone on the fly to handle the load. If it works like this in Planetside 2 then I can totally see them greatly increasing the caps from what they were before. The bigger issue is the players computer. Can it handle that much action? They said in the Q & A that the new game engine was built for speed an designed for good FPS under these extreme conditions. So we will see.

[BorisBlade]

Yeah servers arent just more powerful but as Sifer2 said, they work differently and can adapt and basically team up to spread out the load. So servers will handle it fine. And if they designed the engine for it then thats fine too. PC's tho, 1000 animated things at once fighting away could be nuts but doable if the engine works right.

I was concerned more about if the caps are really high how do you keep the fights balanced population wise? I mean with old caps everone locked it up and you were balanced. But if pop caps are very high to near non existant then it would rarely be balanced. Yeah you could have some uber bonuses to the lower pop teams but as we all know in ps and other games those bonuses rarely work. They either encourage farming in areas where you are underpop or they are too weak to matter, there isnt a middle ground. Some new mechanics will be needed to encourage population balance better.

[SKYeXile]

your PC does not need to animate everything at once, it could just render some friendlies near you and then the 100 closest enemies.

when in planetside would the game ever had to render 300-400 enemies at once?

[DviddLeff]

Immediately after release we had a cap of 500 people per continent and didn't have an even split between the empires either, 40/40/20 I believe.

400 players all fighting over one base caused mega lag and server crashes, so they lowered the overall pop to 400 and split it evenly.

[Aractain]

Its totaly achiveable. It seems like SOE knows thier marketing angle is going to be scale so thier pushing that side of things to a max, massive seamless worlds with thousands of players is kind of hard to knock with 64 player servers.