Idea for maps, and other things.

[Roy]

Reno Wrote:What we mean by linking the servers, is basically take the map, and chop it up into zones, where a server is in charge of the zone.
When you load the zone, you load the info that particular server has to offer, and as long as your in that zone, you\'re on that server. The most basic explination of that system anyways.
What we can do from there, is dynamically let servers host zones, like if a server is in a zone that has no people, and someone walks into a zone that doesnt have a server, the server can host that zone.
What this means is that if you maintain a 128 person player cap per server(in this case, a zone) and have several zones spread across the map(ie, a city) you could have many hundreds of people in the same level(and they could move between zones at will) while keeping very cheap, less than \'zomg awsome\' powered servers to do the work.
There\'s also stuff to do player balancing if a server gets too full and the like as well, so the system would be massively flexible.
And if you had quite a few servers you could create a near infinite player cap.

Sounds good. I was wondering though what those zone limitations would be, ie: open areas cannot be chopped to prevent extra lag and/or weird behaviours from bullets when crossing zones, queues or wait zones for players that want to access a certain zone that has reached population limit, prediction of zone hopping so it can be done \"on the fly\" without significant delay and last but not least, communications between servers so that there isn\'t any contradictions among servers when checking the player status (location, stats, etc).

In short... the very basic mmo rules it would have to meet in order to run properly but with very limited bandwidth in comparision.

I know this is not the main goal but it\'s something that I\'ve always thought it could be doable, in theory at least