Idea for maps, and other things.

[Big-Al]

=D.C.L.I=Everest Wrote:I have an idea! Why not just make the game?

:rofl:, what do you think they are doing huh?

anyway, it was jus a forum moderator that started this thread... not an actual dev team member... and besides, they are making thing game for free you know?

still.. i agree, would be nice if they finished it already


:wall:

[The_Punisher]

I definately think that the team is underestimating the amount of people that will be playing here.

[sono]

OK, Pun. How many would you estimate to play our first release? Not trying to argue, just see someone elses opinion.

[Gego]

It depends on another work -> advertising. The game is going to be 100% indepedent and free. IMO a lot of players will at least download and try it. They just have to find it. The better TTTR will be the more people will stay. Just my 2 cents.

[The_Punisher]

The better it will be, the more people will stay?

Not at all. Not even close.

The closer you make TTR to counterstrike, the more people you\'ll have. But I don\'t think you want to compromise TTR that much.


If you hit up sights like IGN, 3DGamers at least, you could have at least 500-1000 people for 2-3 weeks. Afterwards, it would probably filter down to 200-300 who will stay around for a while.

Another problem would be building up a fanbase and a server base. You would need people promising to have servers up, or have at least 3-4 big servers running at release.

I\'d avoid linking of the servers. How would they be linked, and for what reasons?

[Reno]

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.

[Gego]

Was it used in any game?

[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

[Big-Al]

could VMware be used to creat virtual servers?

[Reno]

Well one thing we had been looking at when dealing with the zone based system(though mind you, we mean simply zone based when we talked about this, not linked servers)is you\'d load say, a + shape on the grid of zones, so while the only thing your completely keeping track of is the center zone your in, the other zones that are adjacent will maintain checks on important things that need to be tracked. So once you step into one of those zones, it\'d load the non critical stuff(debris, particles, blah blah) and you\'d be off.
Also, dealing with cross zone behaviors; mind you, these zones would be pretty big, say taking up all of a town square and the like, so worrying about cross zone peculiarities isnt a massively critical issur, but is something that needs to be kept a check on yes
Also, as said, there\'s some facets to the system we havent checked in depth yet, so we still need to look at what else it\'s capable of doing it that way, but it is *very* promising to say the least.
@Al
Hmm, i dont know actually. It\'s a possibility, but arent the VM\'s still going to be running off of their parent server\'s bandwidth?
Given, if you get enough of it for the parent server, it would be feasible, so it might be worth glancing at, but as of, i\'m not sure.
Interesting suggestion though