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Server Population?
mike470
General CorrespondentMember Posts: 2,396
After shifting through the Darkfall forums, they are arguing that the AI will not be able to be as great as they say with 10k people on a server. They are saying that it is just not possible to have such great AI with many people on servers.
How many people will one server hold? If you are unsure at this moment, could you please explain why so many people seem to think this (cause CoS will have brilliant AI)
Thanks.
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In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
Comments
We had to put a VERY skilled programmer on this one task for eighteen months. Even then, when the opponent had to weigh factors and make good strategic decisions, it would pause for up to five to ten seconds while it parsed through all it's available options and made a decision.
Why am I telling you this story? Simple, to illustrate that true AI is costly and difficult to write and takes a bunch of CPU time.
As to how many people are going to be on each server in Citadel of Sorcery, that is unknown at this time. Yet, this is also one of several reasons we are not using the current standard server setup used by many other MMO games. We use much more dynamic loading and moving of players from one server to another, sometimes by player choice, other times for game play reasons.
I'm not going to explain how this all works, so don't ask. However, to head off some people from freaking out about this, you will NOT be moved away from your friends and guild members. Really, don't panic about this. It is, in fact, just the opposite. It is easier to get with the players you want to adventure with on any given day.
However, one reason that we are creating entire Reflected Worlds to handle just your group's Quest is so that we can dedicate as much CPU time as possible to your opponent's AI. Fortunately, computer CPUs are MUCH faster now then when I was on the team making that military game, and we can do a lot more with that additional computational power in Citadel of Sorcery
Jatar
We had to put a VERY skilled programmer on this one task for eighteen months. Even then, when the opponent had to weigh factors and make good strategic decisions, it would pause for up to five to ten seconds while it parsed through all it's available options and made a decision.
Why am I telling you this story? Simple, to illustrate that true AI is costly and difficult to write and takes a bunch of CPU time.
As to how many people are going to be on each server in Citadel of Sorcery, that is unknown at this time. Yet, this is also one of several reasons we are not using the current standard server setup used by many other MMO games. We use much more dynamic loading and moving of players from one server to another, sometimes by player choice, other times for game play reasons.
I'm not going to explain how this all works, so don't ask. However, to head off some people from freaking out about this, you will NOT be moved away from your friends and guild members. Really, don't panic about this. It is, in fact, just the opposite. It is easier to get with the players you want to adventure with on any given day.
However, one reason that we are creating entire Reflected Worlds to handle just your group's Quest is so that we can dedicate as much CPU time as possible to your opponent's AI. Fortunately, computer CPUs are MUCH faster now then when I was on the team making that military game, and we can do a lot more with that additional computational power in Citadel of Sorcery
Jatar
Having gone through the website if the content is truthful, this game will have one instance if the world has 9,000,000,000 Km , lots of instancing and room for content and a year real time if someone is daft enough to walk the world. Obviously the world will be spread over a large computational cluster. To have a world that size for 2k users wouldnt make sense would it ?
________________________________________________________
Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
We had to put a VERY skilled programmer on this one task for eighteen months. Even then, when the opponent had to weigh factors and make good strategic decisions, it would pause for up to five to ten seconds while it parsed through all it's available options and made a decision.
Why am I telling you this story? Simple, to illustrate that true AI is costly and difficult to write and takes a bunch of CPU time.
As to how many people are going to be on each server in Citadel of Sorcery, that is unknown at this time. Yet, this is also one of several reasons we are not using the current standard server setup used by many other MMO games. We use much more dynamic loading and moving of players from one server to another, sometimes by player choice, other times for game play reasons.
I'm not going to explain how this all works, so don't ask. However, to head off some people from freaking out about this, you will NOT be moved away from your friends and guild members. Really, don't panic about this. It is, in fact, just the opposite. It is easier to get with the players you want to adventure with on any given day.
However, one reason that we are creating entire Reflected Worlds to handle just your group's Quest is so that we can dedicate as much CPU time as possible to your opponent's AI. Fortunately, computer CPUs are MUCH faster now then when I was on the team making that military game, and we can do a lot more with that additional computational power in Citadel of Sorcery
Jatar
Having gone through the website if the content is truthful, this game will have one instance if the world has 9,000,000,000 Km , lots of instancing and room for content and a year real time if someone is daft enough to walk the world. Obviously the world will be spread over a large computational cluster. To have a world that size for 2k users wouldnt make sense would it ?
Are you infering that this game won't be popular? If you ask me once this gets more publicity and people find out about it's unique system's, people are gonna want to go and see if the new change will work.
We had to put a VERY skilled programmer on this one task for eighteen months. Even then, when the opponent had to weigh factors and make good strategic decisions, it would pause for up to five to ten seconds while it parsed through all it's available options and made a decision.
Why am I telling you this story? Simple, to illustrate that true AI is costly and difficult to write and takes a bunch of CPU time.
As to how many people are going to be on each server in Citadel of Sorcery, that is unknown at this time. Yet, this is also one of several reasons we are not using the current standard server setup used by many other MMO games. We use much more dynamic loading and moving of players from one server to another, sometimes by player choice, other times for game play reasons.
I'm not going to explain how this all works, so don't ask. However, to head off some people from freaking out about this, you will NOT be moved away from your friends and guild members. Really, don't panic about this. It is, in fact, just the opposite. It is easier to get with the players you want to adventure with on any given day.
However, one reason that we are creating entire Reflected Worlds to handle just your group's Quest is so that we can dedicate as much CPU time as possible to your opponent's AI. Fortunately, computer CPUs are MUCH faster now then when I was on the team making that military game, and we can do a lot more with that additional computational power in Citadel of Sorcery
Jatar
Having gone through the website if the content is truthful, this game will have one instance if the world has 9,000,000,000 Km , lots of instancing and room for content and a year real time if someone is daft enough to walk the world. Obviously the world will be spread over a large computational cluster. To have a world that size for 2k users wouldnt make sense would it ?
Are you infering that this game won't be popular? If you ask me once this gets more publicity and people find out about it's unique system's, people are gonna want to go and see if the new change will work.
This thread is about server population, and based on the landmass and high level of instancing and reading the website I am surmising it will be a single instance world.I think this game will be very very popular, group sizes limited , quests generated on player faction, bility to travel and discover adventure saving towns ... Ability and teaching and learning. Groups limited to 8 players. This to me is heaven lots of community based features, no raiding no upper level limits so a scaling development system.
________________________________________________________
Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel