Huge world like eve online
Hi
How does such a world work? With thousands of systems and plenty of ships and other objects active in all the places at the same time (becouse there are players everywhere) how can this work?
Is each players computer only concerned about the things in the vicinity? But what controlles the big picture? All the myriad of pirates for example. A bunch of server computer?
The answer might be a bit over my head but it's interessting nevertheless.
Erik
I am not a networking guru, however when doing such a programming feat, several things are taken into account. One of them is how data (packets I suppose) are sent from and to the server. What you see in front of you when you move a ship for example is the server sending back and forthm messages to increment a few variables.
The ships are, of course, stored in a database. The ones that are active are drawn similarly. All the actual rendering occurs on your computer, but the on/off switches to do things happen on the server, and don't take all that much bandwidth per-person (but it does accumulate as there are thousands of players).
I think nowadays they are concerned about finding a good way of doing the data transfer in order to minimize the usage of bandwidth.
Anyone willing to correct me incase I got something wrong? :[
The ships are, of course, stored in a database. The ones that are active are drawn similarly. All the actual rendering occurs on your computer, but the on/off switches to do things happen on the server, and don't take all that much bandwidth per-person (but it does accumulate as there are thousands of players).
I think nowadays they are concerned about finding a good way of doing the data transfer in order to minimize the usage of bandwidth.
Anyone willing to correct me incase I got something wrong? :[
ye i mean the networking hassle in such a game must be immense, but i mean the pure size of it. Even if there were only one player, the entire world couldnt be active at the same time right? On the other hand if there were only one player, the rest of the world(not seen by the player) could evolve/live in a abstracted way and not be as complex as the things in front of the player.
E
E
If I remember correctly from my time as an EVE Volunteer they have a setup sorta like this:
They have a shitload of servers, with each solar system having it's own server cluster. Within a solar system, there is a further seperation of task so that you have 1 main server and then for each location you have a seperate server. So each planet / asteroid belt / station has it's own server. The main server is there to transfer users from location server to location server. This transfer is done while your computer shows you in warp to that new location. That way, you hardly ever notice anything.
The same goes for the solarsystems as a whole. When using a jumpgate to get from one solarsystem to the next, you computer takes care of rendering the graphics of the jump. Meanwhile, while your compupter is doing that, the server side is already working on the actual transfer. That way, by the time your computer is done with the graphics, the move should be complete on the server side as well.
While all this simultanious servers-client side stuff may not work out all of the time, most of the time it works like a charm and the player doesn't even know that all that is happening on the server side.
The plus part to this is that you only ever have to transfer the data for the location you are in at a certain time. Which drastically decreases the amount of network traffic.
Mark
They have a shitload of servers, with each solar system having it's own server cluster. Within a solar system, there is a further seperation of task so that you have 1 main server and then for each location you have a seperate server. So each planet / asteroid belt / station has it's own server. The main server is there to transfer users from location server to location server. This transfer is done while your computer shows you in warp to that new location. That way, you hardly ever notice anything.
The same goes for the solarsystems as a whole. When using a jumpgate to get from one solarsystem to the next, you computer takes care of rendering the graphics of the jump. Meanwhile, while your compupter is doing that, the server side is already working on the actual transfer. That way, by the time your computer is done with the graphics, the move should be complete on the server side as well.
While all this simultanious servers-client side stuff may not work out all of the time, most of the time it works like a charm and the player doesn't even know that all that is happening on the server side.
The plus part to this is that you only ever have to transfer the data for the location you are in at a certain time. Which drastically decreases the amount of network traffic.
Mark
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