Will the number of players allowed into an instance change depending on location? For example, would it be possible to interact with more players on a station or planet side since there are no ship assets to render?asked by AragornBH
TL;DRPlayer counts per instance may vary by location and networking; on-foot FPS should allow more players (around 32 is likely) than ship combat, and shared-server approaches are being explored but are early.
It sort of all depends. I would say we haven't quite, this is something we're actively working on. It's very possible that the number of players in any one area would potentially be dependent on the kind of location they're in, and also the networking. To give an example, on FPS, we're pretty sure we'll be able to have say 32 players in some of the aspects of it, and that's because it's just a player and a character, vs. the ships are much harder, because a ship is, first of all you have a player inside each ship, and a ship is very complicated, has lots of moving parts, and all those moving parts require some level of networking simulation, so more complicated items like spaceships take up more network bandwidth. So if it's just people running around on foot, in an infantry environment, the odds are that we should be able to have more of them than we would, once we're in space and people are dogfighting. And that's not to say that we're not trying to push it to get as much as we possibly can, we're playing around with, I think I've mentioned this before but, the possibility of having servers in the same dataserver all working together on the same area or instance, and essentially sharing the workload of simulating that area, and sharing the workload of telling the clients they are responsible for where they are in the world. And doing that, we'll potentially be able to have more players in one area than one server could simulate, this is still very early, but that's one of the approaches we're looking at. But it's definitely probably the case that there's going to be more players in certain areas than others. I know that when we do the social module, Tony's aiming for a lot more players than we have right now out in space, and actually more than they have in the top end of what they think they're going to do in FPS. So we will see.