Are massive fleet battles still feasible?
TL;DRThey think massive fleet battles are feasible, since servers can use many more cores and parallel network code scales well, with plans in place and player and ship counts to keep rising, though it depends on other systems too.
Yes. Yes, I think so.
Do you have any elaboration?
Yeah, okay. One of the things you've got to bear in mind is that for 3.0, the servers were running on 16 cores. So we run one thread per core. So we had 16 threads available to the server. The servers that Amazon have available to us have up to 72 cores. So obviously there's a lot more cores, there's a lot more scope for us to expand and run more things in parallel. With the changes that we made to make the network code run more in parallel, it's starting to look like, yeah, we could pretty much scale up the numbers quite well. It relies a lot not just on the network code, though. It relies on, as Rob was saying earlier, the mix of everyone, of the physics code and the gameplay code and everything working together, so that we can fill out those cores as optimally as possible. I do believe that we've got the systems coming online that will allow us to do that, such as the entity, I always get stuck on this name, the entity component update scheduler. So it's just a question of leveraging those to the best of our ability. And then, yes, I think massive space battles will be a reality.
Yeah, you can see what we're trying to do all the time. We're really just trying to push things as much as we possibly can, keep raising the bar. Like Clive says, we've got the plans in place. It's really just now we've just got to continue implementing things the way we've been doing it. We'll keep on raising the player counts, allowing more ships into the PU. And so hopefully we'll reach a point where people consider the amount we've got to be massive. So yeah, we think it's feasible. We're going to keep going towards it.