intra player research/repair stations

[Stratennotblitz]

hopefully there can be belter colonies made by players where you can fix a ship for some money, with some level of automation of course

kinda like a space based economy!

[shdwlrd]

It's a possibility. Don't know if funds will be a part of the game, but resources can be used for trade.

[K^2]

You mean inter-player? Because I would appreciate it if people didn't build research stations inside of me. (intra- vs inter-)

For comprehensive inter-player economies, you might need mods. Given the current team composition, I would guess that it's way beyond the scope of what Intercept is planning for multiplayer. But it is well within what you should be able to achieve with mods.

[Stratennotblitz]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

You mean inter-player? Because I would appreciate it if people didn't build research stations inside of me. (intra- vs inter-)

For comprehensive inter-player economies, you might need mods. Given the current team composition, I would guess that it's way beyond the scope of what Intercept is planning for multiplayer. But it is well within what you should be able to achieve with mods.

yeah makes sense, I hope the community can run servers themselves per example a 1000 person server, I'd be expensive to run but possible

9 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

It's a possibility. Don't know if funds will be a part of the game, but resources can be used for trade.

yup

[K^2]

1 minute ago, Stratennotblitz said:

1000 person server, I'd be expensive to run but possible

Not with Unity. It doesn't scale like that. Even if you grab some exotic enthusiast grade CPU with absurd thread count on high performance cores, you aren't going to be able to leverage full performance of it, and there is no real way to distribute the load between multiple game servers without a major re-write to the core loop. If the game is well written, there isn't some silly cap on resources, and players don't build anything complex, something in health double digits might be doable. But I have a strong suspicion that you'll run into some bottleneck you can't solve with more expensive hardware before you're half way to 100 concurrent players.

Now if the game handles ships that are landed or in good "parking" orbit elegantly, maybe you can have a few hundred players have their ships and bases in the game, but you'll still only be able to have a small fraction of them logged in and actively playing at the same time. Could still be interesting from perspective of player economies if there's a good system in place.

 

There is a world where community writes custom infrastructure for this. The most mad lads thing would be a complete custom server written in a civilized language, like C++ or Rust. Problem is that you'd have to port every component, every behavior, every feature of every planetary body, make sure everything's simulated just so... Depending on how server-client is handled that can range from legendary challenge to impossible.

But there is a more realistic scenario. Say you wrote a custom server that just handles open space in ballistic trajectories. So long as networking isn't too obfuscated, that might be a weekend project. Next, you make sure that while flying solo you can still interact with your craft and update server. If the game's client-authoritative on forces applied to piloted rockets, this might be a freebie. Otherwise, a bit of work is needed. At this point, this custom server can already handle a silly number of people - tens of thousands wouldn't be a stretch running in the cloud - who are all flying in the same shared space, but can't physically interact with each other. So the hard part is solving this interaction. And you do this by running Intercept's stand-alone server for every player hub. The easy version is to have pre-determined locations where players can meet up. Say, every planet and every moon gets a server. Maybe some specific orbits of some specific bodies as well for orbital stations. Only a fixed number of players would be allowed to gather at one of these at any given time, but you could absolutely instance it. So, like, if you are on Kerbin, you're playing on a version of Kerbin that has up to 8, maybe 16 players on it. But once you depart Kerbin and go build a colony on Lathe, or something, you could be meeting players from another version of Kerbin server visiting you there. Hence one big shared world for thousands of players.

At that point, some sort of player economy would make sense, but it'd be basically up to whatever community builds all of that.

[Stratennotblitz]

12 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Not with Unity. It doesn't scale like that. Even if you grab some exotic enthusiast grade CPU with absurd thread count on high performance cores, you aren't going to be able to leverage full performance of it, and there is no real way to distribute the load between multiple game servers without a major re-write to the core loop. If the game is well written, there isn't some silly cap on resources, and players don't build anything complex, something in health double digits might be doable. But I have a strong suspicion that you'll run into some bottleneck you can't solve with more expensive hardware before you're half way to 100 concurrent players.

Now if the game handles ships that are landed or in good "parking" orbit elegantly, maybe you can have a few hundred players have their ships and bases in the game, but you'll still only be able to have a small fraction of them logged in and actively playing at the same time. Could still be interesting from perspective of player economies if there's a good system in place.

 

There is a world where community writes custom infrastructure for this. The most mad lads thing would be a complete custom server written in a civilized language, like C++ or Rust. Problem is that you'd have to port every component, every behavior, every feature of every planetary body, make sure everything's simulated just so... Depending on how server-client is handled that can range from legendary challenge to impossible.

But there is a more realistic scenario. Say you wrote a custom server that just handles open space in ballistic trajectories. So long as networking isn't too obfuscated, that might be a weekend project. Next, you make sure that while flying solo you can still interact with your craft and update server. If the game's client-authoritative on forces applied to piloted rockets, this might be a freebie. Otherwise, a bit of work is needed. At this point, this custom server can already handle a silly number of people - tens of thousands wouldn't be a stretch running in the cloud - who are all flying in the same shared space, but can't physically interact with each other. So the hard part is solving this interaction. And you do this by running Intercept's stand-alone server for every player hub. The easy version is to have pre-determined locations where players can meet up. Say, every planet and every moon gets a server. Maybe some specific orbits of some specific bodies as well for orbital stations. Only a fixed number of players would be allowed to gather at one of these at any given time, but you could absolutely instance it. So, like, if you are on Kerbin, you're playing on a version of Kerbin that has up to 8, maybe 16 players on it. But once you depart Kerbin and go build a colony on Lathe, or something, you could be meeting players from another version of Kerbin server visiting you there. Hence one big shared world for thousands of players.

At that point, some sort of player economy would make sense, but it'd be basically up to whatever community builds all of that.

a 100 players is really good, also if the devs or mods can create a good trading place like per example relay based communication from a player to the other, it'd add a lot of immersion to the game since you wound;t have to pause and go on "marketplace"

Hence one big shared world for thousands of players.

I've seen other games try to add permanent structures on worlds for visiting players, maybe we'd need some sort of reset every few months

8 t0 16 players is already amazing imo