koobas.hobune.stream
What is the maximum feasible number of players in a procedural-generated, top-down 2D MMO?
I'm working on a procedural-generated, top-down 2D, open world space game. I'm pondering the possibilities, however complex they may be.
Imagine it were an MMO and was designed in a way that if you're travelling alone to different procedural-generated space towns you'd likely bump into another player or two every 10-20 minutes of game-play, in certain specific areas of the game you'd have a consistent 30-60 players or so, and some groups of 5-20 players travelled together.
I'm interested in what kind of same-server player count is feasible, and what kind of obstacles you'd have to overcome to achieve that.
What kind of effect would physics and building have, something like Space Engineers but less realistic and top-down 2D. Possibly with planets just being separately loaded areas from the main server.
What kind of effect would dynamic, procedural-generated AI have? As a possible example, if you went to a town and talked to an NPC who told you they'd be starting a new rebel group. You could go back a real week later and they've actually taken over the town and covered the place in turrets and defences. Somewhere else in the universe a couple days later another NPC you bump into mentions a new rebel group formed just over a week ago in "solar system 21b"(or something) and they kidnapped their aunt (or something) etc, etc.
I know this is a rather ambiguous, hypothetical question, but I'm not looking for an exact answer either.
This can't be answered, you need to come up with a game then ask the question;
We don't know your hardware and you can scale according to players with AWS or something simmilar, or have a dedicated set up, both have pro's and cons.
It's not about "How many players you can have" it's about how you create your game to hold the players, some $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$Os pass expensive packets some don't so it would make sense the ones that pass as little data as possible would hold more players.
Networking is quite difficult to do it well, I wish I had the answer for you and say X players could play at the same time, but this is a specific case for each game, that can only be understood with testing and logical analysis of all data.
Theoretically you could have "infinite", EVE's server houses over 300,000 players with a peak concurrent user record of over 40,000. But that comes down to the design of the gameplay and tech.
Physics, rendering, is all done client side. Procedural generation, ai / NPC , world systems, validation is done server side.
You are not limited to amount of players playing only on the same server. With the use of "Distributed Systems" you can potentially have thousands of players playing at the same time. The user wouldn't even know that multiple servers exist, it would all seem as it is just one server. Read up on Spatial OS and the technology they use, it's a framework that implements such a system. It really depends how much time and effort you are willing to put into this. If you aren't bothered about limit of the players then you can get away with one or a couple servers. It all comes down to the design of your client, how much data and how big the packets will be sent to the server. Look at Spatial OS, and Life is Feudal MMO.
