If anyone can answer or provide details on what Clive is proposing is possible? Can server meshes and handle 1000 players? A person name Valaska seems to have some knowledge and greatly disagrees.
Long-time lurker, first time poster.
Derek wrote a good post about just this issue in October last year:
http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5949/Short answer, it's never going to happen. Long answer, it's technically possible but it's a very complex system that will take a long time to develop and debug, and they're starting on it very late in the piece.
From a technical point of view, it's not a hardware issue, it's a software issue. Sure, there are many amazing cloud computing technologies at the moment that allow you to scale server resources instantly to your computing demands, but the magic is in the software that you write to run on those resources. We're talking about a distributed software computing system, presumably with the intelligence to dynamically partition bits of the game world, to handle balancing and passing of users between servers, and to (intelligently) send relevant game world data between servers, while filtering out or minimising the passing of irrelevant data. It's not an easy job. You need to write code to do all that, in a way that integrates with the way the engine's networking functions work, and then spend time debugging the myriad of weird and wonderful emergent behaviours that arise in distributed systems (things not getting passed around, too many things being passed, scalability and performance, duplicated data, split brain, race conditions etc. etc.)
Source: I'm a software engineer who builds distributed systems (not games, but ones that do cool science with big, dangerous moving parts that can kill people if you write crap code).
This links into broader issues about the game and its development that Derek has been talking about for the last two and a half years, but which many people seem unable to grasp. Yes, progress is being made. New features are being implemented. Bugs are being fixed. Promises are being delivered on. But progress is so slow that the game, as promised, can
never be made in a reasonable period of time. Yes, maybe given another ten years and another hundred million dollars, but it looks doubtful they're going to get either the time or the money, as they're pissing off more and more backers with constant glacial progress, lack of delivery on promises and endless appeals for more time and money.
So, going back to the server meshing, it's technically possible but they're never going to finish it because they'll have run out of time and money before they do.
You find parallels in a lot of the other questionable tech products that are heavily promoted and crowdfunded, but fail before or after coming to market - the product is based on sound technical principles which are within the realm of physical possibility, but it's simply not possible to create the product due to engineering challenges, the product doesn't make economic sense or it's implemented so badly that nobody wants it. Arguably Star Citizen is all three. Possible to build but implausible to engineer (at least with the currently expanded scope), not economically viable (as the niche market isn't big enough to provide the funds required to realise the scope), and badly implemented (full of annoying bugs and unnecessarily autistic gameplay mechanics, and what they have managed to build has been done inefficiently due to Chris Roberts' leadership style).
I don't know why on Earth people want to make Derek out as the bad guy in all this. Quite the opposite - he's clearly a talented developer with a deep sense of commitment to the space genre, and indie game development in general, and he's despairing at what he sees - a development process that more than likely will disappoint everyone who backed it, if it's not a downright failure, doing serious harm to the genre, indie development and crowdfunding of games for years to come. I'm reading posts even now where people are looking at the state of "Alpha 3.0", as little as it is after several years of development, and saying "Whelp, that was a total rubbish fire. I'm definitely not crowdfunding another indie game again".
It's a total disaster and my hat is off to Derek that he sounded the alarm bells so long ago now.
He was right, and I think has already been proven so even prior to the eventual failure of the development (the ELE).
