I need some advice as my server is growing fast, newcomers buying the game I need to alter the experience gain level, is there anyway of doing this ? Please reply asap. Many Thanks, Regards, Maxumous
I run Liberland which has consistently been the most populated server since we moved to dedicated hardware in an actual datacenter. Akua used to fill up in 4-5 days when we were using a GSP like pingperfect but now it fills up in 4-5 hours (meaning 100 base limit is reached), which is incredible! I have studied this and I believe the reason to be that people sort the server list by population and tend to join the most populated server first. Currently we receive around 50 new unique players each day but the percentage that stay drops off soon after a wipe once Akua starts looking like a trailer park. The number of new players each day remains unchanged but they are no longer staying due to Akua being full. Liberland has added additional planets to help fight this problem, so on our server Akua orbit has two breathable worlds. Many players have embraced the job of taxi driver and spend their time relocating new players from Akua to other starting worlds, even going so far as to make their CVs look like an actual taxi. This really helps and has the added benefit of getting new players to interact with others more and is in my opinion the best option currently available since nobody is losing anything. Alternatively you can wipe Akua by deleting the playfield folder, starting the server under a different name with a password and not logging in, stopping it, changing it back and starting it up again. The problem with this is that anyone who was landed on Akua during the wipe has lost their ship, and everyone's bases there will be gone of course. The result of doing this is an immediate boom in population as the unchanged stream of new players previously mentioned begin to stay due to Akua having room. The problem with this is that at the current rate Akua would need to be wiped up to 6 times per day which negates any benift of allowing more bases to be built. Many want the option for alternating starting planets but even this isn't good enough. The game is designed for maybe 10 players and just is not able to scale to meet the demand for more players online in its current form. Something really clever is going to have to be done to address this and it will need to be more than additional starting planets, higher base limits, or even larger planets. The rate of growth is simply too high for any of those solutions to work which is in some ways is awesome! Some have suggested additional abilities for admins to identify and purge ununsed bases. This would help a lot since due to the number of new players that login you have the problem of someone making a base and then never returning again. Some servers make Akua PVP for a time like in the movie "The Purge" but this is not a good solution either. Our soltution of encouraging players to become taxi drivers may not be perfect but it works. I hope some of this data dump is useful.
I was on your server today for about 15 minutes. Your right it does look like a trailer park but crossed with a amusement park with towers an such. I saw so many survival contructors along the beaches it looked like a Normandy invasion had taken place. Then you called out on chat. You were going to restart. So I left. I think it's just me but I didn't like so many players packed so tightly in such a small area. I didn't have time to travel to far to see how much of the planet was covered with huts but it sure looks full. Never saw one single person or ship of any kind. Did see some chat though. Thanks for letting me look around but I don't think I will go back. To crowded for me.
Whats about the idea to have more instances of Akua? The id of the home instance is given to the player when they log in first time.
I've send Hummel a pm about the ability to select more then one planet as starting-area, would also be very helpfull for servers with lot of players.
Not worries and I agree. The excitement of landing on an empty planet vs a packed one is quite different. Your description was quite More instances of Akua or additional starting planets are not enough (see my post higher up). I'm not really sure what can fix this as it seems we've hit a dead end regarding how far the game can scale so support the populations we see in multiplayer. New players want to login to see an unexplored world not one already filled up. How can that be provided to a constant stream of new players on a single server? This is the fundamental issue at hand and I am very curious to see what long term solutions for this are even possible. Whatever it is it's going to have to be big if our server is any indication of what is to come.
Hey I have a small question, I have searched google and these forums and can't find an answer so I decided to post here. Is there a way to edit/change the starting items in the escape pod on dedicated servers? I looked around the Empyrion folders but I couldn't figure it out. Thanks.
There is no way to do this. You can mess with player inventory with a combination of creative mode and file renaming but there is no way to change what you start with in a pod.
I have noticed that more structures on planets the more the Fps goes down on the planet, But I got the idea it slows down other planets too. we was getting like 13 fps on Akua with around 70 structures. Something wrong here. it just doesn't effect one player it effects all players on server. I got to do some more testing, once I got all details I place a bug report. As anyone noticed this. It maybe due to CV's being on planets.
It is per playfield. Nothing done in one playfield can affect another from what I have observed. On our server, Liberland, only PVP areas have decent fps since few build there.
Dynamic rendering according to distance is needed. The problem is mostly that everything in a playfield you are in is rendered with equal detail even if km's away, behind a planet, etc. This is taking up much needed computing resources for something that isn't required at all. Then at least when a FPS hogging player enters a playfield and I see the big blob in the distance, they aren't ruining my gameplay experience -and have the option of warping away before they are in range to drop my FPS from 60 to 4. Different situation with bases planet side, but we don't need to render bases on the other side of the planet.
There are so many tricks possible to reduce or eliminate this issue. I have been following game development since before games used any 3d rendering and I have seen this time and again. Over the years I have watched developers find ways to not render things not in the line of sight, not render the inside of objects, not render a complex object as a complex object when far away (this is what we see here among others) instead rendering a simplified version, and not allow clients to affect the server to anything like what we see currently. These and other tricks are invented and reinvented because developers use their own engine or are not familiar with mitigating these issues with existing engines. To be fair this is something they would not have had reason to expect since the multi-player aspects of this game are fairly new. Even then some of these issues do not start appearing until later on when people are building giant structures or have deformed a lot of terrain. On servers with more players this is even more of a pronounced issue. I have full faith in the developers that they will address these and other issues. After all this is pre-alpha and we're just now finding out what this game can handle.
I know allot of answers there , but honestly allot of pages to go by just for this . So my problem is , Weather i use the nogui or the dedicated.exe bat , The play fields wont launch , just a empyriondedicated.exr in the task manager , and the empyrion.exe that takes up like 700mb then stops , Previously when i tried a server it launched several empyrion exe's i assumed they were the separate playfields , nothing this time tho , The GUI also shows 0 playfields . interesting thing is i get a windows cannot find a empyriondedicated.exe , even tho thats what i use to launch and when i try to launch it a second time , it works , tho no playfields or anything
Playfields will launch only if someone is accessing the server/playfield. Akua is preloaded, though (visible from the "Available: 1" tag)
Sometimes the dedicated server wont start because theres an instance of Empyrion still running from the previous running of the game. What happens then is the blue GUI screen flashes up and then crashes and the game wont start. You have to go to task manager and manually shut down the instance still running then it should load properly again. This probably isn't what your experiencing, not sure, but thought I'd throw it out there just in case. Also , in your screen shot its shows a playfield running, if the yaml is set to a value of 2 in reserve it will have ''Available 2'' and 2 play areas will be running for people to join or connect to. You can adjust these value also , in the yaml files.
