Hello, What do you think about Eleon studio invest on mega server to make a multiplayer experience with hundreds players like Elite Dangerous with IA ships (random missions to take in station ). The game is really good but it's a shame that there are not dedicated servers with online gameplay experience with thousand players with pvp pve area like HWS server. In terms of course.
Actually a good idea but ... Financially almost impossible for a little Company like ELEON. Such 'Mega'/MMO-Server are far from being cheap. Here a bit of Info about MMO - 'Server' (not the financial factor) https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/mmorpg6.htm
HWS servers are basically already using the best server hardware you can use, and even then they don't set the max player count higher than 170 players. Even at 170 max on HWS server hardware, once the online player count gets up towards the limit, there are severe issues. Even if we make the universe smaller so there are less playfields loaded, at 170 players there are major issues starting to happen. Check this link to see the server hardware HWS already uses just to accomplish that 170 player max count. https://forum.empyrion-homeworld.net/t/server-hardware-and-cost/4357 That hardware isn't cheap, as shown in the link above. You are wanting a thousand players or more on one server? It could be done, sure, but it wouldn't be a pleasant experience for anyone on the server. It would be unplayable at best. You can already set the max player count to whatever number you want. That doesn't mean it will work with that many players though. Unless the game undergoes a miraculous amount of optimizing I don't see this ever happening (or unless you have access to a supercomputer for a server).
You'd have to use multiple servers and spread the playfields across them (a perfect example on how to achieve this is Eve Online) though i kinda doubt EGS is even built to be used this way to get several thousand players onto the megaserver. And even then it wouldn't be an optimal experience as EGS is basically not optimized in any way. I do not know how many ships fighting each other in a single playfield are enough to lag the game out completely; 10, maybe 20? Last but not least, what for? Multiplayer-wise EGS is a N+1 game. If you have 2 sides fighting each other it doesn't matter how many ships each side has as the one with more ships wins, there are no meaningful choices atm.
I did try modding something similar for both EGS and 7 Days a few years ago. Since each playfield was a separate process, it seemed like it should be easy enough. In the end it wasn't though. Had nothing but sync issues. And really, if you get too many blocks and entities into an area, it will quite easily overcome what the core client is even capable of handling. This isn't an MMO with static map areas and minimal client data. There is a LOT more going on in the game that is in turn a lot more demanding of hardware.
And I'm not convinced it would be better, maybe even worse for those that want to play singleplayer if resources and balancing go the MMO way...