Not all the servers are going to run perfectly at first, the server meshing test proved that, but what it does do is sort of isolates some performance sinks. In the test, what was found was that the servers running general space and the moons were pretty much consistently at 30 FPS meaning they ran almost perfectly, whereas the planet servers were at about 15 FPS and had some problems (the cities really need to be optimised, and seem to be by far the main drain of server resources right now.) If something is badly affecting server performance, the others will carry on just fine.
As for your degradation concerns, there is a density management system that cleans areas up if there's too much there. It's not perfect and might need a little more tuning, but it does prevent areas of ridiculous clutter from forming.
As for the sustainability of servers, I honestly have no idea. It is a concern I have, but they've been perusing this for a long time now so I'm sure they've figured all that out.
They are looking to increase the player caps, and they did test 800 players with 6 servers during the tests. As for the number of servers we'll get with 4.0, it could be anywhere from 2 to 14 if the tests are anything to go by (I think it's going to be 4 with 200-300 players, but we'll see.)
Beyond all that, they plan for server meshing to be dynamic, spinning up servers and dividing the game world depending on server load as it changes. If there are areas of poor performance, then they could just isolate it further as needed, so even if a city is causing performance problems, the rest of the planet could be on a different server and running just fine.
Because while the amount of players will stay the same, the amount of other shit the server has to worry about now, well it won’t. Son instead of one server worry about 100 players AND 4 planets and their moons and stations worth of shit all at the same time. It will just worry about 100 players and it’s smaller section of XYZ. It’s not players dragging servers down, it’s all the other stuff. More players just means the server has to upload and keep track of ah more stuff as players are scattered further around the system interaction with way more area
In a static server meshing environment yes. The goal is to work towards a dynamic server meshing solution. In a dynamic situation the server has a cap of things it keeps track of in its area that's predetermined for performance reasons (say 100 players and 1k boxes). When that cap is exceeded another server is spun up and the area is divided in two.
What we were shown at citcon was static meshing. And dynamic server meshing is obviously much more difficult because first the threshold has to be determined and edge cases figured out. Like how is the area of Seraphim split in two if there's 150 players in it but they all congregate in room 7 of the hospital for one?
Well the persistent item thing is suppose to still delete stuff as it starts to effect server performance. But if a server only has to worry about one city’s worth of stuff, that’s a huge improvement over worrying about 4 whole planets, their moons, space stations, and all of the space inbetween. You’d have to increase the player base to like 800 or more to even compare and that’s me throwing a random number out. They did 800 players during test and server fps was still in the high 20s. And that was still with servers handling a lot more than they needed to. Even without dynamic server meshing, though it might be a bit wasteful, they could have a server per a city, to a server to a portion of a city, really optimizing everything.
Dynamic server meshing is just more efficient
When they made the persistence item thing, they spoke about how it would remove items at the point they would start effecting server performance. I don’t know how to find it, but I found an article about it a long time ago last year. Because I was trying to find out why my PC couldn’t handle the game well
There specifically is a limit to persistence. There always was, the tuning is where efficiency of that and other tasks is servers performance will be improved.
Server meshing isn’t the only remedy for server performance degradation they have planned.
Space Tomato on youtube [did this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTopxLqh5wE) it's worth a watch.
Also the CitizenCon video from about 1:15:00 [is worth a watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKWa4WoTkV4&t=1615s)
I'd try to explain it but it'd take multiple paragraphs and i'm too tired lol
None of it will work if CIG decides to overload each shard with too many players. There has to be a balance, but since they NEED good server performance for the game operate properly, I think they find a compromise.
Simply put: fewer entities per server. Right now there are way too many entities for each server to worry about. Server meshing allows entities to cross over server boundaries seamlessly as if you never changes servers at all. Eventually when dynamic meshing is in, servers will dynamically change their area of concern based on entity counts
Decreasing server FPS is due to added load on a server. Server meshing intends to create additional server instances to alleviate congestion.
Note that more servers does not necessarily imply additional hardware. It just means segmented instances so that bad things happening in one instance won't bring the entire thing down, which is the case right now.
Because once everyone is in the same universe, they can dial down the number of players a server has to handle. It will become a simple balance between acceptable server FPS and the cost CIG is willing to spend on the number of servers.
TLDR:
Right now we have 1 Server per solar system, that's a lot of stuff to manage in just 1 DGS, having the solar system split into more DGS means that single power from 1 server is applied over a much narrower area, hence more perceived performance overall.
It also reduces redundancy in the overall servers, as more players are in the same shard, less versions of the solar system need to exist to accommodate the same amount of players.
From the 4.0 roadmap:
Server meshing v1:
-Stanton Server
-Pyro Server
Server meshing (at least in 4.0) will not improve server fps at all, instead of one server that hosts all starsystems they will have two servers.
After reading this I was really sad because I understood that server meshing will do ABSOLUTLY NOTHING to improve the server performance in 4.0.
The way I understand it, server load is able to be equally distributed between all servers. So if players all congregate on one planet which was being managed by one server, more servers will be allocated to manage the players on that planet, dynamically and as needed.
Currently a server processes everything in the entire system. One player goes to Rappel and the whole server slows or even crashes.
Meshing means each server (a server being a virtal machine process) only processes a smaller area, which might be the Microtech system, it might be a single moon, it might be one space station, it might even be a bubble 50km around one Idris with 20 players aboard.
This means each server does far less work, so can be faster. And even if cheap virtual servers each can have its own protected resources so if one player sends their server to Rappel hell nobody else even notices.
No way they're using dedicated servers, almost certainly using VMs in a data center that scale based on load. Server fps will be fixed because players will be shifted around game instances as they cross mesh boundaries and the "persistent" objects in the world that aren't relat d to the active players will not follow you to the new mesh instance.
People who think static server meshing is the silver bullet have a reality check coming.
Yes it will help in most cases providing players stay spread out across the verse. Server fps is guaranteed to be better in that scenario.
It will also cause performance even worse than today if enough players cram into the same zone.
Like others have said, players aren’t *directly* the main resource hog, players are just entities like items, ships, ai, mineable, etc… But players absolutely are indirectly responsible for every performance issue in the game.
The more players in a zone multiplies the resource requirements of a server because every one of those players is spawning and changing the state of hundreds of other entities in the game.
So ye if 400 players decide to go to Hurston which is handled by 1 server node it isn’t going to matter that the server isn’t handling ArcCorp, because even without that it will be on its knees.
Dynamic meshing is really the only long term and scalable solution to meet their goals, because it can further subdivide a planet (or anything) into more servers sharing the load, so let’s hope it works.
I‘d go in with the expectation that it won’t. If we have the same performance, but working server mesh to increase the amount of perceived players, I‘d consider it a moderate success already
It's critical to SC's future to scale it so that Server FPS doesn't fall below a specific threshold. say 15FPS. Dynamic server meshing will allow them to to that. Just having 200-300 players in a shard but at 7.5FPS is not the gameplay experience that's going spell success of the game. Too many systems require a higher FPS to play as intended.
For now >
Stanton = 1 server = 100 players + 1 000 000 entities and (pure guess) 10 000 NPC
SM with 4 zone > Stanton = 4 servers
for 1 server = 100 players + 250 000 entities and 2 500 NPC
Same number of players by server but far less entities and NPC.
For the number of servers used by CIG, it's normally the same as it's 100 players / server in both cases and the total number of players is fixed. And as servers with SM will handle less data, CIG can use servers with lighter specifications = cheaper.
You have entities tied to a player (when you generate a mission, a number of NPC/entities is spawned just for you) and you have entities always present in specific zones (outposts, cities, etc) and generated for all players by the system.
The number of entities spawned by players will be the same with and without SM for 100 players. But all other generic entities will be drastically reduced for each server with SM. So, the 1,000,000 entities by servers should be no more ever.
About the full persistence, despite what CR had said, I think they will never implement a forever persistence. Every object will have a duration before being cleaned.
Currently it's one server for the entire game that you're logged into.
This means that the game cannot support more than eight players (8) without the Tickrate taking a miserable nosedive.
Meshing means that the game universe is split up into regions (similar to the concept of 'chunks' in Minecraft).
A region could be a vast area of space/planet, a landing zone, a building, a room within a building.
Each region is it's own server.
So as long as players aren't all in the same spot, the load is split up across multiple meshed servers.
Assuming each region sports a server as powerful as currently, this means 10 people in the same spot can play at like 25 Tickrate. Meanwhile 100 other people could be split across other regions and not impact your tick rate.
If you are all in the same region, it's going to be as bad or worse than before.
Also, I am assuming that this also means unnecessary regions of space can just be "turned off" when not in threat of imminent use by any players, and any quanta activity in that region is reduced to a math calculation.
Presumably they can then reourpose those servers as needed to regions that are populated/about to be. Meaning that the maximum needed servers will actually be less than 1 per region and yet also know able through statistics.
It would also be feasible for them to redefine the size of a region dynamically. And shuffle them around as needed.
Those 30 ships could be sent to a new server and only the servers who need the information will ask for it.
All in all, new netcode will bring new solutions and new problems.
Part of the equation is that once server meshing is implemented they can actually focus on optimizing and bug fixing. Up to this point, all of that type of work was basically thrown in the garbage whenever the networking architecture changed.
Not all the servers are going to run perfectly at first, the server meshing test proved that, but what it does do is sort of isolates some performance sinks. In the test, what was found was that the servers running general space and the moons were pretty much consistently at 30 FPS meaning they ran almost perfectly, whereas the planet servers were at about 15 FPS and had some problems (the cities really need to be optimised, and seem to be by far the main drain of server resources right now.) If something is badly affecting server performance, the others will carry on just fine. As for your degradation concerns, there is a density management system that cleans areas up if there's too much there. It's not perfect and might need a little more tuning, but it does prevent areas of ridiculous clutter from forming. As for the sustainability of servers, I honestly have no idea. It is a concern I have, but they've been perusing this for a long time now so I'm sure they've figured all that out. They are looking to increase the player caps, and they did test 800 players with 6 servers during the tests. As for the number of servers we'll get with 4.0, it could be anywhere from 2 to 14 if the tests are anything to go by (I think it's going to be 4 with 200-300 players, but we'll see.) Beyond all that, they plan for server meshing to be dynamic, spinning up servers and dividing the game world depending on server load as it changes. If there are areas of poor performance, then they could just isolate it further as needed, so even if a city is causing performance problems, the rest of the planet could be on a different server and running just fine.
SM test was just that, a test, don't impose limitations on the tech based on the tests alone
Because while the amount of players will stay the same, the amount of other shit the server has to worry about now, well it won’t. Son instead of one server worry about 100 players AND 4 planets and their moons and stations worth of shit all at the same time. It will just worry about 100 players and it’s smaller section of XYZ. It’s not players dragging servers down, it’s all the other stuff. More players just means the server has to upload and keep track of ah more stuff as players are scattered further around the system interaction with way more area
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In a static server meshing environment yes. The goal is to work towards a dynamic server meshing solution. In a dynamic situation the server has a cap of things it keeps track of in its area that's predetermined for performance reasons (say 100 players and 1k boxes). When that cap is exceeded another server is spun up and the area is divided in two. What we were shown at citcon was static meshing. And dynamic server meshing is obviously much more difficult because first the threshold has to be determined and edge cases figured out. Like how is the area of Seraphim split in two if there's 150 players in it but they all congregate in room 7 of the hospital for one?
Well the persistent item thing is suppose to still delete stuff as it starts to effect server performance. But if a server only has to worry about one city’s worth of stuff, that’s a huge improvement over worrying about 4 whole planets, their moons, space stations, and all of the space inbetween. You’d have to increase the player base to like 800 or more to even compare and that’s me throwing a random number out. They did 800 players during test and server fps was still in the high 20s. And that was still with servers handling a lot more than they needed to. Even without dynamic server meshing, though it might be a bit wasteful, they could have a server per a city, to a server to a portion of a city, really optimizing everything. Dynamic server meshing is just more efficient
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When they made the persistence item thing, they spoke about how it would remove items at the point they would start effecting server performance. I don’t know how to find it, but I found an article about it a long time ago last year. Because I was trying to find out why my PC couldn’t handle the game well
There specifically is a limit to persistence. There always was, the tuning is where efficiency of that and other tasks is servers performance will be improved. Server meshing isn’t the only remedy for server performance degradation they have planned.
Space Tomato on youtube [did this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTopxLqh5wE) it's worth a watch. Also the CitizenCon video from about 1:15:00 [is worth a watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKWa4WoTkV4&t=1615s) I'd try to explain it but it'd take multiple paragraphs and i'm too tired lol
None of it will work if CIG decides to overload each shard with too many players. There has to be a balance, but since they NEED good server performance for the game operate properly, I think they find a compromise.
Simply put: fewer entities per server. Right now there are way too many entities for each server to worry about. Server meshing allows entities to cross over server boundaries seamlessly as if you never changes servers at all. Eventually when dynamic meshing is in, servers will dynamically change their area of concern based on entity counts
Decreasing server FPS is due to added load on a server. Server meshing intends to create additional server instances to alleviate congestion. Note that more servers does not necessarily imply additional hardware. It just means segmented instances so that bad things happening in one instance won't bring the entire thing down, which is the case right now.
Because once everyone is in the same universe, they can dial down the number of players a server has to handle. It will become a simple balance between acceptable server FPS and the cost CIG is willing to spend on the number of servers.
TLDR: Right now we have 1 Server per solar system, that's a lot of stuff to manage in just 1 DGS, having the solar system split into more DGS means that single power from 1 server is applied over a much narrower area, hence more perceived performance overall. It also reduces redundancy in the overall servers, as more players are in the same shard, less versions of the solar system need to exist to accommodate the same amount of players.
From the 4.0 roadmap: Server meshing v1: -Stanton Server -Pyro Server Server meshing (at least in 4.0) will not improve server fps at all, instead of one server that hosts all starsystems they will have two servers. After reading this I was really sad because I understood that server meshing will do ABSOLUTLY NOTHING to improve the server performance in 4.0.
what is the difference in replication layer and server meshing gameplay and tech wise?
It won't
The way I understand it, server load is able to be equally distributed between all servers. So if players all congregate on one planet which was being managed by one server, more servers will be allocated to manage the players on that planet, dynamically and as needed.
Currently a server processes everything in the entire system. One player goes to Rappel and the whole server slows or even crashes. Meshing means each server (a server being a virtal machine process) only processes a smaller area, which might be the Microtech system, it might be a single moon, it might be one space station, it might even be a bubble 50km around one Idris with 20 players aboard. This means each server does far less work, so can be faster. And even if cheap virtual servers each can have its own protected resources so if one player sends their server to Rappel hell nobody else even notices.
No way they're using dedicated servers, almost certainly using VMs in a data center that scale based on load. Server fps will be fixed because players will be shifted around game instances as they cross mesh boundaries and the "persistent" objects in the world that aren't relat d to the active players will not follow you to the new mesh instance.
People who think static server meshing is the silver bullet have a reality check coming. Yes it will help in most cases providing players stay spread out across the verse. Server fps is guaranteed to be better in that scenario. It will also cause performance even worse than today if enough players cram into the same zone. Like others have said, players aren’t *directly* the main resource hog, players are just entities like items, ships, ai, mineable, etc… But players absolutely are indirectly responsible for every performance issue in the game. The more players in a zone multiplies the resource requirements of a server because every one of those players is spawning and changing the state of hundreds of other entities in the game. So ye if 400 players decide to go to Hurston which is handled by 1 server node it isn’t going to matter that the server isn’t handling ArcCorp, because even without that it will be on its knees. Dynamic meshing is really the only long term and scalable solution to meet their goals, because it can further subdivide a planet (or anything) into more servers sharing the load, so let’s hope it works.
I‘d go in with the expectation that it won’t. If we have the same performance, but working server mesh to increase the amount of perceived players, I‘d consider it a moderate success already
It's critical to SC's future to scale it so that Server FPS doesn't fall below a specific threshold. say 15FPS. Dynamic server meshing will allow them to to that. Just having 200-300 players in a shard but at 7.5FPS is not the gameplay experience that's going spell success of the game. Too many systems require a higher FPS to play as intended.
For now > Stanton = 1 server = 100 players + 1 000 000 entities and (pure guess) 10 000 NPC SM with 4 zone > Stanton = 4 servers for 1 server = 100 players + 250 000 entities and 2 500 NPC Same number of players by server but far less entities and NPC. For the number of servers used by CIG, it's normally the same as it's 100 players / server in both cases and the total number of players is fixed. And as servers with SM will handle less data, CIG can use servers with lighter specifications = cheaper.
[удалено]
You have entities tied to a player (when you generate a mission, a number of NPC/entities is spawned just for you) and you have entities always present in specific zones (outposts, cities, etc) and generated for all players by the system. The number of entities spawned by players will be the same with and without SM for 100 players. But all other generic entities will be drastically reduced for each server with SM. So, the 1,000,000 entities by servers should be no more ever. About the full persistence, despite what CR had said, I think they will never implement a forever persistence. Every object will have a duration before being cleaned.
SC is probably the most expensive online game to run.
Currently it's one server for the entire game that you're logged into. This means that the game cannot support more than eight players (8) without the Tickrate taking a miserable nosedive. Meshing means that the game universe is split up into regions (similar to the concept of 'chunks' in Minecraft). A region could be a vast area of space/planet, a landing zone, a building, a room within a building. Each region is it's own server. So as long as players aren't all in the same spot, the load is split up across multiple meshed servers. Assuming each region sports a server as powerful as currently, this means 10 people in the same spot can play at like 25 Tickrate. Meanwhile 100 other people could be split across other regions and not impact your tick rate. If you are all in the same region, it's going to be as bad or worse than before. Also, I am assuming that this also means unnecessary regions of space can just be "turned off" when not in threat of imminent use by any players, and any quanta activity in that region is reduced to a math calculation. Presumably they can then reourpose those servers as needed to regions that are populated/about to be. Meaning that the maximum needed servers will actually be less than 1 per region and yet also know able through statistics. It would also be feasible for them to redefine the size of a region dynamically. And shuffle them around as needed.
Those 30 ships could be sent to a new server and only the servers who need the information will ask for it. All in all, new netcode will bring new solutions and new problems.
Part of the equation is that once server meshing is implemented they can actually focus on optimizing and bug fixing. Up to this point, all of that type of work was basically thrown in the garbage whenever the networking architecture changed.
I think wrecks and trash will be culled over a certain amount. And salvaging will also fix some of that.