The live servers are currently set to 32 plays - but this is an arbitrary default setting at the moment.
The ultimate value will be determined by:
Performance of the hardware servers (CPU, RAM and Networking) we deploy the 1.0 servers on.
The # of worlds we run per hardware server.
The # of entities (mainly creatures) we spawn per player on the world.
The # of global entities (eg. titans) we spawn per world.
The sophistication of the code (mainly AI) executed per entity.
The desired density of players per world
The size of the explorable landscape.
So even if we could get 1000 players on a single world, we may choose to put 10x the number of servers on the same hardware because we feel like 100 players per world is a better balance.
More interesting World variation and getting players moving between worlds is an interesting and more unique aspect of Boundless.
The whole Home, Moon, Ring world naming is an initial setup of the universe graph. But this is going to evolve to become more complex once we start increasing the # of worlds online. There’ll be more challenge exploring the worlds and their relationships.
This is really pitty in my opinion. I always liked the idea of “big cities” and with “only” 100 players on one world it will be hard to find 20 people to start a city. I also hoped for “huge” worlds (16k x 16k in size or even bigger). At the moment the worlds are really crowded but nearly everybody builds his own base alone.
I feel you on this one. Given how many worlds (servers) we’ll be having, this really seems to be an inevitable exchange.
I guess one why to compensate on this one is for the devs to allot few resource powerful servers in which its purpose is that it is the “Capital” world of the universe and we are all living in the “Province” worlds. Living in the capital shouldn’t be allowed so that we wouldn’t just choose it as our home world (Not sure how can this be implemented though. Maybe only allow guild beacons?).
Personally, I think it would be better if the total number of players per world was as high as possible, as this is surely a key factor with guilds competing to become the “capital city” and gain the prestige / rewards that come with that?
I’d also expect some guilds to consist of at least 30+ members, with some more dedicated ones maybe even reaching the 100+ member level. Minimising the number of players per world, would effectively minimise competition as well.
Theoretically, you could also potentially prevent any competition at all by making sure you had enough players in your guild to take up most of the available player slots on the server at any given time.
I guess part of the decision would also come down to sustainable hardware costs versus active players.
These responses seem to ignore the point that this is a balancable value. We can trade off the number of players versus the number of active entities per player. I didn’t say 10, 100, or 1000 was the answer.
However, world size is not connected to the number of players and entities - but an issue of generation time, player desity, bandwidth and caching. Making the worlds 100km x 100km is trivial todo, but all things being equal would greatly reduce player density.
But given the options of (say):
1 world with 1000 unique biomes and 1000km x 1000km, or
10 connected worlds each with 100 unique biomes per world and 100km x 100km, or
100 connected worlds each with 10 unique biomes per world and 10km x 10km.
Which do we prefer?
Do we want to planet hop and explore a universe, or biome / island(?) hop and explore a world.
I think “world hop” should feel special. I know the “world tier concept” is not longer used but I think, that the start worlds (easy worlds) should be really big (e.g. 1000km x 1000km) and allow a lot of players to settle. The harder worlds with special resources should have an alien appearance and they can be smaller or even tiny (eg. 5km x 5km).
did you check to see if your graphics settings changed when you upgraded? I found that my settings defaulted back to medium after I installed the test version.
