A question for the Dev's or anyone savvy with game coding

[Hunters' Moon]

In a 3D game enviroment,how expansive can an online world become? Is there a limit on how much land can be added before it becomes too much for the servers to handle.

 

[Sir_Bolo]

If you try to cram all players on the same physical machine you will hit a limit eventually.
But you can split the game world in different subservers and continue to expand the map indefinitely by adding new subservers.
The transition between different zones can be through a portal, or it can be "smooth" - exactly as in 2D online games like UO.

 

[Jeremy]

"The servers" is the vague part of your question - depending on how you set up the world, you can expand quite a bit. EVE Online has a single-shard setup that uses a massive server farm to run, Guild Wars has entirely small (population-wise) instances, WoW is mostly non-instanced common areas with some instances, Age of Conan and City of Heroes have loading-screen transitions between areas - there are nearly as many ways to build a large world as there are worlds.

 

[Vyal]

Like Jer said, all depends how it's setup. You could have a world that isn't one gaint map and that would have limits on the other hand you could break it down to maps and have different servers for different sections of the world basically you could have unlimited maps that way and it could never stop growing. www.everquest.com is a good example.

 

[Hunters' Moon]

Thanks for the replies guys

 

[EnigmaMaitreya]

In a 3D game enviroment,how expansive can an online world become? Is there a limit on how much land can be added before it becomes too much for the servers to handle.

I would disagree that the ambiguous part of your question is "Server(s)".

It is the definition of "online world". This term is NOT a single thing or if in your context it is, i.e. the Land part of your question, then by all means the expansion of the world is limited by the Disk Drive and not any specific Server configuration as you only have land and nothing else.

Now if you start layering the definition of an Online World then it will be one or more of these layers of definition that will be the limiting factor and to some extent the definition of the server(s).

 

[DHMagicMan_1]

An engineer from Eve-Online posted a blog about the hardware setup running their "Single Instance" world... if you havn't played Eve... the world is MASSIVE and the number of "systems" and planets etc is impressive... as is, aparently the number of servers (blade servers) it takes to run their setup...

Link for more info... http://www.eve-online.com/news/newsOfEve.asp?newsID=610

 

[Mitzlplik_SP]

I would disagree that the ambiguous part of your question is "Server(s)".

It is the definition of "online world". This term is NOT a single thing or if in your context it is, i.e. the Land part of your question, then by all means the expansion of the world is limited by the Disk Drive and not any specific Server configuration as you only have land and nothing else.

Now if you start layering the definition of an Online World then it will be one or more of these layers of definition that will be the limiting factor and to some extent the definition of the server(s).

Aaaaaalrighty than.