Setting up a community dedicated-monster-of-a-server

I know this might be annoying, but until you find good support for this, you could talk with a modder or two to implement a pre game add, like the kind that rolls before youtube videos, when you start the game. It is not preferable, but it may help pad the costs/get it started until its got a good player base.

I'd hope we do find at least enough people to pay for a decent "normal" dedicated server. If everyone donates 5$ to 10$ that's quickly enough to pay for one of those.

22 people doing 10$ can get there server for a month.

I wonder about using Amazon cloud servers for something like this. I tried looking into it one time (for running a website and Teamspeak server) but their pricing is based on usage and I was too chicken to try it since I had no idea how to predict my usage and therefore my cost. I'm also not sure what performance would look like.

But it might be a cheaper (and possibly superior) option, since you won't pay anything for off-hours when nobody is using it.

Amazon cloud servers per hour are an option but there core clock speeds are far to low, for PA you need 2 cores that are clocked at obnoctious rates. were shooting for 4.5 Ghz core clock rates. amazon servers are only 2.2 or 2.4 Ghz.

Well actually they got to 2.8, but let's not fall into the traps of the P4 era please. It's the overall performance of the CPU that matters, not the raw Ghz.

it's the per thread speed to be precise. Nobody is looking for a p4 4ghz.
But if you take the most efficient cpu there is than having 4ghz instead of 3ghz is a difference.
If the amazon server runs a typical intel cpu at 2.8 and we run the same kind of cpu, but at 4.2ghz you can imagine that we're gonna be faster.

I really don't understand any of this tech talk, but count me in =D
by the way, how are we supposed to send the money? I think Paypal rates would cause a big loss

paypal rates?
I've only got 10$ once via paypal and it least from my side there was no loss there xD

In, google compute high CPU, any idea of speed?

I'd be willing to chip in for this, but you'd need to go about it c arefully. Ideally, a server rent-able by the hour that you can spin up quickly would be great. If it had to be a pay-monthly deal, you'd want a rolling contract, I wouldn't want to commit for a year - and more than anything, I'd want to test the server first before committing to whatever cost. Which would rely on either one/a few people fronting the cost who are happy to lose their money if the server turns out to not work for whatever reason, or a trial of some sort from the server host.

@Bsport : what?

I can't see why a dedicated linux box should not "work". I think I know what I am talking about in that regard.
Basically I've tested this already on the ubuntu pastats runs on. No issues.
Payment for the server should be cancellable on a monthly basis, that I agree on.

I can message the company we were looking at and ask about cost reduction for advertising there site someway. Also I'll look into best group funding option for the community so that we don't lose 10% of money raised in fees and tax.

If people have EU-bankaccounts they can send me money within the EU for free to my bankaccount
outside of the EU: no idea what the best way is
maybe we can find a hoster that can be payed in bitcoins xD

I've started a list of potential contributors in the OP. Please post/pm me if you want to chip in and what amount.

I know you've already got it working, I didn't express myself clearly enough! Too sleepy. I meant more like, if the server couldn't handle the kind of games we wanted. Minor issue though, from what I've heard so far. Pretty sure a meaty server will be able to give us good games

It will slow down, no matter what server we get, as the playerlimit I have configured is 1000. Basically a highly clocked state-of-the-art intel i5/i7 will be the best we can get, but obviously not good enough for max speed 100 man games. But it's as good as it gets.

Makes you wonder whether the server software could support multiple CPUs in some kind of distributed environment. But that's probably just a silly dream of mine

I doubt it profits a lot from more than 4 cores from what I've seen.

I've been thinking about this too, but have been planing to build a dedicated (well at least 80% dedicated) box by my self for one huge game at the time only and let players play for free. More dedicated servers for huge games are always better, of course.

From my last offline play (me versus 9 AIs on 4 large planets) I noticed that my i7 4770 was never fully utilised (but all cores had relatively evenly distributed load on them). Total system ram used was 22/32 GB of which the PA server used at most 7 GB I think, and client somewhere around 4 GB, but there were tons of Coherent UI treads too... For some reason late in game the simulations did run slower until I terminated a few AI, but in multiplayer the server wouldn't have to simulate the AI, i.e. outsourcing the computations to the players brain, so the load should be less I guess.

Anyway, I've been planing to build a dual Xeon box with at least 8x2 cores (or more ...) at 3.2 GHz and at least 128 GB ram (I would use it for something else 20% of the time). But reading this thread it seems people prefer per thread speed and going with a faster (3.7 GHz) 4x2 Xeon might be better. I'm thinking about Xeons as I believe uber said somewhere, at some point in time that the game should scale (almost) linearly with the number of cores. Might be worth waiting for the new AVX-512F instruction if it's worth, too. Decisions... Will need to do some profiling and maybe ask uber before the final decisions.

I'm a few months away from realising this, and by that time I hope to be riding a 1/1 Gbit line too. What I wanted to add to this thread, besides my own plans, was that if I get my own gigabit line I'd be happy to run a community paid/built server 24/7 free of charge (i.e. no running costs) from Sweden. I'm not big on monthly fees .