Will 10 Always Be Max Players?

Sorry if this sounds like a rude or dumb question, but I'm curious. Will our max players ALWAYS be 10?

On Uber servers, maybe. Once the server is released, there will likely be no fixed limit (or one that is easily increasable). During development, a way was found (a bug) that allowed larger than 10 player games - 40+ player games were held and worked, so there is no technical issue with a greater player count, only performance/bandwidth considerations.

I keep hearing the term 'server', what actually is it?

Will they release a uber powerful PC that can handle huge amounts of data?

Uber has said they want to allow up to 40 player games, but it will take them time to start opening that up as they need to do quite a bit of load handling on the servers to make it work properly without killing the experience for other people on the same server

no, "server" is a bit of an ambiguous term, in that in can mean both the hardware and software used to host web services.

In this case they are referring to the software.

EDIT: A good way to tell the difference is pluralization. "servers" almost always refers to the physical machines, whereas "server" is more likely to refer to the software, or both.

Think of the software "server" like a waiter, and the hardware "server" as the kitchen/cooks. The "client" is the customer, ordering things through the waiter, while the kitchen & cooks have the tools necessary for the waiter to bring out your order.

If you have your own kitchen, then there's no issue with having the waiter come to yours instead (once Uber lets the waiter off their current exclusive contract )

Large games is the biggest reason why I want server access so we can have massive games.

I am dreaming of massive games. That's the main reason I am plugging away at the clan-building thing. We have 12 people now so we are ready for 10v10v10v10. Bring it on, dammit!

IIRC it's already been said that the PA server is both computationally and memory intensive. Amazon's AWS, which I believe is where games are being hosted, has systems and network connectivity that's not practical for regular users to replicate. Put two and two together and I think people might want to re-evaluate their expectations.

For example, based on the 1 thread per player that's been mentioned in the past, even if you had Intel's latest and greatest i7-5960X, it's 8 physical cores (16 hyperthreaded) probably means a max game size of 8-12 players. And that assumes the entire machine is devoted to running the PA server; you'd need a separate PC to run the PA client.

The server specs we know of so far are fairly modest, RAM being the biggest issue (I can't find the quote right now, but we do know roughly what they are); Only one core of the current servers are dedicated to each game.

Also, a single CPU core can run multiple threads; but having them as multiple threads mean that they will spread out if more cores are available.

Atm a single core runs a game, so it's actually not that much computing going into a game. That's kinda the funny thing about multi-core CPU's, even while they get more and more efficient, the power of single cores isn't actualy that strong. Missing multicore support for games was actually a huge issue for games like SupCom.

And talking about 40 player games, i would assume those will run on multiple server simultaneously. PA dividing a match into multiple planets should be perfectly adjusted for that idea. And costwise it's not that much of a difference either. For example, either you'll run 4 games for 12 players or 4 times the computing powers for a single one.

@raevn
@temeter
I'm almost positive that past posts said that it was one thread per player but I'll be happy to admit it if I'm wrong.

I know that post, quoted it a few times myself. It's one core per game, one thread per player.

I believe I saw that too (or was it one thread per planet?), but what I was trying to say is that 1 thread is not equal to 1 core; there isn't a 1:1 requirement. For example, every process your computer is currently running is at least 1 thread.

The server rig is a computer with an octo-core CPU, and it runs 8 servers. (One game per CPU), each server has either one thread per player or one thread per planet... I can't remember which. And the rig also has 16GB or RAM.

In fact the reason the servers were doing really badly last week was because there were more than eight servers being hosted per server computer! The specs of the server hardware should mean that hosting your own server would be simple. Even a single core computer with 2GB technically should be enough. (Except there'd be no wiggle room, because servers of course steal from each other)

A quad core machine with 8GB of RAM should easily be able to host a game.

To my information "your server hardware is the limit".
They are currently working with a 10 player limit on thier servers as the optimisation does not support 40 players yet, but going towards a 40 player limit for thier servers as thier optimsiation progresses.

They literally said: "The real question is: How big a server to host the game will you have?" Can't find that cite however.

We hosted a 40 player game back in Beta, then we're about to host a 100 player game, but the servers crashed and Uber capped the players.

Typically, one has to go, overdo it and break it for everyone
Ah well, propably would have done the same.

I asume the code limit for players is at least at 256 players+spectators (unsigned 8-bit int for player/spectator ID's). I would be shocked if it was not that high.
I asume the code side unit limit is at least 9.223.372.036.854.775.807. Propably same limit for max resource storage (64-bit integer for unit ID's and resoruce counters*).
With that many units 65.536 player should be well possible. Actually even 2.147.483.647 player is possible, as long as on average nobody has more then 2.147.483.647 units (and player will fly out fast with such a large game).
Limtis per game.

So I asume we will hit hardware, scaling or optimisation limits long before we hit the code limits. Foor the time being 64-bit provides plenty of room to grow upwards, wich is why switching to that for computers, IP adresses and the like was well overdue.


*For optimal performance (anything this large scale) you have to choose your integer size to be as high as the Processor register bit size or smaller. We could use 64-bit numbers as far back as win 95/16 bit times. They just were terribly slow (4 times as) compared to a 16 bit number.

Oh, you mean this one?

The biggest limitation for hosting your own online server will be your upload limit. They've already said it requires a lot, on the order of 1 - 2 Mbps per player (excluding the person hosting in the case it is on the same machine).

I'm sitting at a sad 0.4 so I'll be mooching off other people or playing offline.