How will multiplayer servers be handled?

I am super excited for PA's release for a number of reasons. One of the big ones for me will be the Galactic War.

As such I'm curious what will be required of a server to run a Galactic War game with multiple players and teams.

My friend has several servers set up but I'd like to know what might be required to host a full-on PA Galactic War.

Oh my. There are still people who are running Windows on servers? You know every respectful game has a dedicated server for linux, even if they don't have non-windows client. That's for a reason.

P.S. And yeah, OS matters less than CPU and servers count, which you didn't mentioned at all.

System requirements wont be released until late beta/release

TL;DR - Nothing has yet been confirmed, but from currently available information hosting at home could be a problem due to bandwidth constraints.

Firstly "oh god oh god windows 7 as a server" (While I am a linux/bsd nutter, I don't take issues with windows servers as much as I used to, but for the love of sanity use a SERVER edition of windows)

Secondly, NOTHING HAS BEEN CONFIRMED ABOUT RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS. Or for that matter if the Galactic War bit will even be multilayer (from what I have read/seen i could have missed something)

In the live streams and on the forums they have been commenting so far that the resource bottleneck for the PA server is likely to be network bandwidth.

While I don't imagine this being an issue in a LAN environment where you have (as a reasonable minimum) 100;Mb up and down, most home internet connections have much less upstream than downstream. This is also not lilly that big of an issue for hosted servers (in data centre style set ups) (well, except that it will cost more to host) as you will often have high speed synchronous links there also.

On your home Internet connection however.... you may well have lots of down stream bandwidth, but your upstream is normally very small in comparison.So you may have issues hosting it at home.

There's plenty of games that have windows servers. In fact you can run a server on any computer, I'm not asking for advice on what might work better.

I'm just asking if there have been any system requirement estimates for large servers.

I think it's important to note that the Galactic War is NOT going to be something that requires a big server. The galactic war is likely going to be more like a Boneyards interface where you pick a solar system to fight over, and then start the game. The real server performance use will be in hosting those games - namely how big your solar system 'map' is and how many players there are.

They actually said in one of their updates that u can do the galactic war in a server. Having a server with 4+ people duking it out in a galaxy has to be taxing on a server comp.

Did you ever play Star Wars: Empire at War? That had a galaxy to battle over.

Fact remains that GW is ultimately just a series of regular skirmishes, GW only provides the context.

Mike

Not only skirmishes. It could be PvP as well. Uber also mentioned "server wars" (server vs server) in context of GW.

Skirmish is a skirmish, GW isn't a new game type, it's just a system to tie together a series of skirmishes.

Mike

Do people still not understand what a meta-game is?

It's a skirmish right! >_>

It's where you play with meta's right ;-)

That's something you do in private.

I would say to expect pretty steep cpu/memory requirements for the server. The majority of the state is going to be kept there.

Mavor is also talking about replays, which will also by necessity be kept server side ( to wit: if battle occurs on planet you are not currently on, the server will not send you that real time battle data, but store it server side )

So I would say, probably no less than 1G for the server. CPU I can't even take a swag at though.

Hope the multiplayer here works better than Sc2, 2V2-ok, 3v3 slow movement, and 4v4 is almost unplayable ^^

Really? I never had a problem with the supcom2 multiplayer with a bunch of people and i used to play it a lot more than most.

Skirmish is a game term that refers to "PvE" type of games. I.e. player vs. AI. GW is not only about player vs. AI. It's also about player vs. player. Please don't confuse people by misusing established terms.

You're the only one that's confused, what do you call a LAN game between 2 human players? A Skirmish. Also, GW can also be played single player.

Mike