Not really sparking a discussion or anything, but back when I first joined, the server used to be packed to the brim with players even on off-times, and I really wondered what was holding the server back from being able to open up its slots to higher numbers.
Was it the hardware that was the limiter (the server, etc.)? Was it the software?
Just curious, and am hoping a dev could answer this question.
I'm not an expert on the server, but I like to pretend I'm familiar with how Freelancer works.
Basically, the code just can't handle it. With a bit of jury rigging, you can get 200+ players on a server, but it's pretty, uh, straining on the game and the server. Instability creeps up, and can lead to sudden crashes, or large amounts of lag.
I think the main reason to pop cap is lower now is because the population just simply doesn't reach the numbers it used to.
You cannot surpass 225 players without creating serious stability issues, as FLServer.exe does not support multithreading and consequently cannot take advantage of more than one CPU core at a time. Also, hi Saronsen.
The original FLServer files had a limit of 128 players. We hacked it to 200 originally, then later 225. Beyond that you get Weird Stuff happening and a lot of crashing. Like Durandal said, it's largely a matter of Freelancer's multithreading being mediocre at best (technically Freelancer and FLServer are multithreaded applications but simply having a handful of threads does not mean you can use a handful of cores, and if anyone would like to know the reason for that in detail I can recommend you some great books on operating systems design and programming for concurrency).
It's kind of like the characters per account limit in a way. The game defaulted to 5, we hacked it to 10, found there were corruption issues, and started lowering it until accounts stopped being corrupted on the regular. Why does it happen? Because FLServer just isn't that good. It was barely meant to do the things it was able to do at release, and frankly it's a miracle it's accepted all the stuff we're doing with it now with as little maintenance and upkeep as there is.
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