About the plans for 2 servers connected to each other...

[Agran Harper]

I officially hijack this thread (sorry) because I want to make something useful out of this instead of "silverleaf wants to play alone". Thank you for bringing activity back on this topic. I posted a ton of text on that exact thread and I'm still CRAVING for an answer, plus additional info.

IT is IMPOSSIBLE to have more than 200 on a server without the source code, because no affordable server can do it, because FL doesn't support dual core.

And that is the thing what keeps me off balance; If I read that correctly, its not the maxplayers that are limited. its the technical limitation that RUNS it. So you could have I dunno 512 maxplayers, but would need hell of equipment to run it?

It is not multicore friendly, okay. So what is our proposal? Run two different servers on different cores / computers and have them swap players via FLhook. This parallel stuff would increase the player limit. And the next person who says, FLS is not capable to support multicore:
I know that. But it is not needed for parallel linked servers. You assign FLS1 to core one, and FLS2 to core two. That is the whole point. Get a quadcore, run 4 FL servers. Get two machines with quadcores, and run 8 parallel servers. etc. etc. (which was my idea in that long message on the dev topic which nobody cared to answer to).

An idea that just shot me exactly now; parallel clusters would even be more gentle to the CPUs. Why? If you split up the server (lets remain with the 2 FLS) into lets say the 4 inner houses on one Server, and the rest on the other; this would mean that certain Systems never will be used on one server. So the first server would never have a player in the Gallia empire to load. My idea would be, having seperate installations of Freelancer, according to what they need to load ingame, and REMOVE the rest except of the "server border" systems. These would have nothing but the system itelf and the exit gate. Just to assure, there IS an exit point for the server to move to, while the character is being transferred to the other server.

This would actually make each server run only half of the universe, instead of activley running a half, and the other half eating up CPU power because the NPCs are still loaded and processed?

Combined with the idea above with 8 FLservers running; the smaller the sections are, the less cpu power is needed to process the NPCs and the less packets need to be sent from the NPCs, so this would also improve lagg if 1+1 is still 2? So on the long run, I can only see improvements and I dearly hope, it is taken into consideration.

EDIT:
Thought about the population itself; I can figure that there are some people who don't play at the rush hours because they say "the server is full anyways. it just gets more laggy and stuff". So with the server max limit increased, yes I can definitely see the counter go up because the player base would see, there previous limit is gone and they will see now if the new limit can be reached with everyone playing their hearts out.

Yes, I absolutely am confident that increasing of the player limit would do the diversity of players in the Sirius Cluster very good.

EDIT 2: spell check + additional clarification. Note to self; never write when you just got up, Harper! *selfdoh*

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To hunt the prey is life,
to lose the prey is death,
to hunt the loss is insane...