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

[Agran Harper]

Uhm... Silverleaf; have you read anything properly what has been written in the discussion thread you referred to, as well as anything the other guys wrote in here?

About the source code; the majority of stuff is written in ini-files. So we already can do plenty of stuff, just look around what has been done on this and different mods...

Several people already said the core requirements could be met, just read up about the bountiful ideas of hardware solutions. Even Cannon (The FLHook mastah!) told, he worked on the software part of the solution, and did not deem it impossible, yet not certain IF it works the way he intends to. If you would have read the thread you referred to properly, you would have known that:

The main challenge for option 2 is hooking the direct play functions sufficiently to intercept all communications traffic to the server and re-directing it when needed to the second server, as well as emulation of connection/disconnect functions on the second server and stuff like that. I've found this to be an excellent way to improve my X86 assembly.

My goal is not to increase the number of players - although this might be possible but I believe there are some really really harded coded limits associated with the clientID which is also used as a NPC shipID in some circumstances.

My goal is to reduce the lag by spliting the server into two parts. With the careful selection of systems for each server, about half the players will be on one server and the other half on the other.

So if you're interesting hack away at the direct play messaging functions in dacom.dll. I've considered reverse engineering and rewriting this library in C and this might prove simpler...and a rewriting effort lends itself collaboration.

I'm working on this and have been doing it for a while...but it might never work.

Less lag and more NPCs but not more players.
The FLserver application doesn't allow this. The trick is to hack it until it does. At some point in the future, as a minimum we will end up with a shared character database with a second server...*goes back to hacking*

Given that, its only a matter of time and creativity to successfully develop the lines of codes necessary to interlink several servers with according database loads to each other. Given the size of the community and given the fact that we are not bound by timelimits that have been drawn by Publishers: we will make it. I have full confidence in it.

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