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

[n1kodemus]

to fulfill my lifetime dream: to have the entire server to myself.

Make your own server with a password or play singleplayer.

[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...

[SuperBeast]

please oh please have a oceania server or at least have it in Los Angeles so that america+Aus+Nz can have good ping

[silverleaf]

In that case I want an australian server. Forget it. Well 2 servers will be nice but it would probably be run on the same machine, just one on each core.

But yes the prospect of having more systems to myself...

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Scavengers of the Abyss - A Freelancer Short Story

[reavengitair]

But yes the prospect of having more systems to myself...

Go back to SP:P

[silverleaf]

Also, methinks having systems in different servers wont work because the whole thing doesn't work like eve. They dont have the source code and it would be absolutely impossible to switch players from one server to another without forcing a relog... or so I think.

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Scavengers of the Abyss - A Freelancer Short Story

[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...

[Jongleur]

You know for someone who likes to play by himself, you have no problems opening up tons of topics to interact with others.. personally I think you like the attention

[11of10]

What about the database?

It would have to be shared between 2 or more servers.
What happens when both try to write to it at the same time?
If it is not implemented correctly, it could lead to very often server crashes.

What kind of database does the Freelancer use anyway?

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Be excelent to each other!

[Violette]

I. Noobish
Often, but not always, noobs will attempt to communicate in their own primitive language, known as "n00bish." It is a variant of the hacker language that exposes them as having little intelligence or will to learn. Here is an example of some noobish. Do not attempt to comprehend it: it cannot be discerned without professionals at hand.

Ahem...

II. Where to find n00bs
On the internet, n00bs make their colonies on forums. They migrate in waves, usually on weekends, and proceed to clog up bandwidth with stupid questions and sometimes even stupid answers. If you happen to be unfortunate enough to be on a board large enough to attract migrating noobs, there will hopefully be authority in charge who is smart enough to take extermination measures before they can make nests and larger colonies. THE BANNER HAMMER is one form of authority.

I rest my case...

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