[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] How big is enough?

[szii at sziisoft.com]

>From: Vincent Archer <archer at frmug.org>

>According to Mike Oxford:
>> You're going to hit technical limitations for scalability as well as
>>> your planned content base. Doesn't do much good to plan for 500 hours
>> of content (projecting 3-5k players at a time) and then be capped at
>> 1000 concurrent users. C10k today may be C20k in reality with today's
>> hardware (I haven't done any profiling in a number of years,) but it's
>> just a heads-up to keep your pipes/memory/bandwidth/CPUs/etc in
>> consideration.

> Note that you do not need to serve every single simultaneous player
> from a single server front-end. Unless you plan for large-scale
> battles in which the entire server gets concentrated on a single area,
> you are better off with segmenting your world into individual zones,
> with a transparent or specific zoning (transparent zoning means you're
> handed off to a new server at "an appropriate time" without any
> obvious effects, while specific gives you the loading screens almost
> every MMO player is familiar with).


This is true, but not all games will scale that well internally.  Not
all games will grow to UO/EO/WoW proportions.  It's just something else
to consider is all, that regardless of how big we may want to make the
world a grandiose plan still has to fall within the technological limits
(and the price to build out that technology) which not all companies can
attain or support.

-mox