Dog Pants wrote:Actually, there's something interesting about this. Presumably the mechs walk on land rather than floating about in space. This would present huge problems for a single-instance world. It's not an issue in Eve - there's no terrain to generate, but a more standard MMO would have to have landscape. Maybe that's not why others don't do it, maybe it's because of the way population would have to be distributed in relation to quest hubs, but even so I'd be curious to see how/if it works.
Why? Eve has landscape, it's not like "space" in Eve is empty, it just appears empty.
Doing a proper landscape is doable, procedurally generate areas based on developer choices, assign area to a server via an assignment program that knits the maps together so maps are on adjacent servers and you'll get some sort of content transition (ie, you wouldn't be going from thick jungle to urban, there'd be transitions in between the two extremes). All you'd need then is for developers to go in a spruce up the areas with anything else they need/want that's special.
Don't forget that the systems in Eve are
massive things (you know, not warping but using MWD's takes hours if not days to get from planet to planet, you're still travelling over a landscape), having a massive play area is completely doable in a mech game, you could even borrow Eve's jumping via some sort of transport/teleport area in order to swap between maps.
I wouldn't want to attempt it as Eve has the benefit of not having to do any collision detection until you actually meet an object, having terrain collision would be extra hassle but it might be client side rather than server. After all, as far as the server is concerned, the terrain is simply a mesh with co-ordinates donating x, y and z in the game world, physcial representation is only drawn on the client.
I reckon it could be workable though.