Joose wrote:
I think you are missing the point here mr buzz. From the computer resources point of view, how "big" the space is is irrelevant. You could make your game world appear to be a million squillion light years wide, and it still wouldn't take up much resources as long as there was nothing in it. EVE gets away with appearing to be hueg by not having a whole lot of stuff in it. A big world with nothing in it would be shit, but as soon as you put stuff in it, that stuff takes up space somewhere. Yeah, you could use some sort of procedural generation thingy to make it, but you still have to store that generated stuff somewhere.
Storage of data like that isn't an issue though, it's mostly just a database like structure of the objects with coordinate data for their position in the landscape. Databases and files store the location of objects, and it's simply the client that
displays that object via modelling and particle effects. All the server has to do is log it and keep track.
Eve is exactly the same in that sense.
What a System is in Eve could simply be a large square on a map in this game, anything in it will be stored somewhere anyway. Most of what is stored on a map is static data anyway. If like Eve each map section has it's own server, that server is responsible for keeping that map specific data up to data and making sure any clients that are connected have up to date records on any data that's changed.
I don't think I've explained myself or how I'm imagining the system will work very well, but I'm of the very strong suspicion that it's entirely workable.