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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

Handling massive amount of players is always challenging, but there nothing unique about it. PlanetSide 2 exist for years and its able to maintain hundreds of players in same area just fine and more than 1200 per "continent" which built of tons of small zones that have almost perfect sync between them.

As for tracking character state and region instancing there tons of MMOs that doing it for years too.

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Planetside 2 is exactly what this sort of reminded me of. In PS2, you can have over 1k players within an entire continent, which is a seamless quilt of many zones, each of which can have up to several hundred players (north of 250 is the most ive seen). The beauty of it being that there is no delineation between areas for players, but clearly the servers are somehow breaking down the continent in some way. So you can have a single battle raging across 2 adjacent areas with 96+ vs 96+, with the perception of being on a single battlefield.

Why not divide the map into BSP tiles and thread AI processing/netcode on that granularity?

Then what do you do at the boundaries? In their example, a single battle raging across adjacent areas.

You will always have to deal with transfer across cell boundaries - but BSP gives you a sensible mechanism to scale it besides "party level" or "whole group level".

I'm open to defense of the concept, or prototypes if someone can suggest something reasonable.

That's why I also mentioned the peer to peer part. They didn't have to do it peer to peer, but they did, so taking that at face value you already have a different set of constraints than most MMO's.

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