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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see how they scale a multiplayer big world.

Not many systems try to do this. Improbable, Minecraft, Second Life, and Roblox are the ones I know about. Almost everybody else shards.

Any other examples of really big shared seamless multiplayer worlds?

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In reality, big Minecraft servers like Hypixel that handle 100k+ players also shard. You jump between many different servers seamlessly using something called Bungeecord.

Planetside 2 has hundreds of players on one map and can theoretically scale to thousands, though the networking gets very noticeably worse as you crowd more players into one place.

Sorry to self-promote, but, Angeldust (https://angeldu.st) is a single, persistent, real-time voxel world going for about eight years now. Can handle 300+K players on a single server due to massive parallelism. Unfortunately we don't get those player numbers right now, but hopefully in the future!

Runescape has sharded worlds, but the worlds go up to 1500 players, which is decently high.

Roblox is pretty sharded I think. Lots of little servers.

Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Planetside

Ultima Online is sharded. Biggest shard is ATL, with maybe 150 players.[1]

Planetside 2 got up to 2000 or so, and may hold the record for a seamless land world MMO.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/tr1r6j/uo_atl...

Planetside 2 has them on on huge map, but as soon as more player are nearer in one area the system got problems too. Lags, Jumps and wrong running clocks (different speeds an the map). They shard within a server. But PS2 Networking is really good and optimized, better as most current games, and Planetside 1 + 2 (and parts of the Engine) are 20 years old. Most new games are overwhelmed with 64 Players. PS2 can handle 200 on small areas without any problem.

Planetside 2 does not have good network code, it's very inaccurate and prone to cheating, I mean when you run at 20hz everything is possible. It's really not a good example of modern "netcode".

Shards in UO are called that way because of the lore (gem shattered into shards), and each shard is just a regional server completely isolated from other shards. So they are not very different from Minecraft or Planetside servers. Sharding in other games split the user base based on active load. This is not the case with UO.

On the other hand 150 isn't that many, and many games that do shard their world can also handle 150 players per shard.

I think you misunderstand the comment about 150 players. It's not the max. UO is simply not that popular nowadays. Back in the day there were thousands of players online per shard.

Edit: And there are apparently private shards that still have that player count per shard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36490436

UO Outlands (by far the most active current UO free shard) hovers around 2500-3000 characters online nightly (1500-1800 unique IPs).

I think EVE wins in this regard. But the sector ends up getting super degraded and going into time dilation to make it happen.

largest multiplayer video game PvP battle (8,825 players) most concurrent participants in a multiplayer video game PvP battle (6,557 participants)

EVE Online

I believe they shard each sector and their inability to sub-divide their hosting on a sector level has created their infamous timewarped battles?

Well, at the smallest level (if I recall correctly) it's a single solar system; they have a few beefy servers on stand-by, one is always in use for Jita, the main and most active trading hub, and others can be spun up and a whole solar system transferred over if it gets busy. And as someone else pointed out, you can organize a large fight in advance so they can transfer it over.

But there's the bottleneck, because they can only do the calculations of ship movement & actions on a single node. I'm sure it's been optimized to no end as well. IIRC it's written in Python, but that's not going to be the main performance bottleneck.

I have only the smallest of clues about distributed systems, the only way they could scale it up is to somehow make it so they can run a single solar system or cluster of ships on multiple servers, but for that you get the overhead of inter-server communication or you need an asynchronous, eventually-consistent game instead of something realtime.

Yes, so in that sense it's sharded. In another sense it's all one server, as you can warp between different systems and meet all the players there in the game. Everything is run on one giant server.

Not sure how it is now, but back in 2014-2016 you could inform them of big battles ahead of time for a specific system, at which point they would, in their own words, reinforce the node (moving that particular system to its own allocation of resources). This often was the difference between being able to duke it out in an epic space battle or wait for the system to load while everyone lagged to death.

Pretty much. Once you got to 1500+ fleet fights it would originally just drop lots and lots of player actions on the floor as could not cope.

Time Dilation came in to run at 1/10 game/real time ratio, allowing fights to scale better and be a less frustrating experience for participants

EVE had some 2020 Guinness records. I'm sure it was time dilated to all hell but I doubt anyone else has come close to this.

largest multiplayer video game PvP battle (8,825 players) most concurrent participants in a multiplayer video game PvP battle (6,557 participants)

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