With the price of GPUs what they are, who risks messing around with new GPUs like that?

It’s almost certainly not going to have much connection to the Marathon series beyond the name and general thematic direction.

I would love to be priced wrong.

Simcity 3000 doesn’t have NAM or anything similar. 😀NAM is a must install for Simcity 4. It’s one of the reason I think Simcity 3000 is a bit more approachable.

I stand by what I say. It is clear that CIG are being dishonest in terms of what they have achieved.

Server meshing is mostly a marketing project to maintain confidence in cash shop spend. Not saying people haven’t worked on it, but the main aim is to keep selling JPEGs.

Using your Dark Age of Camelot example, server meshing would be expanding the map using 2 different “gamespaces” and allowing players the ability to transition between those gamespaces seamlessly without any loading screens and without realizing that they even crossed a boundary at some point. It let’s you massively expand the area in which you can travel without loading screens.

So a single dual core Pentium Pro CPU handles a shard of 4K players, with a comparable server CPU being limited exclusively to trading/transactions and another high end Pentium Pro being limited to (as per your description) a high traffic IRC server?

Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious. I am happy to learn more about Dark Age of Camelot’s architecture (even if I am wrong), but I also won’t take CIG marketing/propaganda at face value.

This is from an article on Dark Age of Camelot from 2003:

The heart of Camelot, it turns out, isn’t in the English countryside but in Fairfax, Virginia. There Mythic keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running linux. Each group of six servers runs what mythic calls a gamespace—a virtual world inhabited by thousands of players. The idea is to create different gamespaces for different types of players.

Design decisions also reflect the need to keep players happy. While each gamespace could conceivably handle 20,000 simultaneous players, Mythic limits them to about 4,000 players each, adding new gamespaces when necessary instead of increasing the load on the ones already up. “If you have too many people, the worlds get too crowded,” says Denton. “The last thing you want is to be bumping into thousands of people.”

We also have multiple example of CIG trying to market common tech (serialized variable!) as some of milestone.

I knew he was an American-style libertarian (understable considering his lack of experience and sheltered life in the US), but I don’t know he was into partaking in ShitCons run by local chauvinists.

One thing to keep in mind about the “$40-$45 is all you need” statements that litter almost every Star Citizen thread is that the math doesn’t really work out.

As per CIG, you have around 2.5 million paying accounts (with many of them being alts). 2.5 M. * $45 gives us $112.5 M, so just 14% of their revenue.

It’s clear that they will put the overwhelming majority of their resources into something that gives them 86% of their revenues; milking whales, selling JPEGs and power creep cash items (with the vast majority of the older cash shop items being either outright non-functional or abandoned).

All you need to do is follow the money.

Server meshing being “unmatched” is mostly marketing BS.

You have examples of MMO games leveraging server meshing (with Pentium CPUs) from 20+ years ago.