Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor Cosmic Consortium
4374
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Posted - 2013.12.03 22:59:00 -
[1] - Quote
How is work progressing with the dynamic node reinforcement where you move sols between nodes while players are busy in those sols?
is there any possibility of only loading systems when 'stuff' happens in them? Thus when nothing is due to happen in a system for half an hour you could "unload" the system until that POS reaction has to be serviced, or someone decides to jump into the system. Heck, if you move POS reactions to a separate service (and thus unlink it from the sol simulator) you don't even need to load the sol at all. When I approach the gate between Lanngisi and Tvink, the gate could have some kind of notice attached indicating that Tvink isn't loaded yet, is currently being loaded, or is ready to jump into. As a blockade runner pilot, I might want to stay cloaked, so there might be a mechanism to ask traffic control to insert me in the queue, at which point Tvink would be loaded, the gate would display the appropriate notification, and off we go. What if gates could be de-illuminated to express the state of being "off" due to the remote system not being loaded?
And as a result, load balancing would only be a case of, "someone wants to load this sol, which server has the lowest load? put this sol on that server!" And load balancing would thus be automatic, as would reinforcement (when one server gets heavily loaded, it won't inherit new sols, and existing ones will end up pruned). You could even preemptively "reinforce" nodes by adding a weighting to the "which server is least loaded" algorithm where an SBU adds 1000 virtual players worth of load to the system for balancing purposes, along with the historical load that your pre-balancer is using.
As a bonus, "downtime" could happen opportunistically, except for continuously populated sols for which the downtime counter would be applied as a timer for that sol, similar to the incursion bar: if I'm missioning in Lanngisi which is supposed to get downtime but has had 100 missioners in it for the last 36 hours, I'd see a non-modal warning that this node is going to experience downtime in 20 minutes. Thus I can choose to do something else (e.g.: fly to Hek to buy some stuff off the market). Then when Hek is due to shut down, I fly back to Lanngisi to continue my missioning. Downtime gets done, player gets a downtime-free playing experience. Of course there is the issue of patching the client.
If a node needs servicing, you could remove it from the opportunistic loading queue, shuffle the current sols to different nodes based on load, then you're free to shut the node down to replace it.
And then you could choose to not apply downtime to sols which don't need it because they don't have infrastructure that requires downtime.
Of course you've all been through this already in your various dev chats internally, and removing downtime is probably going to be easier than moving to a "just-in-time" sol loader with dynamic sol rehoming, and I should just shut up.
I'd just like you to consider that AU-TZ players would love downtime operating per-system on a round-robin basis almost as much as removing downtime altogether.
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