Revoke

I suppose NQ's dynamic server/area splitting trick is intended to handle that. I don't get the impression the ship interiors will be instanced, though. Relative reference frames don't require instancing (and indeed, instancing would render them unnecessary). But instancing of any kind doesn't seem to be on NQ's agenda. In any case, they can come up with an awesome way to let very large of people play in the same area. Bandwidth gets saturated in those cases in current games because N players in the same area requires N*N updates to be sent (each player gets an update about every other player). If NQ is right about their system, it reduces the load to a linear load (N updates per N players, roughly speaking). Changing the load from N*N to just N is a huge deal, and makes the kind of huge fleet actions you're describing entirely plausible! It's why everyone's so excited about NQ's claim about their algorithm.

I realize it's a bit early to start asking about specifics, but I wanted to bring up the topic while all the big, fundamental mechanics are getting decided on. I'm wondering how viable the game will be for individuals and small groups - I mean, really getting out there and doing interesting stuff in space, not just putzing around near the safe zone. Suppose I have a small group of friends. We pool our resources, buy a modest base ship, and proceed to travel about, mining asteroids and shooting pirates. Everyone we own is stored on this base ship. How does that really work? How do we keep the base ship safe when we're not around? When we're logged off for days at a time? Assume we don't have the time to fly it back to a safe zone every time we log off. What's our recourse if some powerful jerk catches us and blows it up? I know there are solutions to this problem (a device to blind-jump to interstellar space, and back to the point of origin would suffice, for example). But I also understand that there's a big focus on large organizations, given that the in-game economy and civilization will be player-driven. So I'm wondering how well the planned mechanics will support a smaller scale of play.

I dunno, 90% of the time someone makes a statement like that, they're wrong. Without being privy to the codebase, it's impossible to know! Moving ships are different from planets; planets probably don't move. Gravity isn't the issue. The more likely problem is when you have two very close objects, moving at high, but similar speeds, in a discretized simulation, you get very large problems from very small inaccuracies, and the whole thing ends up unstable. This problem is much worse when you add in network latency! Anyone who's played space engineers will know what I'm talking about here. Fortunately, the solution exists; use relative frames of reference (ie, players inside a ship have their movement tracked relative to the ship, as a few posters have already alluded to). It's probably a bit tricky to implement, but given what we've seen so far, I'd be shocked if Novaquark didn't have the technical chops to do it. Nothing here to worry about, I reckon.