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Single Shard? LOL


Decker

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Dual Universe is a Continuous Single-Shard sandbox MMORPG taking place in a vast Sci-Fi universe, focusing on emergent gameplay with player-driven in-game economy, politics, trade and warfare. Players can freely modify the voxel-based universe by creating structures, spaceships or giant orbital stations, giving birth to empires and civilizations.

 

Single Shard?

 

Do you even know what a shard is?  There's no way you're going to host this on a single computer.

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Hi Dehkur and welcome on the Dual Universe official forum.

 

Nowhere it has been said this will be hosted on a single computer.

It has been said it will be hosted on a single server.

Are you not confusing the words "server" and "computer"?

A server can be hosted on a cluster composed of many computers.

And for Dual Universe, this is definitely the case.


Best Regards,

Nyzaltar.

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It may not be instanced, but it will certainly have shards;  a shard is a single computational unit.  A server/cluster consists of multiple shards that all communicate with each other.
 

 

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23 minutes ago, Dehkur said:

It may not be instanced, but it will certainly have shards;  a shard is a single computational unit.  A server/cluster consists of multiple shards that all communicate with each other.

Well, wether you like it or not, the "single shard" expression isn't born yesterday and hasn't been invented by us, as it has been used for more than a decade in the video game industry, and has been widely spread with EVE Online.

 

Edit: According to wikipedia, a "Shard" can be used to designate a database architecture OR a game server (which can be hosted on several computers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard

 

Best Regards,

Nyzaltar.

 

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I don't know personally what the definition for 'shard' is so I am just going to paste the wikipedia disambiguation page here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard

Quote

Computing

 

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@Dekhur - You can think of the server that Dual universe runs on, as a massive computer (made from lots of little computers all connected together to perform tasks and calculations that a small single pc could never hope to run. Dual universe the software is designed to provide a single persistant universe where we 1000s of people all play at the same time....with out instancing. This means if i do something you can see the effect without delay because the world is affected not the intance and does not require you to update your client in order to perceive this change. The game is also designed to improve the  performace from the hardware by increase or decreasing its requirements from the provided hardware (as is necessary), in order to make sure the system resources are not wasted and its capable of load balancing to make sure the game is running efficiently.

 

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Alright I give.  

 

This is probably a better definition of the origin.  From what I learned by observations over the evolution of this whole thing from the 80's ... a shard is a part of a whole, the whole being the cluster, and a shard being a single computation unit as I said before.  Apparently it's more popularly used for databsae, where the database is split between multiple computational points, which is closer to my definition( So for isntance eve would be 'sharded' even though it's one server, or Elite dangerous... or Second Life....)  ... but apparently it has other origins that end up regarding the server as a whole....

 

 

 

from http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/general-discussion/40451-why-servers-called-shards.html

Default Why are the servers called "shards"?

Quick history lesson:

MMORPG servers have been referred to as "shards" for a long time. The reason for this was the lore behind the original Ultima Online. In that game, the wizard Mondaine bound the world of Sosaria into a crystal orb in order to magically control its destiny. When the Avatar defeated Mondaine, the orb was shattered into "shards", each of which contained a perfect copy of Sosaria that continued to exist in parallel. These shards represented the individual servers of the game world. 

As time went on, servers of many MMOs were casually referred to by players "shards" despite being officially called by other names. WoW has realms, for example.

Why, then, does Rift refer to their own servers as "shards" within their own client unless they simply don't know that the word "shard" originally had a meaning other than simply another name for an MMO server?

Not that I'm complaining. I find the evolution of words interesting. Just thought you might like some background on this little oddity.
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2 hours ago, Dehkur said:

Dual Universe is a Continuous Single-Shard sandbox MMORPG taking place in a vast Sci-Fi universe, focusing on emergent gameplay with player-driven in-game economy, politics, trade and warfare. Players can freely modify the voxel-based universe by creating structures, spaceships or giant orbital stations, giving birth to empires and civilizations.

 

Single Shard?

 

Do you even know what a shard is?  There's no way you're going to host this on a single computer.

 

Where in the above does it mention single shard computer? It is a _single-shard sandbox MMO_ which means it is one instance of the universe and everything happens in that instance. Obviously there is a cluster of servers running the DU universe. Probably a considerable cluster.

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24 minutes ago, Tethrazor said:

Got to love it when people who have no idea what they are talking about and have spent no time researching the project, come here and troll post.

Right. :) 
Or that make a whole marketing thing of ioocy.  I really didn't realize UO was such a bad influence.  A shard is a part of a thing (databases) and is not a whole thing itself.  If it was a whole, it would be a crystal.  Or it would be a pane... or a glass... a shard is never a whole.

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It's just semantics; in the end it always meant a single playing field, but every cubic kilometer represents a virtual server, as the density of players increase the virtual servers decrease in size, maintaining the same load on each server.

 

The issue will always be latency. I'm interested in how NQ will approach this problem. 

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What they mean is that there won't be multiple copies of the same game objects in different states. If something is destroyed, it is destroyed for everyone, not just for a certain set of players.

 

How they will achieve that is a completely different question. You will see for yourself how well it works, once there is public alpha footage available.

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