32 player servers?

[Lurker]

Why there are no 32 player servers? I played once, it was super fun chaos. For some reson I saw such beauty only once, and I'm playing from the first day of NS2 on steam.

[Vitdom]

Some don't like to play 16vs16 but some do, but almost no server administrators can handle such intensive gameplay. If you know of anyone with a nice i5 dual core 5+ GHz server tell them to host a NS2 gameserver. They'll really thrive because, as you say, nobody else is providing the gameplay.

The developers have put a hardcoded limit at 24 players to disallow most server providers to create 32 servers because they don't understand the requirements to host such a server. There is an easy tweak on the official forums to circumvent the limit.

[Volcano]

The game is no where near balanced for 32 players it's barely balanced for 16

[Vitdom]

Well, the maps are very small compared to Natural Selection 1, but since the mechanics are very much the same, only a few tweaks here and there, it should be balanced for 32 players. Personally I think the rules are balanced for 32 players. There are many NS1 sized maps in the Workshop, and they look pretty ok!

[Lurker]

Volcano, game can't be balanced by default, and it is a philosophical question...
But the baseline is - 32 player game is fun, and games are about fun.

Vitdom thanks for the info, I didn't know that it has official restrictions, it's a shame that such great game is so poorly written.

[LtW00dy]

The server isn't optimized for multi-core cpus yet so it relies exclusively on a single core to do all the work. So even if u have a quad-core or eight-core it doesn't mean anything for hosting NS2. The requirements for 24 players is 4.4ghz and rarely you will see servers with this clock. To improve gameplay hosters are overclocking their cpus to reach something near this high so basically 32 players would be impossible for anyone to host. I just hope they don't take long to optimize the game servers.

[Vitdom]

Originally posted by Lurker:

it's a shame that such great game is so poorly written.

I completely agree that it needs more optimization throguh both mutex'd independent parallel execution and improvement of execution times, but this game is already very optimized. If you can name me any single other game that in a completely dynamic, i.e. not precompiled, environment world allows dynamic placement and action of custom entities, of several types each doing numerous of interactions at once. Then I will be amazed... UWE has done the impossible, and it works well. And it's all done in multiplayer-mode, which is even more amazing.

[Lurker]

Originally posted by Vitdom:

Originally posted by Lurker:

it's a shame that such great game is so poorly written.

I completely agree that it needs more optimization throguh both mutex'd independent parallel execution and improvement of execution times, but this game is already very optimized. If you can name me any single other game that in a completely dynamic, i.e. not precompiled, environment world allows dynamic placement and action of custom entities, of several types each doing numerous of interactions at once. Then I will be amazed... UWE has done the impossible, and it works well. And it's all done in multiplayer-mode, which is even more amazing.

Well, theoretically it shouldn’t be a problem to store couple of dynamic objects on a map (by server side). Even the alien goo should not be a problem.
But right now main issues are Frame rates and a hit registration. It's like you die in 0.5 second just right after you run from marines' vision, or you take a phase gate after aliens bite your ass and die after you teleported.

[Vitdom]

Originally posted by Lurker:

But right now main issues are Frame rates and a hit registration. It's like you die in 0.5 second just right after you run from marines' vision, or you take a phase gate after aliens bite your ass and die after you teleported.

But that's how it's supposed to work.

[Wooza]

nice info! But this is NS2:Combat not NS2. In ns2 you can now go up to 99 slots without any hex editing.