An infinite World

Seraph

Hi there,

I searched the forum but i didn't really find the answers i am looking for.
I have read about rooms and games etc. but i need to explicitly tell the server/client that the room has to be switched under some circumstances (e.g. player is entering a tunnel). Is there a more generic way to do that with photon?

Lets say i have an infinite scalable world (fractal generated but to simplify it, with a fixed size). And lets say i want to use the photon server to synchronize this world for players moving around in this very big world (talking about thousands of square miles). In this world there are no clearly defined boundaries like tunnels or mountains etc. which i could use as a trigger to switch rooms like in WOW.
So my question is: What photon software would i have to use and how, to accomplish my goal? And what should happen at the room frontiers? Let's suppose we have a very big world with players in it and i want to use the full MMO functionality of photon to synchronize the items in this world. One room would not handle that amount of data, i am talking about a grid with millions of tiles and also millions of players. So i would have to split it in many rooms/games which have no noticeable/visible frontiers at the client side. Is that even possible with photon?

Thanks in advance.

[Deleted User]

Hello,

I would not focus on that "room" concept to much. "Rooms" or "games" or "levels" or whatever you call them (= a bunch of players who play together, separated from other players) are working for many types of games, but not for all - and it seems difficult to force a large, open-world scenario into the room concept.

What you probably need, instead of rooms, is a kind of "interest management" system.
This means that lots of your players *are* in the same game, but they receive only the data they are interested in. For example, a player receives only the movement data of those other players who are in his line of sight. When the player moves around, you calculate his new area of interest and see what is inside it and send the according data.

We have a proof of concept for interest management in the "MMO" solution in our Photon Server SDK.
Please check this article for a start: http://doc.exitgames.com/en/onpremise/c ... mo-concept

Please note that this is really only a proof of concept - interest management is a complex topic, and you can build it on top of Photon, but you probably need to make lots of adjustments before it fits for your concept. But I hope this gives you a good starting point nevertheless.

Seraph

Hi Nicole,

Thanks for your fast answer.
I know the MMO functionality of photon and i am using it already. But i have to divide my big world into sub regions on different physical servers because one server cannot handle it. My question was if photon does already have functionality to do that. A special problem with that is the switching between the sub regions when the player moves near a frontier between those sub regions. Since the data of the players of the other regions will not be synchronized.
e.g.: player1 is in region1 and player2 is in region2 which is next to region1. Let's say the distance between the two players is 5 meters but they wont see each other since they are in different regions/rooms/games.
Do you get my problem? Is there a common solution that can be done with photon?