Hello everyone!
Can someone explain me why a game server needs RAM? Above all, the more players are supposed to play on it at the same time, the higher the RAM is on other game servers where u can rent.
But let’s assume I only use a VPS as a relay, i.e. players connect to the server, but the first player is basically the host and do all the proofs if the data sended by other players are right. Does the server need anything at all apart from 2 transistors in the CPU, a floppy disc for data storage + RAM and a strong modem?
so you couldnt just rent a 1€ vps and let there play thousends of player?
you could design a really efficient game server that only simulated physics and game logic. stripping out any sort of visual rendering. if you could then also design one process to scale and to handle thousands of players, you could kick overhead of running multiple game servers. Then within the process, if the player instance data size data is less then a few bytes and all the game constructs are shared by all players, and all networked data was streamlined to never exceed the bandwidth of a T1 and still give everyone an enjoyable experience with low latency.
then yes you could maybe even do it on a raspberry pi.
(The REAL answer) it depends… there are physical limits to everything, and nothing can be gotten for free. If you anticipate your game to do really well, then you need to plan for scaling. even if a player represents a single byte in memory/storage, you will need physical hardware to store, operate, and send its value to everyone. 9 billion people bytes is 8.3 GB. and this is just the players… and if everyone is active online you need to send 8 GB of data potentially multiple times a second.
If your VPS is just a proxy relay, then it doesn’t need much. How much bandwidth and CPU you need will depend on how much data you’re sending and receiving.
Even in games with client-authoritative networking, the server will still perform a bunch of game logic because clients can be a poor place to do this kind of logic in.
For instance, it is possible to let clients control bots or monsters (and relay those to other players on the server), but this makes cheating and other kinds of manipulation even easier, so keep that in mind.
It’s important to remember that “server-authoritative” and “client-authoritative” is a spectrum, and that there isn’t an universally right or wrong solution to the problem.
I see. I’ve already read from other posts that when it comes to a large number of players (over 5k), then Godot’s own multiplayer API should no longer be used anyway.
But let’s assume I only use a VPS as a relay, i.e. players connect to the server, but the first player is basically the host and do all the proofs if the data sended by other players are right. Does the server need anything at all apart from 2 transistors in the CPU, a floppy disc for data storage + RAM and a strong modem?
so you couldnt just rent a 1€ vps and let there play thousends of player?
So then the host’s computer needs to do those calculations for thousands of players, and needs to keep all the relevant data in its RAM, in addition to actually rendering the game and all that. And whatever network the host is on needs to handle all that traffic.