With release just weeks away, it’s nearly at it’s end, but Oster plans to get stuck straight into revamping the sequel, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows Of Amn, which came out in 2000.
“We are committed to doing Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition,” he says. “The instant Baldur’s Gate is completed most of our team is ready to start work on [it], with a couple holding back to continue to add features and support the fans...We're planning on shipping [it] in 2013, hopefully before the end of summer. I want to enjoy some sun this year - 2012 was a write off.”
In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on. So you will never be separated from your friends, and if you want you’ll be able to join up and adventure together, you can. Due to the fidelity of the dogfighting and physics simulation we can’t however handle thousands of players in the same area of space. Even if you had enough internet bandwidth to handle the data going back and forth and a super computer for the server there’s no PC, even with quad SLI that could render that many spaceships with Star Citizen’s fidelity.
So the “magic” of Star Citizen’s multiplayer design is how we combine a persistent universe with a more traditional (and easier to implement) temporary multiplayer “battle” instance.
The way it works is that the persistent universe server, which we’re calling the Galaxy Server, keeps track of all players’ assets, group relationships and locations inside the Star Citizen universe. As the Galaxy server isn’t handling any realtime action it can handle our complete player base, which right now would be about 45,000 players, but is designed to be able to scale to millions if need be. The other key thing the Galaxy Server does is dynamically place players based on their location, skill level, alignment and player versus player (PvP) preference into battle instances. Think of a “battle” instance like a Battlefield 3 multiplayer session or a World of Tanks Battle with the key difference that the selection of players is done transparently and is “in fiction”.
Links: | Thanks Ant and Acleacius. |
Play: | Spy Car. |
Media: |
Wolfenstein 3D in Real Life. New James Bond Trailer. What If Wes Anderson Directed the Next Star Wars Movie? Drive a Car That's On Fire - Like a Boss. |
The Funnies: | Brevity. |