New server?

[Gegis]

Ok might not be the best idea out there but if EI hasn't done much and so many have been complaining about the lack of support or content but have some background in programming and might be able to do something for horizons has anyone thought of making their own private server like they have in other games such as UO, WoW ect. Mabye if that happened we could have a chance on progressing our home on our own. I myself have no idea how to begin to design or program so I don't know how hard it would be but just an idea.

[Justa Mirage]

Fridlekh was working on one, and posted he was working on one, and like magic, his account was deleted and wiped from this community board.

He is still working on a possible project of making an emulator that would not require too much bandwidth but allow communication with the game server.

It would be nice if it would be like an FPS, since the game will never change, just make sure the server gets maintenance every so ofted and run it at home. A few players should not need that much bandwidth.

[AA0]

You won't see a full blown emulator server around any time... ever. He can try and copy components of it, but never would be able to recreate the whole package alone.

[Aviendeha]

From what i understand emulating Horizons is next to impossible without some top of the line server hardware and resources. Shame, i think this game would do very well emulated.


Here is a thread where we were discussing this on another forum...The rest that follows is quotes from that forum by others. I am no expert by far, just dabbled in running some stuff here and there.

Aviendeha





"Here is the information about server specs for the Horizons shards, as told by Amon Gwareth on another forum:"

Amon Gwareth:

Current server runs on Xeons. not sure about a Woodcrest. Most ram you'd need would be 4gb per server box. Harddrive needs are negligible as its all database driven. You would need a database server, I have no idea what their requirements are or how many you'd need. The big costs are of course, the servers themselves up front and then the power, cooling and especially bandwidth.

Amon Gwareth:

You cannot get the footprint down to 2-3 servers. Not if you want monsters enabled and more than 10 players online at a time.

As for why you need such a powerful server farm to run a Horizons shard, another poster by the name of Dangit (Who used to be the lead moderator for Tazoon.com, and later for the main community site run by Tulga) posted this in the same thread:



Dangit:

The original server code was written to make heavy use of the ram. And at the time was hitting against the 2GB (or maybe 4GB) ram limit that MBs and OS had at the time. To make use of more ram than that, the server code has to be rewritten. The server uses a lot of memory.. 15MB per character 1.5 per other entity. An Entity is anything the player interacts with. Monster, resource node, machine etc. (I believe those numbers are correct) Then you have all the memory taken up by other aspects. From my own experience what I have found is you need 3 Servers with at least 2.0GHz Xeons, 4GB ram 60GB hard drives. And a database raid server with about 80GB.
That would be able to support about 150 people with enough monsters and resource spawning to keep some people happy. But your map size would be about the size of Lesser Aradoth.
Increase your land size and you will be adding another server. Otherwise performance becomes too erratic

[Gegis]

Eck... Well if it takes that much space/money and such... anyone for making a Horizons II then? c.c

[Solitaire]

Eck... Well if it takes that much space/money and such... anyone for making a Horizons II then? c.c

If you know anyone with the financial resources to invest in it that is willing to take a risk in an already flooded market.... Just need to somehow get the intellectual property away from EI. Might not be hard cause rumors abound that they never paid for it anyway. A new Horizons with next generation tech could be pretty ******** cool.

[vahrokh_the_ancient]

What yesterday was a supercomputer, it's nothing impossible today. My PC has 4G ram, Pentium Core Duo, 480G hard disk and lots more. As for using 1.5M per entity, I find such an implementation asinine at best, it could probably be squashed by 2 orders of magnitude with some optimization.

[Aviendeha]

What yesterday was a supercomputer, it's nothing impossible today. My PC has 4G ram, Pentium Core Duo, 480G hard disk and lots more.

WHOO HOO Server at Vahrokh's house! LOL just kidding

[MadDwarf]

there are better games out now and better games coming out. Why would anyone want to spend YEARS even making something more of horizons ? They would spend so much of their own time that by the time they would finish no one would want to play a game that would be dwarfed by all the new ones out.

Sad thing is it would take a team of programmers just to fix horizons in a year to 2 years. Would take one with their own time invested about the same just to put up a server without any fixes. Way more time to address the games technical challenges.

There is a reason why the game is in the state its in now.

[Justa Mirage]

Actually MadDwarf...

I log in and play Horizons more than I play my Vanguard account.

Why?

Because in Vanguard, no matter how hard I tried, I can't get into any groups, I have been LFG for hours with no takers, server populations have migrated past my level and there are not a whole lot of new players... sound familiar?

I come to Horizons, there are guild dragons still needing ROP / AROP, there are a few bi-ped players needing items, and our guild is still highly active.

I play MMORPG just for those letters alone (Massive Multiplayer) and if I log into a game, even though it's supposed to have thousands of players on it, if I am soloing, with no hopes for a group pickup, and dying every 10 minutes to mobs that are 3 levels below me because they do more DPS than I do, or have a quest that requires a "Group" to do, then I tend not to play it.

Here in Horizons, I have property which I can build on (most of the property in Vanguard has been taken by the Uber no-sleep 24/7 players) and I still have some goals to reach. Believe this or not... my new computer (E6700 core2 with 2gb ram and a crossfire 1950XTX video card) studders, gags, and lags playing Vanguard even with balanced settings, but Horizons plays just fine, the only problem I find is the time it takes to render a town after portalling in, but once it's done, my FPS stay around 40.

I know the game is on the way to hell, with no future, but at least it keeps me entertained for the time being. If it were to be "redesigned" it would be a good competitor for a market 2 years in the future if done right.

And right means.... make an MMORPG that is not bleeding cutting edge, tone the graphics down to about 1 generation back so that those trying to catch up to technology don't miss out, while on the other hand those with high end systems won't have anything to worry about. Keep the same lore and game play, there is something more to horizons than just a poor company trying to milk its players for every dime they can get.

[Gegis]

I have to go and agree with Mirage, despite all the new and "better" games out there there is almost no way someone could make it on their own and it always takes AGES to get a group, then once one person finishes what they came to do the whole group breaks apart.

Despite the fact that im bored out of my mind, I havn't gotten the desire to fix my biped or to hunt components for some goals i've yet to achieve there is still a great community here, even though its small and somewhat lonely here, people are still there and on most of the other games i've tried, there hardly is anyone that is like that unless you join a their guild and have been there for a long while. It may just be my luck but that is what i've seen.

As for Vanguard, It is WAY to high. 17gig for just the game itself and with a high end computer it lags horribly, and good luck trying to get it to play on my older computer. Its sad that many of the other games have taken a WoW approach with their interface mostly and some graphics, WILL NOT touch them unless there is absolutely nothing else to do, even then it would be murder.

If EI/PME could get on the ball, get some programming done and start adding to horizons it would be safe I would think. Will it happen? Most likely not.

[AA0]

Horizons is dead in the water, the profit in it is now gone, and any playerbase has been destroyed... it will never come back.

[C`gan]

Personally, if "new" and "better" refer to games such as LOTRO or Vanguard, I have to shake my head. I found neither of those games to be much more than Everquest/WoW knockoffs. And if they're so much "better" than Horizons, why is it my dual core machine can run up to 60 FPS in Horizons with all graphics maxxed out while on them with the graphics at next to nothing, I'm lucky to see 10 FPS? Mind you, I'm still on Windows XP and have no interest in Vista. I like an operating system that doesn't require the sum entirety of the computer to run.

As for Horizons being "dead", I still see people playing. I'm still playing. As I was telling Ein last night, depending on what your goals and priorities are, you may have completed as much as you desired to and are ready to move on. That doesn't mean all of us have. Tagath's at 49, on the last quest before the level 50 hatchling scales and RoP. I've still got several buildings to complete on my plot and then continue on with other guildmates' plots. So, life is in the eye of the beholder (as Guinan put it, that phrase works for a lot of things. Truth, beauty, whatever).

[AA0]

ya, 4 years to get to level 50 is definitely not the norm..

[Deth]

I do not think the profits are gone. They would pull the plug in a heart beat if the profits were gone. They are making some money.

[Gegis]

Hmmm yeah they are making some profits by double billing who they can, my original guild master was double billed so were a few of my friends, now I don't get billed at all yet we are all still able to play. Shure they are making some profit but not what is needed and not how it should be made.

I would say that horizons is dead in the water with the company is concerned in how much effort is seen going into it. I will also say that there is a dwindling player base, half of witch can't even access their server, and there isn't enough others comming into replace the lost ones. I can only say this for order because I do not go on chaos, its still there but its still going down.

There are still plenty of things I could do as well, I still have a few aspirations but at the moment no will to continue on them. Some of them are unrealistic but Im hoping to somehow reach them. Solo Valcor, get my biped up to lv 100 in atleast 4 classes, Solo SoG, Build a Lair, Upgrade the structures on my plot, become more active and avaliable to help with RoP, ARoP or general things, ect.

I agree with C`gan, most of these "new" games just seem to be old ones with a mask, quoting a part of someone's statement in game there. They aren't the next generation because they are un-playable and un-orignal We've seen dragons as mounts in WoW, we've seen that type of crafting ect. Nothing is new about them. Just a more flashy version of old games, with new titles and more lag.

Horizons is orignal though, I have yet to see a game that parallels it in hunting, crafting I have seen some game replicate it but it still has its own to it.

[Aviendeha]

Indeed I agree with Justa,C'gan, and Gegis..
I and a few friends left those "better" games to come here. This game is over 3 years old and still has elements and game play that is VERY enjoyable and brings some players back. That has to count for something in a bussiness that most games come and go in less than a year, never to be played again.

[Hal`cyon Sskyler]

I'd say as soon as there exists a new game that involves playable dragons, the few remaining players will jump ship. That seems to be the only draw left. For people who really, really like dragons. Really.

[Varraven]

I'd say as soon as there exists a new game that involves playable dragons, the few remaining players will jump ship. That seems to be the only draw left. For people who really, really like dragons. Really.

Add to that adv/craft multiclassing like we have here, and I think you'd be spot-on.

[Gegis]

Mmm *nodds* I would say you'd have to add in the adv/craft system and the multiclassing. I admit if there was another game that you could play as a dragon I would probably leave to play it, but right now there isn't and with ToA being disbanded it doesn't seem like there will be for a while. And as Aviendeha said Horizons is enough to drag the attention of old players to come back, though they leave once agian because there isn't anyting being done with the company as many threads and people have said. Its a pity that a private server couldn't be made.