Because that then becomes another product we have to create and support and that just isn't possible. We have considered many alternatives to see if we could make this work, but unfortunately this is what we've had to do.
Michael
The problem here is that you'd have access to the server which isn't something we'd want to allow as it contains the secrets of the galaxy. Which was also an issue with an online version.
Michael
As I've mentioned elsewhere I understand the sentiment. We have put considerable time and effort to try and make this happen, but we've had to make this decision to make the game we set out to do. We would happily support offline play if it were possible for us to do so.
Michael
Why is this very different to the comment you made yesterday which was not that we could not run a server ourselves but that you did not want to
give us the server data so that we could run it ourselves.
You can't say your simulating more then the X series at the moment your own documentation, interviews state your not.. the X Series is simulating every sector, every ship, every station, every station process even if you are not in the system.. where as by your own admission Elite simply looks at the current system and then once some one turns up starts producing traffic based on the data in the background simulation.. Hence why there is no true perminancy to ships in those systems.
Even if we have to store the changing data for trade etc it's still only on the level of number data so even if it's millions of entries it's only 100's of mb because in the end it's Text (likely encoded but still text) data, and a simple purge of the older data every x amount of time would prevent that data from bloating and given that it's never meant to be as 'dynamic' would mean that it would fit with the 'not as indepth'.
The core 'seed' David himself has stood and been interviewed and I believe his comment 'Rules are beautiful' because they allow something like this... 4319823178903217807832178078321780321 to generate an entire universe that is the core of your technology the procedrual generation of using those sets of number to produce all your data.. Or are you actually saying you've mislead not only university lectures but the press on that?
The textures etc for worlds are already being generated on our machines, so there not the cause of the extra data.
The underlying simulation shouldn't be running really at anything more then 1hz heartbeat as there is no need for an economic simulation to run faster then 1 second at a time... so the overhead process on that shouldn't be that hard, add to that you could simply 'wrapper' the entire thing in a offline server so that it only looks at a 50 or so LY radius of the players current position and only runs the Simulation on those sectors... which would be a simple function call.
But even when those who have programming knowledge point things like this out we expect to be flamed and told we have no clue.
Look I've no issue with you guys saying we don't want to release the server, because we don't want to let people play at home they have to play our way.. But at the moment your own posts keep contradicting each other Michael and rather than come clean on what the server actually requires you hide behind 'oh its in the cloud'.
Cloud based computing is simply 'server based' computing rather then 'workstation' based computing, it's existed since the 70's with dumb terminals.. the modern younger generation might be fooled but you've a lot of older generation here who know exactly how and what cloud computing is..
But what I find the worst of all this is that rather than address it as you should, a post and likely a VIDEO of it's own where you fronted up to the community and where honest addressed us one on one, you hid it in a newletter paragraph and even then mislead about the level of 'connectivity' that would be required. That's just wrong.
Fingers crossed for the future 
