What hardware would be required to host Elite Dangerous locally on a home PC?

[Chaparral]

Yeah yeah I get it - I can play ED right now on my home PC.

Let's play fantasyland for a moment and say FDEV allowed/sold the capacity to run their software on home servers.

Allowing me and my mates to have our own galaxy.

Games like Conan Exiles permit this sort of home or server-leased "instances" of the game.

With Conan Exiles, the population cap per server is right around 40 players for official servers - which is surprisingly similar to the limit on player per instance in ED.

For a mid-tier gaming PC the Conan Exiles cap is around 10 players.

What kind of hardware would be required?

Anyone have any idea on what the requirements might be?

 

[Vandaahl]

Well, if it remains P2P, you only need to host a database server for transaction, adjudication and matchmaking purposes(?), maybe another one for CMDR data as well.
There is no server that keeps track of where players are in normal space or super cruise, or that does any complexities when doing dogfights or anything.

Long story short, any potato would do, you still need a gaming PC to run the client on though.

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

I don't think it would run well on a potato server. How long would it take to calculate a 20,000ly plotted route.

 

[Morbad]

I don't think it would run well on a potato server. How long would it take to calculate a 20ly plotted route.

That's done locally, isn't it?

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

That's done locally, isn't it?

I have no idea, I just assumed that was server side.

 

[Chaparral]

I am wondering is the only thing that is actually managed at the FDEV end - is it pointers for player locations and BGS states?

 

[ebbrell]

there are multiple servers, they have different roles, one controls missions other perform other roles.
and it wont work the networking speak to servers defined in the client not configurable.

and this game is best played with others, not sure what you would gain running it on your own but of tin

 

[Bigmaec]

I guess the biggest problem would be cheating / the transaction(?) server.
It must maintain a list of all CMDRs stats in your local group, sure if it's personal friends level that would work,
but as soon as it goes halfway "open" it all goes out of the window.

 

[Darth Ender]

a lot of people think the galaxy is generated on the server or there is a database of the galaxy we reference.

The client creates the galaxy on-demand ...every client creating the same galaxy. Down to the surfaces of planets and the asteroids. Exactly the same on every client machine. That's what it means to be procedurally generated.

The servers (like noted in some above) just track state changes of the bgs and players and divy out missions and control the locations of non-stellar persistent objects.

 

[Darth Ender]

I guess the biggest problem would be cheating / the transaction(?) server.
It must maintain a list of all CMDRs stats in your local group, sure if it's personal friends level that would work,
but as soon as it goes halfway "open" it all goes out of the window.

anti-cheat mechanisms exist in the current game (they're not great and probably rely on manual review)

However, i think running local servers would be primarily for solo players looking to mod their game (this would go hand-in-hand with modded clients and modded servers).

Or maybe small scale group servers hosting a popular mod.

 

[Vandaahl]

Well, the question was asked in the context of "Me and my mates". If your mates cheat, you need new mates, not an anti-cheat mechanism.

 

[Caydran]

One of these, a BBS phone line and a number to call.

 

[Bigmaec]

anti-cheat mechanisms exist in the current game (they're not great and probably rely on manual review)

However, i think running local servers would be primarily for solo players looking to mod their game (this would go hand-in-hand with modded clients and modded servers).

Or maybe small scale group servers hosting a popular mod.

Yep. Anything above that or simultaneous to the main game I can't see happening.

And I very much question any intention from FD to release the game for free when the servers shut down.
(Yes I know it's a kickstarter "promise")

 

[bangermsuk]

you probably need to use a cloud data server like ED does.has your local server couldn't handle all that data poping in

 

[Bigmaec]

Well, the question was asked in the context of "Me and my mates". If your mates cheat, you need new mates, not an anti-cheat mechanism.

I've seen lots of things like that, from Command and Conquer over Unreal Tournament, Diablo and up to Ark, to name a few.
That's basically an internet law. As long as you can cheat, some people inevitably will.

 

[Darth Ender]

Yep. Anything above that or simultaneous to the main game I can't see happening.

And I very much question any intention from FD to release the game for free when the servers shut down.
(Yes I know it's a kickstarter "promise")

that's about as likely as finding raxxla - much less it actually being not disappointing when you do.

you probably need to use a cloud data server like ED does.has your local server couldn't handle all that data poping in

nah. There's not a whole lot of data. Just likely a lot of connections that are held open too long and probably not optimized for high performance and low latency.

if you dont have thousands of people connected ...you'll be fine.

 

[Darth Ender]

gotta remember, the servers dont simulate the game with you... you're just giving them tiny snippets (or receiving) of data at the start and end of a session / instance and when completing some loggable event such as a mission objective / picking up a commodity, losing a commodity , etc.

Look at your network data rate when in solo ...that's what you can expect (multiply that by how many players you expect on your server to get an idea of bandwidth requirements).

On the server side, you're mostly dealing with database logging and reading. Not any real processing (aside from the processing needed during the tick - which occurs when the servers have to go offline to deal with)

 

[Chaparral]

there are multiple servers, they have different roles, one controls missions other perform other roles.
and it wont work the networking speak to servers defined in the client not configurable.

and this game is best played with others, not sure what you would gain running it on your own but of tin

On your own, you could be protected from potential negative updates, potentially mod the game, set up private servers where you would not have to compete with very large player groups in the BGS, avoid unwanted pvp - tons of reasons not listed here.

 

[Chaparral]

gotta remember, the servers dont simulate the game with you... you're just giving them tiny snippets (or receiving) of data at the start and end of a session / instance and when completing some loggable event such as a mission objective / picking up a commodity, losing a commodity , etc.

Look at your network data rate when in solo ...that's what you can expect (multiply that by how many players you expect on your server to get an idea of bandwidth requirements).

On the server side, you're mostly dealing with database logging and reading. Not any real processing (aside from the processing needed during the tick - which occurs when the servers have to go offline to deal with)

If this is true, the real question is how challenging is the BGS and mission generation processing and state storage?

 

[Darth Ender]

If this is true, the real question is how challenging is the BGS and mission generation processing and state storage?

I doubt it's challenging at all. If you're wondering why we get so many connection errors and failures in the game ....that's probably got more to do with the tier of cloud subscription fdev uses or the webserver used in juggling so many simultaneous active connections than it does in the cpu resources in processing the activities.

You're talking probably tens of thousands of people making requests at the same time ....where some of those servers probably communicate to other servers running on other machines. All increasing latency and thus increasing the simultaneous connection count.

a local server wouldn't be communicating to other servers, it would be communicating with itself. You'd have no failover protection, but you'd have a much lower latency between the different "servers" functioning on your local machine. On top of a much lower (probably) total number of connected users.

In a video recently, they mentioned how long it takes (i forget if it was 1 hour or less) for the tick processing mechanism to parse thru all stations and update the factions. That's likely done in a single process thread ...and server cpu's aren't all that fast single threaded. But even if it was multi-threaded ...most people's pcs are too and this is done while the servers are offline during the tick. I would assume, this would be accomplished via some setting as either a cron job or after a certain amount of in-game time has passed or manually.


But hey, that's not too abnormal. The Conan server leaks memory like it's going out of style and has to be reset regularly and the mods and such need to be updated on it when they're updated on clients. Server maintenance is a fact of life for running a server.