Linguofreak
Well-known member
The reason this engine interests me so much, is simply because it already has the scale and simulation levels we hoped to achieve with this project and because of this I thought it might be useful to test some of our ideas. I am still personally interested to see whether or not this engine could be modified to produce something similar but I am well aware of current limitations not only with the engine itself, but with todays technologies.
The problem is that it's doubtful if multiplayer capability at that scale is really feasible. The problem is not really with so much with technical limitations, per se, as it is with human limitations: It can take weeks or months (or longer) to get around the solar system. Combat is more likely to take place on the scale of seconds, minutes, or hours. Players are likely to get bored when they have to wait for two months for the troop transport they're on to get to the planet they're invading. They're likely to get angry when they have to wait two weeks for a battle, only to find out that the trajectories of the two forces have them meeting for combat at 4:20 in the morning the night before that big history test.
And since you're running an MMORPG, rather than a single player or few-player game, you can't use Orbiter's time-warp feature, or anything like it, to cut down on the boring waiting, since you're unlikely to get every single player to agree on when to use it.