Division of Labor

[CHowell2005]

Ive got an Athlonxp 1700+, 512mb ddr and a Celeron 600 with..i think 384mb SDram

I will probably have max peak player # of 10....would i need to divide the server tasks amongst the two or would the athlon be suitable...if i do have to divide...any tips on doing so. Celeron speed and ram may be upgraded soon also. Also...the pc i acutally play on is a 2.8ghz w/1mb l2cache, 1gig3200ddr and raid sata.....im sure i could spare a little cpu power from it if need be...but i would rather not to keep things uncomplicated. Any ideas are appreciated.

[Charmy]

with only 10 ppl, you won't need to host very many static zones, unless you are writting complicated quests that require zones to stay alive, or if you want them to stay alive to keep up with mob tiemrs, remember every time a zone shuts down and starts back up it repops and starts the timers over, so this wouldn't work if you had mobs that had set timers for certain quests (epics, planar mobs etc..), or else people coudl just leave the zone have it shut down then re pop back in and kill all the mobs again. it all just depends. if your not really caring about the mob spawn times and such you can just host 10 dynamic zones and limit the people to 10, this will allow each person to have their own zone up at the same time.

If you want to split the work load among different servers just set the internal ip address to the ip of the machine that hosts the world.exe, this will make zone point to this ip and connect to world, and when world.exe needs to direct a person to a zone it can find it on any of the computers hooked togehter. just make sure you are running on a 100mbs + connection between the machines or you might get some serious lag between zone > world > client >world >zone process. (someone correct me if i am wrong on the way to point zone to world, it seemed like the logical way to do it, but i am not positive <wince>) anyway, for only 10 clients you should be ok with just the althlon, but more firepower doesn't hurt.

One thing i do not know how to do is work the quest system when spliting the zones, i think if you just place the needed quests in the folder called quests in the same lcoation as zone.exe you would be ok, not sure though. again i have never run the server on mroe than once machine.

Hope this helps.