Minecraft worlds are infinitely big, but if you’re playing the vanilla game, they only support a small number of players. Imagine, though, if there was no limit. Imagine if, once you’d finished your dream Minecraft build, you could invite thousands or tens of thousands of fellow players to come and marvel at it first-hand. Imagine raiding The Nether alongside an entire army of fellow builders. While it’s still in the works, one prospective Minecraft mod is an invitation to dream. By fundamentally altering how multiplayer worlds are handled in the Mojang building game, it allows 100,000 players to occupy the same space all at once.
The best Minecraft mods vary in scope. Some make tiny, surgical changes to core systems, nudging the building game ever so slightly so that it better suits players’ needs. Others are transformative, adding new enemies, biomes, mobs, and even story-driven campaigns. This one, however, could outsize them all. Developed by videogame tech company Meta Gravity, for the moment, it serves as a testbed for something called Quark, a network engine which allows for multiplayer games to be dramatically scaled in size. Instead of a server processing all the data and information, with Quark, the computing burden is spread across a contained network of both server and client machines. Applied to Minecraft, this allows for worlds that support 100,000 players.
“Minecraft runs everything on the server, from locomotion and combat to chunk generation,” Meta Gravity senior software engineer Mihail Makei explains. “The client’s role is limited to collecting the inputs (keyboard, mouse, gamepad) and propagating them to the server. To integrate Quark Multiplayer, we rewrote the networking layer from scratch and moved simulations to the client. Everyone who joins the game is providing computer power to the world.”
In order to stress test the mod, Meta Gravity built a bot network to simulate tens of thousands of Minecraft players, all on the same world at one time. 100,000 players could join at once. Of that 100,000, the latest prototype of the mod allows for 5,000 players to be visible and active on your screen at any time, although in those cases, your framerate could vary between 20 and 60fps. However, even with this many players in a single world at once, movement, combat, digging, placing blocks, and basic crafting are all still possible.
Meta Gravity says that it plans to release the mod publicly and will include support for NPCs, weather, and terrain growth, as well as moderation and anti-cheat validation. The team also says there will be public playtests and that when the mod is finally launched it will be available for free.
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Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum
Source: https://www.pcgamesn.com/minecraft/one-hundred-thousand-players
