According to the Vendetta docs, there will be hundreds/thousands of sectors for us to explore. However, I can't imagine any person actually designing each and every one. Will they be randomly generated? If so, will new sectors be created and attached to old sectors during the course of the game?

i just hope sector 7 will remain the same for the entire life of the game. :)

I was wondering the exact same thing igrok :). I bet they will. If you read the docs carefully you'll notice that they even mention the possibility of having up to an infinite number of sectors. Since the devs plan to host everything on *one* server I could imagine all these sectors being relatively well populated (if this thing grows to other MMORPG proportions).
I think this is a revolutionary and awe-inspiring idea personally.

The server itself is a P3 550. Jealous? ;)

Now that I think about it, I remember one of the devs saying that there is a separate process/thread for each sector. If the server architecture remains that way, they may have trouble doing thousands of sectors :(

They don't plan on one server. They've said that...they just haven't set up a second server yet...

The game *already* has the capacity to add new sectors on the fly. Incarnate told me that a long time ago.

If they put a second server up, would it be you connecto to a different server, or would it merely handle the load of additional sectors?

Spontaneous sector creation could be very helpful for the whole 'exploring' idea.

BTW, what are the server specs as is?

~The Penguin

Ah...I thought it was a 1024-way SGI Origin 3900 with 1 TB RAM and that you devs had 30,000 sectors all to yourselves =P

The FAQ would seem to indicate that although there may be more than one "server" there will be only one cohesive universe:

"Will the game be split among multiple "servers clusters", each supporting a unique game universe?
No. We intend to support a single game universe contiguously across all servers. In other words, the entire population of the game will interact in the same universe, not be split into different "server universes" as it is in EverQuest and other MMOs. This brings about some potential technical challenges, to which we believe we have good solutions."

"i just hope sector 7 will remain the same for the entire life of the game. :)"

Sector 7 is eternal.

A single contiguous "universe" can be served from multiple pieces of actual server hardware. We don't currently plan on using the "Shard" type fragmented universe supported by many other MMOs. But, even those single "Server Shards" are actually back-ended by clusters of machines. I think I once heard that a Lineage shard costs about $500k in computer hardware.

Yes, we currently use a separate process for each sector. However, we only have to actively maintain those sectors with people in them. Idle sectors can sleep and eventually be shut down. Some sectors will, no doubt, be much more popular than other sectors. Thus, we may actually be able to get a pretty good amount of mileage out of each server-computer.

We intend to have a mixture of sectors that are hand-assembled, sectors that are automatically generated, and sectors with elements of both. Important, popular sectors are likely to be mostly hand-built. Far-flung outlying sectors are likely to be auto generated, but even the auto-generation algorithms will have some significant amount of hand-tweaking, to produce the types of sectors we want. The core systems of the expanded universe will probably be mostly hand-built, the systems & sectors moving out from there will likely be more of a mix.

So the sectors we have now are the core system's right? Does that mean that these sectors will have the really big fancy stations you're designing while the automatically generated ones will have the small "outpost" style stations we have currently?

I call for Elite style sectors with suns and planets and moons!!!

nice info...

/me runs around incarnate: "Tell me more, Tell me more, uuuuhhh - will ya" %D

What functions will be added for testing/using the sector event trigger system, just wondering?

The entire universe, right now, might be encapsulated within a single solar system in the expanded universe. Each system will contain several sectors. There will be many systems. The whole concept of navigation is going to change.

I've gone into more detail on this before, you can look through the archives (too bad you can't search.. talk to andy about that :). I'm not going to talk about it any more right now. Eventually I'll add something to the FAQ or In Progress or some such.

Well, whatever it is i'm sure i'll like it.

Our entire universe is a single solar system? The whole concept of navigation is going to change?

As Keanu Reeves would say: "....woah"

/me heads off to the cavernous underground known as the "Archives"

Sweet... Will there be a faster way of getting between systems than taking tons of wormholes? Maybe like each system would have some huge portal (like the really old model [the ring thingy]), and these (for a good fee, like over 10k) would warp you instantly to the portal in the selected system. Ooo... And the charge could be distance based... Yeah... And maybe dynamic, changing with demand! *drool* Yeah, I have to prod a1k0n to give us some html tags... :P

Different-range drive accessories?
"Large Hyperdrive" ? (>5 sectors away)
"Small Hyperdrive" ? (<5 sectors away)
and
"Free Drive" ? (wormhole-to-wormhole only)

Hmm, reminds me of Cowboy Bebop. I like it.