Mainframe has revealed some behind the scenes technical details about Pax Dei’s building system. With so much player-created content in the game, It's no surprise that the building system is one of the most highly used, and that players have found creative ways to build some intricate structures.
In an update shared to Discord, they revealed that out of the 24 Home Valleys on each server, the ones with the most building action have about 400,000 building pieces. On top of this, in any Home Valley, typical build rates amount to 10,000 new pieces every week. Again, no surprise, given the extent of player-created elements in Pax Dei. The team offers a number of additional technical details that illustrate what they are working with. With a single Home Valley building taking up about 30 GB of data, 100 people in that location means 3GB of data for the server to handle. Remember that there are 24 Home Valleys on each server. It’s a lot of data.
The team goes into lots more detail on how they handle such a massive amount of data, in an MMORPG where players building the world is the standard. An important first step is the use of a dedicated building replication system. Repli is this backend server just supporting the building data from the world database. It's a custom system that has to not only process all of this changing data that needs to be replicated in real time, it has to do all of this in a way that lends itself to a smooth player experience.
Repli works alongside Unreal Engine, through which they handle the gameplay side. Another vital tool is to use Instanced Static Meshes. These ISMs allow for multiple pieces to be rendered in one shot which also improves the performance. Through “area managers”, they Handle the creation and changes for building pieces in the area, including the ISM.
Related:
Pax Dei Early Access Review
The full dev update is very technical, and there's even more to explore, but the bottom line is this is a massive system, and Mainframe isn't even done yet.
“The current system should work fine until around 500,000 pieces. After that, we will start seeing new issues that must be solved. Good news, though! We already have plans to scale the system to 1,000,000 pieces per zone. But, that is a story for another time.”
So we’ll have to wait and see how this shakes out as Early Access continues.
