I am not a games dev so no idea if this would actually work but...

Would it be possible to split the game into 2 parts. The viable game that you are playing would be on your computer but all of the ongoing background calculations for economy etc would be done in the cloud. The game then pulls the numbers from the server only when they are actually needed rather than everything being constantly calculated in the background.

Might give significant performance boost?

If there is any other computational heavy lifting could that be done by server as well?

That would make the game online-only, would it not? I'm fairly sure that's off the table.

And also doesn't actually help given that the game isn't multithreaded

The game is multithreaded, actually, but only for things like loading/generation/rendering. (At least, as I understand it.)

Okay, given that the parts that give the actual performance problems aren't multithreaded

That's about right, yes.

This, is unfortunately not how the game can work, all you would do is shunt effort off onto another system.
Who pays for that system? What happens if the versions are out of sync? Do all players share the same systems, and in which case how can the universe be infinite in game?


Something like this would be acceptable for a Single Shard MMO, like EVE, where you split effort between machines, allowing each region, or system, to be hosted on it's own system. And something that I am planning to provide for a late project goal for the LT Multiplayer Mod. But, this is where this idea unfortunately has to reside, multiplayer.

Ah well that all makes sense. Useful to learn these bits and pieces. I am only an occasional visitor but this is why I really love these forums!

Thanks all

Of course! Glad you visit, too.

Cloud computing might be off the table because not always-online (whew!). But the networking connectivity Josh recently added suggests that maybe there are other options.

What if I have multiple physical computers on my home network? Can I offload some processing onto them?

Dinosawer wrote:given that the parts that give the actual performance problems aren't multithreaded

nope, as distributed memory multithreading is even harder than shared memory