How exactly are my ships simulated, when I'm not in the sector?

[AlexUtopia]

I'm assuming that when my ships are mining in another sector for example, that this is not physically simulated. In which case what they do would be some sort of simple formula?  I guess what I'm asking is, do we know how this calculation actually looks like? I started to test this a little, but it's hard to say, how ship equipment and maneuverability is factored in the result you get. And much more interesting how will off screen fights be calculated?

 

How well will an escort ship for miners be able to defend them, when I'm not around, can I expect it to roughly perform as it would when I can see it in the sector I'm in? Does it simply calculated something like hitpoints vs damage-output = who won the fight? Does it matter where exactly it was positioned in the sector, when pirates attack?

 

I paused playing for a few months and missed a lot of updates notes you could say, maybe there is a link, or maybe somebody could share their experience with this sort of thing. Thanks in advance!

[DivineEvil]

Ship's actions are simulated just like in the sector you're currently are. There are no formulas. It is not rendered to your display, but the ships move, mine and perform any other actions just like if you were present, and if you switch to the sector, you can enter into the ship in the middle of performing its current task. As far as I can tell, new ships will not be spawned into the sector.

 

When you have too many ships in too many different sectors, this can lead to massive lags due to real-time processing, and that is why the number of active sectors is limited (to 5 by default, IIRC). When the limit is exhausted, the oldest sector activated is cached and doesn't allow action simulation.

[Sir Charles]

Active sector limit is 5 per player on multiplayer severs.

Any sector you have been in should be active for 5 minutes after you leave it and then be stored on disc.

 

In singleplayer it is much higher (i have the number 500 in my mind, but that might be wrong memory). The choice of active sectors is made by a priority system that will consider how many ships and stations are in the sector as well as whether it is ships or stations in said sector.

Such independently running sectors used to be safe from pirate and xsotan attacks because those used to be timer-based events that would follow the player, not his crafts. However this might have been changed by now, I can just tell it used to be like that.

 

For sectors with no crafts from an active (currently logged in) player the behavior is different. Once a sector is loaded from disc the game will calculate changes to that sector (I think actually just to the goods stored in those stations to simulate that some trading and production has happened since you left) based on the time that has passed since your last visit. This creates the illusion that the sector has been "active" while you were elsewhere, which it has not been.

 

In the last updates there was stated that factions will rebuild their stations and fleets now. I do not know how this is done by the game and I cannot give any formulas for the sectors that are loaded from disc either. Sorry to be of no help in that regard, but I think this will answer most of your question anyways.

 

Have fun in the game! ;)

[AlexUtopia]

Thanks for the answer guys! I didn't think of that option. Normal single-player games would probably not do that, but due to the server architecture, that is in place here anyway, it makes sense that this is possible.

[SneakyTacts]

By the way, the number of sectors that may be active is a variable that you may change in the server’s file.