It's still going to be a distributed server thingy, but instead of having server that'll handle thousands of clients, the servers will only handle 1000 or so. Anyone will be able to run a game server, not just me. That should save on bandwidth a bit.
My theory is, every player registers an account. They use that account to connect to my global login server. The login server will provide the client with a list of game servers that it knows about, their capacity, etc etc (Very similar to how it is at the moment). Game servers may have an optional password as well (So you can have clan servers or whatnot).
Players can create characters on the game server, but once created, they'll stay on that server (Their details will be on a DB local to that server). That way there can be loads of different servers with loads of different economies and suchlike.
There's bound to be some problems, such as server admins being able to cheat in the game and create high level characters by modifying their database, but I suppose that's not too bad really. I could have some sort of sync server too to handle things like levelling up and maybe cash, to prevent people doing that. I dunno.
So I'll be playing with that later on tonight or tomorrow.
I also realised that I still haven't installed that 250GB hard drive from about 3 or 4 weeks ago. And I saw from a post in my journal (2nd bottom at the moment), that I could just install the drive and partition it into smaller chunks. I don't know why I didn't think of that... I'll have to partition it in my other PC though, since my server can't see the whole disk, so it can't partition it. Anyway, if that works, I'll be a happy chappy.
