Two facts and an assumption lead to an interesting idea. One fact is that if I had posted to the ''common themes in your design'' thread, I would have said that in action I prefer the din of battle rather than the focus of dueling and that in strategy I prefer vast sweeps as opposed to the manipulation of a few. (I like seeing the bullets and beams but hate telling them who to shoot, they''re f***ing soldiers, they should know who to shoot.) The other is that due to the growth in popularity and capability of PC''s, I, and probably a few of you, have been accumulating a number of computers over the years. The assumption the industry has made is that the game world is placed on one computer(two if you''re hosting a separate server but that''s it). So what do I do if the game worlds I want to create are too large for one computer? I use more than one, obviously. I know it''s a niche. It hasn''t(AFAIK) been done because of scale and economy. The scale is on the consumer''s side. Not everyone has multiple computers, nor does everyone who has multiple computers have a proper way to link them for games. The economy portion affects the designers, they can only guarantee a buyer has one computer of course, but just as important I think, is that they know computers will be twice as fast in a couple of years. In other words, it''s easier to design for the next generation rather than make the game work on multiple computers. So the question is, what can we do with this? Let''s look at the benefits. We can have much larger worlds with many more actors for starters. We don''t have to worry with security overhead because the player is running the cluster himself. We can have one computer in the cluster dedicated to compiling new sections of code and distributing the libs to the others in the cluster. You know those dynamic, living, evolving worlds we all go on about? We can get closer by finally being able to appropriately handle events beyond the player''s eyes. The non-player machines don''t need gfx or sound. Feel free to discuss technical issues as well such as synching, bandwidth, etc..

I don''t think it is that much of a niche. That is what any large online game does (everquest etc...). If you want a large living world anything like that then you need far more than two computers. If you are just thinking about making a single player game using two computers then look into Distributed Computing. I know there is a course on it at my uni. Have yet to take it so I can''t give any more info.
-Greg

Hmm actually my original idea for my RPG (everyone is making one these days :D ) is kinda what you''re describing. It uses a distributed server model. A game world can exist on one or more servers. I''ve got most of the logic figured out, and I''ve seen this done by other people (like "big world" or something like that) so it''s not rocket science. This way servers can be added on the fly (and removed, such as when one of them is down), server load can be distributed evenly amongst servers, stuff like that. But you can also run the server in the same machine as you run the client for single-player games (with an option to not make it available to other players on the net), like in Freelancer - because there can be multiple servers for the same world, you can have more than one computer for a single player game. So all you need is a distributed server =)

Greg K:
I had originally planned to post this a couple of days ago but I accidentally closed the browser and went to bed so this version is a little different so thank you for mentioning distributed computing. You''re right, I had single-player games in mind when I wrote it but the point is that current software is built so that one or more worlds or zones are running on *one* server rather than one world being run on multiple servers.

It''s not just having large worlds that''d be cool. We could have extremely specialized portions of gameplay. Imagine if we had a whole other computer dedicated only to AI.

Business-wise I see the servers being free and the single-player program being the part you pay for.

What can I say? Seeing a couple hundred thousand ships fighting would be awesome.

hmmm... interesting... connect to computers owned by the publisher/game makers which have super intelligent ai?..over internet? (broadband!)... the user/player need not rely on his ancient 800mhz machine to calculate moves.. etcetera

difficult to implement ..but worth keeping in the old noggin for possible future use

maybe charge for use of game..