Support for multi CPU servers

[mike]

Problem

The current server doesn't take advantage of multiple CPUs on a server.

[mike]

One possible idea is to use the ability of MV3D to run multiple servers in the same application. Run multiple servers in the same app on different threads and find some way for them to communicate. The tricky part will be making it so that having one server with one area and the other server with an area that borders it behave in a simple fashion and they will not duplicate efforts.

It may help to allow a server to cache an area without computing physics on it. It should set up the physics bodies and update them with updates from the primary server, but doing collision checks each frame shouldn't be required. However, updating the physics bodies will be needed so that the objects in the area can be collided with objects in the area that borders it.

[mike]

Additionally, some things like pathfinding that can take a set of data and go to town with it should be deferred to threads.

[mike]

Solution

For some reason, running multiple servers in the same app seems to work fine. I'm hesitant to close this ticket because it probably shouldn't work. I suppose this means that Twisted is thread safe.

The problem I think should be there (but isn't) is that the reactor is running in a seperate thread from the rest of the app. In addition, ODE can't be thread safe either. Adding geoms and stuff should cause issues maybe? Maybe not though.. Who knows. It seems to work, so I'm sticking to that.

It isn't very helpful at the moment though because a server that gets updates from another server causes both to go pretty slowly at present. Another ticket should solve that.

See the --nservers arg in ServerCommandLineArgs for a test.

[mike]

Milestone beta-test deleted

[mike]

Setting the milestone back