[rdtsc]

I thought of that too. So if you have a large MMO presumable players wouldn't be uniformly distributed in the world. As in, here, there is a fairly constant 100 players per sq km. Rather I see hubs forming (maybe with some power law distribution) -- maybe a large city, market, planetary system, ring of hell, a battlefield that would disproportion ally hold a large number of entities vs other ares.

There then instead of node ownership based on the space grid, you'd want to somehow have node ownership based on clustering/density.

So maybe constantly iterate a K-means clustering algorithm, where servers are cluster centers and every player/client in the cluster belongs to that server.

That would be my back of the envelope approach. It probably has lots of terrible flaws that I haven't thought of yet.

[Arelius]

I mean, I imagine that the system can handle the density by progressive balancing the tree. The problem is that gameplay doesn't do the same thing, A client wants to see all characters within 10(or w/e) meters, not the closest 10 characters.