Project Overworld

'Ah... This is tiring me a lot..' Keith realized while doing some stretches after having spent his entire day inside Project Overworld. Ever since he started his new job at the NASA, the young man was connected almost the entire day to this simulation.

Without mentioning the physical problems that lying in bed for this many hours may cause, the young man also felt a bit more strained than he was when working from the NASA headquarters directly. His responsabilities also got more numerous with this new function, after all.

Other than that, Keith's centers of interest had changed a lot. A few months ago, when he got back home from his intense NASA work, he would hop inside his favorite Simulated Reality game and spend the rest of his evening accomplishing various tasks for Spacol. Since then, however, he slowly realized he wanted to consume other types of content being totally unrelated to Project Overworld.

'After something becomes a job, it feels like it loses its substance as a hobby.' Keith theorized. To him, his lost in interest in Project Overworld was totally due to his new job at the NASA. He did work for eight hours straight every working day inside this simulation, after all. Up until now, he would only spend this much time inside this game on the week-end, and it also depended on whether he had to do some shopping or not.

The week-ends have always been an opportunity for him to meet with his friends and it would be quite rare for Keith not to spend a bit of time with them on the days off. That was why, the young man thought the only reason he grew tired of Project Overworld was the amount of time he spent inside this simulation every week.

Though, the six initial members of Spacol would not dare to skip any week-ends and days off by not connecting to their common game. Their project at building a self-sustaining Moon base was getting closer by the week and the large pipeline that was supposed to be connecting the base to one of the poles of the satellite was now halfway done. Ever since the new recruits joined Spacol, their rate of work more than doubled and Keith even tasked a few of them with the construction of another 'Rocket assembler'.

He had no hopes of it being completed in a few months of time but it sure was a good future improvement for their Earth base. In any case, Spacol was now functionning more as a company than it ever did during the past few years.

Up until now, Keith only thought of it as a friends organization and its name was only there for public reputation.

- "I guess we did progress a lot since the start of 2037..." Keith thought out loud. However, it was now time for them to go the extra mile. Even though his interest in the game decreased, the servers of Advanced Simulations were also nearing their end quite a lot faster than they had anticipated. In fact, the company had even published their first official post on the forums in years, and this was purely made because of how dire the situation was getting for them.

The last post they had published dated from two years ago, when they announced they would be expanding the total player count on their server by another whopping 'one hundred thousand spots'. Now that Keith could look back on this old post with a few more informations at hand, he realized the decline of Project Overworld was not a new topic at all. Today, the game could host about one million players at the same time, but this number grew to such heights across three long years.

At first, the server could only host twenty thousand people at once until it quickly grew to one hundred thousand spots. Six months later, this number was doubled as another one hundred thousand spots were unlocked to the public. Afterwards, every half a year or so the servers would gain two hundred thousand more places until this final post was made by Advanced Simulation on the year 2035. Even though the company did not let anything slip out from this message, it was now pretty clear to Keith that they had already reached technical limitations.

A lot of players though they stopped there because of the flat one million spots mark, but Keith had other theories as for the reason behind it. The young man theorized that the company must have estimated they had reached a soft player cap back then, meaning that they would not gain enough active players to justify the expenses of upgrading their servers again.

In the present days, this hypothesis was clearly the most likely but the same problems must have been thought of back then. That was why, the young man was feeling like Advanced Simulations had already decided upon stopping the expansion of their game two years ago.

'Well, not that it matters anyways, does it?' Keith meditated. The fact was players were developing increasingly more powerful devices within the simulation and this had a toll on the servers as a whole. Amber had slowed down these sorts of improvements by a lot but it obviously did not prevent anyone from doing as they pleased.

For now, everything had been mostly alright excepting from a few incendents were people got randomly disconnected from the game for no reason. Other than that, Keith has had long conversations with Horace Johnson on that end but to no avail.

- "I don't see much solutions other than buying back the servers of Advanced Simulations ourselves. However, this would prove a much too important investment for the NASA to make, and I'm not sure it would be worth it at all. This is still supposed to be a sandbox for our engineers but the real deal is in the real world, after all." The human resources manager said during the last meeting they have had together. "I suppose we could convince the company to host private servers for us only, and to a much lower price than buying back their whole serverbase, but we'll see once the situation degenerate to the point where we won't be able to connect back to Project Overworld." He concluded.

That was why, Keith had to conciliate his growing tiredness to the game with the fact they had not much time left to accomplish their projects. For the time being, the NASA employees he oversaw had progressed quite a lot for the past few months and he could not be more happy about that. They were now entirely proficient with the way this game worked and they soon started testing their own improvements over rocket designs. Those were not that impressive since Keith has been making his own improvements for over three years now, but it sure was showing how quickly they adapted to this new environment.

In any case, this project of having NASA engineers working inside of a simulation proved a lot more useful than Horace could have hoped. The main problem with rocketry in the 'real world' was access to resources. A rocket alone could amount to a total of dozens upon dozens of million dollars in construction and materials costs.

Thanks to the help of Amber, and the few drilling units Keith had transported all the way to the 'Area 51', the NASA employees had access to virtually endless amounts of materials for their builds so they could test new ideas without much repercussions. That was why this whole project was so successful, and had a lot of potential for the future of the Space administration of North America.

'Well, I guess having a private server would be a pretty good idea, isn't it?' Keith realized. 'We could be asking Advanced Simulations to generate loads of minerals for us too, right?' He pondered for a while. However, now was not the time for him to think about that. They still had at least a few months before the servers could not hold the pressure any longer and they had to make as much progress as they could in the meantime.

Thus, the young man focused back on the matters at end and started assisting the third team on the construction of their fourth rocket. This one was equipped with some self-landing launchers that Keith had not seen the usage for in this game until very late. In fact, those have always been a go-to in the 'real world' because it would lower the costs of a rocket's structure by re-using launchers that they had recovered during a past launch.

As for Keith, he did not have to lower his costs at all so he had not been thinking about re-usable launchers until very late to reduce the working time of Spacol's 'Rocket assembler'.

'Well, we're doing things a lot different than I used to do a few years ago. We're designing rockets for the real world after all, and cost efficiency is the real deal.' Keith meditated. 'Anyways, let's get back to work!' He motivated himself, before motivating his subordinates in turn.