I want a persistent world the size of planet earth. How many players can I have fighting each other at the same time?
As many as you want, however, there are limitations when it comes to funding. How many servers can you afford? What is your expected network usage per player per second?
Well for servers, wouldn’t I only need 1 cause all possible players are gonna be playing 1 map the size of earth? So the network usage per player would include only player actions or all things tied to the player like actions to the environment, economy and possible in game utilities the character would use to keep track of in game progress? Thanks
That’s not how it works. With only 1 server, located wherever it is, will cause immensive lag on other continents of the world. To ensure a fast and stable internet connection, you need at least 1 server per continent. You could however try to let those servers somehow communicate with each other, but that will get very complex very fast and will be slow because of the latency
Depends on what zoom level you are using.
If you are thinking of doing FPS zoom level. Give up now.
If you are thinking of doing a ‘Space exploration’ zoom level (ie, zoomed right out so the planet is small), then you will probably only need one server.
Hi Importfilta, If you are interested in a single world with unlimited number of players, you should check out Badumna.
It was designed with your use case in mind. It uses a decentralised architecture and has a distributed spatial indexing system that allows all users to co-exist in a single shard/world without the requirement for having large server farms.
Cheers.
Thanks for the replies 
I would love to do FPS zoom level cause its my favorite type/way of playing games. I know Im not the only one who has thought of incorporating planet earth as one map into a game, so hopefully the technology is available today with using BADUMNA. Im still going to do some more research and will get back to you all on the possibility. Fingers crossed lol…
Ok so I posted 2 threads on Badumna which still haven’t gone through the moderators. Then I posted a thread on the forum for Photon Cloud Server and got the same answer as Wasstraat65 implied. It is possible but there is gonna have to be some multi server load balancing. So I really want to do this project and am going to start it. Just wanted to give you guys the info I got and if its still not a viable solution please let me know, thanks again to all…
Hi Importfilta,
Your post on Badumna forum has been responded…take a look:
http://www.scalify.com/forum/showthread.php?915-Unity-Multiplayer-game-possible
Cheers
There is no way you will ever be able to achieve FPS level for planet earth size. I would give up on that idea. Its stupid anyway. You would need over 1 billion players to be sure to bump into someone. Can you even get your head around how much content you would have to create? because I dont think you have really thought that through.
I would concentrate on trying to create something much smaller in scale first. If you have success with that, you can always start expanding into new regions.
LoL, i got kicked from a project saying this to the leader ^^
He was only going for 1 server based and expected a huge player base
sounds like it was a blessing
Well i guess you could say that…
Was a bit sad about it myself, but nothing to do about it.
Really wanted to be part of a team again 
Going solo just so boring!