Just got a question about networking and player counts.
So me and a few friends are talking about making a game with about 128 players per server. Possibly more…
Now before you say you are crazy or This cannot be done! I have been doing some research into this. Namely older games that have done this.
The oldest one that comes to mind is a Novalogic game called Joint Ops: Combined Arms Gold That has about 150 Players online per server. This is still sold on Steam.
The second one that comes to mind is MAG which was a PlayStation 3 game with 256 Players per server by Zipper Interactive.
This Last one is from the Developer Tale Worlds The creators of the Mount and blade series. This can have up to 200 Players a game providing that the map supports it. Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars Also sold on Steam.
With that said - Here goes the questions
Is 128 Players Reasonable to aim for in a next generation FPS game? If not why? Should I aim Higher? Lower?
Are there anyways to get performance increases with games such as First person shooters on this scale? I would like to hear peoples thoughts on this.
When I say Next Generation I am not talking about graphics. I could care less about that. I am talking about stuff like Player counts and player interactions, Modding tools, etc.
It depends on if you can actually support that many on the server and clients (Like if everyone stands on top of each other what happens?), size of maps etc. But 128 players is a medium sized map sounds pretty good.
Making sure everything is optimized as it should be, I don’t feel that you’ll have much of any issue. If you go back to 1998 when Tribes was first released, or even more recent Tribes 2; they were already handling all of this including having a very large modding scene.
So make sure that you have your networking down, optimize at every chance, and with enough time you’ll be able to reach your goal.
The good news is our game is feasible and we can do it with the amount of players we want.
The second bit of good news is that we plan to make my game open source some time after release. This would include art assets as well.
The bad news is - Well we wont be doing this with Unity3D due to its closed source nature.
Here is why - We want to have mod tools for my game but we do not want to pay hand over fist of a Source Code License for Unity.
So I am looking into Torque 3D 3.5 MIT - Here is what we discovered.
The net code is very robust. It can support allot of players with very little changes to the net code.
There are allot of awesome upgrades coming down the pipe. (DirectX 11 Render, APEX integration, 64 Bit support, etc.)
Since it is under the MIT License we can use the full source code for commercial use or Mod tools.
They are also putting in a Fourth map soon. Its name escapes me at the moment. It is essentially a Swamp continent.
But my goal here is too allow players to host their own dedicated servers.
While I am not aiming for over 2k players. Still… It proves that it can be done.
