@Michael: I have been an owner of 3DGS since A4, I am hardly talking through my hat. I simply posted here because Prence of Darkness asked the same questions I was asking 3 years ago. He is getting, in effect, the same answer I got back then. I thought I should clarify the response with some solid facts. I spent over a year and a half working with the A5/A6 network code, and if my findings were incorrect all I would ask to refute those findings is a working demo that allows 20 people to connect to a single server and run around without cratering their FPS to 1. Your demo does not allow that. Fastlanes working physics example allowing multiple people to view a physics interaction is not the same as even a handfull of people physically running around and sending their player object updates.

Anyways, as before, there has always been the same old rhetoric that it's all possible, it's just that there are no examples of it working.. Locoweed's work came as close to a success as anyones. I think he actually broke 10 players online with his last round of tests without completely killing the framerate..

The fact of the matter is this, 5 players? 10 players? 50 players? is 50 players enough to run an MMO? of course not.

All that Prence of Darkness is asking is has anyone succesfully made a working MMO base engine with 3DGS. The answer to that is no. Any MMO project that has been attempted with 3DGS has been unable to have more than a base handful of people connect and that is why they moved to third party network solutions.

Please don't worry about convincing me, I am very happy with my current MMO engine which I have load tested with well over 300 connections to a single server (335 I believe was where I started to bottom out). Now those were simple authenticated connections, actually 3D player clients in game I have only been able to get just over a hundred(thats WAN connects not LAN) but not because my server started to get upset, just because I didnt have anymore testers heh. At 118 connected players I was between 20-25% CPU useage and just over 10% network useage.

There is no out of the box MMO solution. My solution is not "out of the box". It took the combined efforts of a lot of people to tweak and fine tune the engine. I am not suggesting for a minute that 3DGS is not capable of multiplayer games, I believe a handful of people have produced 2-4 player games with 3DGS and they work fairly well on a LAN. ( I dont recall a successful 4 player 3DGS game that works over the WAN) Instead of just the usual rhetoric, if someone has a working solution maybe they could post it for Prence to incorporate. If not then it's all just talk.

All the best.
Mark

PS: My post is not meant to slam 3DGS is any way. I have no agenda to forward by posting and it is certainly not my intention to get into a he said/he said argument. I agree to disagree and if someone is successful with making a 3DGS MMO base engine I am sure discussions like this will bring them out and benefit the community. It's simply the honest exchange of where the network code is at that is all I ever wanted. Microsoft stopped working with the DX net code years ago because game developers couldnt make it work under load. It didnt have the flexibility required by current datastream levels for todays multiplayer entertainment titles. Trying to implement DX networking into an MMO is something Microsoft couldnt do with their multi-billion dollar entertainment division. To assume that an indie developer is somehow better than that is perhaps slightly unrealistic.

Sorry for the disruption I leave you all to your work.
Cheers,
Mark

I was in fastlane's public test a good, good while back and we had like 15~20 people in over the internet and there wasn't much lag to speak of. IMHO affording the hardware to do an MMO is more of an obstact than coding the software.

I NEVER INTENDED FOR THIS!

All I asked for is what is the proven max amount people have been able to accomplish in a shooter or an RPG.

@MarkMcFear Please don't let the community force you away from this post, it is important to have all points of view. I agree with you very much. I searched long and hard for a demo. I didn't find one. If anyone has a demo can you please provide us NOT with all the top secret code, but with a crappy down graded version that can support at least 10 or so people? I'm very close to spending the 800+ to upgrade to pro, but I can't do so until I'm sure that I wont be wasting my money. SOMEONE please post a working downloadable demo, please. I would also like for conitec to answer not just be but also MarkMcFear who claims to have spent 3000, which to me is no punk change.

It would be great if conitec would supply a multiplayer demo for A7.
I think they should. "Office" would work with multiple players, but what I mean is a complete demo, with interacting clients, some particle effects etc. Just to prove to people that it can be done. That would be great. Unfortunately they probably don't have the time...
maybe we should ask George Dan Pirvu (writer of the AUMs) I think he knows pretty much everything about c script, and it would be great of him to code a small-but working demo for massive multiplayer games...

I'm sorry I don't have such a demo. If I did, off course, I'd give you some of the essential code...

Micha

there are other options, if i remember ghostfacekillah was working on a networking plugin that was doing well, tho he seemed to stop working on it completely... if you contact him, im sure that money that you would use for pro could be used to help motivate him again hell, i'd learn how to use udp, and check it out if i could get $800

My response to Mark was meant to refute his incorrect statements and was not an attempt at getting into a flame war or to prove "quien es mas macho". Thus I will not rise (or lower) myself to the challenge of "prove this" or "show that". You either believe what I have done or don't... does me no never mind either way.

To answer Prence's question directly, with a single server and nothing else, you will not get more than 20 people in before even a fast computer bogs down. With a distributed server (that is to say all server-side functions are distributed across various computers), we've acheived 50 interacting connections with no loss of FPS and around 5% server resource usage. The only reason we couldn't get more is because we had 50 clients on three computers, one of which was running the server, and we couldn't load more in and got weird glitches from so many people on so few computers. If you read through our posts through the years you'll find this fact well documented: single server=about 20 clients; distributed server = much more than 20 clients.

BTW, it's unfair to pick on Locoweeds tutorial. It is just that: a tutorial, nothing more or less. It's not meant as a full feature optimzed network code much less an MMO backend. It is a way to get a newbie up to speed on how to network program with 3DGS. From there to MMO status is a long, ardous and mostly alone road since there are so few of us who have the time to pursue it.

Trust me, we are working hard at making our client public. Right now we are fighting our offices network topology which prevents us from making our servers public and thus giving a demo. But we are working towards that and once we are ready, you all will be the first to know!

I'm hoping to be on everyone side in this argument. Personally I like everyone in the community. In my opinion everyone has something important to say, especially after investing 300$ or more in either com or pro ed.

No offence to fastlane or anything but I haven't seen any evidence. Could someone link me to it? Further more, fastlane what where the stats of your server? (RAM, Connection type, Proccessor and so on).