Pardon me Doug but I dont feel that answer was a very fair response to the question. For years people have been trying to accomplish varying degrees of MMO type 3D interaction with 3DGS and no one has been succesful with more than 2-4 players online.. That is using the most basic data objects with a simple shape for the player and no terrain or models to clutter up the rendering pipeline..

3DGS uses DX net code for their network layer which has been proven unstable in the past and is no longer supported by Microsoft. Every player who has attempted any kind of multiplayer connectivity with 3DGS beyond 4 players has been forced to go to a third party network layer. This fact, and the fact that trying to get support on the native network code was so difficult in these forums are the reasons my project had to switch to a more flexible engine. This after we had invested over $3000 in commercial team licensing and personal Pro editions as needed.

@Prence: You can continue making your game with 3DGS, only you can decide if it meets your criteria or not, but try some searches in the forums here for populace and Raknet.. I know nothing about this Populace plugin but supposedly it has realistic and useable 3d many player support.. Raknet is a very viable third party network app written by a very competant network GURU who has integrated into many commercial systems. The down side to Raknet is you will have to get into the C++ stuff in order to tailor it to your needs.

Truth be told Fastlane claims to have been working on getting a many player "demo" of what 3DGS can do for over 3 years now. I believe in one of his more recent posts he claims his university is funding his "analysis" of the 3DGS connectivity and he has 2 full time interns working on it.. To my knowledge, after 3 years of solid work, including professional funding and interns all he has been able to do is run a 3DGS app in "server" mode that allows approx a couple hundreds "connected" clients but without the necessary 3D objects required for an MMO. (EI: In plain english the client software "connects" to the server software but does nothing with the connection as in there is no 3D object handling, movement or any kind of interaction other than the initial connect between the clients and the servers.)

Other testing that has been done (most noteably by Locoweed) allowed 3-4 players to connect and actually move around in a very simplistic zone but they got such terrible lag even after months and months of "tweaking" it was often less than 1 frame per second. I know this because I took part in some of locoweeds testing and even after I abandoned 3DGS for a more flexible solution for MMO development I continued to follow his testing as I am always curious if anyone will ever get it to work.

The bottom line is this. 3DGS has a working network layer.. If you are designing a card game or word game or perhaps even a turn based application that does not require real time updating to many concurrently connected clients it works quite well. As soon as you attempt to introduce real time 3D object manipulation across multiple clients you get bottlenecked by the network code and since 3DGS does not allow owners to modify the source you are very limited in how you can handle these hurdles..

Beyond all of that, the very nature of how 3DGS connects clients makes it virtually impossible for linked servers to hand off client objects to each other.

I think if people were more open about the current potential and limitations of the 3DGS networking code instead of being so defensive it might foster a better community effort to make it better. After being ridiculed by both the admins here and some of the "preferred" users over my finding regarding the network layer of 3DGS I came to my own conclusions and found a product that works much better for my application with a much more supportive community and customer support options. If you have any further questions about my work with 3DGS and you are serious in your efforts (I dont have much in the way of free time but I am always glad to help someone avoid the pitfalls that I've already been through) please feel free to contact me on my project forums. http://www.aakrana.com/community

I wish you all the best.

Mark