@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