Ok, this is the situation. I want to make a massively multiplayer (I know, I know...) space game and run the server off of my laptop when I get back to my internet connection at college. I''m up on all of the arguments of the pros and cons of Winsock vs. DPlay, but something I''m not clear on is which would scale better in my case? I''m not running Win2000, so IOCP is out of the question for the moment. I''m estimating that I could probably process around 200 players simulataneously with a custom UDP protocol, but I''m not sure where the bottleneck on performance would be. I guess my real question here is how well DPlay scales in general (or, in specific, to about 200 connections) in comparision to using UDP and collecting all the incoming packets on the server side with a singular recv inside of a lone thread - which is what I''m currently doing. Does anyone have experience with maintaining many connections with both Winsock and DPlay? All the books I have focus on one or the other. Thanks for any input, Lews

Dont know if you are using Win2k pro, but it seems win2k pro has a limited amount of remote connections hardcoded into the network module, so... Might not be the perfect OS for your needs, as for scalability, winsock will very probably be faster.

Tombstone uses DirectPlay from DX 7 and managed to handle 12,200 characters at once over a LAN. Took about 7Mbits per second to do. That was only one connection but it does show the server could handle that many players and push that much data. It was a 10Mbit LAN at the time and an AMD 333 PC.

As for Winsock, I''ve gotten up to 2000 connections with my current project (TCP/IP). I''m going to try some more tests with that one. I think it can do better.

How well your server handles really depends on how well you code it. Not whether you use Winsock or DirectPlay.

Ben


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