Dear all, Maybe it sounds a stupid question, but I would like to know how many users can play at the same time for a online game? I know there is so many technique, topology to set up a game server, however I want to have some example, such as UO or EQ, so that I can have some case studies on them. Best regards, DT

How long is a piece of string?

Without some useful parameters, the question is impossible to answer. In most cases, you can simply up the numbers by buying in more CPU power -- more servers = more people. (The scaling isn''t as clear cut as that sounds, but you _can_ throw CPU cycles at the problem if you have money to burn.)

If you''re interested in generalising, the question should be "How many users should I _design_ for?" The answer to this boils down to the value you assign to the word "Massive" in "Massively-Multiplayer Online Game". Too many people and your servers may fall over. Alternatively, you find people having to ''queue up'' with other players to complete a quest if that quest is proving too popular.

Too few players and the game-world appears sparsely populated.

Both UO and EQ have suffered problems like this. Neither are perfect, but mere numbers alone won''t tell you all you need to know.

Summary: "It depends".

thx stimarco,

That''s why I said it''s a stupid question (^v^). Maybe I change the question to "How many users can play at the same time for UO or EQ?" and "What technique they are using?". Coz it''s difficult to find article about setting up game server for online game, if you have any article or web about this topic, can you send them to me?

Best regards
DT

EQ just recently set a record of 100,000 concurrent. That''s across all servers.

-Mike

Yeah, EQ hit 100k Sunday night. But this scales nicely with stimarcos comments. The MUD that I used to work on peaked for a short time in beta at about 315 players, using TCP in a single process/thread. Of course, with 315 players we crashed a lot and lagged a lot. We had 315 players online, but would you consider that to be playable? I wouldn''t. We did very well with about 100 players though.

Give us an idea of how your game server is set up, then we can probably help give more accurate information on what you can expect. Is it a single process for login, chat and game logic? Are you on a multi-processor system using multiple threads?

I''m working on a MMO using DirectPlay8, using multithread to handle received data. I''ve tried to use socket/thread method, but turn out just like the MUD u method, 500 is the peak. You guy mentioned EQ hits 100k, how''s the server set up? anyone know about it?

gah, directplay is crap, too much overhead, use pure winsock

Mindgamez Entertainment

more inportant is your connection which is very expensive, i would amagine with 100 players you would probly need atleast a 5mbit conenction (unless they are all on 56k) most lickly a 10mbit. or coarse it depends on the amount of bandwith being passed.

more inportant is your connection which is very expensive, i would amagine with 100 players you would probly need atleast a 5mbit conenction (unless they are all on 56k) most likely a 10mbit. or coarse it depends on the amount of bandwith being passed.

you mean directplay8 will eat up lots of resources?