what kind of setup would be needed to have a game server that can run 1000,2000,3000,4000, or 5000 poeple conferbly?

Ooooh oooh let me answer this one =)

First off guy you really need to put a lot more thought into your server process before you can decide on a limit. I''f you are talking about a text mud then you could probably run10k peopel off a dual processing P4 system with 4 gigs of RAM using UDP networking code.

However if you are talking about a 3D client/server application you are undertaking a project with a scope that has, to date, eluded even the largest of the commercial gaming teams. A couple of corporate gaming comapnies are attempting the truely Ginormous multiplayer gaming architecture but it is a task that requires such intense memory/database/bandwith optimization that I doubt any person that has ever visited these boards could properly outline.

Intresting topic for discussion though. Good luck

Mark

Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

Well, I built a server application that can handle well in excess of 2000 client connections. I know that because I wrote a simulator to test that and from each instance of the simulator, I opened 400 connections to it. Ran it six times and all of them connected just fine.

Of course, the fact of the matter is that it takes a lot of bandwidth to actually answer all of those connections. As Slyxsith alluded to, you really need to ask yourself what you''re doing and what is reasonable. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred players logged in and sending messages back and forth to the server, you''re probably going to need to scale out to multiple servers. That''s application specific, as Slyxsith pointed out. 3D client server stuff takes a lot more bandwidth and cpu power than a simple text mud.

Think about what you''re doing, why you''re doing it, and figure out if you even need to scale up that far. Aside from the major companies, there aren''t too many games that have more than 1000 players logged in at any given time.

Of course, if this is a purely research oriented question, you might want to actually implement several different network architectures and then go from there. You''ll learn a lot more than you would from a book and much faster, trust me.

An online game called Infantry (www.infantryzone.com) used to contain thousands of people spread out over the zones in its prime. Now that its pay-to-play, the number dropped by about 80-90%.

Why is 3d that much more data? float x,y,z,radian; That''s going to be the MOST common packet being sent around, which is a total of 16bytes. This could easily support 1,000 users on a not so high end server, with a cable modem (well, my cable company doesn''t cap my download, and more importantly, doesn''t cap my upload speed, i can easily get 512KB/s uploading ). With a higher end server, and a full T1, or T3 would be able to support 2k users without issues, and multiple servers can get you to the 10k mark if you really need. It really depends on the game and server though, if you''re transfering tons of info back and forth, you obviously can''t hold as many users, or you need more bandwidth, if you''ve got very small packets, but a lot of AI going on, a faster server would help, or, if you''re doing a lot of DB reads/writes, you''ll need a fast harddrive RAID array. There are to many factors to be able to give you any exact numbers (or even close to exact). It also depends on how up to date you want to keep the users... do you want to update positions every second, every 1/2 second, 10 times a second, every 2 seconds?

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Original post by Slyxsith
Ooooh oooh let me answer this one =)

First off guy you really need to put a lot more thought into your server process before you can decide on a limit. I''f you are talking about a text mud then you could probably run10k peopel off a dual processing P4 system with 4 gigs of RAM using UDP networking code.

However if you are talking about a 3D client/server application you are undertaking a project with a scope that has, to date, eluded even the largest of the commercial gaming teams. A couple of corporate gaming comapnies are attempting the truely Ginormous multiplayer gaming architecture but it is a task that requires such intense memory/database/bandwith optimization that I doubt any person that has ever visited these boards could properly outline.

Intresting topic for discussion though. Good luck

Mark

Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

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Don''t be so sure about anyone that has visited these boards . I have a pretty well outlined idea of what i''m going to do to support about 400 users on my duron 1.2ghz with 192mb sdram machine. If I throw in a dual athlon 2000 system with 1gb of ram, and get a dedicated t1, I could easily support 1,000+ users on a single machine, depending on how often I want to update my users (i''m think 3 times per second or so), I could easily bring that number up to 800 users on my machine, and 2k on a better machine, AND i''m going to have multiple server support built in, so I will be able to dynamically put up new servers whenever the work load gets to high, so I will be able to support as many users as I want (and I could put servers around country so people don''t have as much lag).

R4Dis,

You sound like someone I need to talk to Network code is really concerning me with my alpha project but I wont waste your time till I get a decent 3D client. (The 3D client started working last night *cheers wildly*) I'd really like to hear what you are planning for network comms and see if you might be intrested in allowing us to use your server controls.

Best of luck on the app development.

Mark

Fly by night Studios
C++ Coders needed

[edited by - Slyxsith on March 31, 2003 3:28:26 PM]

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Original post by Ready4Dis
Why is 3d that much more data?

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I''d guess the difference between a discrete environment where you just move between rooms (and perhaps not very often) and a contiuously updated 3D coordinate position (arbitrarily dense streaming of updates when moving). So the difference would be more of how often it is updated, not so much how much data each update contains. Right?

And you tend to pump out a lot of lead (or laser) in a fast paced 3D fps game.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster

Original post by Ready4Dis
Why is 3d that much more data?

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I''d guess the difference between a discrete environment where you just move between rooms (and perhaps not very often) and a contiuously updated 3D coordinate position (arbitrarily dense streaming of updates when moving). So the difference would be more of how often it is updated, not so much how much data each update contains. Right?

Ahh, but I was more talking along the lines of why would 3d be any different than 2d, obviously a text based thing, or similar would be a different story, since you only need to send info when they switch rooms.

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Original post by granat
And you tend to pump out a lot of lead (or laser) in a fast paced 3D fps game.

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We aren''t talking about a fps (first person shooter), I haven''t seen to many 5000 player fps''s .