im pretty sure that direct play isnt powerful enough for 500-1000 players... but i dont want to assume incorrectly is directplay powerful enough to handle this amount of players?

Actually, the scalability of DirectDraw is pretty good these days. It''d probably be fine. Of course, with that number of simultaneous players, you''re starting to look at multi-server setups.

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How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

fireking sniffs a problem in your post, im going to assume by direct draw that you meant direct play, since thats the subject at hand...

anyways, id like to get lots of opinions on this, because ive heard several arguments but not much evidence to prove it. Why is direct play good and why is direct play bad. Why is winsock good and why is winsock bad.

I currently am a big fan of winsock, but dont know how to totally use it yet. But trust me, i played UO for 2 years, and that game ran great on a modem. If you can manage a large world like that with winsock, i think its safe to say that my game should use the same. But direct play is supposed to be easier (i expect microsoft/direct x (yes i know they are kind of seperate) programmers to be a lot smarter than me, i wouldnt touch asm with a 10 foot pole)

PS! I am using Direct X 8.1 SDK for development of this game. Im not using 9 because i dont have any reason too... (unless directplay makes a major improvement here). The game im developing will have 3d graphics, but nothing that needs pixel shaders or vertex shaders or anything of that nature. Just your basic 3d stuff (1 to 2 years ago 3d technology). So if directplay 9 is a big improvement over 8, please fill me in

DP8 and DP9 are much better (and easier) than the previous versions.

.lick

You can get performance data in:

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/corpevents/meltdown2001/ppt/DPScaleNPerf.ppt

They claim to have tried 5200 simultaneous clients without any problem.

-cb

I think UO used IOCP for its login server. IOCP allows thousands of simultaneous connections. Way above 1000. Depending, of course, of your machine power. DPlay now uses IOCP. So I guess you can use it for your massive.

I don''t think the limit is in the API used in this case.

To get thousands of player to be able to play at once, you have to create a multiplayengine that is pretty big and optimized, and at that time, there will be a minor problem to choose between api:s. You might also be able to try diffrent api:s if you design the multiplayengine in the right way

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Petter Nordlander

"There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. The who understand binary and those who don''t"

The challenge with thouands of players (even TCP/IP can handle thousands of connections) is writting an efficient messaging system to keep bandwidth at a minimum and writting very tight and fast code for processing those messages.

If you''re spending 1ms to handle a message, at 1000 players you''re looking at 1sec of software induced lag on top of the lag you have no control over.

Ben


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