My dad wants me to make a Massive Multiplayer game like Starcraft (i.e 200 men per player) and with infinite players (>100,000) all at run time, and guess what He wants it in 3D!!!! What should I do? How can I convince him that this is NOT possible? maybe not even feasible by 2010? Ohh yeah and I''m not Blizzard, a mutli-million dollar company with experience in making 8-player MAX. games. I''m just a small-time developer with 3 brothers, who haven''t even made 1 penny out of Games. /Memir

ahah, no way in hell that''s possible. there are so many reasons why if you had 100,000 players with 200 units a piece..

you''d have to display thousands of 3d units at once (even at a measly 10 polys per unit that''ll wreak havoc on the bus let alone the CPU!
the memory requirements keeping track of the units (100,000players * 200units per player=20,000,000 units!, that cracks me up just thinking about that)
and finally.. bandwidth.. first off there''s no way the average client can handle it and then the server has to have the bandwidth of the number of clients combined

Even if this game was codeable and would run on todays machines(which is impossible),would it be fun to play?I don´t think so.
With 100.000 players you couldn´t even realize who is your enemy and who is your friend....But if the map would be the whole world and everybody would play another country it might be fun....

Greets,XBTC!

If your dad is willing to pay money, I''ll do it.

I''d like to see how he plans on paying for all the servers he''ll need to run a game of that magnitude. I''m guessing you''d at least need one server for every 25 players. Which means that you''d need about 4000 servers. And I doubt any publisher would want to pay for all those servers for an unproven game company with an idea that''s probably not going to be all that fun.

Plus, there''s simply no way that you''d be able to program a game of that magnitude yourself. Even John Carmack wouldn''t stand a chance against those odds.

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Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant and she fell on me? Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.

My suggestion:
Find some of the design diaries from Shogan:Total War. Originally they wanted around a thousand troops on a single screen, each acting individually, and be playable on-line. They ditched the idea, and probably dicussed hy in their diaries. Basically, if a big-time developer with a decent sized team can''t figure out how to do it, how can four people with a few games under their belt hope to come up with a solution.

BTW, it can be done in real time in 3D. Just tell your dad that everything will be dots. He, he

It''s possible. You just have to do it the right way. I have an idea which would probably work perfectly. MAybe when I get some spare time and finish learning OpenGL and get my 3D engine started I''ll give it a go.

Hey, um.. what''s up with your dad? lol
(no offense)

Guys and gals, you all are real cool and funny I thought programmers are all processing 1''s and 0''s in their brains, hahaha ...... but you guys made me laugh so loud that it nearly wake my mom and dad up

Your dad wants it 3d and like Starcraft? Why? I''ve never seen a 3d map building game. Does your dad actually want it to be a map building game?

I''m part of an ORPG group, and something like that was our original idea. We changed it a lot. For one because in most map building games everyone starts out weak, then they get really strong. If someone joined in at the end they would die so fast. So instead we decided to make it more individual and have every person be someone in the army. And its also much slower to build things. Eventually if you get strong enough you can become a lord or emperor and tell people what to do and where to build stuff.