there's this idea in my head of creating a free onlinegame where instead of joining a server you connect to a swarm of peers just like in bittorrent with the tracker just keeping track (duh) of the realms and the clients in them. the game would be action oriented and might use a physics engine (maybe newton). what do you think?

Sounds cool, just start hacking...

Hi,

Perhaps you should check out Question 17 of the forum FAQ

Later,

GCS584

typical case of rtfm :)
what do you think of the following concept: if the game has several areas, one player in that area becomes the "listen server" which players that enter the area connect to, and if he leaves some other player becomes the listen server...
just mindstorming...

Heh...

Actually, this has been discussed quite extensively on the forums. You can check out another post here that mentions all the horrid implications of a decentralized (p2p) MMORPG. Take into consideration what the moderator in the topic has to say; he knows his stuff.

Later,

GCS584

I think trying P2P would be an very interesting idea if you keep the number of players relatively small.
As far as Question 17 ...it is not 100% accurate in what is says. P2P is not used for bulk file transfers...this is done by a client server connection. P2P is mostly used to implement searches. The question also states that it would be hard to find the right peers with low latency??? If done right a P2P will have less latency than a client server arch because there is no 'server' to cause the extra delay. In virtual reality most of the new work has moved away from client server to P2P. A lot of research has been done on this problem and if you were to try a P2P game you should look into using a P2P overlay network with possibly application layer multicast.
A lot has been research on these two ideas but there isn't enough people trying to spend the time building the software.