Sorry about the bad math!.. thats acutally 30,000 units, but you could knock that down by half if you limit the number to 50 bot units. AC I believe is not FPS, so in a way, it makes your argument stronger.. but read on! I made this same comment on another board to a similar concern:


Well.. you could scale that down to like 60 real players controlling a limit of 30 bots for the standard college T1 or ATM servers. Thats 1800 units and I think a a map the size of 2 Tribes maps (im talking the whole map of most Tribes maps where you can go out of the standard playing area.. they are really pretty large) For stuff that has 300 real players and 100 (or 50 bots per real player, than larger servers would be needed. And that is actually much smaller from a network standpoint than what a game like PlanetSide is proposing (goto www.verant.com and follow the link to Planetside).

Remember, the bots are controlled by the individuals own pc''s and THIER bandwidth is mostly used, not the servers.. the server just needs to route x,y,z coords and other small data packets for the bots. What really kills the servers bandwidth is more REAL player because the represent more bandwidth usage. So cleary for larger scale games, it would be catering only to broadband users.. of which most serious gamers use broadband anyway.. and this game if for serious gamers.

Planside is suggesting a much more ambitious network plan than my game would need.. like 3000 real players per server, w/ many servers tied together to make one massive world. But my game would actually have a purpose, and people would be able to keep a sence of continuity because of the save-game element. Planetside only has one world, whereas my idea would promote a vast number of different games going on..so individual players can book themselves for many differnt games, and never lose track of anygame because they are SAVED. And remember, major ahole control w/ my idea!.. so important I think because aholes are what make most fps game suckass!

TheEnderBean

You forget than in a game like PlanetSide, each individual player would see maybe 20 or 30 other players at once, so each person is only recieving data about those 20 or 30 other people. Sure the server has to send data about all 3000, but the server is on a super-high-speed line.

If you have 50 bots per player, and the player is one who is doing the calculating for those bots (not usually a good idea, because it leaves the game wide open to hackers) then that player has to send data to the server for all 50 bots, plus recieve data for the 30 or so people on his screen. Don''t forget most broadband services have a much smaller upstream bandwidth than down (meaning they don''t upload as fast as they download)

Also, how do you expect to serve the games? Do you want people to host them on their own machines? You seem to forget that even games like Tribes (which don''t have a large number of simultaneous connections) are hosted on machines with very high bandwidth. Most broadband connections don''t even come close to the bandwidth available to an ISP hosting a Tribes game. And games like AC or PlanetSide are hosted on *server farms* that mean there is four or five physically separate computers hosting *each* world. All of these servers have very high megabit connections to the internet. That''s *upstream* bandwidth. Most DSL connections have 256k or 512k upstream connections (or less).

Putting more demand on the clients will not solve the bandwidth problem, in fact, it''ll probably only make it worse, since the internet usually works quite well in one direction, but terrible when trying to work in both. And it will only add to the "ahole" problem, as people can easily create their own clients which make unstoppable bots or something similar.

War Worlds - A 3D Real-Time Strategy game in development.

Im quite aware of how up and downstream works. I have Assynchronous, with 312 upstream. Thats more than enough upstream to send position coords for my bots/AI units. True, that does increase the need on the client side, but thats not impossible to handle, as it has been done by Bzone1&2. You can create and control up 50 bot units (no control from an fp perspectivie though). Yes, to go beyond that you would need some seriouse server farms. To answer your question as to who can serve I will requote from my last post:


"Well.. you could scale that down to like 60 real players controlling a limit of 30 bots for the standard college T1 or ATM servers. Thats 1800 units and I think a a map the size of 2 Tribes maps (im talking the whole map of most Tribes maps where you can go out of the standard playing area.. they are really pretty large) For stuff that has 300 real players and 100 (or 50 bots per real player, than larger servers would be needed. And that is actually much smaller from a network standpoint than what a game like PlanetSide is proposing (goto www.verant.com and follow the link to Planetside). "

(notice I never suggested a home user serve the game.. except maybe to limit it to like 8 real players controlling more or less bots.. which is exactly how Bzone works.. so there now I suggested it.)

Planetside proposes more REAL players over their network than the total number of units available in my game.. except on the larger scales. So logically, how can my game have more bandwidth problems than this game?

As to creating bots that are indestructable? Not sure how to answer that, as I dont see how that would be possible except through some serious amount of hacking.. which is a risk any software maker takes and tries to head off through good software encryption. The "ahole control" im talking about is done through the website, and via a system that only allows players to join after having been VERBALLY screened. And even after that, they can just get kicked and banned. ( I suggest actually creating a profiling system so people cant switch names/hardware.. but thats even more ambition.. and no one likes to hear ambitious suggestions

On a side note, I would like to point out the human tendancy towards concluding things to be "impossible", "too hard to do", and "unrealistic". I remember when I actually predicted CTF through a 3d simulated world on comupters before Wolfenstien came out.. and my brother who was and is a computer technician, said that it would well into our 50''s (im 30 now) before computers and networks (the "Internet" was not a popular word at that time ) could handle what I wanted to see. Sure enough, in 95'' I was the first in our circle of friends to find an IP address for a Quake (the first actual 3d engine) CTF game.

So far, the majority of people who have posted thier replies have tended towards this disturbing lack of imagination and skepticism. AND Im suggesting things that have already been done to some degree already, and people tend to think its not possible.

Just 20 years ago no one could have predicted what we are seeing now in computing and other technoligcal/ medical marvels.. so to say that my little game idea is "impossible", or "too hard" I think is a bit presumptious.

Think outside the box people! Everyone is used to "gaming as usual". Every other RPG game is the same.. every other FPS is basically the same.. its time to move on!

TheEnderBean