Alathon wrote:

Well, that depends really. Some MMORPGs only have a few hundred players online at a time per server. Which is definately possible in BYOND.

I've never seen that on BYOND, maybe just a little over one hundred in a server (with very intense lag I might add), but a few hundred in one server... That's a little far-fetched.

Kaioken wrote:

But hey, I doubt the guy was really so overly ambitious to have such a big playerbase than he realized his usage of the word MMORPG implied. People just don't tend to know the versions of that term without the MM so much these days I suppose.

I agree. I'm just pointing out the fact that, by merit of the fact that you can have a game distributed across multiple DD instances, you can technically host a game for thousands of players. As long as they aren't all in the same exact area.

Not even modern-day MMORPGs perform well with 100 players in the same area.

No, they handle that many in a server farm.

[Edit]
Also note that he said "area", not server.

Kaioken wrote:

Popisfizzy wrote:

No, they handle that many in a server farm.

No, single server. Naturally varies from game to game though.

Could you give an example? 40,000 simultaneous users on a single MMORPG server would be quite impressive. Especially since EVE Online holds the record at a bit over 30,000 players in the same non-instanced gameworld for their entire server farm.

Most MMORPGs don't come anywhere near close to that, since they split up their gameworld into multiple instanced shards or realms with player caps nearer to 5000. And even each of those might be run on multiple servers, depending on the setup.

Kaioken wrote:

Actually, that is my example, and their record is 40,000+ for a single server. ;P
http://www.eve-online.com/news/newsOfEve.asp?newsID=505
(Tranquility is a name of one of their servers, of course)

Tranquility is a single gameworld, but it's hosted by multiple physical servers. I believe they're also in multiple datacenters across the planet with high-speed links between them, but I can't find a reference to back that up, and could easily be misremembering things.

Here's a case study on EVE and some faster (and expensive!) disks they switched to: http://www.superssd.com/success/ccpgames.htm

It mentions the 150 IBM servers that they used at the time. There's also an IBM case study but they re-arranged their site or something and the link I found is dead, so that article doesn't talk about the servers in any great detail.

Kaioken wrote:

Well, I also know only what I read. Multiple sources said that's a single 'server'. They may be inaccurate, though, I don't play that game and I haven't done in-depth scientific research. =P

What you read you either misunderstood or is incorrect.

Heres an example: Even WoW which presents a 'seamless' world (except for switching between continents) uses roughly 80 computers per continent. Thats more than one computer per 'area', dedicated to that area alone. Per server.

EverQuest uses 1 computer per zone, per server.

Like I said: No MMORPG handles in excess of 100 players very well in the same area - EvE, which you mentioned, does it the best. Even they had server crashes when several hundred players engage in very large-scale fights.

Age of Conan, which is newly released, grinds to a halt when players engage in 48 vs 48 combat in a large outdoor zone.

The issue with lots of players in one spot isn't even necessarily the ones that BYOND comes with, like the object limits you mentioned. Its the network traffic which expands exponentially as the number of players in the same area increases. And seeing as its not possible to do specific tweaks making it more effective for the particular game in BYOND, that problem is slightly worse here.

Having said that, its very possible to create a large-scale game in BYOND, you just need to plan it. Write a login server, just like an MMORPG uses. Write your game such that it expects to only be utilizing a single map, and recieve its state from a MySQL database. Write a manager to start and stop DD instances as needed, and make sure the MySQL DB knows which map is in which DD instance at which adress, so that players entering a new area are sent to the correct computer.

I already have a library handling most of this, the implementation isn't all that complicated. I'll try to push out a demo of it sometime, also because I'd like to see what sort of CPU impact shuffling players back and forth between worlds has.

The basic theory goes like this:

1) Player logs into login server
2) Was the player already logged in ? (Linkdeath)
a) Yes. Redirect to DD with the player on it.
b) No. Continue
3) Does the player want to load a character or create a new one?
a) Load. Load player and send player to correct DD
b) Create. Send player to character creation DD

Note that any point which sends a player to a DD with a map on it (2a, 3a) does the following:

1) Is the map the player needs to go to currently up in a DD instance?
a) Yes. Send the player there
b) No. Start a new DD instance up with that map, then 1a

With each map in a seperate DD instance, you're going to have a much harder time hitting any sort of limits. The most exposed areas are gathering points, which you'll probably want in your game for the sake of community building. As such, you'll want to try and keep the amount of certain things down in large cities (Lists come to mind, but those can be reduced bigtime using MySQL anyhow).

Kaioken wrote:

Well, you can't really misunderstand if they write plainly 'server', so I suppose it's a common misunderstanding and so the latter. I see it's the same in Wikipedia, you may want to correct that. =P

You missunderstood what server means. One game server (as in, EU-Kazzak in WoW) can have many computers running it.

The issue with lots of players in one spot isn't even necessarily the ones that BYOND comes with, like the object limits you mentioned.

I said non-BYOND games don't really get those problems. :P

Implying that BYOND games do.

Having said that, its very possible to create a large-scale game in BYOND, you just need to plan it.

Technically you might be able to supposedly have up to ~30,000 players in one BYOND server. ;D You'd need a decent computer and connection of course, and a ton of players available to confirm it works.

No, you'd need computers. Plural. I'm not sure you understand how things actually work with MMORPGs :s

You open the game, and connect with your account information. This information is passed to the login server, which validates it. You're then given a list of servers to connect to. When you log into a character you've created on a server, you're automatically re-directed, behind the scenes, to a specific computer in a large cluster of computers, all running different parts of the game for that one server. When you zone from The Barrens in WoW to Orgrimmar, behind the scenes your character is being transferred from one game instance on computer A to a game instance running orgrimmar on computer B. Even though you don't see any indication of this in-game, it happens behind the scenes.

Write a login server, just like an MMORPG uses. Write your game such that it expects to only be utilizing a single map, and recieve its state from a MySQL database.

Yes, of course you can do it with multiple servers, or even with having the clients (players) run their own servers that connect to the others for some "client-side processing".

Client side processing like that would be extremely insecure, and I'm not sure BYOND can calculate things fast enough to make that feasible at all. Multiple computers, not servers - Try not to mix up the terminology, because I think thats where you're getting confused :)

And if you 'of course can', then I'd say your assessment that BYOND can't run an MMORPG is entirely false. BYOND has other things that are bottlenecks, but the amount of players is not one of them unless the game requires that they all be in the exact same area, visible to one another.

Kaioken wrote:

Alathon wrote:

You missunderstood what server means. One game server (as in, EU-Kazzak in WoW) can have many computers running it.

No, because 'a server' means a computer. You misunderstood it; your sentence needs to be rephrased: "One game world/instance can have many servers/computers running it."

Yes, normally a server means that. But in the context that it was being used, not so.

Client side processing like that would be extremely insecure, and I'm not sure BYOND can calculate things fast enough to make that feasible at all.

Well, it has been used anyway. And tons of things are 'extremely insecure' and still used (eg client-side savefiles), that's why you implement security measures, to negate that.

Sure, but its still insecure, which was my point - You can use client side savefiles all you want, that doesn't make it more secure.

multiple computers, not servers - Try not to mix up the terminology, because I think thats where you're getting confused :)

Actually, you are. ;P A server means 'a computer that serves', basically put. One server can host multiple services (on different ports), but the technical terminology means 'a server' is 'a computer'. When you see an ad for some expensive 'Server' at a computer store, you are not buying a 'service' (such as 'hosting'), you are buying a computer itself.

Yes, and when somebody mentions a 'server' in WoW, they mean something entirely different.

And if you 'of course can', then I'd say your assessment that BYOND can't run an MMORPG is entirely false.

Well, strictly, then yes, but usually people do not always mean their things strictly. As they say "Everything is possible", so eg by saying "BYOND can't run a MMORPG" I really imply "BYOND can't reasonably run a MMORPG feasibly", as server-to-outside connections through the current world/Export() probably don't cut it to, say, accomplish it 'properly' like non-BYOND games.

And thats where our opinion differs. Its entirely possible, its entirely feasible to do. I haven't seen a single thing indicating otherwise.

Kaioken wrote:

Alathon wrote:

Sure, but its still insecure, which was my point - You can use client side savefiles all you want, that doesn't make it more secure.

Except it does if you, say, use a hash with a secure salt to validate the integrity, which was my point.

I don't honestly see the point in arguing semantics. Its still insecure, I'm well aware of hashes and salts.

Anything stored client-side is insecure.