It can have a huge impact based on your computer/server specs, the best way to find out is to test it yourself on this one. Older hardware or a laptop is going to be your enemy on this one.

There are many things that factor into this ill tell you a couple and how you can go about maneuvering through the needed stuff for the best performance.

First up you have server specs, every server will run at different rates and what not so ideally you will want something cost effective to your needs. this will mean you want to research a number of different places for hosting so to ascertain the best server you can get for your buck. Do not go with the first thing you see as it may not be the best always look around. That's business 101.

next up you got the actual workings of the code the main cause of delay in a game is how long the procs hang. so make sure you know how they are coded and if you feel the cpu time is to high for a proc then look into ways of improving it via code problems or dev how to. to check this you can profile your world by allowing debug mode by typing #debug anywhere in your code and inside dream seeker click profile while hosting.

Another thing relating to the code side and mainly how many mobs you have now im going to assume that you will want these active computer mobs as enemies of some form. now what you need to do is disable the mob from doing any "real" processing until a mob is within a certain range. you can do this at any range you like its upto you really. having mobs doing stuff when there is no actual need for it to be doing something just ties down the CPU and thus rendering your game unstable. Lets say you have 200 mobs in your game both player and computer both are doing some form of processing action. Now usually you can only see about at max maybe 24 odd tiles each way more or less. now if you did some non processing action those mobs wouldnt do anything until in range of say a player. so we have 5 players with 195 ai. now lets say mobs cant stack in one place and as such you have 20 mobs all clumped together, they wont do anything and as such wont use cpu but when the player comes they will start there procs for ai checks and what not.

That will save your CPU greatly, if you look at Forum_accounts pixel movement library which is still very much usefull even with native he has a few examples of things you can do to increase performance.

Jotdaniel wrote:

Not any problems, but a computer with a really slow/old cpu may only be able to host 5-10 people, while a newer cpu might get up to 20 or more.

I'm pretty sure that the bottleneck in pixel movement games is server bandwidth, not CPU.