ID:2584114
 
(See the best response by Lummox JR.)
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Problem description:
I know that things like this have been brought up before, but I am trying to figure out if better technology has increased the number of players a BYOND game could easily handle. I know that bandwidth has increased to insane crazy amounts, with streaming services, and the like. That should never be a problem for BYOND. The thing I am wondering about is in the actual ideal situation, a game that does not strain the computer, what the player limit would be. I don't want this to come off wrong, but would a language like C have the same limitation. Pretty much doing the same thing, the same game for the most part, just written in C. How many more connected players could it handle?

You're really asking all the wrong questions. If you program a game from scratch in a fairly low-level language like C++, you're taking 100% control of everything and you can tailor the algorithms you use to the exact situations you have. In that situation you may also be able to unload a certain amount of handling to clients, provided you can figure out how to sync them up properly and handle bad actors. The downside is that you would have to do all of those things from scratch, and making games work that way is a very intensive process that takes a lot of knowledge and experience to get right.

BYOND games can handle a pretty high number of clients if they're not loaded down with design problems that work against performance. Even years ago it was common to have 100+ players on some of the most popular games, and that was before several rounds of optimization that have happened since then.
I know I was wording it in a pretty bad way, I'm sorry for that. I understand completely that things like pathfinding will usually be resource hogs, so I was really refering to a type of game that either didn't use those sort of things at all, or had found a way to do it without using a ton of resources. Its more just the connections themselves, and the point at which simply having those clients connected would become a problem itself. I know a lot of the "big games" out there have thousands of players on a single server. Would that ever be possible for a BYOND game?
Best response
Those "big games" are doing complex and extremely fine-tuned things under the hood to make that possible. An engine and a game coded from the ground up in machine code are completely different animals.