Is 8 the limit?

posted on September 17th, 2009, 6:34 pm

I was wondering if it is possible to expand the max amount of players to 10, 12, or even more if possible. Because to me, when it comes to MP, the more the merrier... (I may have misspelled that ). But hey, if you can do up to 20 players I am good with that too.

posted on September 17th, 2009, 6:35 pm

Even if it is possible, would it be worth it?

posted on September 17th, 2009, 6:40 pm

Well, wouldn't you ever want to be able to host a FltOps party round? Like an entire group of 20 players battling it out, I think it'd be cool.

posted on September 17th, 2009, 6:41 pm

4-6 people can lag pretty bad, 8 people can be murder... Imagine 20.

posted on September 17th, 2009, 6:46 pm

I have done one 4v4 before and if the connections are good it is not too bad.  The only problem is that the game engine might not support that many players and I can only imagine the work that would be required to do this.

posted on September 17th, 2009, 7:20 pm

Nevermind the obvious technical issues of having a stable game with 20 people, there is a more pressing matter when it comes to holding a LAN party with 20 people playing this game. I don't know about the rest of you, but I myself have never even met 20 people that like Star Trek enough to play a videogame based on it! The population density just isn't quite there yet .

Having said that, even if it was, I suspect that adding a 20 player multiplayer would go against the hardcoding within the game, which automatically makes this a gargantuan effort to implement. I think it's effort that would be better spent on other parts of the game.

posted on September 17th, 2009, 7:57 pm

Yeah.

Remember that a player hosts the game for all. Obviously, his/her network connection gets quite taxed AND the more players in a game, the higher the chances that one or more has connection problems.

I play connected by wifi and, sometimes, I get less than one megabit of speed available. Without BitTorrent or any other P2P. That's why I usually avoid volunteering to host a game.

As for availability of players, it's also a matter of time zones. I have 60 people in the "FleetOps" group in my Wippien account, but most of the time, I "see" two or three people online.

posted on September 17th, 2009, 8:00 pm

What about a Flt Ops 5 year Anniversary game party? When ever that day is...

posted on September 17th, 2009, 9:00 pm

actually, Fleet Operations already had its 5th birthday quite a while ago

hm, a larger player number then 8 sounds attractive in the first place, but its quite hard to implement that, and i don't think the content updates required (maps etc) and the coding effort is wirth it. not to speak of networking problems.
perhaps some where in the future, but i think we have a lot of stuff on todo that will be more fun once its done so we will focus on that

posted on September 17th, 2009, 9:08 pm

Okay... I'll wait till the 10th Anniversary...

posted on September 17th, 2009, 9:22 pm

Yes I see your point 1337, but I also notice that you have not played online that much. Trust me if you've played as manny 3vs3 (let alone 4vs4) games as I have, you would know that it usualy lags out 80% of the time. There are manny factors involved in the lag, Distance, hardware, background tasks, servers, downloads, computer having a mind of its own  , and many other wonderful things. Trust me, 8 player limit is plenty. I got the solution for your 20 player game. Have 3 3vs3 and 1 1vs1

posted on September 17th, 2009, 9:32 pm

yep i think reviewing the net code would be a prerequesit for mire then 8 players - not that we are at anything close to reviewing and redoing the source code

posted on September 17th, 2009, 9:36 pm

more than 8 players -> impossible

posted on September 18th, 2009, 1:47 am

more than 8 players -> impossible

morethan8players->impossible->makePossible();
j/k

posted on September 18th, 2009, 7:17 am

the 9 player limitation (team0 for spectators/neutral objects) is hardcoded in nearly every aspect of armada, it's not impossible but quite close to impossible (time aspect) without the source code at hand