Hello all, to make this quick without boring you, I have been developing games for a while now, I currently have a mmorpg in the works, http://forsakensanctum.com/ and I have made a few other various games.

My question is, I have been reading through these forums and it seems the multi-player is trash for 3dgs. But in alot of posts they talk about the massive multi-player isnt worth fooling with. What about say 8 a player RPG?
I am deciding on whether to buy 3DGS to build a multi-player RPG but I dont need any more than 8 player functionality.
Is it worth fooling with?
If not what am i looking at on integrating 3rd party tools?
Will it be source changes or scripting?

Thanks for all answers. This seems like a rocking engine and community.

As most would say, don't do it.

I'm not necessarily commenting in a bad way for the MP portion of 3DGS, but in all honesty it cannot be done.

I would.
Look at "glider"... out communities greates and most commercial MP success... and it (the MP) failed because it was wide open to security breaches and generally unstable as I remember.

Use GSTNet, or write your own plugin

8 Players are easily capable with GSTNet or ENet, RakeNet if you program your own plugin

Dark_Samurai

Thanks for the replies. By looking at all of your join dates I see you all have been around for a bit. Just curious though, if the multi-player is such trash why do you stick around? I only ask because this engine must be good, for you to continue with or you have found a easy work around with these 3rd party tools. If torque was ever to lose its network capability it would be nothing. IMO thats all it has.

Its a shame that 3DGS's network is non functional. The indie game community needs a good multi-player engine. Especially one for MMOs. The options are so few. You have Realmcrafter, aka RealmCrapper, but the server is crap and its a cookie cutter. You have Torque, but torquescript is a joke and Garage Games is ran by a bunch of monkeys. They have crud on all attempts at a mmo kit or even a rpg kit. Then you have Multiverse but the licensing is a joke and the art pipeline is less than par.
Things like Blitz3d and DarkBasic are not serious contenders, I have built a RPG engine with Blitz3d but the networking was too much of a hassle to continue.
There is a mess load of money to be made with a good solid engine(which 3DGS seems to be) with great networking capability. Hopefully the creators will read these posts along with various posts by fastlane and others that I have read that are pleading to get it done. My whole team had planned on buying this engine but not if I have to spend all this extra time trying to implement 3rd party networking.

Can anyone spare some links to the tools you mentioned above? What kind of difficulty am I looking at?

Misplaced faith in the engine's company. I got "real" close to having a funcitioning MMO engine; others have gotten "real" close to having a working MP project (ie: glider).

But as close as we get, Conitec doesn't step up and fix the issues or update the engine.

As I learned game programming and networking on this engine, I frankly didn't know better for the first 2 years.

Then in the next year, I tried to do it myself and got far.

And then in the next two years, I thought "If I can get this far, other programmers can get further" and sure enough, with a programming team we got further.

But eventually we need Conitec to step up and as you can see from the forecast, MP improvements are last on the list.

Hence, enough is enough and it's time to face facts: GS MP is a lie. It's built on a antiquated system (DPLAY), it lacks the most basic of modern networking techniques (encryption, nat punchthrough, inter-server communication, server lists, etc), and it's been this way for the last few years.

So to answer your question, we "thought" GS could do it... but it can't!



And this my friend is the biggest shame: GS IS a great engine but Conitec doesn't realize the gold mine they are sitting on by putting some dedicated attention on MP and MMP. It's as simple as putting RakNet in to replace DPlay. You are NOT the first team who wanted to invest in GS for a MP/MMP. Unfortunately you will not be the last to be dismissed because those of us who know better don't want others wasting their time like we have.

well i havent dismissed it. After looking at the features and watching videos of other games we(the team) are stoked on the engine. This engine seems to save us time in places where we would lag with other engines, so maybe we can use that extra time to bring Raknet or something.

As advice to you, which I am sure you already know, don't think that you have wasted anytime here and that if you would of started with another engine you might be ahead. Trust me, i have been through nearly every "indie" engine on the market and they all have their share of issues. At least 3DGS keeps up with todays market with features. I visited your site that is linked in your sig. Good stuff. Very interesting.

I would think and hope with nearly EVERYTHING moving to web players and multi-player that Conitec will rise to the challenge shortly, but i am sure many of you have been saying that for a while now .

I doubt my whole team will invest in this product. I however will and get a project started shortly. Wish me luck.

Best of luck is wished upon you, and your team if they desire to step their feet into the 3DGS engine as well. No offense to you, but if you have indeed been with every indie engine out there then you wouldn't have reached the 3DGS engine as a last resort. This is purely a hobbyist engine and I wouldn't classify it in any other category. Of course you can create a great game with it but not when you talk Multiplayer.

If I could I'd set up a law suit demanding either:
A) Conitec to prove it's MP is capable of 1000's of players
-or-
B) Remove all claims off their site

Regardless of being a Moderator for the Conitec 3DGS forums, I'm still a user at heart and will always fight for what the users want.

Excellent response with which I agree completely.
However, I believe they have taken the "1000's of players" line that I BOUGHT INTO off the site and now AFAIK they only have "multizone/multiserver support for MMOG"... which is still misleading and in our opinion, false.

I think its time...
See you in "Ask Conitec".

Actually if you look at my registered date
<----
I came here earlier, but the engine was not what I was looking for at the time. I have actually gave a lot of people advice to come here and check it out when they ask my opinion on a good engine thats easy to learn.
It really wasn't until A7 and a lot of the shader support was added that my interest grew.
If this is a hobbyist engine then I would classify torque, Blitz, Darkbasic, unity, RC, and many others the same, for there seems to be more games going commercial from this engine than any of those.
I like the large line between hobbyist and commercial, Allows us hobbyist that sell games and game coding to remain to do this for fun.
So even making a small 2-8 player game is not wise?