Uffff... who knows when and who knows into what. First we have to convince Conitec that losing DPlay will bring in more MP business, then we have to convince Conitec that DPlay is the laughing stock of the MP world, and finally we have to convince Conitec of which engine is best.

It's like we have to work hard to make sure that Conitec does the right thing... silly really, but like you, I have too much invested in GS to give up now... especially now that we have Conitec's attention in the matter!

I don't think that changing DPlay to a different library will require modifications in existing projects. Most multiplayer functions will remain unchanged under a different library. The only severe drawback would be that the network simulator (-sim option) won't be supported anymore. The simulator works with DPlay only.

Thanks JCL.

My guess is that the -sim option may be less of a concern with actual live testing being more of an accessible option these days.

Although I couldn't pretend to understand its full use, maybe it's more important than I think? How severe is 'servere'?

Anyway, it's good to here that current projects should not require modification, unless its new functionality that maybe becomes available due to switching libraries.

I am very pleased at what I am reading. I am also currently trying to create a mmorpg game, and have been since LocoWeed has published his intro to Multi-player. My goal is to have a game that can overall support 500 players over one or several servers. I have spent weeks on tweaking multi-player code to have clients join a server and be totally satisfied with it. I read all over the forums that 99% of MMOg games fail, but I am not giving up. My hope is that with the update of the engine, we will be given more and more commands to help us get to our goal. I for one would like to see more commands implemented into the game engine to support production of games like these.

my request to help me finish my game;
- What others have posted on server to server communication
- Lobby features
- More security
- File transfer function from at least Server to Client or Clients
- Static variables we can adjust to the main script to let us optimize multi-player games.
- Some way clients can create a model on their client machine and have the server know it was created and broadcast and update that entity to other clients. (maybe a command like ent_createClient)
- A way of determining if the packets made it to the client without any loss or distortion, without having to write code to echo back
- An easier way of sending data/file/var to a single client without broadcasting to all clients
- Any other commands to simplify or speed up the communication between Server and clients, for games played over the internet that support more than 8 players.

This would be my request to finish my game. I still won't give up on creating this game, I have faith in Conitec that they will start gearing towards Multi-Player (more than 8 players) friendly support...So count me in Conitec for someone who is creating this type of game.

Extra Note: I know 500 players is not possible or reasonable at this time, and certainly not efficient. The only thing I can do is sit back and wait patiently until there is more support for this.

Great find Two!

Neatly answers the question of what better statistics are and allays any fears of the network simulator being exclusive to DPLay.

Unity3D also uses Raknet for Networking: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/net-MasterServerBuild.html

I talked to Raknet this spring and they made us a good offer. But the problem is that switching to Raknet still means you need to pay them license fees when you want to do a small multiplayer app. I'm not sure that this is what the majority of users want. Therefore when we make the change, I tend to use a different library.

RakNet is free for non-commercial usage (which are most of the few mp apps here). And for commercial usage, don't we just have to pay ~100$ ?

http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/manual/ReplicaManager2Video.html

The only thing I'm concerned of is that it will take a lot of time to expose most of the features to lite-c.

yeah it is 100 to 2000. you choose the price.

a poll could be started with clear explanation(like you need to pay 100$ if you make a commerical game etc.).