What do you mean by conservative?
I don't even have any actual design implementations laid out yet, I'm just throwing around ideas, so theoretically my design is whatever is going to make it feel the best while playing it.

[edited by - ziphren on October 27, 2003 3:41:03 AM]

Arianne is a MMORPG project. Since its based on CrystalSpace I really should have remembered to include it.

FPS limiting won''t help your problem of network bandwidth per player. Only sending packets ever 1/10 of a second might (thats what Quake2 did), or even less often depending on how much action you envision. Something to be tweaked (perhaps players not engaged in battle need less update resolution than ones in battle with NPCs, and PvP gets the most network updates/server time). In any case, its not an impossible goal in terms of getting a small MMOG up and running.

In terms of bandwidth, even if you have an extremly liberal BOFH (Network Administrator) that will look the other way, its probably a violation of your terms of use on the connection. After that, it might be in violations of the University''s terms of use on the leased connection to subhost anything. In any case, you''re probably screwed from the legal standpoint of leaving it up 24/7 with even 64 players average.

I want the action level to be like Unreal Tournament 2003, if anyone's played that. I think I'm just going to give the 'illusion' of realtime, and have everything take place slightly after the packets are received to make the interpolation easier.

I'm just going to make the game, and if my sysadmin freaks out or if I can't host it because of their firewalls, someone else can buy the server/connection for the game. It's going to be THE SHIAT so I don't see why anyone wouldn't want to support it. Bwahahahahahahhahhaaaa! Hee heheheheheheeeheeeheee!

later,
Ziphren

http://ziphren.iuma.com
http://www.newscientist.com/news/

[edited by - ziphren on October 29, 2003 3:10:52 PM]

Something like this is most likely possible with the Arianne tech (or similar) so long as you don''t require it to be emmently playable on a non-broadband connection. The real trick is to narrow down the player''s choices to those that are actually meaningful (whether they are focusing on attacking, finding cover, dodging, if not in direct combat, where is the player going/who are they following). Pathfinding is to be up to AI running the server probably; a BSP ut/q3/hl level system is possible to use, but not efficient. Aiming/combat might be done on an RPG-style basis, with to hit rolls etc.

I considered doing something like this with another person in a business venture, but I backed out due to extreme over-saturation in the MMORPG market.