What is the most players do you think you can squeeze out of todays Internet connections? If one person would write a book on DirectX in VB, I would make them a rich man!

Also depends on how clever you are. If you are doing this peer-to-peer, your player count is severely limited.

If you do this server side and be clever about it, you can fit near an incredible amount of players (depending on server bandwidth). But it all depends on segmenting users into broadcast domains and groups so every player doesn''t have to know about every other player.

- Tom

Ok, let me be more specific. I am making a 2D side view game where each person controls a certain character... I have to send the position of the player and what frame of animation it is on, and the creation and destructin commands of any ammo flying through the air.

Any guesses?

If one person would write a book on DirectX in VB, I would make them a rich man!

If you write a finite state machine so you don''t have to send messages every frame you could have a large number of players.

A 56k modem can handle about 50 players on the screen at once in Tombstone. But it would take the equivilent of 50 56k modems on the server side to handle that kind of bandwidth.

Most of programming is making it up as you go. Just play around with different methods and see what you can come up with. The networking code for each game is too specific to give any definite answer on how you personally should do it.

First get it working over a LAN then test it over a modem connection and look for problem areas. Use a log file on the server and client to record the byte sizes of all the messages being passed. Find ways to make them smaller. Then find ways to send them less often.

Ben