How Indie Devs Made an 1,800-Player Action Game Mod In Their Spare Time

An anonymous reader writes "Just Cause 2 Multiplayer has been getting a lot of press lately, but this making-of feature points out how the mod raises serious questions about the games industry: if 1,800-player massively multiplayer action games are possible on one server, why did it take a group of modders to prove it? From the article: 'There’s more chaos to come. That 1,800 player limit isn’t maxing out the server or the software by any means. Foote says that the team, who first met online seven years ago playing the similar Multi Theft Auto GTA mod, are "yet to reach any real barrier or limitation preventing us from reaching an even higher player count than the previous public tests." When it’s ready, the team will release the software for everyone to download and run their own servers, wherever they are in the world.'"

Comments

I did the math, with P2P you can get 50,000

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

My math is old, but with P2P where you update everyone around you of your position with 640k upload, you can do about 50,000 players if your attacks are melee only. The key is not updating people far away as frequently, since they can't get in range and get a hit on you, you only have to calculate a full run between you for the time between sending out data. The biggest trick with P2P as everyone knows is dealing with hackers though... Even games like WOW, I would think you might be able to fly with a hack because their central server probably isn't calculating your collision detection.

Re:I did the math, with P2P you can get 50,000

[JonySuede]

dealing with hackers though

Here is a probably patentable or patented method of dealing with that:
Each node shall crypt then sign its data. One key shall be unique keys per connection, it shall be use for encryption. The other key should be unique per application instances, it shall be use to sign the data. A node shall validate the authenticity of that data with a peer after every an empirically determined threshold of data on a singular connection. If there is a mismatch broadcast it to your peers, except the one use to detect the mismatch, inform central.
On reception of the broadcast the peers shall have the following behavior:
If the node having sent unauthentic data is know to the recipient node. It shall validate the authenticity of the data then it shall inform central. It shall also broadcast it to its peers. If the potentially malicious node is unknown, the recipient shall drop the message.
The central should perform a local rollback of the cheater when it reaches an empirically determined threshold with regard to an empirically determined metric.

Re:MMO Joust

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

MMO Pong: Everyone gets a side of an nsided polygon where N is the number of players. There is n-1 balls in play. MMO ET: Everyone gets thrown into a pit, and you need to jump on top of other people's heads to jump out of the pit. I would think this would have to be a minigame inside an actually fun game, otherwise how would you get people to play it :P