Re: Solo/Multiplayer emphasis

[Sven Neuhaus <neuhau00@marvin.informatik.uni-dortmund.de>]

> While keeping crossfire multi-player would be cool, I think that we should 
> look realistically at this.   It just eats way too much cpu to really support
> a lot of players well, certainly not on the sale of the multi-scores of people
> on your typical MUD.  
> Basically, on a MUD, they don't have all the tactical complexities, grapics, 
> and sheer volume of MOBS that we have in crossfire.  We're inherendly limited
> in number of players equivalent CPU can support.  In that respect, then, the
> peak number of players is limited.  With less players, its hard to get together
> a multi-player game.  You sort of see this in netrek, which is why the 
> netrek METASERVER came about -- to help the few players around find a game with
> players in it.  Perhaps future possibility of something similar that should be 
> looked into (wouldn't bee too hard, what with the crossfire telnet port 
> already built in).

I don't agree with this. I expect Crossfire to become a true client/server
game sooner or later. Then, there won't be that much of CPU per player.
I think the game could handle 20 players or even more. The maps are certainly
large enough. Once the servers really get that full, we should implement
"soft updates" for shops and maybe some other maps. Some items get replaced
one-by-one.

> If you lean too heavily toward the 'all multiplayer or nothing' approach, 
> then your servers will start looking like netrek, either full, or completely
> empty, and rarely anything in between.

It will never be that extreme, I'm sure, since Netrek is heavily based on
2 teams competing against each other so playing alone is pointless (you
can fight robots, but that does get boring).

> The most players I've ever seen on a server was something like 8. Has 
> anyone actually gone higher, in a realistic situation?

Not really. Our local server is running on a Sparc Classic, and we're
at something like 6 players max. The limiting factor is the slow X redirection.

>  Eric Mehlhaff, mehlhaff@crl.com

-Sven
-- 
 Sven Neuhaus, CS student at University of Dortmund, Germany/\Internet for
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