Researching possible multiplayer frameworks - have some questions

Hi. First of all, im developing a game with unity in combination with Photon Server SDK, self-hosted.I'm currently in the process of choosing a multiplayer server framework for the game, and I have some questions and concerns about your framework.

A little bit about the architechture I hope to achieve:

One masterserver, which communicates with a certain number of game servers. The game servers instantiate and create a certain number of empty rooms, where each room have a different "map"/ gamemode. Of course, the map isnt actually hosted on the server, but the point is that the user should see a nice list of "servers" ( but actually rooms), to choose from and join one.

Here are the concerns I have:

1. The game I intend to pick a framework for, aims to have server capacity of 64 people in each game-instance (level/map, call it whatever you want). The game is intended to be a 3D FPS mainly, where positional updates, and some minor physics (collison with other players mainly). I've come to understand that if I create a room with more than 10 players , its likely to become a bottleneck with traffic.

2. The game will utilize relative small maps/levels, this means that interestgroups loose parts of its potential when it comes to limitting traffic usage. Considering the small map size, I fear all players position and physical properties will need to be sent to everyone, on a constant basis - which, judging by what i've read about the rooms, will not work well with that many players.

3. To make it even more challenging, the game will also have rts elements with a few players in RTS position (like the warcraft games), with around 40 NPC's on average on each map, which the RTS persons controll. This makes controlling and limitting the traffic even harder :s

So, these are my concerns. Now, the questions:
1. How many rooms can a server manage, regardless of room size?
2. Is it possible to limit the number of rooms a server can manage?
3. If yes to question two, is there any variables or settings in the framework which prevents the server from using all of its resources on a single room ?
4. Can a gameserver create rooms by itself ?


Thanks for your time, hope to see a answer soon :-)

- Madmod

Comments

  • hi, @Madmod.

    Let me tell you something about our cloud. Our regular cloud game server usual 8 core machine with gigabit network. it usually handles upto 5000 players and 70 MB/s of traffic. So far so good.

    Now about questions:
    1. it is difficult to answer on such question. it depends on size of your server, right and on size of your room. even one room with 10K players will be diffuclt to handle on our regular GS

    You should be aware that when you/we speak about buttleneck for players, we should understand that this buttleneck is on client machines. Whether they are able to handle such amount of traffic or not. And to be honest this is totaly your responsibility. We provide you tool, like other frameworks. In short, i do not see any issues from server side. But you should test and see whether your idea works for client side. We will happy to answer on concret question. This one is tooo abstract

    2. you are going to use self hosted version. so, you may limit everything. there is no such settings in configs, you should update RoomCacheBase descendant to get this
    3. no, there is no such settings. and it is not really possible to implement this in our case
    4. Yes

    best,
    ilya
  • Thanks alot for the reply. I understand things more clearly now :)