How to set up global matchmaking for an RTS game?

deevo

I am trying to create a RTS game using self-hosted photon servers where a player can battle any other player in the world, but I have no idea how to architect this.

For example in a game like World of Warcraft, there are say maybe 50k players registered per server, and they can only interact with other players in this particular server (which would be a Photon Server instance).

But what if I want to create a game where one player can join a RTS battle with any other player in the world, how would I architect Photon Server to acheive this?

I want to create the framework in such a way that the server is always the authority for the RTS match.

Thanks!

[Deleted User]

In theory, our Loadbalancing application supports this. You have one master server, which is responsible for matchmaking, and any number of gameservers that actually host the game rooms and handle the majority of the load.

We have hosted ~ 40-50k CCU on a Loadbalancing cluster where a standard, single processor, quad core machine (like an Intel Xenon 3440 etc.) was used as a Master server. If you scale up the hardware + network connections (bandwidth!) accordingly, you can go way beyond that.

More info on the loadbalancing setup: http://doc.exitgames.com/en/onpremise/c ... -balancing

In practice, global RTS does not make much sense because of latency issues. If you are trying to mach players from east asia with other players from Europe, they won't have much fun in a realtime game. It's better to split a large user base by region, so that they have the best gaming experience.

deevo

Thank you for the reply. Is Photon Realtime a viable solution for a RTS game? Or is it mainly used for FPS type of games?

Tobias

Photon is very flexible and has been used for many genres. FPS is just more popular but it has been used in several strategy games and TD games as well.
It can be what you make out of it