http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=15630

"A recent Microsoft research paper analyzed the possibility of dramatically increasing the possible number of players in an FPS death match. Using a methodology dubbed "Donnybrook," the researchers suggested a variety of techinques to squeeze the most out of the bandwidth available, potentially allowing for a thousand players to wage war on the same map. "

And extended article explaining the technology is available in German here:

http://golem.de/0709/54749.html

Their research paper can be found here:

https://research.microsoft.com/~lorch/papers/iptps2007.pdf

Another english article here:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/09/10/new-technology-promises-a-thousand-players-per-map-in-deathmatch

Well, I think this would get FPS players realy happy. Also intresting that the technologie is P2P based.

OMG?!?!! 1000 players at the same time?!?!?! And I thought 64 players was amazing wow. If they do that then they have the online world controlled.

I'm sure much of the idea revolves around prioritization. You look at a player's location, and you send that player lots of packets for those players and game objects that are near him, and only a few packets for objects that are far away. You still probably need one hell of a server for this kind of game, but the bandwidth requirements would scale something closer to linear (whereas non-prioritized would scale more like a quadratic).

So they just figured to skips hundreds, and go straight from dozens to thousands? I honestly don't expect games getting that big any time soon, but it's nice to know some competent people are working on the technology to make truly massive online games feasible in the near future.

Nice. Battlefield 2 with 64 players was awesome. Can't imagine 1000 players.

Starsiege Tribes supported a max of 128 players, and it was sick.

One mod for the game would generate a random map that was basically a plain with a bunch of bolders for cover. Basically, it was round based with one respawn and you could actually employ some truely amazing tactics with 64 player teams. There was also an option for random weapons/classes, which made things even messier.

It was honestly some of the most intese FPS matches I've ever played.

I have always wondered why the didn't approach it like a torrent where each person is responsible for passing on certain bits to other peers. Detecting cheaters would be easy with occasional redundant packets randomly sent to verify the data is being recieved. In this way it would be possible for a low bandwidth server to hold a lot more players.

There are of course serious issues to be dealt with in any multiplayer topology but I don't see anything that jumps out at me as making this infeasible or slow. It seems like you could quite easily support an infinite number of players as each player brings potential bandwidth greater than their usage.

 *sheds a tear*

I don't think i ever played the mod you arae talking about... but Tribes was by far the best shooter I ever played.  It was way ahead of its time.  I miss it dearly... Id still play it if I could talk my friends into it, lol 

I was just discussing MMOFPSs the other day, didn't know about this, though.

Interesting...

Battles of 500+ players would truly be something nobody's ever seen before though....truly epic. I look forward to the future of gaming yet again.