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Forums - Gaming - Microsoft Research: Online Deathmatch with thousands players

Hehe...I'm imagining an RTS game, where two AIs battle against each other with their massive armies...and YOU are the tiny soldiers on the battlefield in FPS view. You'd receive commands and objectives from your leader, and you, with your dozens or even hundreds of teammates would go fulfill your duty. I think that'd be a ton of fun.



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Bet with disolitude: Left4Dead will have a higher Metacritic rating than Project Origin, 3 months after the second game's release.  (hasn't been 3 months but it looks like I won :-p )

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Sqrl said:
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.

The important issue in gaming isn't so much bandwidth as it is latency.  Peer to peer might work for a slower game with thousands of users like an MMORPG, but not for an FPS.



Microsoft Research made one of the best multiplayer game ever, Allegiance. I never really understood why the game was never promoted, because it was light years ahead any other. The graphics weren't the best, but the gameplay is unmatched even by today's games. It's the only game I've ever played that perfectly blended teamwork and strategy into an action game.



Allegiance was certainly a radical new gaming concept. It's unfortunate that it didn't work out better.