General FreeSpace > Multiplayer

Newbie question RE: multiplayer scalability

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anvari257:
Hi! I am new to FreeSpace2 and am having trouble working out how
to get started and would be most grateful for any tips/pointers.

I want  to simulate a large space battle with a large number of
players and was hoping to use FreeSpace2 to do this.

I assume this means I must get a standalone server up and running
and then hack the existing bot code to connect to the server over
a UDP socket to impersonate human players.

Firstly, is this the correct forum to be asking about such questions?
If not, which forum should I be asking?

Assuming this is the correct forum,  what should I be doing to get
started other than going through the Windows compilation guide?
I assume I need to buy a copy on GOG?

Finally, what is the largest game in terms of number of players
that FreeSpace2 has hosted that members of this board know of?

Many, Many Thanks in advance,
Ali

EatThePath:
You can just have normal AI controlled ships in multiplayer like any other mission. If there's behavior that you want to include in your simulation, unless there's a wrinkle I'm not thinking of it would likely be saner and just as effective to create that behavior in lua scripts on a local game instead of creating a freespace-playing bot. If you have any goals that wouldn't be served by that, I'd be very interested to hear what they are.

Also, if you want to play a freespace-based mod then yes you need to buy a copy from gog or steam. There are a few stand-alone games such as Solaris that can run on FSO without a copy of FS2, though.

Novachen:
FreeSpace allows up to 12 human players on a server iirc.

I do not think, that this limit was bumped up with FSOpen, because the multiplayer code had already very much issues with this number of players.

anvari257:
Many Thanks for your replies.
 
I am actually doing academic research into how to get large
numbers of players into the same battlefield. For my project
my goal is to get actual network traces from a game.

It should be *possible* to scale to more than 12 players;
Eve Online has had battles with thousands of players,
and NATO training simulators have had tens of thousands
of players I believe.

Without looking at the source code I have no idea how hard
it might be to get a more scalable networking system *into
FreeSpace2 specifically* because the trick is to get it to
play well with the existing code.

I guess the next thing I should do is buy a copy on GOG, and
then come back with more questions.

Again, Many Thanks,
Ali

Strygon:

--- Quote from: anvari257 on February 07, 2022, 02:57:51 pm ---
It should be *possible* to scale to more than 12 players;
Eve Online has had battles with thousands of players,
and NATO training simulators have had tens of thousands
of players I believe.


--- End quote ---

Well one thing to really take into consideration is that this isn't Eve, and this definitely is NOT a NATO simulator, it's an old space sim from the late 90s that is currently being maintained by a group of hobbyists, and as skilled as they definitely are (please don't take offense to this, SCP Team, you do great work), the engine simply cannot handle as many players as both instances.

More than 12 players? Maybe. Hundreds? Good luck even finding the players for that, let alone make it actually work. Thousands? Don't even bother. The maximum number of ships allowed in total in a mission is around 300 I believe.

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