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Re: Solo/Multiplayer emphasis



Ninja <ninja@comp.vuw.ac.nz> recently wrote:


>what? I think we should make it possible to play most of the game alone.
>you won't always have people to team up with.
>
>we should not make multiplayer capability the best feature of crossfire, 
>rather something which adds something special to it

While keeping crossfire multi-player would be cool, I think that we should 
look realistically at this.   It just eats way too much cpu to really support
a lot of players well, certainly not on the sale of the multi-scores of people
on your typical MUD.  

Basically, on a MUD, they don't have all the tactical complexities, grapics, 
and sheer volume of MOBS that we have in crossfire.  We're inherendly limited
in number of players equivalent CPU can support.  In that respect, then, the
peak number of players is limited.  With less players, its hard to get together
a multi-player game.  You sort of see this in netrek, which is why the 
netrek METASERVER came about -- to help the few players around find a game with
players in it.  Perhaps future possibility of something similar that should be 
looked into (wouldn't bee too hard, what with the crossfire telnet port 
already built in).

If you lean too heavily toward the 'all multiplayer or nothing' approach, 
then your servers will start looking like netrek, either full, or completely
empty, and rarely anything in between.

The most players I've ever seen on a server was something like 8. Has 
anyone actually gone higher, in a realistic situation?

 Eric Mehlhaff, mehlhaff@crl.com