Idea for multiplayer

[Kajos]

Hi guys (and girls, are you there?),

I love this project and the professionality of it! I think it's a shame that it's not very popular, but however very well received though.
Anyway, I was brainstorming a little about the multiplayer aspect and was thinking how it's handled right now. I figure the position of units is not sent over the network, but their targetlocation / destinations are. This would take up the least bandwidth I think.
Another thing I'm wondering is wheter clustering your units would reduce bandwidth usage.

Where am I going with this? I'm thinking OpenRA MMO would be an awesome idea and momentarily just figuring where the bottlenecks would be mainly.

320x240 (not screen resolution, just a number) units max per screen, x y position in 64 bits each per ~3 seconds = 3 Mbit/s. When moving the screen 320 units per 1/3 sec need to be loaded, so 320*3 x y = 120 Kbit/s.
Seems quite reasonable right?

One bottleneck would be the huge server usage though...

On the other side, you could create a massive map with perlin noise, which is not very heavy in RTS usage. Also buildings could be built with a Minecraft-idea, making chunks of the tilemap and this way reducing storesize (for the server and the client).

I hope I'm not offending anyone with my crazy ideas, but I just love crazy ideas
Any thoughts on this would be cool And sorry if I seem vague, ask me where it is please.

Greetings,
Kajos

[Kajos]

I've put some more thought into this and theoretically this could work. Only problem would be the massive serveruse, as with any MMO. However one could run, say 50 players on a 100 mbit line.

Having a steady fps of 20.

32 bit for id of unit -> max 65536 players and each player 65536 units
11 bit for x relative to screen position (which is uploaded) (max resolution 2048x2048)
11 bit for y
= 62bit

2mbit download / 20 fps / 62bit = 1700 units on screen max.

As for upload, one would only send a units current position and destination to the server.
So this will probably fit in a 512Kbit upload.

[riderr3]

meh

[Kajos]

brah

[zypres1]

An easy mmo could be fun, like the new c&c online game...
But must be easy mod to make, else it will die...

[knivesron]

i was entertaining the idea of a openra mmo. it would sort of be easy but im not really sure how easy.

my thoughts were sumthing like how battle pirates works (some gay facebook gayme) there would be a world map premade. that would would be split into tiles/territorys. each territory would represent a normal openra map like we use now. each tile would be its own dedicated server. you login pick a start tile and build a base and harvest your stuffs. once you have decided you have a big enough army you zoom out to the world map. and choose what units you want to send where. once those units arrive they deploy and then you zoom in to the new sever with your units spawned and away you go to expand and exterminate.

that way each server should have a small load, and the coding wouldent be that complicated.

good luck to an mmo. i think openra would kinda suck as an mmo though considering it takes you like 10mins to build everything.