Ultra-Large Servers
quake2 +set maxclients 200
The stage is set for ultra-large servers. Imagine everyone at QuakeCon in one gigantic level! A single T1 could run 80 internet players if it wasn’t doing anything else, a switched ethernet should be able to run as many as we are ever likely to have together in one place.
There will be a number of issues that will need to be resolved when this becomes a reality, but the fundamentals are there.
There will probably be issues with UDP packet dropping at the ethernet card level that will need to be worked around with a seperate qued thread.
Quake 2 isn’t as cpu intensive as QuakeWorld, but I’m not sure even a Pentium-II 300 could run 200 users. An alpha 21264 could certainly deal with it, though.
The new .bsp format has greatly increased size limits, but you could still make a map that hits them. The first one to be hit will probably be 64k brush sides. Ten thousand brushes can make a really big level if you don’t make it incredibly detailed. Loading a monster map like that will probably take over a minute, and require 32+ megs of ram.
I should probably make an option for death messages to only be multicast to people that are in the potentially hearable set, otherwise death messages would dominate the bandwidth.
Everyone should start thinking about interesting rules for huge games. A QuakeArmies dll has immense potential. Enemy lines, conquering teritory, multiple clan bases, etc.
Cooperating servers will be possible with modified dlls, but I probably won’t include any specific code for it in the default game.dll.