Multiplayer Capabilities

[Col. Miles]

I run a fairly large online historical war gaming club and would like to ask if the game is or maybe capable of handling as many as 10 players per side as we are planning a huge online campaign, and have many members who want to take part?
I have read some of you forum posts on multiplayer and know you can not really say much
at this time but I guess our question is: Do you think honestly this is possible?
or have you considerd this many players in multiplayer, we could make this work with 4-8 members per side but more would be better yet, thanks in advance...

John Miles
www.armchairgenerals.net

[Jim]

The truthful answer is that we don't know. We know that it can handle at least 2/side because we have done that in alpha testing. When we get the alpha build complete and open it up to beta testers, then we expect to have a big enough group available to find out where the practical limits are. There is no built in limit, but no doubt there are practical limits. Only large group testing will tell us where those limits are.

-Jim

[Col. Miles]

Thanks for the quick responce Jim, do we know when it might go to beta?

[norb]

We don't right now. Within the next two months. Buy Beta we mean feature complete, code freeze. Only code added at that point is to fix bugs. So when we go beta, we are entering into our final testing. At that point we will bring in some more testers, assigning new faces to all the scenarios. So that stuff that we just can't see anymore will be noted and fixed if necessary.

IMO I think that 10 will be fine depending on the connections of everyone. We have had two great nights of bug free 1 on 1 action. We are getting our third tester online as we speak and I am interviewing a fourth this week. Our goal is to get these 4 guys together 3 times a week to see how it plays. We had 4 going fine on a lan. But this will be on the net across great distances, so it will be a better test. Hopefully we will be able to test 10 before release. We may just release it with no cap, play with as many as you can. I have no limits in the code. But like Jim said, there may be practical limits that become obvious later.

Norb

[Rello]

Based on my past experience with other games I'd be satisfied with a stable 3vs3 or even 2vs2. Adding more players brings to many disconnections, tymeout, desync, lag...and people loose interest after some evenings with that sort of things.

[Col. Miles]

Our war gaming club use's Hamachi, is a zero-configuration virtual private network (VPN) shareware application capable of establishing direct links between computers that are behind NAT firewalls without requiring reconfiguration (in most cases); in other words, it establishes a connection over the Internet that very closely emulates the connection that would exist if the computers were connected over a local area network. Currently available as a production version for Microsoft Windows and, as beta, for Mac OS X and Linux. Current Version is 2.0

It is free very small and helps keep large groups of players connected in Lan battles...

Here is a link to the latest version: http://www.filehippo.com/download_hamachi/