Max amount of ships?

I have been playing Epsilon for a while now with a few friends and we are looking at running a Larp style game here in Australia.
I had read here that a few people had had issues when running more than 3 ships at a time.
I was wondering what the max number of ships/players anyone had run successfully or semi successfully?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • There was a report of 7 player ships I think, playing trough the internet.

    Personally, my maximum was 2 ships, 12 "clients".

    EE was made partially because of the problems with Artemis getting out of sync. EE should never get out of sync problems. However, a single client which cannot keep up with the game network/performance wise can cause problems for the whole game.

    They also need to run all the same version, version mismatches is also against the design of EE.
  • We did three at once, with I think 5 or 6 clients maybe more. And another game of three - one 4 person, one 2 person and another 2 person over the net. Ran good, we even did the star trek mod and some of my own ships.
  • Oh, and there is currently a hard-coded max of 32 player ships....
  • I will say, I used to be able to run the large battle scenario, but recently it has taxed the game and crashes. Even with my new computer. I'd say I haven't been able to run the scenario for very long since the last two updates. Of course there has been new ships added. I currently put in 8gb of ram, so I will have to try it again now that I have 16.
  • Last year we played with 7 ships connected by ehternet cable, each vessel in a different room and at most, near to 100 feet apart.

    Most of our scenarios froze after 20-30 min of play. But probably my limited skills in programing was to blame.

    More recently we played many games with 3 ships and encountered no problem (We had to clean more space on C:/ drive to opperate correctly.).
  • Hi! I got a couple questions.

    1. Is 32 max player ships mean that there can be a max of 32 clients or a max of 32 ships (6*32 = 192 clients)

    2. What is the limiting factor for a game?
    2a.) Is it the computer that is running the server? If so, what are the specs to be looking at? processor speed or ram or both?
    2b.) Or is it a limitation of the router?
    2c.) Or is it a limitation of the game script?
    2d.) Daid mentioned that a client who cannot keep up with the game network/performance wise can cause problems for the whole game. How do you determine the min spec for that? would dual core 2.2 GHz and 2 GB of ram be sufficient?

    I am trying to prepare for an event of around 30 people and would love to have them all be playing in the same game at the same time.

  • 1.

    32 max player ships, and with that, as many clients as you want, there is most likely some upper limit that I don't know about due to tech used. Could be that the number of clients on the windows release is limited to 63 due to this: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms739169(v=vs.85).aspx
    (FD_SET is most likely used with the 64 socket limit)
    On a linux server this value is 1024 as far as I understood.

    You might want to run more then 6 clients per ship, for extra viewports or other interfaces.

    2.
    As for specs, we don't really know. Remember that a Raspberry Pi 2 can almost run the game without too much issues. So the specs are quite low on CPU/GPU requirements.

    With a lot of clients, the server does need a lot of bandwidth. Pressing F10 ingame will show you the FPS and network usage on the server. I recommend the actual bandwidth requirements to be actually double that number, to allow for bursts. For example, when a client connects, it needs to be send all the gamestate data.


    But, 30 people would be no issue, people have done that.
  • When you say 63 for Windows and 1024 for Linux, does that number depend on if the server is Windows or Linux? Say you have 100 Linux clients, 1 Linux server and 1 Windows client. Would the limit be defined by the fact that the Windows computer exists? Or the server's OS?
  • It's the server that sets this limit. So with a Windows server, you can only 63 Linux clients, but with a Linux server, you could have up to 1023 Windows clients.

    But, a compile change in SFML can most likely change this, as a compile time define can overwrite this limit.
  • I believe the winsock limit is set by the OS, the compile time define does not change the OS settings, note this line from the article you posted " It must be emphasized that defining FD_SETSIZE as a particular value has no effect on the actual number of sockets provided by a Windows Sockets service provider."

    Older non-server windows versions did have servery restrictive limits on connections. Newer OSs and server OSs have much higher limits.
  • There are different limits, but the FD_SETSIZE limit is the first limit we will hit. Other limits are much larger. This limit is only present for a certain way of checking which sockets have data available for them.
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