Interesting idea Rob. Of course, you have to be rich enough to pay for a lot of servers :-)
My (currently free) MMO just uses BlitzPlay, and it works fine so far. I should be able to handle quite large amounts of players on only a modest server.
What I do is split my game world into Areas. A player in one Area doesn't "know" about players in any other. This keeps bandwidth usage way down.
Also I don't worry about perfect synchronisation - so long as something is "about right" it's fine. And I handle as much on the client side as possible.
The result - it's currently possible to have 2 players with no lag to speak of over a single 56k connection. And that's with a server which only does 128k upstream and 512k downstream.
I haven't had enough players to REALLY strain the thing but I think it should be able to handle a couple of thousand at once without being too slow. In fact the game would slow to a crawl rendering and updating all the players long before the network side of things became annoyingly slow.
My (currently free) MMO just uses BlitzPlay, and it works fine so far. I should be able to handle quite large amounts of players on only a modest server.
What I do is split my game world into Areas. A player in one Area doesn't "know" about players in any other. This keeps bandwidth usage way down.
Also I don't worry about perfect synchronisation - so long as something is "about right" it's fine. And I handle as much on the client side as possible.
The result - it's currently possible to have 2 players with no lag to speak of over a single 56k connection. And that's with a server which only does 128k upstream and 512k downstream.
I haven't had enough players to REALLY strain the thing but I think it should be able to handle a couple of thousand at once without being too slow. In fact the game would slow to a crawl rendering and updating all the players long before the network side of things became annoyingly slow.