Re: *Peers skeptically at this Product*

#1 1. It won't do that out of the box AFAIK. There is no hard coded limit, but the online play is geared for FPS team play running off of one server. Think Tribes 2. I'd guess 100 is the current practical limit with a good server, with ~150 being practical max with a really powerful server and big bandwidth. Someone else might be able to give you better estimates.

There are several projects that are re-doing the networking for massively multiplayer purposes, but that's a lot of work.

2. Source code isn't available to the player once it is compiled.

3. I know there is a Maya exporter. I'm pretty sure there is one for version 5.

#2 Thanks very much! I really appreciate the feedback!

#3 1. If you're willing to not have everyone run around like an FPS character, you can probably fit a lot more than a 100 on a server.

2. Please use common sense here. Torque is compiled, not magical. Sufficiently determined players can still reverse engineer your game, just as they can with any program or data file.

3. Maya 5 is indeed supported.

#4 FWI, 3D Game Studio has a very good file packer if you buy the proffesional version ($900). The Pro version also supports unlimited numbers of players and there is a Maya exporter available.

#5 I'm sure there are many ways to optmize the max players to fit your needs, but i dont much about 3DGame Studio, so whatever...

#6 Just FYI, as for the everquest like performance. You can do it like City of Heroes. They have zones, so you could have spereate servers if you wanted to. And if to many people are in one zone, Another server pops up to host another identical version of that zone that other players can use(by choice to a point).

This is what I planned on using if I made an MMORPG.

#7 @Dustin: Torque supports ZIP-based volumes, and unlimited players... all for $100. If you need better compression, you could pretty easily implement a .rar module (for instance), or bzip2, or others.

But sometimes loads of compression is bad, if you want to load stuff quickly. Better to leave the game assets relatively uncompressed but really scrunch down for the installer.

The number of players is limited of course by the amount of data you need to transfer. If you have a rich dynamic world, like in Quake or Serious Sam, you're only going to be able to deal with maybe a dozen to a hundred players (on a really beefy, big-pipe system)... But if you scale it down, only send update events, and so forht, you could do a MUD type application with hundreds of players.

#8 I'm considering switching from 3DGS to Torque. Right now I can compress my game into two main files--a resource file (where everything is compressed) and an executable. Would it be fairly easy to do this with Torque?

#9 Legends did it without too much trouble. It's not a major focal point of Torque, so it's probably not going to be as slick as 3DGS.

But hopefully you're not making your engine purchase decisions off of who has the better file packing interface. :)

AFAIK, Torque can read standard ZIP files or you can modify it to read a packed format of your choice. You can of course rename the .zip to something else if you want.