Torque capacity

#1 1. There is no hard maximum. It depends on the infrastructure, bandwidth, latency, etc.
2. Once you have purchased the license, you get the full source code to modify as needed.
3. If you have the skills, you can program it to have more optimized networking or different networking requirements.

#2 Hi,

Just adding a bit to what David said . . .

There is no hard-coded engine limit that I'm aware of. However, there are script/configuation limits that you can change.

When you try to connect to a Torque session, you will see the number of players in the session and the maximum possible for that server -- in the following format . . .

3/64

64 is the scripted default number of players. Torque can handle up to 128 fairly well. However, large numbers of vehicles and other demanding objects (networked physics) will affect performance no matter what your scripted player cap is.

I hope all that makes sense,

Aaron E.

#3 Thanks alot! ^_^

#4 It really depends, are you looking to get thousands of FPS players on with twitch like game play or something a bit less intensive like an RTS or RPG style game?

The more physics, the more networking (messages you need to send/receive) they fewer players you are likely to support.

At one point I was able to run 2000 players on a torque server, lowered the bandwidth, no vehicles, just players. Biggest problem then was the client couldnt handle drawing all those models (another problem youll run into with high numbers is framerate).

Torque is definately capable but it will require making sacrifices to mostly likely your gameplay unless you
break out the heaviest pieces to another process perhaps, and make some significant changes to the client.

But like a lot of things torque is an excellent start for such an endeavor :)

#5 2000?!?!?!? Wow! That's an incredibly number.

#6 I've just purchased Torque with the intent of making a Third Person RTS/RPG.
Players will control from four to eight soldiers each so I'm also keen to figure out what the capacity of a server is.

I havent yet worked out if one server will handle only one battle at a time or if the one server session can handle multiple battle locations. As near as I can tell, the more virtual environments that exist (and players logged in) the more resources that will be needed.

#7 The RTS Kit (ie, 3rd person control of units) can support several hundred. If you turn up the network fidelity then you'll get less, but still plenty for your style of game, I imagine.

#8 I think you can get more then 2k even, I was hitting that limit because the ai for the other players was eating up some of the processing. The surprising thing was at the time I was testing on mediocre hardware, not even state of the art stuff that you have today.

It important to remember that when this torque engine was originally developed CPU and memory was not what it is now and bandwidth was at a premium compared to what most people have today.

This is a huge benefit now, since its can run as a true dedicated server and is so sensitive about what bits and how many bits it sends to the clients it gives you the ability to do some amazing things that even modern engines(which their gross misuse of processing/memory and bandwidth just can not do).

Try running 2k players on a unreal3 "server" (in quotes because its not a server, its a client running in server mode). You can barely get 24 to 32 on state of the art hardware and the bandwidth it uses is unprecedented, but alas I digress.

People will say thats not what it was designed for(unreal), well neither was torque but it can still do it :)

I hope as you new comers to torque soon realize, you are getting an amazing technology that really is still leading edge(sure the graphics engine needs work, see TSE) but the underlying frame work is top notch.

I thank these guys everyday for bring this joy of this technology into our grubby little hands.

#9 I agree with everything TheMartian said. It's really amazing when you start to fully realize the capabilities of the engine.

#10 Just curious, if you have clustered servers could you increase the number of players exponetially ? I hope so.

#11 If you cluster the servers via a hardware cluster, then no - unless you want to modify the engine.

If you cluster the servers as in having seperate servers for different areas, then yes.

#12 Hmm well clustering depends on the layout (as stefan mentioned), clustered servers wouldnt hold more players (if we handle 2k per machine its 2k per machine, more machines means more players but the same number
per machine).

if you broke out some of the functionality onto seperate processes you might be able to increase it, but you run into complexity issues, asyncronous problems, etc. (for example, putting the ai on another server) may increase the number of real clients you could get on the main game server (but now your running more hardware, which costs more) but technically you could then get even more players in one map.

so it depends. exponential growth? probably not hehe, even linear growth is difficult since very few algorithms even scale linearly. so you would increase the players probably by a decent amount, at the cost of adding more hardware.