config required for 18 player game?

[uncleFungus]

Hi. I want to host a doomsday game for upto 18 players. how much RAM and bandwidth will I need for the game to run smoothly for everybody?

Also, can someone clarify what is a more common cause for lag: clients not receiving packets or clients being bombarded with too many packets and not being able to keep up with the hosting machine?

As an example for the second question: Yesterday 3 of us played a game over the internet through hamachi. I was hosting. The game began smoothly enough but I noticed it was running considerably slower than when i play single player. After about a year in game time my friends started complaining about minor lag. After a while I increased the game speed to fast and thats when my friends told me that there is too much lag and it is impossible to play.

Now I want to know whether the lag was because my machine was not able to cope with all the game and network computation or was it because my friends' machines were not able to receive the packets at the rate at which my machine was sending them.

I was hosting on an old laptop of mine....with 512MB RAM and 128MB shared graphics memory (yeah yeah its a long story). I have a 512 Kbps broadband connection and both my friends have 2 Mbps connections.

Since they had faster internet connections than me I would think that they should be receiving the packets as I send them. Could it be a case of packet loss due to their PCs being behind a NAT/Firewall?

 

[unmerged(115311)]

Well I don't know so much about the technical aspects, but I have hosted games up to 15 ppl and it works pretty nicely. Althrough you will have a lot more rehosts, since the likelyhood of player crashes increases with more players. Also rehosts, especially loading the save for 18 ppl takes a lot more time.

I can however tell you that as good as Hamachi might be, large scale games with it aren't recommendable. I once tried with some 13 ppl and that 5 hour session was a nightmare, with some 10 crashes & rehosts.

And you shouldn't ever put the speed on Fast, because that will desync the game. Above normal is the max we've used, and even with it, lag will build up eventually. Above normal during peacetime, then normal to fix the lags. Normal-Below normal during wartime, and Slow if requested so.