Multiplayer capacity

[Binesi]

"GameCore provides 'Out of the Box' multiplayer support, complete with Game Lobbies, Online User Profiles, Leaderboards and much more.

From FPS Deathmatch Shooters to Persistent World 'MMO' style games, GameCore includes everything you need out of the box. GameCore ships with full set of example projects to get you started as well."

I have a client project right now which could potentially scale (at a later point in time) to encompass their 60,000+ employees. Basically a training simulation with virtual meeting rooms also used for training. Is Gamecore going to be able to handle something like this? How far can we scale the master server which is part of the Pro license? Would we need to use individual server instances - and if so, what is the capacity for each (ignoring network bandwidth issues).

Assuming it is all possible, and we chose to sell this solution to them, what type of server hardware would they require? At which point do features such as "Online User Profiles" and "Game Lobbies" require a dedicated SQL server or additional support servers?

Also, how robust is the network code right now? Is there prediction, encryption, compression, bandwidth scaling, etc?

Right now I'm working with a design that uses Unity 3D and SmartFox, but if Gamecore can do it - I don't mind being an early adopter, as I will be in either case.

[gekido]

If you want, I can email you offline (or send me a quick note via the contact form on the main gamecore site and I'll follow up with you) and I can get into a bit more of the details specifically for your situation.

The simple answer is:

1) the master server system / framework (which includes the online user profiles / global leaderboards / statistics etc) is a custom php / mysql application.  You can store anything on a user-profile basis 'in the cloud', which includes save games, general profile details (achievements etc), as well as post global stats such as leaderboard updates etc.

Depending on the situation, this could be ported over to Oracle or other larger-scale database frameworks (which we can help with if desired), but the core of the system is designed to be mappable to existing web-based technolgies wherever possible.  This includes things like database mirroring / syncing etc - all standard web-stuff for larger-scale web infrastructure. 

Our development team have quite a bit of experience creating very large scale web applications that have run sites with millions of transactions a day, which lends nicely to this kind of system.  The good news is that the master server / profile server are typically only 'hit' every so often and don't receive much of a load, network or processor-wise, so they can scale well.  We have a project just about to go live using the system that is designed to have hundreds of thousands of player sessions a month for example.

In our tests so far, the master server has been very minimal, band-width and performance-wise.  Once this project goes live in the near future, we'll be able to provide more specific stats for everyone.

2) the low-level Nat traversal server is a seperate stand-alone 'session manager' server application that basically serves as a bit of a 'handshake' manager between clients and servers located behind NAT routers.  This system is very low-overhead and can be scaled as desired from the backend.

Both the master server and nat traversal server are independent and can be instanced as desired - this functionality is already built-into the system and adding a new master server is all of a matter of clicking 'add server' on the master server web interface and giving it the IP of the new server.

Integrating the master server / user profiles into something like an external (or internal) website is also very possible, since it's just a standard php / mysql application - which is exactly what the project I was mentioning does (so you can check out leaderboards from the website etc).

There are other details that are available in the network management system that I can't mention publically at the moment, but again if you wish to follow up with me, I'd be more than happy to help you decide if our solution will work for your project.

[BigDaz]

But according to the the GameCore license page, you're limited to creating games for entertainment purposes only, it doesn't allow for commercial or industrial use.

[gekido]

Like I said, contact us offline and we'll discuss your project's specific needs. 

We most definitely have licensing options available for serious games, simulations and virtual platforms, but the GameCore product line is specifically for developing games, hence the license terms.