Needed bandwidth

[ehbgamer]

Hello,
I'm wondering how much bandwidth is usually needed for hosting an MMORPG game, If we are going to server hundreds of players.

Thanks,

[techbear]

I ran Blade Mistress off of my Roadrunner cable modem for two years with no problem, though I designed Blade Mistress as low-bandwidth as possible. My peak simultanious users was 90.

Take that for what it's worth.

http://www.blademistress.com

[Rainer Deyke]

Total bandwidth = number of users x bandwidth per user. Bandwidth per user is more or less under your control, and depends heavily on technical aspects of your game that I know nothing about. Number of users is less under your control, but you can plan for X number of users and either close the game or open a new server when more than X people want to play. Do your own math - I don't have enough information to do it for you.

[tolik]

Low-budget titles can implement Kaillera for VS player support (up to 4 players in one session I guess). It's free (but closed source), it handles lobby and chat rooms for you and takes 30kb of your application.
http://www.kaillera.com

I wouldn't recommend going into MMORPG unless you have highly skilled network professionals and a support from at least two network providers. Otherwise you'll have outages, problems and will spend all your time supporting the project instead of working on the future ones.

[indiemaker]

I ran Blade Mistress off of my Roadrunner cable modem for two years with no problem, though I designed Blade Mistress as low-bandwidth as possible. My peak simultanious users was 90.

Take that for what it's worth.

http://www.blademistress.com

Excellent job! I tried playing your game, and indeed, it works. One question though, how come the movement is restricted to grid to grid? Is that to reduce bandwidth?

Can I ask other questions? Did you make the server and client engine yourself? Any pointers into learning how to make a MMORPG? Do you have to learn networking programming..etc?

[kerchen]

I recently read about this very issue in "Massively Multiplayer Game Development", edited by Thor Alexander (ISBN 1584502436). According to one of the articles in that book, the typical MMOG aims for a bandwidth usage of about 1KB/sec per player. If you go much beyond that, you cut out the dial-up users.