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Is it possible to run multiple games per server?

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    Is it possible to run multiple games per server?

    Hi all.

    So here's my situation. I was hoping to get some feedback as to whether what I'm trying to do is even possible, as I can't find info on it elsewhere (only found this thread which seems relevant, but no useful info).

    I'm working on this small multiplayer game. The game itself is 1v1, a chess sort of game. There are two players, and the chess pieces are abilities that the players can use, so it's a real-time chess game basically. So I know for a fact that each game will only have 2 players in it. This works fine on a small scale. The problem comes when I want to be able to support a larger number of players.

    Since each server only runs 1 game, I find that I have to run multiple servers to support multiple concurrent games. As you can imagine this adds up rather quickly. Even at just 100 players playing at the same time, that's 50 instances of the server. I'm worried about memory issues in the future with this.

    What I'm wondering is if there is any way to have each server run multiple copies of the game?

    I know that in regular FPS-type unreal games, the server can do 32, even 64, players in the same game. So it seems like a waste to me to run it with just 2 players each time.

    Anyone have any idea? Or if this is even possible with Unreal?


    I'm also curious on how this is handled in the bigger games. Like say Gears of War, or Borderlands and those. So any time anyone out there wants to play with his friends, they start a new instance of the server somewhere out there even for just 2 people? Wouldn't that mean that there could potentially be hundreds of copies of the server instanced at once?

    #2
    its possible... just start your server instances on diffent ports (and add the port to your join function)

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      #3
      Hey thanks for the comment. That's the way I'm doing it currently. But it means that to support just 100 players I would have to start 50 server instances.

      My problem is that the nature of my game is 1 on 1 multiplayer. So even though each server instance supports 64 players, I'm only using 2. What I'd like to do is to load multiple games on the same server instance.

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        #4
        Just an idea.. a bad one but.. Maybe you should make a map with 16 chess tables.. and set that only 2 players at the time can play in each table.. and i don't know.. maybe hide all the remaining tables... so the player can see only one table? And only 2 players can play in each table.. In that case you can have 32 players in one server.. but they would never see the other 30 players.. sorry for my bad English ..

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          #5
          That sounds like it could work. But it's way outside the scope of the game design. I guess another possibility would be to simply make all irrelevant players invisible. But I'm not sure how that will work with replication. They might still get replicated and waste network bandwidth. None of these solution seems ideal. What makes sense to me is to have the server support more than one game, but I have no clue if that's possible.

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