More than 16 players in Multiplayer?

[HaloReach'Around 0]

Seeing how far you guys have come with Halo modding do you think its possible that in the future one of you could be hosting a game with 32 or more players at once? Or is the player cap hard coded in a way where you think it will never be possible?

[Lord Zedd 1,771]

The cap is too rooted into everything so there a good chance it will never happen.

[adamgm10 38]

Seeing how far you guys have come with Halo modding do you think its possible that in the future one of you could be hosting a game with 32 or more players at once? Or is the player cap hard coded in a way where you think it will never be possible?

The lag would be insane. There's a reason why Battlefield only supports 24 players on the Xbox 360 and PS3 rather than 64. The game can only support that amount without massive lag or problems. Same with Halo. The game is designed to have 16 players anymore would cause massive lag or major problems Like FPS drops or crashes. The only way to fix this is by downgrading the textures and other stuff. That's too much work for anyone to want to do.

[HaloReach'Around 0]

The lag would be insane. There's a reason why Battlefield only supports 24 players on the Xbox 360 and PS3 rather than 64. The game can only support that amount without massive lag or problems.

Is that an issue of not having  dedicated servers or the 360 not being powerful enough? If a game with say, 24 payers was played over system link would there still be too much lag?

Edited August 5, 2014 by HaloReach'Around

[Nate the Great 560]

The lag would be insane. There's a reason why Battlefield only supports 24 players on the Xbox 360 and PS3 rather than 64. The game can only support that amount without massive lag or problems. Same with Halo. The game is designed to have 16 players anymore would cause massive lag or major problems Like FPS drops or crashes. The only way to fix this is by downgrading the textures and other stuff. That's too much work for anyone to want to do.

 

I'm inclined to say this isn't the case. In Halo 3/Reach you can spawn a crazy amount of BIPDs before the game begins to lag, so I imagine the game could handle 2-4 extra players. I just think they've kept it to 16 because that's kinda become the de facto party size limit on Xbox in general.

Edited August 5, 2014 by Xevalous

[Teancum 221]

I'm inclined to say this isn't the case. In Halo 3/Reach you can spawn a crazy amount of BIPDs before the game begins to lag, so I imagine the game could handle 2-4 extra players. I just think they've kept it to 16 because that's kinda become the de facto party size limit on Xbox in general.

The BIPD isn't a player, though. It's a 'dumb' animated model. The network code doesn't need to keep track of it's current weaponry, ammo, grenades, health, shields, current location, current velocity, current animation being played, etc. The list goes on and on. Just because it can render something doesn't mean the network can handle that something being an actual player.

[HaloReach'Around 0]

^ Is that a limitation of the the 360, the games (maybe the later games are different?), or a problem of bandwidth?

[adamgm10 38]

I believe it's game side. It all depends on the engine and graphics in my opinion. I do believe there is an arcade game on Xbox that has 32 players but I think the textures are quite poor. And It depends on the game engine. I'm positive that Halo can run fine with a few extra people, it just happens that 16 players have worked out just fine.

But for Halo to support a bigger amount of players from 16 to say 24 or 32 then the engine would need to be messed around with to help support that amount of players and the graphics and probably some other things would need to be downgraded to help sync everything otherwise you will probably lag all over the place and with that amount of people in one game you can expect FPS drops.

[HaloReach'Around 0]

Gotcha. If someone eventually did figure out how to bypass the player cap it would be interesting to see what the performance limits are for each halo game engine and the what is impact of variables like system link vs dedicated server, xbox 360 vs xbox one. I guess no one has even figured it out for Halo Custom Edition. Has anyone tried any 16 player games with injected vehicles and AI on Reach or H3? Does one perform better than the other?

[Bunker Jeremy 14]

Its possible but we would need to test its limit and make a team on how to get step one done first.

[Nowise10 24]

Kinda relevant, but remember when The Defiant mappack came out and 343 released this picture 

 

 

and dat reach manual with 16 player firefight.

 

[AMD 885]

Player limit is impossible to change without access to the source code. I say that with 100% certainty. Too many assumptions are made about a 16 player limit with regards to how the game's memory is laid out.

EDIT: to give you an idea as to how difficult this would be, Kornman said once that he would probably need Kickstarter funding just to be able to reasonably change it in CE.

[HaloReach'Around 0]

Player limit is impossible to change without access to the source code. I say that with 100% certainty. Too many assumptions are made about a 16 player limit with regards to how the game's memory is laid out.

EDIT: to give you an idea as to how difficult this would be, Kornman said once that he would probably need Kickstarter funding just to be able to reasonably change it in CE.

If you had to guess off the top of your head, how much would you have to raise on kickstarter to get it done for H3/Reach? Hypothetically, If I was someone wealthy enough and willing - what would you need? (funds  to support a team of the best modders on this site, a pro game developer, other resources.. ect)?

[AMD 885]

If you had to guess off the top of your head, how much would you have to raise on kickstarter to get it done for H3/Reach? Hypothetically, If I was someone wealthy enough and willing - what would you need? (funds to support a team of the best modders on this site, a pro game developer, other resources.. ect)?

I'd probably ask for around $10,000 at the least.

The issue is that the third-gen engines still really aren't understood well enough (and probably never will be) to make it reasonable. An enormous amount of time would need to be spent, and that's assuming there are no hardware limitations to begin with.

Not to mention it would only appeal to a niche group of people. It's really not worth it.

[HaloReach'Around 0]

Kinda relevant, but remember when The Defiant mappack came out and 343 released this picture 

 

 

 

and dat reach manual with 16 player firefight.

 

 

 

Now this is interesting. Anyone have any thoughts on this being possible/impossible?

....

Also, can anyone tell me if AI injected into multiplayer works for non-host players? Does it sync in Reach?

Edited August 13, 2014 by Lord Zedd
removed quoted images

[Gamecheat13 253]

Now this is interesting. Anyone have any thoughts on this being possible/impossible?

....

Also, can anyone tell me if AI injected into multiplayer works for non-host players? Does it sync in Reach?

No.

AI does not sync in netgames on any Halo games besides Halo 1 Xbox.

[HaloReach'Around 0]

No.

AI does not sync in netgames on any Halo games besides Halo 1 Xbox.

 

Gotcha, does the same apply to general mods of firefight and campaign with someone playing co-op? Those AI battle videos you make are great by the way. Are those videos made in campaign or campaign maps converted to MP?  What do you think about the plausibility of increasing the player cap in Firefight? I know Firefight maps have been converted to MP but I'm also curious if it could work the other way around. Could Firefight happen in forge world?