Torque 3d Limitations

#1 T3D limitations: Your imagination.
About making a mmo: Read this thread

Winterleaf entertainment is developing an mmo kit afaik don't quote me on that tho.

If you are new to game development and coding in general and don't have what it takes to make the engine changes to make Torque work with a mmo I think you would be better off starting with Hero Engine.
T3D is not a mmo engine and as such is not out of the box working for mmo's. But it is indeed very possible to make it suitable for a mmo if you work with the source code. This is the same for all engines except for Hero Engine which is a dedicated mmo engine and therefore should work with mmos out of the box.

#2 WinterLeaf Entertainment is working on a MMO Platform using T3D. Its pretty much a "from the ground up re-write" of T3D. As far as what it can handle.... we arent 100% sure as of yet. We are in the middle of a re-write atm to make the engine more..... more stable, more capable of handling large amounts of AIs, etc. If you are wanting to read up on what we are doing, look for WinterLeaf Entertainment here, or go to our site - www.winterleafentertainment.com

#3 Actually what i am interested is just knowing the map size limitations and the amount of players on one map. I will check out Hero engine. Basically how much can I do before it starts to lagg?

#4 I looked at Hero Engine and, maybe its just my inexperience, but I am unimpressed. The only two games that look promising are Star Wars and the Repopulation. It is 99$ a year from what I could see and graphically less than acceptable. If that MMO platform by winter leaf is reasonable maybe I will get that but for now I need information on what I can do with Torque 3d at the moment.

#5 Beyond a certain size and amount of detail fidelity you are only limited by your machine's available Resources. You can make a super detailed 2k square map or you can make a low detailed 128k square map. You have to ask yourself what "large map" means for your game.

To create the terrain you import a heighmap (various sizes supported). Each pixel within that heightmap will approximately represent 1 Torque Unit by default, which visually is close to a meter. So a 2048x2048 heightmap will give you a map that is 2km squared. Each terrain has a "squaresize" multiplyer that lets you adjust the ratio of each pixel of the heightmap to terrain distance. A squaresize of 8 will cause each pixel of the heightmap to represent 8 Torque Units instead of 1. Do the math of various ratios and you can see that yes indeed large maps are supported.

However, Torque does not handle streaming of the map or it's contents so if you actually manage to fill a 64k map with objects you will have a large resource overhead. Also, once you get far enough out from the origin you will start running into floating point precision errors which can cause camera jitter and other oddities. This is an issue in almost any engine.

Torque easily supports 64 concurrent players in one session out of the box on a server with a reasonably good (hi-speed) connection. This number can be increased, but at a cost of necessary network bandwidth. Will it handle tens of thousands of players in the same scene at once? No, but then neither does any actual MMO out there.

Network lag can be affected by many things, primarily the amount of traffic being sent back and forth. Torque's networking is primarily set up to handle high speed movement and reactions of FPS gameplay. As a result it does not contain any kind of sophisticated database management or tools that a MMO will require - but they can be added.

#6 Thank you.