In our game, the draw distance of other players is dependent on your ping. The lower your ping, the more players you can see up to a point and your video settings. A single server can quite easily track hundreds of thousands of player coordinates without much effort, the limitation really being the underlying network and number of simultaneous connections so there are proxies involved. Other persistent world data is stored at a slower pace on different servers. The game client itself connects to a server that is just a router to these other servers and then messages are sent to the router. For incoming data, there is a single stream that the game client consumes in real-time. Easy to draw on a whiteboard, a bit harder to code.
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