I have an air application that I’d like to turn into a multi-player game. I’d like to have 2-40 concurrent connections per “room”. We would like to have 1-10 rooms going at once in the beginning. I’d like for users to be able to share voice and video but that’s not a requirement.
Users will be racing each other based on data that’s updated once every second, so ping doesn’t have to be super low. 1000ms would be fine but lower is preferred.
I’ve looked at Cirrus with its RTMFP protocol.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/
Cirrus looks perfect. I’ve heard some problems about firewall and port settings, but was wondering if anyone had experience with at home users and Cirrus. Another problem is that it’s been in labs for ever. You can get RTMFP with Flash Media Server Enterprise but that’s like 60k-70k per processor, way out of our price range.
I’ve also looked at http://www.wowzamedia.com/ but it doesn’t support RTMFP. I know we can host this on AWS and maybe save some money.
There is an open source project (cumulus) that implements RTMFP too but I’ve read that it’s more of a POC then a production ready project. The license is also GPL which doesn’t work for our commercial application.
I’ve also looked at http://www.red5.org/ but again, no RTMFP integration.
The reason I like RTMFP is because we can scale without a lot of server cost. I know it’s a closed protocol from Adobe and it looks like wowza or red5 won’t be implementing it any time soon.
Is there an affordable (not 70k per processor) server tech for multi-player gaming that you can use with AIR/Flash that scales well?
Edit: We are .NET developers, but are open to other techs.
We are looking at electroserver and smartfox server. Electroserver is the front runner. It has a bunch of built in features like creation of rooms and flood filtering that we like. We can also program our server side code in AS3 along with a bunch of other servers. It’s not too expensive either.
http://www.electrotank.com/es5.html