Irrlicht Engine

I have to say, it's an absolutely fascinating approach to offloading work from the server, and handling trust issues. If hacking your client only benefits or harms some other random player, then there little incentive to do it beyond academic curiosity. You have to trust the clients in toto, but then if the majority of your players are actually bots (hellllllo Korean MMORPGs) then there's little point in continue to serve them anyway.

I can't remember ever seeing a a hybrid client/server/P2P architecture making it into production, but that's not to say that you can't make it work.

However, I'd have thought that it would increase both latency and bandwidth requirements, as the data have to be sent to and from clients rather than calculated on the server. It also makes player X's experience dependant on the reliability of player Y's connection to the server, which was always a problem with P2P architectures.

We added Nvidia physx (ageia). This cause its much faster than irrlichts system. But we watched with fear when nvidia bought ageia but it seemed the physx support will only grow with its new owner.

We used the physx also for advanced pathfinding and it has improved AI dramaticly.

looking good. any idea of an eta on an open alpha?

i would totally agree with rogerborg. there is no such thing as "client side security". you can never trust the client. all checks must be done in server-side and even in that case there will be "always one more bug".

@lostclimategames
No sorry we still have no eta. We're still searching for 2d and 3d artists. Mostly for character animators.

@Mirror
Well, if a client is manipulating his "child" npc he would gain things if its was someone he was fighting with. But when his computer calculates the npc 900 meters further thre isn't much profit for manipulating. and when someone logs off or logs in the npcs are for a part again organized over some clients. And still letting the server make a small calculation about positions and such doesn't hurt (against teleporting, giving other armors to his child npc and such).

and bots serve themself instead the server for 100%

i wont do actual work for you but for testing purposes, i can make some prototyping dummies with basic animations for you. if it can be used for getting a alpha demo out.