Maximal player count

[Lafriks]

Would be great if maximal player count for multiplayer games could be increased to 10.. that's more or less only thing that's stopping me from creating dota-like mod/map

[-Archmage-]

There's no 'max player count' 8 is just the number of players currently supported by the engine and the .mgm extension. Remember the higher the player count the harder it is to tell units apart on the minimap.

[Lafriks]

Yes, that is what I was thinking about. To increase engine/mgm maximal supported player count. Of course most probably it wont be suitable for playing 10 players on standart map but this could be usefull for building custom/scripted scenarious for up to 10/12 players.. I could probably look on how to implement this by myself as I'm software developer but I have no prior knowledge on opengl so any hints would be welcome

[Omega]

Technically, it wouldn't be that hard to add the extra players, as GAE even planned to originally support 12 players (but bumped that down to 8 due to the fact they'd have to make yet another map format, etc). As mentioned, the map limitation is the worst; as you see, MGM files are not backwards compatible, there's no fallback. Ideally, a "new" map format would be based on MGM and simply ignore the extra player starting positions specified if they are not supported. As well, there's the current limitation even in scenarios that you can't have more players than the map is made for, even if the scenario doesn't use their starting positions.

As for what you'd have to change, I'm afraid I haven't the foggiest, though you won't have to mess with any OpenGL stuff, as that's just for the graphics.