Mar 30, 2026 5 min read

So I'm making a 1000 player multiplayer space game

If you enjoy space games, you're probably familiar with promises of 1000s of players. In fact, Star Citizen has been promising this for a decade (is it done yet?). Other games like Elite: Dangerous and No Man's Sky have high player counts technically, and maybe there can be more than 1000 players connected inside a vast infinite procedurally generated universe at the same time... but good luck seeing them all together in the same place!

Hi, I'm Glenn Fiedler, a professional game programmer with more than 25 years experience. I'm an expert in game netcode and the author of gafferongames.com and mas-bandwidth.com.

In the past, I've worked on some games you may know:

Freedom Force
Tribes: Vengeance
L.A. Noire
Mercenaries 2
God of War
Journey
Titanfall 1 and Titanfall 2
... plus a tiny bit of my netcode is still active in Apex Legends.

And now I'm very happy to announce my own multiplayer game project.

A 1000 player space game.

When I say 1000 players, know that I mean something quite different to anything you've seen before. I don't mean 1000 players spread out across a whole galaxy or solar system where occasionally you might have a battle with tens or 100s of ships. I mean 1000 players that you can see, right in front of you, all fighting in one huge space battle.

Here are some references for the core fantasy I'm aiming for:

As you can see I'm going for that classic space battle: fighters, bombers, lasers, missiles, turrets, capital ships – all networked with the fidelity of a top-tier FPS, not an MMO. So it's fast-paced action, not a flight simulator or role playing game.

Over the past 1.5 years I've spent my spare time researching and scaling up traditional FPS netcode techniques to support 1000 players with a completely custom game and netcode engine. No network lodding. No distance culling. No chugging when more than a hundred ships get together in the same space. All spaceships visible all the time.

Even better, this announcement is 100% vaporware free. This is not an announcement of something to come in the future, this is something that's working right now.

Here's a video showing the latest prototype build from GDC 2026:

First, you probably notice that the graphics are very basic. In the game industry we call this "blockout" or "grey boxing". At this early stage of development, this is normal. First, we prototype with placeholder art until we are sure we have something that technically works and is really, really fun, and we have all the scale, speeds and weapons working correctly, only once we have this, do we spend money on art.

So what we have here is my test level, designed to show off one of each type of object the engine supports, and to test that the network engine can handle the number of objects we need to make a huge space battle.

In the test level you can see:

1,000 player fighter ships flying around the level firing their lasers.
A Dyson sphere made out of 8,000 cubes. Each cube is a "static prop". These props are stationary and thus do not need synchronization between the client and the server, although I'm thinking about making it possible to "reconfigure" static props as a function of server scripting variables in the near future, so maybe the Dyson sphere can switch between different configurations.
Outside the Dyson sphere you see 1,000 "asteroids" made up of dark grey cubes. These are "dynamic props". They are simulated in the physics engine on the server and synchronized to the client. Dynamic props are gameplay affecting and can damage other ships. Yes, you can even shoot them with your lasers and push into other ships or structures.
Inside the Dyson sphere you see yellow cubes orbiting around a tiny sun. These are "cosmetic props". You can shoot them and they'll recursively fragment by breaking up into 8 sub-cubes for several levels. I currently support as many as 16,000 cosmetic props in the level. These are simulated client side and are cosmetic, and not gameplay affecting. They do not damage ships that hit them, they do not push back or affect gameplay objects, and they do not block lasers or missiles. Because these props are cosmetic, they do not require any bandwidth to synchronize, so we are limited only by how many rigid bodies the client can simulate at 60FPS.
The ship you are piloting is a fighter. These are very fast and have a boost or afterburner. Currently the boost speed is 1,000 meters per-second, because I want this not to be a game about shooting at dots in the distance, so fighters need a way to quickly close distance with opponents and start a dogfight. Currently there is no energy cost or cooldown on boost (this will probably have to change), but you can't shoot while boosting, and it is less maneuverable than flying at regular speed. When not boosting the fighter regular speed is 200 meters/second, and it is highly maneuverable with true 6DOF controls.
You can see at the start your team's carrier ship flanked on either side by destroyers. The same exists on the other side of the Dyson sphere megastructure for the other team. We support multiple ship types with different armor types as well as weapons with different amount of penetration, so for example, a fighter may not be able to directly damage a destroyer or carrier, but may be able to help take out turrets so bombers can approach.
Above the carrier in you can see a line of bombers. These are comedically stupid at this point but they represent a type of NPC ship. I'm not sure yet how many NPC ships we can support yet, but I'm hopeful we can support at least a few hundred when there are 1,000 players already in the game, and definitely we can support much more more as needed to fill the level out when there aren't 1,000 real players in the level.
Not shown, but I plan to have both player and NPC controlled turrets on capital ships, as well as corsair or corvette class ships where one player can fly and their friends can man turrets. There is also a homing missile system where you can lock on and fire missiles at other ships.

The development game server is running in Los Angeles with simulated clients connected taking the full bandwidth, CPU and memory load for 1,000 players, and after an intense amount of optimization over the last 1.5 years, we are have solved the core technical challenge of getting 1,000 players working.

So here we have the announcement of the game. Yes, it is still incredibly early but I promise you that everything, absolutely everything you see is real.

So what's next?

I have a few months of work ahead of me to get the first alpha build ready for play testing, and then I'm ready to start getting early feedback from real players. It definitely won't be fun (yet!), but I'm looking for some excited space game loving souls willing to look past rough edges and join me in early playtesting and give me honest feedback as I craft this game.

If you'd like support the development of 1000 player space game, you can support me here on Patreon: Space Game Glenn.

Supporters get access to exclusive posts about the development of the game, access to the space game discord, and access to early playtests.

See you online in Space Game!

ps. A huge, huge thanks is due to three friends of mine: Nathan Drabsch, Brian Bucklew and Paul Fox. Brian for massive assistance for the past year and doing a tonne of work getting the Unity renderer online and hitting 120FPS on iOS in time for GDC, Nathan for his early participation, moral support and help in discussions and ideation around this project from the very start 1.5 years ago, and Paul for dropping in and helping out with sound. Thank you all!