is it possible for a game to have different clients

[heero yuy]

is it possible for an online game to have for example one client that uses the unreal 3 engine and one that uses the cry 3
on the top they are the same just different engines but is there anything stopping it from working?

this question stems from an argument i had in a steam chat about world of warcraft and its engine being outdated i suggested that they could make a new client that people can have instead of the current one that uses a new engine that allows for more graphical bells and whistles

because to me it does not sound like there should be a problem (other than perhaps cost) because all the client really does is show the user whats happening and tells the server what the user is doing (the client probably also deals with what can and cannot be walked into with the server having the final say)

 

[bystander]

This happens all the time, but maybe not to the degree you guys are thinking, but WoW has a DX9 client and a DX11 client. Both work, but the DX11 client has more bells and whistles.

I believe with EQ2, there was two very different clients at one point during an expansion. You could use the new one with completely different character models, or use the old one with the original models. It was your choice.

There does have to be certain shared code to connect and deal with data in similar ways, but there is nothing stopping a dev from having different clients.