[Blinx]

Assuming you have a powerful enough server to support high player caps and you're diligent about the 2047 dynamic entity cap, is there any workaround to extend beyond this?

[asherkin]

Nope, best you can do is 33 (enable srctv/replay, kick the bot), then you start overwriting memory due to fixed-size arrays.

[nosoop]

The simple answer: No. MAX_PLAYERS is hardcoded to 33 by default. Clients cannot support more than 33 standard players, and no amount of server mods can change that limitation client-side.

The balls-to-the-wall hypothetical answer: Maybe with some kind of sharding solution. Set up a number of servers on one machine, write something for them to communicate data between each server, and fake the clients that aren't on a particular server with props, weapon mimic points, and so on. Provided it somehow works, it'd be a very hacky solution from a client standpoint.

The practical answer: Run TF2 Classic instead, which, from what I can tell, has MAX_PLAYERS set to 128.

[Blinx]

Ah dang, I had heard myths of people running 33+ TF2 servers but I guess they weren't true.

[Oshizu]

Originally Posted by Blinx Ah dang, I had heard myths of people running 33+ TF2 servers but I guess they weren't true.

It's possible to run servers with 33+ people but as asherkin said server's memory is going to be overwritten and eventually srcds is gonna crash

[Potato Uno]

Even if you hacked the server to run 128 players flawlessly, the client only has arrays and data initialized up to a max of 33 or 34 player slots. You will eventually cause clients to crash to desktop with segmentation faults.