The other day, I went back to working on an older project of mine and had some other people log in to play it. It became really, really laggy with all of the graphical effects of even things like walking and standing, not to mention the other complicated systems. It bogged my system down in a big way. So,I was thinking... should I rework the game so that each person joins with their own copy of the game and the central server is only used to handle communications between the individual instances of the game? This would let each person process their own commands instead of bogging the server down with them. Also, I could have a number of graphical things that the server never even needs to know about that will make the game run more smoothely.

Has anyone tried this before, or have any suggestions for me? Is the whole engine reworking worth the effort?

-Lord of Water