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Lowering bandwidth

Started by Butabee Jun 17, 2010 at 10:33 PM 3 replies 950+ views

Original Post

Jun 17, 2010 at 10:33 PM

I'm trying to think of ways to lower bandwidth and what I thought of was, instead of sending position updates of all surrounding mobs/players, I could just send a message from the server for when the monster/player starts and stops moving, and then handle the moving on the client.

I think if I sent a position update with each start and stop message it would also prevent incorrect positions, but there might be a little rubber banding.

Anyone see issues with this?

Hodgman

Jun 17, 2010 at 10:44 PM

Your simulation should be deterministic to take this networking approach.

Check out 1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond

hplus0603

Jun 18, 2010 at 12:00 AM

The Forum FAQ has a number of links that will probably interest you, including the "1,500 archers" article.
There are various hybrids, too, where you get "intents" from things that are far away, with perhaps an occasional state update for re-sync, and get more frequent, higher-resolution updates for things that are closer, or more important (because they're part of your current quest or whatever).

Butabee

Jun 18, 2010 at 3:24 PM

Thanks, but the next question is, should I make the state messages reliable since they won't be sent that often, and if a packet that told someone to stop moving was missed, it would be problematic.

hplus0603

Jun 18, 2010 at 4:20 PM

That's entirely up to you. You can either make everything reliable, and accept that some actions will have a lot of latency, or you can send occasional state checkpoint messages which correct whatever de-sync has happened.

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