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The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

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Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#11

Post by gafferongames »

JohnMakin wrote: post #10
gafferongames wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.

You don't really ever stream games in normal situations in the same manner though. The content is mostly rendered client side, why does the server need so much bandwidth?

If a normal game sends 2mbps, then 20mbps would be 10 times as many objects.

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#12

Post by thunderfork »

gafferongames wrote: post #9
frollogaston wrote: post #7

"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.

Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.

Game data and video data have very different constraints. Depends on the nature of the game, of course, but with jitter and all that, video can just run a buffer and manage network conditions (more) trivially, but a game needs things to be a lot tighter to avoid gameplay-impacting desync

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#13

Post by thunderfork »

frollogaston wrote: post #7

"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.

Yeah, this strikes me as strange. If you're sending that much data constantly, you're either syncing too much stuff too often, or you're not using compression when you should be (shout-out to Oodle)

Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients.

At the end of the day, you can only "democratize" while you have players, and performance constraints on end users aren't getting any looser

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#14

Post by gafferongames »

thunderfork wrote: post #13
frollogaston wrote: post #7

"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.

Yeah, this strikes me as strange. If you're sending that much data constantly, you're either syncing too much stuff too often, or you're not using compression when you should be (shout-out to Oodle) Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients. At the end of the day, you can only "…

Maybe you can just be doing all the standard compression tricks, but still have a 10-20 times larger world? If so, why not?

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#15

Post by xnx »

gafferongames wrote: post #9
frollogaston wrote: post #7

"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.

Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.

Is there any reason that transmitted data would be much larger than player inputs (e.g. keystrokes and mouse movement)?

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#16

Post by frollogaston »

gafferongames wrote: post #11
JohnMakin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really ever stream games in normal situations in the same manner though. The content is mostly rendered client side, why does the server need so much bandwidth?

If a normal game sends 2mbps, then 20mbps would be 10 times as many objects.

That's what I'm asking, seems like this isn't a normal game, but what specifically about it makes the bandwidth requirement so high? I know RTSes send inputs instead of state, but that has its own drawbacks.

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#17

Post by thunderfork »

gafferongames wrote: post #11
JohnMakin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really ever stream games in normal situations in the same manner though. The content is mostly rendered client side, why does the server need so much bandwidth?

If a normal game sends 2mbps, then 20mbps would be 10 times as many objects.

If you're using stream compression, 20mbps would likely be a lot more than 10 times as many objects (and you shouldn't be serializing the whole state every update, and... yadda yadda)

You can fit a lot of game in 2mbit/s with a little bit of work.

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#18

Post by mvdtnz »

frollogaston wrote: post #7

"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.

It's a ludicrous amount of bandwidth even for a 1,000 player game, and a strong indicator that this developer is doing something very wrong.

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#19

Post by thunderfork »

gafferongames wrote: post #14
thunderfork wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this strikes me as strange. If you're sending that much data constantly, you're either syncing too much stuff too often, or you're not using compression when you should be (shout-out to Oodle) Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients. At the end of the day, you can only "…

Maybe you can just be doing all the standard compression tricks, but still have a 10-20 times larger world? If so, why not?

Client performance characteristics? Speaking very broadly... I can't imagine a game that'd need that much data unless it involved a lot of streaming assets (audio, video, etc) or really, really naive netcode.

Re: The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

#20

Post by kridsdale1 »

xnx wrote: post #15
gafferongames wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.

Is there any reason that transmitted data would be much larger than player inputs (e.g. keystrokes and mouse movement)?

Typically you send state, not inputs. To prevent cheating.
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