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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?

#21

Post by [deleted] »

thunderfork wrote: post #12
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.

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

[deleted]

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by mvdtnz »

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.

Even 2mbps would be on the extremely high side. I doubt many mainstream games, if any, use this kind of bandwidth. Excluding games that stream video of course.

A 6v6 game of Forged Alliance (12 players each moving hundreds of units around, many with simulated projectile weapons) uses 0.3mbps.

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

#24

Post by gafferongames »

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)?

Some games are networked deterministically, so that you can send only the inputs, and the game plays out exactly the same way (down to a checksum matching for all game state in memory across all players).

For example many RTSs are networked this way. They can have thousands or tens of thousands of units, but send only inputs. The classic article on this being 1500 archers on a 28k modem: https://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs538/readings/papers/terran...

The problem is that as player counts increase, the chance that any one player is late delivering inputs to the server (or to other players, if peer-to-peer) approaches 100%.

A deterministic simulation cannot stay deterministic, unless it has the correct inputs for all players, so the game has to pause and wait for inputs for all players before stepping the authoritative game state forward.

This is why high player count games like MMOs are not usually networked deterministically.

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

#25

Post by dwroberts »

Stevvo wrote: post #8

There is nothing "democratizing" about hosting your game's servers on AWS. Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.

Although I agree it’s more like subsidising than democratising (and the price will just go back up eventually), the “just let players host it” is overly simplistic.

There are tons of reasons to not do that - for example, companies and games that have not embraced modding do not want to be competing with modified/unofficial versions of their own games’ servers (as well as the cheating issue that can bring with it)

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

#26

Post by gafferongames »

Stevvo wrote: post #8

There is nothing "democratizing" about hosting your game's servers on AWS. Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.

Hosting in AWS (or anywhere else) doesn't preclude you from doing the right thing and releasing your server binary or even source code after you shut your game down. For example, Knockout City by Velan Studios did exactly this.

https://knockoutcity.com/private-server-edition

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

#27

Post by gafferongames »

dwroberts wrote: post #25
Stevvo wrote: post #8

There is nothing "democratizing" about hosting your game's servers on AWS. Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.

Although I agree it’s more like subsidising than democratising (and the price will just go back up eventually), the “just let players host it” is overly simplistic. There are tons of reasons to not do that - for example, companies and games that have not embraced modding do not want to be competing with modified/unofficial versions of their own games’ servers (as well as the cheating issue that can bring with it)

Companies like https://nitrado.com host community servers cheaply and support mods. Sort of a nice half-way in between truly player hosted servers (where somebody could quit mid-game, or even cheat the game), and dedicated servers run only by the devs.

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

#28

Post by gafferongames »

thunderfork wrote: post #19
gafferongames wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I can't imagine a game that'd need that much data

I can :)

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

#30

Post by gafferongames »

thunderfork wrote: post #17
gafferongames wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

And you can fit exactly 10X the game in 20mbps with the same amount of work, plus some AF_XDP magic.

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