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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.
"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.
(btw game server network data is usually trivially and insanely compressible, far more than text)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/class…
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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
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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 :)
Give me self host code any day. This feels like the bait and switch AWS likes to pull. Would rather rely on the server in my dresser drawer than AWS for as much as I possibly can.
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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.
Games don't need to send much data to sync game state across clients
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/class…
If any player desynchronizes, their state has to be erased and then completely re-sent from scratch so that they can start processing inputs correctly again.
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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.
I understand that those are big budget games, but there is a lot of room for improvement in 10000 kbps.