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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?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

10000truths wrote: post #48
mvdtnz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons: 1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a sma…

[deleted]

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

#52

Post by frollogaston »

gafferongames wrote: post #47
frollogaston wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already plenty of 1000-player games with 2000 objects that use a lot less bandwidth than this, usually because a lot of the object tracking is left to the clients while the server shares some form of player input. I'm not saying there's no possible reason to use 20mbps, just asking what it's for. Is the space game avoiding sending player inputs for anticheat reasons? How is the server updating the client on…

Yes, but how many games truly support 1000 players at the same quality level and fidelity of a AAA FPS? I can't think of any, even Eve: Online has time dilation and starts to chug when the action gets too intense. What if you could have a 1000 player FPS, and it was networked at the same fidelity of a AAA FPS? It would certainly use more bandwidth, but what if?

The largest player count FPSes I can think of are Battlefield and Fortnite. I don't think the bandwidth is the constraint on those, even if you really wanted to have 1000 people shooting at each other in the same spot.

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

#53

Post by frollogaston »

gafferongames wrote: post #45
mvdtnz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of leaving drive by comments like this you can explain this to the overwhelming majority of people in this thread who think it's bananas.

Nobody has answered my question, which is if you can use more bandwidth, and in doing so supports a larger, more detailed world, then why not? Why limit yourself to bandwidth usage designed around the turn of the century? It's 2026. We can do better :)

The article already started off saying the bandwidth itself was a problem due to egress costs, but that's not the only issue. Thunderfork already answered what else is wrong with it. Now if you're the author, can you tell me what the space game does?

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

#54

Post by Stevvo »

10000truths wrote: post #48
mvdtnz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons: 1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a sma…

2. Is an absurd example. That is not how you do networked physics in 2026. You use jolt for cross-platform determinism with rollback, replicating only inputs.

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

#55

Post by gafferongames »

frollogaston wrote: post #50
10000truths wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons: 1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a sma…

"Every server-side entity affecting a client needs to have its state broadcast to that client" is true, but you're presuming all those entities are going to be server-side, which in most cases they're not. Yes I can imagine if you put all the state on the server and broadcast all that to the clients, you can easily use 20mbps for a massive game, more like 200mbps. Would also imagine it'd be insanely laggy, and not be…

A typical quake style FPS netcode like Counterstrike, Apex Legends, Titanfall etc. would have all gameplay affecting objects (bullets, missiles props whatever...) as server side entities.

On the client these entities are usually interpolated, except the local player character, which has client-side prediction (eg. optimistic execution with rollback to apply server corrections to maintain server authority).

So it's not at all unusual to suggest that all gameplay affecting objects would be server-side. In this network model, that is the default approach.

The exception would be for entirely cosmetic FX or cosmetic debris objects that don't push back on the player.

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

#56

Post by xboxnolifes »

10000truths wrote: post #48
mvdtnz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons: 1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a sma…

It does not scale quadratically per client though, and the number given is per client.

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

#57

Post by frollogaston »

dieselgate wrote: post #3
zuzululu wrote: post #2

I expect Amazon to change their pricing once they've established a foothold and makes me a bit wary to adopting it. Their other offerings are simply far too expensive which you will naturally reach out for.

Do know that you cannot trust Amazon.

I can trust Amazon in general. Just not going to assume that something that costs them a lot will remain free for me to use.

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

#58

Post by gafferongames »

gafferongames wrote: post #45
mvdtnz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of leaving drive by comments like this you can explain this to the overwhelming majority of people in this thread who think it's bananas.

Nobody has answered my question, which is if you can use more bandwidth, and in doing so supports a larger, more detailed world, then why not? Why limit yourself to bandwidth usage designed around the turn of the century? It's 2026. We can do better :)

> Now if you're the author, can you tell me what the space game does?

A larger more detailed world with a higher player count, networked using quake style netcode techniques ala. Counterstrike, Titanfall, Apex Legends with snapshots and delta compression, client side prediction and lag compensation.

In short, FPS netcode scaled up to 1000 players, but applied to a space game, not an FPS, because the world doesn't need another FPS right now...

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

#59

Post by gafferongames »

frollogaston wrote: post #41
kridsdale1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some genres of games (like RTS) typically do send inputs instead of state. Cheating is indeed possible.

Cheating in the sense of breaking fog of war, because the client has to actually have the whole game state in memory due to deterministic synchronization. Yes.

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

#60

Post by gafferongames »

Stevvo wrote: post #54
10000truths wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons: 1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a sma…

2. Is an absurd example. That is not how you do networked physics in 2026. You use jolt for cross-platform determinism with rollback, replicating only inputs.

Deterministic cross-platform networking with jolt is fine and good, but there are multiple ways to network a game, and even to do networked physics in 2026.

I hope your game world is small, and your player count is low, otherwise: 1) your server will be waiting for inputs from the most lagged player, 2) you will become entirely CPU bound on the client performing all this rollback.

Approaches that don't suffer from these two problems send state, yes they send a lot more bandwidth, but they scale better as the number of players n increases.

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