4 ms·
I haven't actually measured anything, I know when it first came out there was some concern about people possibly hitting bandwidth caps. I think part of the iss
by fencepost 9y ago
I haven't actually measured anything, I know when it first came out there was some concern about people possibly hitting bandwidth caps. I think part of the issue may be overhead - it's regularly communicating back to the servers with current location, and getting back a list of coordinates for stops within a certain distance (with a bit of other data), coordinates and other data for Pokemon spawns, etc. It's also using Google Maps data to draw a map of the terrain including roads, water and building outlines, so all of that is also something that changes as you move around. Finally, people are also supposed to "spin" Pokestops and gyms, each of which also has a photo of the piece of artwork, etc. that the stop is located at. Along with the map data, those photos are not preloaded in the app so they have to be downloaded at least once. I don't know how much caching of those images is done - hopefully some, but if they're doing little or no caching then that's yet another chunk of data to pull down.
Looking at the screen and a map, it looks like the game renders an outline for every structure within 600-650 meters of me, so for an area with a lot of structures that could be a fair amount of downloaded data depending on how good their caching is. If their download process isn't good at handling missing data or transmission errors, it could also be pretty vulnerable to problems on a congested network.
- Operyl 9y agoSlight correction, as far as I know they were using OSM, not Google Maps.
- maxerickson 9y agoThey use Google for the base map everywhere except South Korea, where they do use OpenStreetMap. There are rumors that some game features (biomes and such) are influenced by features in OpenStreetMap, but no clear statement from Niantic, just a bunch of weak correlations (like OSM having a path where a bunch of people go and try to play the game...).
- Operyl 9y agoThere was a big problem where people were manipulating biomes in the game by messing with OSM, so unless there's some sharing going on with Google..?
- maxerickson 9y agoBase map vs hidden game features. Outside of Korea the base map is 100% Google. The hidden game features, who knows. Lots of people are very convinced that OpenStreetMap features have an impact. I haven't really seen anything all that convincing, just lots of correlations that could be have other explanations (game analytics, other datasets, etc).