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I really want to just stop here and ask you what you expect will happen if you take a multiplayer game with n players and increase it to have 10 times the playe

I really want to just stop here and ask you what you expect will happen if you take a multiplayer game with n players and increase it to have 10 times the player count (10n). Do you expect bandwidth sent per-player will: a) stay the same b) decrease c) increase ? > Streaming sounds and FX every single time and never caching is a choice that will lead to 10Mbps Nobody is suggesting streaming sounds and FX like this. If it helps you, completely ignore my comment about sounds and FX. Focus instead on how the per-player bandwidth has scaled up, eerily close to 10mbps per-client, when you take any of the classic games you mentioned, and scale their player count up to 1000 players and see what happens. > All you "really need" is initial state, the timestamps / inputs of the other players, and reproducible physics. Yes, this approach works for low player count games, but as player counts increase the probability that you'll be stuck waiting for the most lagged player to deliver input to the server approaches 1. So no, this is not all you really need. This approach doesn't work well for high player count games (I wouldn't use it for any game with more than 4 players personally).

axus 3mo ago
My naive perspective is that bandwidth will increase linearly with the number of visible players. I get that the people doing the work know better than people who haven't, I'm open to learning more and can't make any ironclad statements. Eve Online could do large-scale player battles before 10Mbps connections were available to gamers. And somehow much more efficiently per/player than Q3: Arena. What were they doing that you are not?
- gafferongames 3mo ago
  Eve Online has a much larger world and ships are scattered around much more in this space, so they only need to network ships that are close to you, so they can make their effective n smaller, eg. per-client bandwidth is now O(n), where n is the number ships close to you only, instead of n being the total number of players in the Eve Online system at any time. When too many ships get close together, the action slows down in "time dilation" (they slow the game down because they cannot keep up in terms of CPU and probably bandwidth as well). It's a smart design trick that made it possible for them to pull this game off much earlier than it should have been possible. I'm not doing any of that time dilation and everything plays like an FPS game or action game, just with n=1000 players all the time because it's 2026 and I can send a lot of bandwidth. Yes, I still have to work really hard to keep server CPU costs, client CPU costs and make all game code || and bandwidth down and optimize it, even to fit in this (seemingly high) bandwidth budget. But it's the right choice for an action game where time dilation is not an option, and all the action happens in one tight space, like in a Star Wars movie when there is a space battle.

axus 3mo ago

My naive perspective is that bandwidth will increase linearly with the number of visible players. I get that the people doing the work know better than people who haven't, I'm open to learning more and can't make any ironclad statements. Eve Online could do large-scale player battles before 10Mbps connections were available to gamers. And somehow much more efficiently per/player than Q3: Arena. What were they doing that you are not?

gafferongames 3mo ago
Eve Online has a much larger world and ships are scattered around much more in this space, so they only need to network ships that are close to you, so they can make their effective n smaller, eg. per-client bandwidth is now O(n), where n is the number ships close to you only, instead of n being the total number of players in the Eve Online system at any time. When too many ships get close together, the action slows down in "time dilation" (they slow the game down because they cannot keep up in terms of CPU and probably bandwidth as well). It's a smart design trick that made it possible for them to pull this game off much earlier than it should have been possible. I'm not doing any of that time dilation and everything plays like an FPS game or action game, just with n=1000 players all the time because it's 2026 and I can send a lot of bandwidth. Yes, I still have to work really hard to keep server CPU costs, client CPU costs and make all game code || and bandwidth down and optimize it, even to fit in this (seemingly high) bandwidth budget. But it's the right choice for an action game where time dilation is not an option, and all the action happens in one tight space, like in a Star Wars movie when there is a space battle.