Hi guys (and girls, are you there?),
I love this project and the professionality of it! I think it's a shame that it's not very popular, but however very well received though.
Anyway, I was brainstorming a little about the multiplayer aspect and was thinking how it's handled right now. I figure the position of units is not sent over the network, but their targetlocation / destinations are. This would take up the least bandwidth I think.
Another thing I'm wondering is wheter clustering your units would reduce bandwidth usage.
Where am I going with this? I'm thinking OpenRA MMO would be an awesome idea and momentarily just figuring where the bottlenecks would be mainly.
320x240 (not screen resolution, just a number) units max per screen, x y position in 64 bits each per ~3 seconds = 3 Mbit/s. When moving the screen 320 units per 1/3 sec need to be loaded, so 320*3 x y = 120 Kbit/s.
Seems quite reasonable right?
One bottleneck would be the huge server usage though...
On the other side, you could create a massive map with perlin noise, which is not very heavy in RTS usage. Also buildings could be built with a Minecraft-idea, making chunks of the tilemap and this way reducing storesize (for the server and the client).
I hope I'm not offending anyone with my crazy ideas, but I just love crazy ideas
Any thoughts on this would be cool And sorry if I seem vague, ask me where it is please.
Greetings,
Kajos
EDIT:
I've put some more thought into this and theoretically this could work. Only problem would be the massive serveruse, as with any MMO. However one could run, say 50 players on a 100 mbit line.
Having a steady fps of 20.
32 bit for id of unit -> max 65536 players and each player 65536 units
11 bit for x relative to screen position (which is uploaded) (max resolution 2048x2048)
11 bit for y
= 62bit
2mbit download / 20 fps / 62bit = 1700 units on screen max.
As for upload, one would only send a units current position and destination to the server.
So this will probably fit in a 512Kbit upload.
EDIT: I read that OpenRA does not support tiles, but rather does images instead. That could be a major problem...
OpenRA MMO
OpenRA MMO
Last edited by Kajos on Thu Sep 15, 2011 1:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thanks, that's handy to know. So a procedurally terrain would be a good possibilty then.
What do you think about the networking structure? Would a setup like this be feasable in practice? I'm not very familiar with the current network structure and gamenetworks in general, but would see my calculations as being possible.
What do you think about the networking structure? Would a setup like this be feasable in practice? I'm not very familiar with the current network structure and gamenetworks in general, but would see my calculations as being possible.