OpenRA MMO

[Kajos]

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...

[chrisf]

The terrain is all tiles internally. We have 'templates' which combine individual tiles in useful patterns, but it's all 24*24px tiles underneath.

[Kajos]

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.