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Bandwidth, Player count, Ghosts

by julius · in Torque Game Engine · 10/20/2010 (10:09 am) · 3 replies

I hope that this thread will open up discussions about bandwidth and player counts and other factors relating to this topic. Let me start:

PacketRateToClient 2816 64 bytes per sec * num players
PacketRateToServer 2816 64 bytes per sec * num players
PacketSize 512 bytes
Players/Game Server 44 (Ideally we would like more than 128 per game server)

Players per Game Server 44 Players
Bandwidth per Game Server 1.89 Mbps
Max Bandwidth of our hosting environment: 2 Mbps

Game client: TGEA 1.8.2 modified but network code as is
Test Mission: 465 ghosted objects + 1 ghost per player joined = 509 active ghosts

Questions:
Are my calculations above correct?
Is the PacketRate really in bytes per second?
What about the PacketSize?
Why is the other player ghosted in the current player even though the other player is not within visible distance? (covered by mountains)
Am I missing something?

Thanks

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  • #1
    10/20/2010 (1:58 pm)
    From what I can tell, the packet rate is a divider of one second (1024ms / rate) for the frequency of sent packets. A rate of 32 would send packets every 32ms.
    There is a little more to it than that with the send delay credit, but that is the general jist of it.

    By the code for TGE, both the client-server and server-client rates have a minimum rate of 32ms, the client-server has a maximum rate of 128ms and the server-client has a maximum rate of 1024ms.
    The packet size is limited to between 100 and 450.

    By the code for TGEA (and probably T3D), the same maximum rate applies but there is no minimum, so you could theoretically send/receive large packets every millisecond, although 1500 bytes is the maximum packet size as per the MaxPacketDataSize constant.
    The code also defaults to 1024 bytes every 8ms for local connections.
    #2
    10/21/2010 (3:17 am)
    Thank you very much. This is a great explanation of what PacketRateToClient and Server means. And most importantly, you just corrected my of the packet size unit. I was thinking 512 bytes but it should be 512 bits. I will adjust my calculations accordingly. Thanks again. More inputs from the community would be highly appreciated especially real world numbers.
    #3
    10/21/2010 (10:17 am)
    Yes, it is bits not bytes. Not sure why I said bytes myself.