Re: [glob2-devel] UDP networking library.

[Bradley Arsenault]

I've seen several such libraries. In my opponion, something that does
minimum spanning tree routing would actually be nice. Glob2 has
relativly low (infact quite low) bandwidth usage. I read an article on
the Age of Empires system, which is strikingly similar to ours. They
described how they had troubles with synchronous execution, and about
their latency issues. They noted that even at 500 mps of latency,
virtually none of their test subjects had a problem playing the game.
Latency isn't a big problem for RTS games.

They did say, however, that latency should be consistant. They said it
was much harder to play on a system where it optimized itself rapidly
for the fastest play at any given moment (and rarely had moments of
500 mps latency), then on a system that conistantly had 500 mps
latency. They said its because the player builds a subconcious timing
of how long it takes between they issue an order and when its
recieved, and compensate for that by themselves, barely noticing it at
all.

They also made another interesting observation. Players tended to
average an issueing of one order for every 1.5 to 2 seconds, with very
brief times of 3-4 orders per second. They saw that the player would
sometimes go click many times, click-click-click "attack! attack!
attack!" as they are bombarding their enemy, and automatically
filtering out redundant orders saved network troubles in these times.
I can see this being an issue when the user is adjusting the number of
workers on a building, and clicks the keyboard +/- key many times.

I also realized that glob2 sends 25 orders per second. A human
couldn't make that many orders in one second even if they tried. I'm
not sure if glob2 already does this, but we could conserve allot of
bandwidth simply by dropping the network framerate to, say, 4-5 orders
per second. With an average NULL order length of 12 bytes, and say 50
bytes for any other order (a high estimate), that means that Glob2
would scarcely use 98 bytes per second, and it wouldn't even be
noticed by the user. I think Glob2 is probably the most bandwidth
efficient RTS game I know.

--
Really. I'm not lieing. Bradley Arsenault.