[ENet-discuss] 4 seconds stalls.. congestion problem?

[Nicholas J Ingrassellino]

I am using exactly 20 unreliable updates a seconds. I experimented doing 
one reliable per second with ~10-15 unreliable but I think this is a 
better compromise. My player object updates, for example, are pretty 
small at 12 bytes. I think with a system like this you run the risk of 
making too many small packets too quickly than anything else. It even 
works well over a high latency (cellular) connection. It is also worth 
noting my system is only one step removed from a dumb terminal with 
minimal dead reckoning.

Bandwidth is not the issue it used to be. Know your target audience and 
then it becomes even less of an issue. With some types of games you 
could go a lot lower if you do a lot of specialized dead reckoning. Some 
game types-- turn-bases games, for example-- run the risk of timing out 
more than they run the risk of sending too many packets.

On a semi-related note check out how it was done in Quake 3. The short 
of it is that a base line game state (including all game objects) is 
calculated when a client connects. Each update after that is all deltas 
(changes since the base line) since the last acknowledged update (thus 
creating a new base line). There are a few things Carmack intentionally 
ignored (UPD packets getting too large, ect) but with ENet such a thing 
is not an issue.

Experiment with a few ways of doing the same thing. What works for my 
game may suck for yours.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nicholas J Ingrassellino
LifebloodNetworks.com <http://www.lifebloodnetworks.com/> || 
nick at lifebloodnetworks.com <mailto:nick at lifebloodnetworks.com>

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically 
solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could 
not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps 
some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying."
- John Carmack on software patents


On 11/23/2010 05:57 PM, Jay Sprenkle wrote:
> I've read several interesting discussions about lag in online games.
> They tried to avoid sending that much network traffic if possible for 
> many reasons.
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Chris Meub <chrismeub at gmail.com 
> <mailto:chrismeub at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Does anyone have experience using enet with a multiplayer game sending
>     reliable packets ~20 times a second or more?
>     I imagine most people sending that many packets are using unreliable.
>
>     On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Lee Salzman <lsalzman at gmail.com
>     <mailto:lsalzman at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > No, the point is to get all available packets in this frame and
>     not stall,
>     > i.e. it is polling. You wouldn't use a non-zero timeout in a
>     game's client
>     > loop like that.
>     >
>
>
>
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