Sim and client performance is getting pretty amazing - bandwidth an issue?

Every once in a while I test out limits of the PA engine by starting up a sandbox game and building thousands of vehicles and/or planes and moving them around.

Yesterday, I built over 8,000 planes on a medium sized planet. Then I played with setting them on patrols and moving them to a particular location. Moving was comical because in formation they covered the entire surface of the planet, and the formation they took on was pretty cool. Patrolling was pretty chaotic.

The server and client performance was awesome, probably 10x better than the last time I did this test. The client FPS was 20-30 at the lowest. The server sim speed was still in the 8-10 range, often at 10. My logical CPU usage charts showed all 4 processors (i5-4670k) being at around 60%.

But the visual effect of putting this many planes on patrol was that they were all "pulsing". So it was kind of like a slideshow, but a slideshow with good FPS because zooming and panning were still smooth. After reading a bit about what the server is actually sending to the client, clearly the limit here is all of the updates on the curve changes for all those planes since they are changing direction constantly while on patrol.

With all factories and units stopped, downstream bandwidth was 3.1 mbits/s. Zooming/panning was very smooth. With everything moving it was 4.2 mbits/s.

Obviously, running a local server will mean bandwidth is not an issue for single player or LAN based games. But I'm curious, are there any major network optimizations in the pipeline? I know for a long while there were some "low hanging fruit" like the coordinates or something were being sent with too much precision, but I think much of that was addressed nearly 2 months ago. Anything else in the works?

Also, is the ~4mbit/s limit intentional? I'm pretty sure it's not my home connection, I get a solid 25mbit/s from speed tests and for file downloads (including updates for PA).

Bandwidth is indeed a major issue. I think Uber has said that they have bandwidth optimizations in the pipeline, but they wanted to wait until the pathing setup and other optimizations were complete before they did that. That's just by what I remember.

The reasons for this could be you don't want to setup a rapid compression/decompression system for data archetypes that might change.

Yeah, makes sense. It would be very interesting if their curve representation could actually include second and third order curves (in a polynomial sense, if that is applicable here) so that a single curve message could describe a fairly long section of a patrolling unit's non-linear path, until something acts on it or it needs to change direction.

You are very lucky!

The internet issue is great for me. I will play some games and right off the start, ill receive serverside lag. My computer runs it great it is just the internet that is always holding me back. I sure do hope they have some major fixes to come on that. I asked the same question a while back and I think the answer was that it would be towards the end and the optimizations would be pretty good. I think they are holding off because it complicates things so they are going to add features and such then fix the internet as a feature may as well undo all the optimization you did.

Uber cap the upload their end, last time I heard it was limited to 2mbit but perhaps they have increased it a bit.

I think the issues of 'server lag at game start' may be latency related as internet bandwidth (at the client end) really isn't an issue. 6mbit down is plenty. What I can't get my head around is that this problem is intermittent.

Well i haven't played in a while, since my internet connction where i live is really sad (ping 106, download 1.66mb adn upload 0.44mb) i could barely play against the AI... Yesterday i logged in and all has changed, the game runs a lot smoother and i can play a lot better against a single AI, thou i tryed to play against 2 or 3 more AIs and i couldn't (the game lags like crazy) wich means i can't play against the main commanders on the Galactic War, i can only fight the small battles... so i guess i will wait until they implement an offline mode... but so far they've done a great job the game is more enjoyable i can't wait to fight epic huge battles against the AI once offline mode is out