Size of replay files. (ChronoCam)

I pay 60 AUD a month for ~5mbit/s in real-world speed and a 100Gb data allowance.

I live in an inner suburb of Adelaide, which is the 5th largest city in Australia, population 1.25 million.
So hardly in the middle of nowhere (all Adelaide jokes aside)

Due to the way phone-line is configured ADSL2+, while widely available elsewhere, is out for me.

There are no fibre providers.
The National Broadband Network (NBN), which is unlike to survive the next election without being crippled, won't be in my area for at least 3 years.

That leaves me on a WiMax connection approx. half as fast as the ADSL2+ at my old house.
For comparison the same ISP offers ADSL2+ with 200Gb for 50 AUD/month.

Storage IS cheap - I mean, you get some free 50GB from DropBox at the, uh, drop of a hat.

Bandwidth isn't an issue if you can only transfer parts of the replay as requested.

Upload bandwidth is going to need to be high for custom owned online servers, so transfer speed for online servers really won't be an issue.

The only thing left is home-based replay management - how to get a big locally created lan replay onto the wider net.

There are lots of technologies out there that make transferring large files a painless process. You may need to upload over a period of a couple hours (using bittorrent protocols perhaps) but for the person wanting to watch the replay, it'll be very fast to connect & start watching.

and ooshr32 I feel your pain. I'm on ADSL2 here in Rockingham WA and I *still* only get a (spotty) 5-mbit/s download. Not that Telstra gives a hoot about connection quality either.

In what way? I'm Australian, have a 200GB usage limit and can stream 1080p video off Youtube. Of course if the servers are based in the US then it could be slower.
Are there any plans for official Uber servers down here?

A bit off topic, but will I experience less lag from this new server model when compared with Supcom? At high pings (300-400) the synchronous system would make games pause every couple of seconds. I always assumed this was so the sim would be in sync across all the clients.

As an Australian backer, I'm looking at the entire online aspect of the game with a "wait and see" attitude. Local Aussie servers will no doubt spring up, so Lag shouldn't really be too much of an issue, but the Uber.net connectivity stuff might not work so well Down Under.

Having said that, I don't think UberEnt should aim for the lowest common denominator with regards to this stuff. If it takes me twenty minutes to upload/download a replay, is it really going to be the end of the world? I've got enough sources of entertainment that if I really want that replay, I'll entertain myself until it's ready.

Patience. It's underrated.

We ran Oceania MNC and SMNC servers, if it makes sense for us to we will undoubtedly run PA servers down under.

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here. The replay system is very similar to what the player uses to connect to their game. After all, they're basically viewing a replay from the server (with some limitations of course).

While hard drive space and big downloads may be cheap, FAST and TIMELY downloads are not. Players have to view important events in real time, and games do not have a fixed data rate. It increases as the field becomes more complex and as more events happen. If the required bandwidth to view events in real time exceeds what a player has at home, bad things happen.

It was mentioned before that bandwidth is one of the most limited resources in this game. It is likely the first thing to break as online games approach extreme scales. So yeah, the size of a replay sounds like a pretty important thing.

Much of the (1st) world has faster, cheaper internet with higher bandwidth limits (or no limits). Within Australia, it's also pot luck as to how good each house's connection is (which is one reason the NBN is so appealing - no "digital divide").

Watching the replay is exactly the same as playing the game in terms of bandwidth needs. Note that we can restrict this pipe to whatever speed we want and just degrade the experience.

Since you only need to stream from the replay it's best to store these centrally and only stream the bit of it that you want (just like what happens during a game). It's pretty much analagous to video streaming. There isn't really a reason to be copying these files anywhere other than into our repository.

And yes Australia has unfortunate internet limits.

Will we have the ability to download and store a replay locally? (Of a game on Ubernet servers.)

Online bandwidth is one of the weakest links for a game like this. It's worth finding ways to optimize every bit that goes through the pipe, lest players find their epic battles filled with loading icons rather than shells. :lol:

Of course, you can't really expect less than broadband connections for any sort of online play nowadays.

Most of the discussions seem to imply all of this is occurring between Uber and a client. Are there any features that won't be available to a locally hosted game server? It would be cool for a clan to be able to host games on a local network for maximum bandwidth and not have the game features like ChronoCam be disabled. Heck, even for youtubers playing among themselves ChronoCam would be an amazing feature to allow for excellent content creation.

I am also in Aussieland and I can tell many people right now that the main issue will not be "replaying" or downloading in any sense. The main issue will be uploading. Basically as far as larger replays go unless you live in a City you will not be able to upload large replays for viewing later on. Now given that you might be playing on a proper server and the replays will be housed on that server it might not be so much of an issue. However for someone wanting to play LAN's and in regional low-end broadband coverage you will find yourself largely unable to upload the larger files. Primarily because upload is bad.

I live in regional Australia and am stuck on what they call "aDSL+" which is a fancy way of saying aDSL1 that can go faster than 1.5 mbps down. Now I pay $80 AUD/month for that and I get 150 GB a month. If I lived in an aDSL2 coverage area I would pay half that and get the same. Or pay the same and get unlimited with 2-5x the speed.



This is not UberEnt's fault nor is it their responsibility. As much as I would love to say "Yes please cater to me and my horrible bandwidth throughput" that is not reasonable. As long as I can play the game reasonably I'll be happy. Given the client<>server architecture the most that might happen is an Aussie player might get slightly lagged/desynched. I would really hope that Uber has some fault tolerance for that in the game or even have a way that if the person gets dropped they can reconnect back to the same game with only marginal disruption where perhaps the AI takes over until they can get back.

Even in Germany, connections that slow are not uncommon.

Sure, if you live close to the city center, you will get 16-100Mbit (16 Mbit ADSL2+, 50Mbit VDSL, 100Mbit via cable TV), but if you live only 5km away, you are down to 2-3 Mbit at best with no more than 0.2-0.3 Mbit/s upstream.

Uploading a replay of more than 2-3 MB is unrealistic as even a "small" 1MB replay would already take ~30 seconds to upload, given that NOBODY else is using the connection at the same time.

Sure, this only affects about ~20-25% of the German users, the other 80% have 6Mbit or more, but bandwidth is still clearly an issue. Even with "broadband", upload is still an issue and "broadband" is a very broad term. Oh, and Germany's biggest ISP just announced that they are going to reintroduce usage limits as low as 75GB per month for all connections with throttling to 387 kb/s (ISDN speed) if you surpass the monthly limit.

will the chronocam be accessible for players during a match or only for caster/observers?
i mean a player could use a seperate window with the chronocam to revisit an event that he missed cause his attention was elsewhere ...

That's exactly the kind of thing they talked about in today's(May 17th) Livestream, it's already up on Youtube.

Mike

k triple checked it ... seems players will be allowed to use it too ... ... well ... ... LET ME PLAY DA GAME ALREADY!!! :twisted:

Maybe I could develop a sexual interest in little robots getting blown up and kill 2 birds with one stone.


Although a flippant remark it's kind of poignant, I don't know anyone who keeps porn on the PC nowadays yet a lot of it gets watched so even if the files are larger than normal I don't see it being an issue with the amount of bandwidth and HDD space that is available to most people. Sure it sucks if you live in the sticks and are still on 1-2mb/s but I don't want you being a millstone around my neck with regards to future developments.

If Uber are going to host them all then then even less of an issue.

I do kinda worry that when someone with a poor connection joins a game with someone that has a fast connection we might see some of the lag issues that have plagued FPS games for years. But fast broadband is pretty common in most small Texas towns.

Don't quote me but my gut tells me the lag would only happen to the person with the slow connection, who is SOL.

Exactly, the lag would only happen for the person with the slow internet connection. The server will happily continue calculating all sim-related things and send those things to all players with a good connection.